Back, in January, I posted about St. Simeon Stylites (apparently the Elder, given that today’s is the Younger). All the Stylites were so named because they spent much of their lives sitting upon the very top of extraordinarily high pillars of stone–often 10, 20, even 60 feet high. Atop these pillars were flat rocks that could accommodate, barely, the ascetic who was taking up residence there.

Now, while some of these Stylites felt that their own spiritual journey required them to withdraw as far from the world as possible in order to devote themselves most fully to God, it seems as though today’s saint was actually encouraged by others to go live up on top of one of those pillars! It doesn’t take too much imagination to read between the lines as to why, based on Butler’s account of young Simeon:

[As a child, for] several years he served a holy hermit . . . who lived . . . upon a pillar. Simeon laboured with his whole strength to be a faithful imitator of all his (the hermit’s) virtues. Meeting one day with a young leopard, and not knowing what it was, he put a rope about its neck, and thus brought it to his master, saying he had found a cat. The good hermit, seeing the furious beast tamely obeying a child . . . ordered him (young Simeon) to make a pillar, and live on it.

Perhaps it just seemed safer to send that clueless, earnest child to a location where he could be holy and not endanger others. And, in all fairness, throughout his subsequent life, Simeon the Younger received visitors from far and wide, Christian and not, rich and poor, who either scaled the pillar or yelled or sent messages up to him, just to receive his words of wisdom.

But no jaguars. Never again.