The Feast of Saint Maron.
On 9 February the church keeps the hermit it is named for — a fifth-century Syrian ascetic who lived on a hilltop by the Orontes, left no rule, no order and no writings, and attracted enough followers that a monastery took his name after he died. Lebanon marks the day as a public holiday. A church of millions is organised around a man whose entire programme was to be left alone.
Maron died around 410 and is known mostly through Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who included him in a collection of Syrian ascetics: he lived in the open air on a hilltop near a ruined pagan temple, and people came to him. The monastery of Beth Maroun on the Orontes grew after his death, its monks became a distinct community, and pressure from Byzantine and Muslim powers pushed them into the Lebanese mountains, where they became a mountain people with their own patriarch. The feast on 9 February is a public holiday in Lebanon and the church's national day. It is worth noticing what the church did not inherit: no rule, no order, no writings, just a name.
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