St. Anthony gives away even the money he kept for his sister

COMA, Middle Egypt, 271 AD — Saint Anthony of Egypt, a young orphan with a small sister to raise, heard the Gospel of the rich young man read in the village church at Coma this year and believed Christ was speaking to him. He walked out of the church and gave the three hundred acres his parents had left him to the people of the village.

St. Anthony wanted to live as the Apostles and the first Christians had lived, and he now held a large estate. He was about eighteen or twenty. His father and mother had died less than six months before, and he was left alone to run the house and look after his sister. Coma is a village near Heracleopolis in Middle Egypt, and his family was one of its best known: Christians, of good standing and considerable wealth. The estate ran to three hundred acres, and its fields gave abundant crops. In Egypt about three and a third acres of farmland was reckoned the least one person could live on.

St. Anthony had gone to that church all his life. As a small boy he ran ahead of his parents on the way there, and as a boy and as a young man he took part in every feast and season of the Church’s year. He would not go to school, because he could not stand the rough ways of the other boys, and he never learned to read. He learned Scripture by hearing it read aloud in church, and he remembered what he heard.

One day this year, on his way to church, St. Anthony was thinking about how the Apostles had left everything to follow Christ. He thought too about the believers in the Acts of the Apostles, who sold what they owned and laid the money at the Apostles’ feet for the needy, and about the great reward kept for them in heaven. He was still thinking about it when he went in. The first reading was finished, and the Gospel was being read. It was the Lord’s answer to the rich young man: “If you would be perfect, go and sell that you have and give to the poor; and come follow Me and you shall have treasure in heaven.”

St. Anthony took the words as meant for him. He did not think the reading had come by chance; he took it as God’s confirmation of what he had been thinking about on the road. He went straight out of the church and handed the three hundred acres to the people of Coma, so that neither he nor his sister would be tied to the land any longer. Then he sold the household goods for a large sum and gave the money to the poor. He kept back a little for his sister’s needs.

He did not keep that money long. On another day, St. Anthony went into the church at the time of the Gospel and listened closely for whatever word would come to him. He heard the Lord tell His disciples, “be not anxious for the morrow.” This time he held nothing back. He went out at once and gave the money he had kept for his sister to the poor.

That left his sister. St. Anthony talked with her about love, about truth and about the fear of God, until she came to think about these things as he did. Then St. Anthony placed the girl with a group of consecrated virgins in the district, women who had given their lives to God and whom he knew and trusted, and left her in their care to be brought up and taught.

With the land, the money and his sister settled, St. Anthony left the family house to train himself in prayer and self-denial. There were no monasteries in Egypt yet, and no monk knew the far desert. Anyone who wanted to live that way lived alone, near his own village. St. Anthony lived by himself a short way outside Coma, far enough to be apart from other people but no farther.

An old man in the next village had lived as a hermit since his youth. St. Anthony watched how the old man lived, and from then on followed his example, trying to match the old man’s devotion.