Letter 331: Theodore Studite, Letter 331; Greek heading: Μαρίᾳ μοναζούσῃ.

A good report of your honored self has reached my hearing, together with your upright conduct and virtuous life, learned from those brothers of ours whom your love of God has chosen to give hospitality and to care for, sheltering them from the hunt of those who persecute them. And thanks be to God, who has many who, amid obscurity in worldly life, possess a splendor that is divine. For Christ also, having thrust aside the things held glorious in the world during his sojourn in the flesh, chose the things that are weak and despised, that he might put to shame the things that are rich and that boast themselves according to the flesh. The pledge of this manner of life of yours is your taking-in of the brothers; and as you shelter them, consider that you are sheltering Christ (for it is for his sake that they are in exile), having also the virtue that is your own from within, unto the glory of salvation. In which may you be kept, growing still further in good things, guarded in a manner befitting God, offering to the Lord the virtue of an elder, like the renowned Hannah [the prophetess of Luke 2:36-37, who served God in the temple in her old age] and any other of those praiseworthy women who served God in a ripe old age.