St. Hilarion the Great

Hilarion was born about the year 291 at Thabatha, a village south of Gaza in Palestine, to pagan parents, who sent him to study at Alexandria. There he came to believe in Christ, and he loved the assemblies of the Church more than the circus and the theatre. Hearing of St. Antony, he went into the desert to see him, and stayed with him about two months, learning his prayer, his humility and his rule of life.

Finding the crowds around Antony too great, he went home, gave what his dead parents had left him to his brothers and to the poor, and at about fifteen went out alone into the wilderness near Majuma, the port of Gaza. He lived there in a hut of reeds and sedge, and later in a cell hardly larger than a tomb, on a few figs a day or a little bread, weaving baskets and singing the Psalms, and he fought for years against hunger, sleep, the flesh and the demons.

After twenty-two years in the wilderness the sick began to find him, and the healings and deliverances God worked through him made his name known through Palestine, Syria and Egypt. Monasteries sprang up after his pattern throughout Palestine, and St. Antony, hearing of him, wrote to him and sent the sick of Syria to him, calling him his son. St. Jerome writes that before Hilarion there were no monasteries in Palestine, and that as the Lord had Antony in Egypt, so He had Hilarion in Palestine.

In old age, weighed down by the crowds and the honour, he fled. He went to Egypt, to the places where Antony had lived and died, then to the oasis of the desert, to Sicily, to Dalmatia and at last to Cyprus, and wherever he hid, the sick and the possessed found him out. His faithful disciple Hesychius followed and found him again and again.