السيرة
Saint Sim'an ibn Kalil ibn Maqara, surnamed al-Makin, was a son of the Coptic people of Egypt and a kinsman of the noble household of Ibn al-Amid. He grew up learned and skilled in letters, and for a time he served the world as a scribe in the diwan of the army in the days of al-Nasir Salah al-Din.
Yet the splendor of the palace and the praise of men could not satisfy the longing of his soul. Remembering the words of the Lord, who said that what a man gains if he wins the whole world and loses his soul profits him nothing, he set his face toward the wilderness. He laid aside the pen of earthly service and took up instead the yoke of Christ.
In the days of Pope Anba John V, the seventy-second of the holy patriarchs, he went down into the desert of Scetis, the wilderness of Wadi al-Natrun made holy by the great fathers. There, in the Monastery of Saint John the Short, he received the angelic habit and gave himself wholly to the monastic life.
He became a true solitary, giving his nights and days to prayer, fasting, and the unceasing meditation of the divine Scriptures. The fathers tell of him that whenever worldly thoughts pressed upon his heart, he would call to mind the words of the Lord, and at once his soul was stilled and filled with peace. Thus he tasted in his cell the consolation promised to those who forsake all for the sake of the kingdom.
Out of the fruit of his stillness he composed for the brethren a beautiful book in twelve chapters, which he named Rawdat al-Farid wa Salwat al-Wahid, "The Garden of the Solitary and the Consolation of the Lonely One." In a graceful and measured tongue he wrote upon the purpose for which God created man, upon faith and the fear of God, upon prayer and fasting, patience and almsgiving, purity and humility, forgiveness and contentment, that the soul of the reader might be led step by step toward heaven.
He labored also in the defense and exposition of the Faith, setting down a treatise upon the oneness of the Creator and the Trinity of His Persons, and explanations of the Holy Gospel drawn from the teaching of the Fathers. So the scribe who had once recorded the affairs of an earthly army became a scribe of the things of God, gathering wisdom for the household of Christ.
Having grown old in the holy life and rich in virtue, this blessed father reposed in peace in his desert at the dawn of the thirteenth century, and his soul was received into the bosom of the saints whom he had loved and imitated.
May his prayers and his blessing be with us. Amen.