It must have been about 28 years ago. After a grueling visit to Mount Lebanon to review the work of CNEWA’s Pontifical Mission team among the Christian and Muslim communities in the north, my colleagues and I traveled south. On our drive down to Beirut, a colleague suggested we visit the tomb of a sainted but unfamiliar (to me) Maronite monk. It was late evening, and I was not expecting much.
As our car approached the courtyard that fronts the monastery, I was amazed to find the grounds teeming with people of all ages and religions. What struck me most was not to find Druze and Muslim families visiting the shrine — that was once commonplace throughout the Middle East — but young adults in their late teens and 20s, all dolled up for the dance clubs of Beirut, stopping first to pray at the tomb of St. Charbel, a monk and hermit who lived a life of “prayer without ceasing” near the village of Annaya and who died quietly on Christmas Eve 1898.
Since that initial visit to St. Charbel, I have observed how the life of this monk and wonderworker have entered the mainstream of Christian devotion across the world. From Phoenix to Lviv, Ukraine, from Quebec City to Cefalu, Sicily, in churches Catholic and Orthodox, the familiar and haunting image of the bearded and hooded hermit looking downward has glowed from a sea of lighted tapers. Not unlike St. Nicholas, perhaps the most popular saint in Christendom for nearly two millennia, St. Charbel, who was canonized in 1977, draws young and old, men and women, Christians and non-Christians, all who seek his favor, intercession and protection.
“People with good hearts come here,” a Syrian Muslim man said to CNEWA’s one-time correspondent Marilyn Raschka in 2009, as he and his wife had traveled to the monastery to seek the saint’s intercession for their family.
Today, on his feast day in the Roman liturgical calendar, may we seek St. Charbel’s intercession, not only for our own personal needs, but for the needs of a broken world so bitterly divided by fear, anger and hate.
God, infinitely holy and glorified in your saints,
You who inspired the holy monk and hermit Charbel
to live and die in perfect likeness to Jesus,
granting him the strength to detach himself from the world
to make the heroism of the monastic virtues triumph in his hermitage
— poverty, obedience and chastity —
we beg you to grant us the grace
to love and serve you following his example.
Almighty Lord, who manifested
the power of St. Charbel’s intercession
through numerous miracles and favors,
grant us the grace (state intention here)
that we implore through his intercession.
Amen.
