After a week in the priest’s cabin at the Norbertine Monastery of Canonesses in California I can be excused for wishing to hunker down even more than usual. I’m one of those introverts who, when faced with pandemic lockdown, muttered, “So things are going to change?”
The priest’s cabin at the nun’s Bethlehem Priory was one thing, but the way things are going I’m considering the Lakskhi Option. This article from the Daily Mail in London is written at about a first grade level (and that’s an insult to our first graders) but the pictures are good. It features Maxime–the hermit of Lakskhi in Georgia (that would be the country not the state where Flannery O’Connor lived).
Maxime has resurrected the ancient tradition of the stylites by living on a 130 ft high limestone monolith. The site had been abandoned after the Ottoman invasion and during the reign of communism it was impossible for anyone to restore religious life in Russia. But in 1944 a climber got to the top and found the ruins of the 10th century monastery and the skeleton of the last stylite. Archeologists did some work, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that Maxime decided to climb up and re-start the eremitical life there.