When it is said
It is a single line, meant to be said again and again.
The Orthodox remember St Thais on 8 October, and the lives of the saints for that day give this prayer.
Where it comes from
Author by tradition
Who was St Thais?
Thais lived in Egypt, where her own mother set her to work as a prostitute. She was so beautiful that many men spent all they had on her. The monk Paphnutius came to her dressed as a customer and asked why, if she knew there was a God, she was ruining so many souls. Thais fell at his feet in tears and asked him for a penance.
The Latin Life of St Thais, in Migne’s Patrologia Latina, volume 73; St Nikolai Velimirović, The Prologue of Ohrid, 8 October
Three years and one line
Thais piled up everything she had earned and burned it in the middle of the city while people watched. Paphnutius then shut her in a small room in a convent, where the nuns passed her a little bread and water through a window. When she asked how she should pray, he told her not even to speak God’s name. She was to sit facing east and say only this line, which she did for three years.
The Latin Life of St Thais, in Migne’s Patrologia Latina, volume 73
How her story ends
After three years Paphnutius went to ask the desert monk St Anthony whether God had forgiven her. Anthony’s disciple Paul saw a bed made ready in heaven and took it to be for Anthony, but a voice said it was for Thais. Paphnutius went back, opened her door and told her that God had forgiven her sins. She lived 15 more days and died in peace.
The Latin Life of St Thais, in Migne’s Patrologia Latina, volume 73; E. A. Wallis Budge, The Paradise of the Holy Fathers (1907), volume 1
What the words mean
Paphnutius or Bessarion?
The Life of St Thais was first written in Greek, perhaps in the 5th century, and was later told in Latin and in Syriac. The Latin and the Orthodox lives of the saints name her monk Paphnutius. In the Syriac telling, which the scholar E. A. Wallis Budge put into English in 1907, he is Bessarion.
Francis Mershman, “St. Thais”, The Catholic Encyclopedia (1912); Orthodox Church in America, Venerable Thais of Egypt
Lost and found
The Syriac telling ends by calling Thais the one “who was lost and was found, and was dead and who came to life by the grace of Christ”. Those words echo Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son, where the father says his son “was dead and is alive again! He was lost and is found!” (Luke 15:24).
E. A. Wallis Budge, The Paradise of the Holy Fathers (1907), volume 1
The Scripture in it
Your hands have made me and fashioned me; give me understanding to learn Your commandments.
Bible text: Berean Standard Bible, public domain.
In Latin
Qui plasmasti me, miserere mei.
From the Latin Life of St Thais, in Migne’s Patrologia Latina, volume 73, column 661.