Their story
Adapted in modern English from Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints · Baring-Gould original below · little is known
Macedonius was a hermit in Syria who lived for forty years on barley soaked in water. When his health failed he began to eat bread, saying it was not lawful to shorten one's life to escape labours. He gave the same advice to the mother of Theodoret (5th-century bishop and church historian) when she was ill.
Theodoret tells of many cures by water over which Macedonius made the sign of the cross, his own mother's among them, and says that his own birth, after thirteen childless years of marriage, came through the hermit's prayers. Macedonius died at ninety.
Early life
The book says little or nothing about early life. This is how the account begins.
S. Macedonius lived a life of great austerity on barley and water. For forty-five years he inhabited a dry ditch, after that he spent twenty-five in a rude cabin. A sedition having broken out in Antioch, and the people having overthrown the statue of the Empress Flacilla, Theodosius, the Emperor, in a fit of rage, ordered the city to be set on fire and reduced to the condition of a village.
How they teach us to live
Drawn from themes in the original account
Practise small acts of self-denial. The account dwells on fasting and penance; a skipped snack or a phone-free hour is a start.
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.
