Seraphim of Sarov and the Bear in the Clearing

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There is a clearing in a very large forest, in the middle of Russia, and it is so quiet that you can hear a pine cone fall.

An old man is sitting on a log, in a plain white work shirt, with an axe on the ground beside him and a small cloth bag on his knee. He is not alone. At the other end of the log, very upright, with the air of someone attending a formal dinner, sits a bear.

The old man takes a piece of bread out of the bag. He does not throw it. He holds it out, flat on his hand, the way you would to a nervous horse. And the bear leans over, with enormous politeness, and takes it.

"There," says the old man. "That is all there is today. Tomorrow, God willing, there will be more."

The bear, who has been eating bread out of this man's hand for some time, looks at the empty bag with the expression of an animal who has opinions about portion sizes. And then they both sit and listen to the trees.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, an Orthodox saint much loved by Catholics too, as it is told by the monks who knew him and the visitors who walked to see him. A few of the small remarks, the bear's manners and a good deal of the weather are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will tell you which parts are which as we go. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

First, who is Seraphim?

He is a Russian saint, and he lived not in the ancient world or the Middle Ages but quite recently, which I find rather wonderful. He was alive when Napoleon was marching toward Moscow. He died in eighteen hundred and thirty-three. There are people alive today whose great-great-grandparents could have met someone who met him.

He was a monk, and for a long time a hermit, which means a person who goes away to live alone with God. And then, when he was an old man, he did the opposite. He opened the door of his little cabin and let the whole world in.

The Orthodox Church calls him a saint of the Russian land, and in nineteen hundred and three, in a great crowd with the emperor in attendance, it formally glorified him, which is the Orthodox word for naming someone a saint. Catholics do not have him on their calendar, since he lived and died in the Orthodox Church, but many Catholics read about him and love him, and many Catholic and Orthodox people have found that his words work just as well in either tradition. So if you are a Catholic listener, you are welcome here tonight, and so is everyone else.

Now, a little about the world he lived in, because it will help.

Russia, in those years, was an enormous country with very few roads and a very great deal of weather. Winter was not a season. Winter was a climate that happened to you for half the year. The forests went on for hundreds of miles, and in them lived wolves and bears and the sort of silence that people from cities find uncomfortable. And in the middle of those forests were monasteries, which were rather like small towns that had decided to spend all their time praying. They had bakeries, and beekeepers, and bell ringers, and an abbot, and a large number of men who got up in the middle of the night to sing.

The one we want is called Sarov. It stood on a wooded hill, a long way east of Moscow, with a river on one side and a great deal of pine forest on every other side. It was not a famous place when our story begins. It was a place where about a hundred monks worked and sang and ate cabbage soup. Cabbage soup, I am told, was a large part of monastery life in Russia, and there are saints' lives that are mostly about cabbage soup. This is not one of them. But it is nice to know it was there.

And now, the boy.

His name, before he was a monk, was Prokhor. He was born in the city of Kursk, probably in seventeen fifty-four, though some books say five years later, and nobody who knew him thought to write it on the back of a door. His father was a merchant, a man who built things and sold things and was, by all accounts, honest and well liked. His mother, Agathia, was a woman of great energy and great faith, and she was the sort of person who, when her husband began to build a new church in the town, simply went along and kept an eye on the building work.

This is important, because a church has a bell tower, and a small boy has legs.

The old story says that when Prokhor was a child of about seven, his mother took him along to inspect the new church. He ran off, as small boys do, and climbed up the scaffolding of the bell tower, and fell. It was a very long way. His mother, hearing the cry, ran down the stairs with her heart in her mouth, and found the boy at the bottom, brushing himself off.

Not a scratch.

Now, we should be careful. This is the sort of story that gets told in a family for years, and it grows a little in each telling, and by the time a biographer writes it down the tower may be taller than the original. We do not know how far it was. What we know is that his family believed, then and always, that God had spared him, and that Prokhor himself, when he was old, did not seem to think it had anything to do with him.

A few years later he was ill. The old Lives say it was very serious, and that the doctors had done what they could. His mother had a cure that was much older than any doctor: she carried him, in a procession, with the people of the town, behind an icon of the Mother of God, which was kept at Kursk and was very dear to the whole region. And the boy got better. In the version told by the monks, the Mother of God had come to him in a dream, and promised to visit him. We tell this as they told it. The family took it, quite simply, as a gift.

He grew up thoughtful. He liked to go and sit by himself and read. He liked the Bible, and the lives of the saints, and he liked churches, and the long hours of prayer in them, much more than he liked the family shop, though he was perfectly competent at it. He did not run away from home. He was not dramatic. He asked his mother for her blessing, and she gave it, and, the old story says, she held up a copper cross and said, "Take this, and carry it all your life."

He carried it all his life. It is in the story of Saint Seraphim that nobody ever left home so quietly, with so little fuss, and with a cross that had cost a few coins.

He walked to Sarov. I would like you to picture that. A young man of about twenty-three, in a plain coat, walking across Russia with a bag and a copper cross, to a monastery he had been told about, in a forest he had never seen.

The abbot, a wise old man named Pachomius, looked at him for a while and took him in. He was given to an older monk, an elder named Joseph, to be a novice. That is the beginning of a monk's life: you are given a job, and an old man to teach you, and a very small room, and you try not to complain about any of it.

Prokhor did every job they gave him. He was a baker, and a carpenter, and a sacristan, and he cut wood, and he served at the altar, and he swept, and, the old monks said, he did it all with a face that looked as if he had been told wonderful news and was keeping it to himself.

