How to Talk to a Hermit

Photo by Pasqual Gorriz

I spent most of the hike down the rim of Qaddisha Valley worrying not so much what would happen if I slipped and fell down the mountain gorge, but about the protocol for visiting a hermit. I was trying to find Our Lady of Hawka Monastery, a 13th century shrine built into the side of the valley's red sandstone cliffs and one of the region's last functioning hermitages. So phoning ahead for an appointment was not an option: hermits are wireless in the Biblical sense.

When I arrived at the monastery grotto, two white doves cooed overhead as if to emphasize the sanctity of the otherwise silent setting. Beginning just a few centuries after the dawn of Christianity, holy men have come to the mountains of northern Lebanon in search of solitude, though the attraction of the ascetic life has faded in the modern era. Father Dario, a 73 year-old Colombian priest, took up residence at Hawka eight years ago, becoming one of just three hermits left in Lebanon.

Which made me that much more nervous about imposing. What if I stumbled into the monastery in middle of holy mass? Or interrupted the Father at some key moment in the contemplation of divine creation? Or more likely, what if the reason he renounced a life of earthly pleasures was to get away from the likes of me? Surely someone who becomes a hermit has people issues.

As it turns out, all that one has to do to ask for an audience with a hermit is knock. Father Dario emerged from his quarters wearing a black cowl and a warm smile. He explained that although he has many visitors -- some of whom wake him in the middle of the night, or use his pencils to graffiti their names on the walls of his cell -- all are welcome. It is the duty of hermits, he explained, to serve both God and humanity through prayer and penitence, which apparently includes suffering fools gladly.

Indeed, ermitism in the Catholic Church and its eastern branches is not some kind of a primal escape to nature and freedom, but a role defined by canonical law and subject to the discipline and hierarchy of the church. To become a hermit, one first has to be either a member of a monastic order, or to be consecrated by a bishop. Father Dario was a Catholic priest living in Florida and making $200 an hour working as a psychologist when God told him to give up his worldly possessions and take on the contemplative life. But the Word of the Lord wasn't good enough on its own. It took Father Dario ten years after moving to Lebanon and becoming a Maronite monk before he received his bishop's blessing to take the next step. He moved out of the hectic life at the main monastery -- Lebanese monks like their mobile phones and Mercedes Benz -- and into the silence of the valley. Now he spends his days on a tight schedule: 14 hours of prayer, 3 hours working in the vegetable garden, two hours studying mystical texts, and five hours sleeping on a wooden board with a stone under his head. "At the beginning it is difficult," he said, "But now I can't sleep with a pillow."

Unfortunately, for all his trials in the proverbial desert, Father Dario had little in the way of gnostic wisdom to offer the passing hiker, though he did have a funny story about what it's like trying to get through Homeland Security onto a flight to the Middle East when you have the same last name -- Escobar -- and the same place of birth -- Medellin -- as the world's most famous cocaine baron. "Many people come here because they think I know the future," he said. "I only know one thing: that we all will die." Then he told me to get married.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut