St. Ephrem

St. Ephrem was born around 306 at Nisibis in Mesopotamia, on the contested frontier between the Roman and Persian empires. Baptized as a young man, he became a disciple of St. Jacob, bishop of Nisibis, and served the church there for decades as a teacher and catechist. He was ordained a deacon and, according to tradition, out of humility never sought the priesthood. When Nisibis was ceded to Persia in 363 after the death of the emperor Julian, Ephrem joined the Christian exodus and settled at Edessa, where he spent his final decade teaching and writing. Ephrem was the greatest poet of the early Church. Writing in Syriac, his own tongue and a language close to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus, he composed hundreds of hymns and metrical homilies along with commentaries on Scripture. He set his hymns to popular melodies and trained choirs—notably choirs of women—to sing them in the liturgy, using sacred song both to teach the faith and to answer the heresies of his day. His poetry is dense with biblical imagery and paradox, dwelling on the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and the mystery of God's humility; his hymns in honor of the Virgin Mary are among the earliest and most beautiful in Christian literature. Ephrem's holiness was practical as well as poetic. In the last year of his life, when famine struck Edessa, the aged deacon organized the distribution of food and the care of the sick and dying. Worn out by this labor, he died at Edessa in June of 373. The Syriac churches came to call him the 'Harp of the Holy Spirit,' and his writings spread in translation throughout the Christian world, East and West. Venerated from antiquity in all the churches of the East, Ephrem was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XV in 1920—the only Syriac father to hold that title. His memorial in the General Roman Calendar is June 9, and he is regarded as a patron of spiritual directors and a model for catechists, poets, and all who teach the faith through beauty.