Feast Day: September 11th
The Life of Saint Theodora: She also raised her adopted child in the life in Christ and love for virtue, truly making him her son in the Holy Spirit…
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Prayers
Apolytikion: Offering your sanctified life as a divinely inspired gift to God, Venerable Theodora all-praised, having displayed fervent repentance, and amid men you shined as a philosopher, wherefore intercede without ceasing for those who glorify you, granting us the great mercy.
Kontakion: With fasting, vigils and prayers you languished your body, entreating the Creator to receive complete forgiveness for your sin, and having truly received it, you show us the path of repentance.
Saint Theodora was married but one day she fell into temptation and sinned by committing adultery. She immediately repented and felt in her heart she needed to struggle to be purified from her great sin. Saint Theodora entered a male Monastery so she could not be found, disguising herself as a male and being Tonsured a Monk. Here she lived for two years in ascesis.
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“You should realize that as soon as you intend to live in peace, at once evil comes and weighs down your Soul through accidie, faintheartedness, and evil thoughts. It also attacks your body through sickness, debility, weakening of the knees and all the members. It dissipates the strength of Soul and body, so that one believes one is ill and no longer able to Pray. But if we are vigilant, all these temptations fall away.”
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“Let us strive to enter the narrow gate. Just as the trees, if they have not stood before the winter’s storms cannot bear fruit, so it is with us; this present age is a storm and it is only through many trials and temptations that we can obtain an inheritance in the Kingdom of Heaven.”
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“Wherever you go, there you are.”
“A certain Monk, afflicted by many sorrows, said to himself, ‘Leave this place.’ With these words he began to put his sandals on his feet, and suddenly he saw the devil in the form of a man sitting in the corner of his Cell. The devil was also putting on his sandals. He said to the Monk, ‘Are you leaving here because of me? Well then, wherever you go, I will be there before you.'”
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Her fellow Monastics slandered her, saying the Monk Theodore committed fornication with a local woman and had a child. So Saint Theodora was sent out of the Monastery to look after this child as a penance. She humbly raised this child for seven years, and then was welcome to return to the Monastery again. It was only at her blessed repose that the Abbot of the Monastery saw a vision of a woman clothed in shining raiment taken up into the Heavens to join the Choir of the Saints.
Below is an Icon of Saint Theodora of Alexandria together with two Saints that share the same Feast Day of September 11th – Saint Theodora of Vasta and Saint Euphrosynos the Cook.
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