Leaving everything to pray, yet still drawing people who needed wisdom.
Read the essentials →Leaving everything to pray, yet still drawing people who needed wisdom.
May 13
Not verified yet
Hermit
Thin entry · the 1897 book gives only 89 words. We have not filled the gap with invented detail.
B. Gerard of Villamagna, brother of the order of S. John of Jerusalem, became a hermit at Florence during the latter years of his life. The cut is from the Bollandists (AA. SS. May, vol. vii.), and exhibits also another Saint of the same order by which the similar habit of the hermit is shown.
Make time for silence. Solitude and withdrawal to pray shape this life.
Learn from the kind of life it was. Leaving everything to pray, yet still drawing people who needed wisdom.
B. Gerard of Villamagna, brother of the order of S. John of Jerusalem, became a hermit at Florence during the latter years of his life. The cut is from the Bollandists [Jesuit scholars who since the 1600s have critically studied the lives of the saints] (AA. SS. May, vol. vii.), and exhibits also another Saint of the same order by which the similar habit of the hermit is shown. The beard and bare feet of B. Gdrard indicate the hermit life which he embraced. He is represented holding a bunch of cherries, in allusion to a story related of him by his chroniclers.
Feast: May 13
One short email a day for nine days. The day's prayer, a line from Bl. Gerard's story, and a nudge to keep going.
From Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, new edition in 16 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897–98); text from the Internet Archive scan (OCR, lightly cleaned; errors possible). Public domain.
From Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, new edition in 16 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897–98); text from the Internet Archive scan (OCR, lightly cleaned; errors possible). Public domain in the United States. Reproduced unedited, except for short bracketed notes in grey that we added to explain names and terms (“S.” is the old abbreviation for Saint). Some history and judgments reflect 19th-century scholarship.
