St. Alexis the Man of God

Alexis the Man of God was born in the late fourth century to a wealthy Christian senator named Euphemianus of Rome and his wife Aglaida — a couple of legendary piety and almsgiving — after long years of barrenness. He was raised in the Christian discipline and educated in the classical learning of the Roman aristocracy. At eighteen his parents arranged his marriage to a young noblewoman of corresponding rank.

On the day of his wedding, after the ceremonies and before the marriage was consummated, Alexis gave his bride his ring and his cincture and asked her to keep them as memorials of him. That night he left home secretly and sailed for the East. He came to Edessa in Mesopotamia and lived for seventeen years there as a beggar at the doors of a great church — unrecognized, sleeping in the porch, eating the alms that pilgrims brought to him, praying through the nights at the icon of the Mother of God in the church's narthex.

After seventeen years a vision of the Mother of God spoke to the doorkeeper of the church, identifying Alexis as "the man of God" — and his fame began to spread. Alexis, alarmed at the notice, fled Edessa by ship for the East, was caught in a storm, and was driven by the winds back to Rome. He recognized none of his family at the imperial pier; they recognized none of him. He went to his father Euphemianus's house and asked for shelter under the stairs as a poor pilgrim — and his father, not knowing it was his son, granted it. There Alexis lived for another seventeen years, fed each day from the household's table by his own servants who mocked and abused him, his identity unknown to anyone in the house.

On the night of his death he wrote a letter explaining who he was and laid it on his breast. The letter was found in the morning. The synaxarion records the discovery, the grief of Euphemianus and Aglaida, the visit of Pope Innocent I to the body, and the public veneration of the saint who had lived hidden in his own father's house. His feast falls on March 17.