Saints, Church History, Mysticism, History, Religious, Christianity, Sharbal Makhlūf, Saint, 1828-1898, Christian Saints--Lebanon--Biography 

Saint Sharbel was a monk and a hermit steeped in the traditions of his Christian ancestors, a mystic who can truly open to us the riches of the mystery of God's inner being and love.
Sharbel came from that part of the world which Belloc characterized as "the battleground," where East and West have ever confronted one another in a constant clash which has not been without those brilliant, yet serene flashes wherein God penetrates our world through Revelation, and solicits in return our ecstatic response in prayer. It is the land where desert-barrenness and fertility are ever struggling to gain the ascendency, and where the struggle, the clash, the battle, are not empty conflicts without issue but, on the contrary, have produced a culture, a people, that is ever rich, ever varied, a blend and synthesis of what makes East, East and West, West. - from Amzon