Venerable Serapion the Sindonite

Life

Sindon means a strip of cloth. This saint was called the Sindonite because he concealed his bodily nakedness with only a strip of cloth. In his hand he carried the Gospel. Serapion lived like a bird, without a roof and without a care, passing from one place to another. He gave his sindon to a poor man who was shivering in the cold, and he himself remained completely naked. When someone asked him: "Serapion, who stripped thee?" he pointed to the Gospel and said: "This!" But afterward he gave even the Gospel to ransom a certain debtor, whom his creditor was driving into prison for debt. Once in Athens he ate nothing for four days, for he had nothing, and he began to cry out from hunger. When the Athenian philosophers asked him why he was crying out, he answered: "I was indebted to three creditors; two I have satisfied, but the third still torments me. The first creditor is bodily lust, which tormented me from my youth; the second is love of money, and the third is the stomach. The first two have left me, but this third still torments me." The philosophers gave him a gold coin to buy bread. He went to the baker, took only one loaf of bread, left the entire gold coin, and departed. In old age he peacefully reposed in the Lord in the fifth century.