I was watching “BBC: Extreme Pilgrim - Ascetic Christianity” (the beginning is boring; you may start watching it from 21st minute) and saw a Coptic monk Father Lazarus, modern-day hermit, living in a cave in the Egyptian desert.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VjU_505i6E
He looked like a fascinating character, so I googled some info about him and found this:
Father Lazarus El Anthony was born in Tasmania and had worked as a university lecturer in a provincial city in Australia teaching literature and philosophy, very often preaching against Christianity in many of his classes. He spent about forty-years of his life as a militant atheist, deriving his philosophy from Marxism. When his mother was diagnosed with incurable cancer and died, "he began realise that he had indentured himself to things, to the promise of illusory happiness; and began to understand the true paradox of existence: that it cannot be ordered or forecast." Ultimately he abandoned his life in Australia and went in search of God and freedom. His pilgrimage eventually brought him to rejecting the empty doctrine of Marxist Atheism and embracing the life of a Coptic Christian monk. He met H.H. Pope Shenouda III, who lead him to where he is today. Father Lazarus El Anthony lives in solitude on the Al-Qalzam Mountain (Egypt). It was in a cave at this mountain that the great hermit, the founder and the father of the monastic life, Saint Anthony the Great (Abba Antonius) lived. At the foot of the mountain lies St. Anthony's Monastery (Deir Mar Antonios), the oldest active Christian monastery in the world, founded in 356 AD, just after the saints' death.
Conversion of Fr. Lazarus ElAnthony
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-armbcp-No
If you don’t have much time, I’d recommend to watch this short movie called “The Last Anchorite”.
The Last Anchorite part1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKXf_7Tt0-c
The Last Anchorite part2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag6WE__82Q8
Fr. Lazarus is definitely out of this world. I don’t know if he is a saint but he looks like one.