Image 1 of 1: Saint Sabas the Sanctified, devotional image
Saints and feasts
St. Sabas
Abbot
Sabas was a desert saint in the fullest sense: hidden, practical, severe, and fatherly. He wanted silence, but men kept finding him, and so the solitary became a founder whose influence reached even emperors.
The reading
ⓘ Butler source
Butler's Lives of the Saints, Volume IV (October-November-December), December 5, St Sabas, Abbot, Christian Classics 1990, pp. 494-497.
Sabas was one of the great patriarchs of Palestinian monasticism. As a child he fled family disputes into the monastery, and after years of formation went to Jerusalem, where he was directed by St. Euthymius and gradually drawn into the harder life of the desert.
He lived for a time in a cave above the Cedron, supporting himself by manual labor, but disciples gathered round him and at last forced him into the role of founder and guide of the Great Laura. The whole mature arc of his life encompasses long solitude, government of monks, internal disputes, journeys to emperors, defense of orthodoxy, and a peaceful old age in which austerity and authority had become inseparable.
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