 |
 |
|
 |
On
fasting
|
 |
 |
 |
|
Holy Hieromartyr Stephen the New 12/11/2013
As Ana, Samuel’s mother, had done before, so had Ana, Stephen’s mother, implored God to grant her a son. Praying one day at the Church of Blachernae before the icon of the Holy Mother of God, she fell into sleep and in her dream she saw the Most Pure Theotokos shining as the sun and heard her voice: “Go in peace woman. Your prayers have been answered. You bear a son in your womb”. And indeed Ana conceived and gave birth to a son - this holy martyr Stephen. When he was sixteen years of age, he received the monastic tonsure on Mount St Auxentius on the way to Constantinople from the Elder John, whose example he followed in the divine wisdom and the ascetic struggle. When the Elder John had fallen asleep in the Lord, Stephen remained on the Mount living in severe ascesis and committing himself to harder and harder struggles. His holiness attracted great many disciples. When the Emperor Constantine Copronymos started persecuting those who venerated the holy icons even more violently than his father Leo the Isaurian had done, Stephen proved himself as a zealous defender of the veneration of the holy icons. The impious Emperor listened to the various slanderous accusations against Stephen and himself produced many affairs in order to discredit the Saint and get him out of his way. Stephen was exiled to the island of Proconnesus and then taken to Constantinople, put in chains and thrown into prison, where he found three hundred forty two monks imprisoned, brought from different places and held in prison for venerating the holy icons. They ordered their prison-life around the never-ceasing praise of God as in a monastery. The cruel Emperor condemned Stephen to death. The Saint had foreseen his death forty days in advance and bid his brothers farewell. The Emperor’s soldiers dragged him out of the prison beating him and pulling his limbs and continued to drag him through the streets of Constantinople calling forth all Emperor’s subjects to stone the “Emperor’s enemy”. One of the heretics hit him on the head with a wooden beam and the Saint gave up his soul. As the first martyr Stephen suffered by the Jews, so did this Stephen suffer by the iconoclast heretics. He ended his life gloriously in the year 767, when he was fifty-three years of age and received the crown of martyrdom from the Lord Jesus Christ.
