Venerable Cyrion the Monk and His Son Zacharias, of Egypt (IV)

The Venerable Cyrion the Monk and his son Zacharias. The Venerable Cyrion lived in one of the sketes of Egypt in the fourth century. In the world he had left a wife and two children. During a famine that broke out in Egypt, his wife, distressed by poverty and extreme want, brought the children to the saint at the monastery. Cyrion kept his son with him and sent his daughter back with her mother. The blessed monk brought up the boy in the skete. When Zacharias had grown up, father and son went to the Thebaid. Zacharias’s youth and handsome face stood out sharply from the ascetic, fasting-worn appearance of the other monks. Saint Zacharias went to a poisonous lake, lowered himself into the water up to his nostrils, and stayed in it for an hour. After this the blessed one’s face was so changed that even his father could hardly recognise him; but at Communion it was revealed about him to the holy presbyter Isidore, and he said to the blessed one: “Son, last Sunday you communed as a man, and now as an angel.” After his father’s death Zacharias laboured together with the Venerable Moses the Black (commemorated 27 August). “What shall I do to be saved?” Moses once asked him. Hearing this, Zacharias fell at the blessed one’s feet: “You ask me, father?!” “Believe me, my son Zacharias,” said Moses, “I saw the Holy Spirit descend upon you, and that is the only reason I asked you.” Then the Venerable Zacharias took the cowl from his head, laid it at his feet, trampled it and said: “Unless a man is trodden down like this, he cannot be a monk.” When Zacharias was dying, the Venerable Moses asked him: “What do you see, brother?” “Is it not better to keep silence, father?” was the answer. “Yes, keep silence, my son!” he replied. When the soul of the Venerable Zacharias was parting from the body, the holy Abba Isidore lifted up his eyes to heaven and said: “Rejoice, my son Zacharias, for the gates of the Kingdom of heaven have been opened unto thee.”