October 08
Pelagia the Righteous

This Saint was a prominent actress of the city of Antioch, and a pagan, who lived a life of unrestrained prodigality and led many to perdition. Instructed and baptized by a certain bishop named Nonnus (Saint Nonnus is commemorated Nov. 10), she departed for the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem, where she lived as a recluse, feigning to be a eunuch called Pelagia. She lived in such holiness and repentance that within three or four years she was deemed worthy to repose in an odour of sanctity, in the middle of the fifth century. Her tomb on the Mount of Olives has been a place of pilgrimage ever since.

October 08
Pelagia the Virgin-martyr of Antioch

October 08
Phillip, Bishop of Gortyna

October 08
Taisia the Harlot of Egypt


October 08
3rd Sunday of Luke

"That dead man was being buried, and many friends were conducting him to his tomb. But there meets him Christ, the Life and Resurrection, for He is the destroyer of death and of corruption; He it is "in Whom we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28); He it is Who has restored the nature of man to that which it originally was; and has set free our death-fraught flesh from the bonds of death."
-- St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke, Homily 36.42, p. 153., 5th Century

"The virgin's son met the widow's son. He became like a sponge for her tears and as life for the death of her son. Death turned about in its den and turned its back on the victorious one."
-- St. Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Tatian's Diatessaron, 6.23. (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. vol. 3: Luke, Intervarsity Press)