To the ordinary human eye, St. Charbel is simply an oddity, one who embraced a life already slightly weird (monasticism) and took it to the next level (hermit). But it’s such radical Christians who transcend their age because they listen always to the Voice telling them of the essence of the moral law within.
This coming Saturday, the Latin Rite Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Houston is hosting Eparch Elias Zaidan of the Maronite Catholic Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon of Los Angeles.[*] His Grace will be celebrating the Maronite Divine Liturgy (which originated as the Antiochene Liturgy) in honor of one of the greatest miracle-workers in history, a nineteenth-century monk and hermit called St. Charbel Makhlouf. Eparch Elias will also bring relics of the saint. A presentation afterward will detail the wonderworking life and death of this Lebanese village boy now loved and venerated around the world.
St. Charbel, born Youssef Antoun Makhlouf in 1828 in Bekaa Kafra, Lebanon, was one of five children in a poor but pious family. His father died when he was three. He was influenced by two uncles who were monks, and the young boy, who served as a cowherd, determined—like the young St. Patrick watching his sheep—to aspire to obey St. Paul’s dictum to pray without ceasing. He put up an icon of Mary in a grotto and led his cows to this place of prayer.
At age 23, Youssef left his family to enter the Monastery of Our Lady in Mayfouq, north of Beirut. He soon transferred to the Monastery of St. Maron, closer to the big city, where he professed his final vows a few years later. His monastic name, Charbel, was taken in honor of a martyr of Antioch in the second century. After studying philosophy and theology at yet another monastery for six years, St. Charbel was ordained a priest. He returned to St. Maron, where he lived a very strict ascetical life for sixteen years. Already during this time, the young monk and priest became known for miraculous events that seemed to follow him. He healed the sick and barren and had an uncanny influence over animals. Even the Muslims around the monastery were witness to supernatural events seemingly done through him. In 1875, the abbot gave St. Charbel permission to live as a hermit at the Chapel of Saints Peter and Paul, which was cared for by the Monastery of St. Maron, for twenty-three years until his death on Christmas Eve, 1898.
To the ordinary human eye, St. Charbel is simply an oddity, one who embraced a life already slightly weird (monasticism) and took it to the next level (hermit). The miracles, many would say, were mere coincidences or ordinary events misunderstood by primitive religious people. The light that seemed to come from his tomb was probably imaginary. That his body remained incorrupt for many years and seemed to emit a strange liquid is a mere curiosity. That miracles were attributed to his intercession after his death is simply more superstition.
What did St. Charbel do for Lebanon, whose political, economic, and social fortunes have been so painful for much of the time since his death? What relevance do such figures as St. Charbel have to our modern life? Why are people still interested in such figures?
In an essay entitled “Church Movements and Their Place in Theology,” then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger examined the roots of all the varied forms of religious life that have begun to spring up after the collapse of so many religious orders in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council. Though there are no doubt differences among the various new groups, and not all will last for centuries as some of the more famous movements in history have, he saw in these new groups something ever-present in the Catholic Church going back to the origins of monasticism.
“The journey into the desert,” he wrote, “is a departure from the solid, interconnected structure of the local Church, a departure from a Christianity more and more adapted to the needs of worldly life, launching into a discipleship with no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts.’” In short, the urge to follow a new form of Christian life is almost always motivated by the desire to seek first the kingdom of God—a desire that should be present in that local Church but often isn’t. Ratzinger noted that St. Basil the Great’s monastic rule was titled “The Enchiridion of the Committed Christians.” Along with bringing to life “the radical dimension of the gospel,” these departures, Ratzinger observes, from the sometimes lukewarm or even stultifying quality of the local parish and diocese also “reinstate and reapply the universalist aspect of the apostolic mission.”
In contrast, the gap between the universal aspirations and parochial reality of Liberal Protestant theologians, who pretended to rise above the history of Christianity with its dubious dogmas and constricting morals to attain to its essence by their attention to all the most up-to-date intellectual trends, is captured in an old joke. Ultimately, they were preaching the fatherhood of God, brotherhood of man, and the neighborhood of Berlin. No figures are narrower or more provincial than the cosmopolitan universalists whose boundaries are the conventional wisdom of their own, however intellectual, time—especially the ones who claimed to belong to an “enlightened” age.
It’s those radical Christians attempting to live with no ifs and buts who transcend their age and make the starry skies above seem brighter and broader because they listen always to the Voice telling them of the essence of the moral law within. “These men,” the scholar Helen Waddell observed of the Desert Fathers of the early centuries, “by the very exaggeration of their lives, stamped infinity on the imagination of the West.”
Reeking of irrelevance to those who find their single-minded pursuit of God to the exclusion of sex, power, money, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll crazy, it is the radical Christian, the monastic, who is most relevant even in a modern world. In a world of wonders, the obviously and exaggeratedly committed Christian stands out not so much for the exaggeration as for the capacity to exercise and express wonder in a world of boredom.
As Kathleen Norris observed of monastics in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography: “It may be fashionable to assert that all is holy, but not many are willing to haul ass to church four or five times a day to sing about it. It’s not for the faint of heart.”
Indeed, monastic singing and silence are not for the faint of heart. Early monks said they were going out into the desert to fight demons. Perhaps more difficult, they also fought their own false selves, peeling back the stories they—we—tell that are not true about where our final happiness lies or why we are so unhappy. They act as all Christians should, preferring nothing at all to communion with Christ the true vine. They understand that it is the heart, the deepest part of us, that is the most important, for it is the place where we decide whether to follow the way of life or death, sacrifice or sin, God or nothing. St. Charbel said, “The things that go on within you are more important than those that take place in your life.”
Because of that depth of communion, the lives of many of these extravagant figures, hidden away from the world and ensconced in wonder at the one who gives them life, are lives of strange fruitfulness. It is not so much that they work wonders as that God works wonders in them, if they will only let that love move through them. St. Charbel counseled, “Whatever enters you and you receive is not yours and whatever comes out of you and you give away belongs to you.”
You and I are likely people living in the world. We must pay attention to what is “relevant” to our age. We turn to the saints in order to discover that what the world (and we) often consider irrelevant is really the one thing needful.
[*] For more on the event, see the article in the Texas Catholic Herald.
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The featured image of Saint Charbel is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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