There seem to be two women called St Matrona and both their stories are inspirational and teach us something!! The first that I will write about is a woman who is counted among the 'queer' saints because she dared to do something different in order to be with God. She was from Perga in Pamphylia and married very young and had a daughter. She was in churches and at prayer so often her husband thought she was having an affair and banned her from going out!! She could not bear it and so she ran away, left her daughter in the care of a nun named Suzanna and ran away to join a monastery. The interesting thing about her is that in order to do this she had to dress in men's clothes and become a Eunuch. She had to shed her given gender in order to follow the call of God in her life. Transvestite must not be confused with transgendered! She did not want to become a man, but it does show that male and female were not equal, not surprising considering she was born in 492AD!! Her saints day is November 9th! She died at the age of 100 peacefully after predicting the date of her own death!
The second woman called St Matrona was born in Russia in 1881...born without any pupils and therefore blind she never let it hold her back! As a young child she would sense people's illnesses and healing them of sickness both in body and soul. And all this at the age of 6 or 7!!! She became paralysed as an adult so became an ascetic, living in a room surrounded by icons and praying constantly. In 1945 during the war the Communists were afraid of her influence over the people and tried to arrest her, but she had gone into hiding.
Two inspirational women with the same name living centuries apart, neither fazed by the sacrifices they had to make in order to follow God's call on their lives, both willing to risk everything, crossing gender boundaries, challenging ideas of disability. Our little Russian girl may have been blind but she 'saw' more than many sighted people do in a lifetime. As we remember these amazing women let us ask God what boundaries we must cross and what prejudices we must challenge to help others to grow and love more.
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