Venerable Torhtgýð of Barking

Icon of the Saints of Barking; Saint Torhtgýð on the far right

The twenty-sixth of January is the feast-day in the Holy Orthodox Church of a lesser-known monastic saint of the English southeast: Saint Torhtgýð [or Theogirtha] of Barking. Holy Bede treats what little we know of her earthly life in his History of the English Church and People.

She lived most of her life in the abbey for women at Barking, ‘humbly and sincerely striving to serve God’. In so doing she became a trusted helpmeet for her Abbess, Saint Æþelburg, and she was placed in charge of teaching the younger novices and gently admonishing them when they strayed.

In her later years she was attacked by a wasting illness that gave her grievous bodily pain for over nine years. She bore it, however, meekly and without grumbling. In Bede’s telling, whatever sins she had committed in life were indeed more than paid for by this this-worldly suffering and her cheerful bearing of it. In the sixth year of her illness, as she left her cell one morning at dawn, she beheld what she thought was a shrouded body – but the body was shining as bright as the sun. This body was being borne out of the cloister and lifted upwards toward heaven, it seemed to Saint Torhtgýð, by gossamer strands of gold – until it entered the firmament and could no longer be seen by her eyes. This apparition, it turned out, was prophetic, for the venerable Abbess Æþelburg reposed peacefully in her old age not long thereafter, and went to her heavenly home. She was replaced as abbess by her motherly tutor in the ways of the Christian life, Saint Hildalíþ.

Saint Torhtgýð lingered in this life for three years more, and she grew so wasted in her illness that her limbs were scarce strung together. As her death drew near, she lost the use of them, as well as of her tongue. Three days and nights passed thus, but then she received a heavenly vision. Looking upward, Saint Torhtgýð began, wondrously, to speak in clear and sterling words, to some person near her which her sister-nuns could neither see nor hear. After exchanging some words in this conversation, the sister-nuns asked her to whom she was speaking, and she answered – clear-eyed and in her right wits – ‘To my dearest Mother Æþelburg!’ And the nuns understood that Saint Torhtgýð had been given by the soul of their dear departed abbess to know the day and hour of her death. After one day and one night, on the twenty-sixth of January 678, Saint Torhtgýð was released from the pains of her body and entered into æternal bliss with Christ.

Venerable Torhtgýð, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!