Then, after a few years, he became ill. This time it was a swelling of the body, a dropsy, as they called it, and it went on for about three years. It was the sort of illness where the monastery doctor shakes his head and the monks bring soup. Prokhor lay in his small room and did not complain. He asked only that no one trouble himself on his account, and that the elder, Joseph, not give up his own sleep to sit with him.

And then, the old story says, he had a vision. The Mother of God came to him, with Saint Peter and Saint John. She said of him, "He is one of our kind." She touched his side with her staff, and the illness drained out of him, and in a few days he was up. It is the second time in the story that the Mother of God has come to him. Those who knew him say he almost never spoke of it. When he did, he said only that he had been very ill, and that he had been healed, and that he was grateful.

A mark was left on his side, they say, where the staff had touched him, which he kept for the rest of his life. We cannot check that. We note it, as they did.

In seventeen eighty-six, after eight years as a novice, he took the final vows of a monk. And at that moment he was given a new name.

It was Seraphim.

Now, here is the thing about names in a monastery. You do not choose your own. The abbot chooses it, and you find out at the ceremony. And Seraphim, in Hebrew, means "the burning ones," the angels who stand nearest to God in the vision of the prophet Isaiah. It is not a modest name. It is a bit like being christened Lightning. But the story is that when the abbot gave it to him, Prokhor had never even said that he liked it. The abbot said it was what came to him, and the new monk bowed, as he did to everything, and said thank you.

It turned out to be exactly right. Because the thing that people noticed about Seraphim, for the next forty-seven years, was that he was on fire. Not with temper. Not with ambition. With a sort of cheerful, steady, unembarrassed joy that seemed to have no particular cause, and came out of him whether it was raining or not.

He was ordained a priest in seventeen ninety-three, and that autumn he did something that surprised the monastery, though not very much. He asked permission to go and live in the forest.

This is a thing monks did in the Russian tradition. Not everyone was allowed. You had to have the blessing of the abbot, and you had to be a person who could manage alone, and you had to understand that it was not an escape. A hermit is not someone who has got away from people. A hermit is someone who has gone to a quiet place to pray for them.

The abbot said yes.

The cabin was about four miles from the monastery, in a stand of old pines on a rise above a little river. It had one room and a stove. There was a small garden, which he dug himself, and a beehive, and a clearing in front. He had a few books, among them the Gospels and the Psalms and some writings of the old desert monks. He had a simple wooden chair, and a block of wood for a table, and an icon of the Mother of God of Tenderness, which was his favourite, in front of which he kept a lamp burning. He had an axe, for firewood. He did not have much else.

The old story says that he got up before dawn, said his prayers, cut wood, tended the bees, worked in the garden, read, and sang the services of the Church, all by himself, the same words the monastery was singing four miles away, at the same hours. In the evening he sat, and watched the light go, and said his prayers again.

Here the animals begin to come into the story. I am told by the people who wrote it down that the forest creatures were not afraid of him. Hares came to the door. Foxes and squirrels and birds came to the clearing. And, the old accounts say, a bear.

Now we should say something about this bear. The stories about him are not in the early records written by the monastery. They come from visitors and pilgrims, and from monks who said they saw it, and from what Seraphim is said to have told his friends. Nobody has found the bear's birth certificate. The Church keeps the story, as it keeps many stories about the saints, as part of the memory of his life. And the Church, as I understand it, asks of such stories that we receive them with respect and without insisting that they are court records.

So let us say plainly: the old story says that a bear came, and Seraphim fed it. He would bring out a piece of bread, and the bear would come to the clearing and take it from his hand. It would sit with him for a little. And then the bear would go back into the trees, and the monk would go back to his prayer.

One day, a monk who had come with supplies is said to have stopped at the edge of the clearing and seen this. The bear, the story goes, was gently eating bread out of the old man's hand, and the old man was talking to it as one talks to a friend. The monk dropped the sack and ran four miles back to the monastery, which is, I think, the most reasonable response to this situation.

When Seraphim heard about it, he was not delighted. He said, in effect, that it was no concern of anyone's and that the monk should keep quiet about it. A saint does not like to be a curiosity. But the story got out, and it has been told ever since, and, I think, for a good reason.

Because a bear is not the point. The point is the old man's face. He was not showing off. He was not using a trick. He was, as you or I might be with an old dog, glad of the company. In the Orthodox tradition, there is a belief that a person who is truly at peace with God becomes, in some small way, at peace with the whole creation, so that even the creatures can sense it. The monks put the bear in his story to show that. We tell the bear for the same reason.

And on the days when the bread ran out, and the bear sat in the clearing and looked disappointed, I like to think he said what he always said: "There is no more today, my friend. Tomorrow."

There is a darker chapter, and it is short, and I will tell it quietly.

In the late summer of eighteen hundred and four, Seraphim was working in his garden. Three men came out of the trees. They were peasants from the nearby villages, and they had heard that the hermit received gifts from pilgrims, and they had decided that he must have money.

He did not. He had a cabin, a garden, a few books and an icon.

Now, he had an axe in his hand. He was a big, strong man, and the men were not very large. The old story says that he looked at them, and at the axe, and then he laid the axe down on the ground, folded his arms over his chest, and said, "Do what you need to do."

They hit him. They hit him very hard, with the handle of the axe, and with their fists, and they left him on the ground for dead. Then they went into the cabin and looked for money. They found nothing but the icon and a few potatoes. And, the story says, they were suddenly ashamed, and they ran out.

Seraphim was found, after a time, by the monks. He was in terrible shape. His head was broken, his ribs were broken, and he could hardly breathe. The doctors thought he would die. He said he would not.

It took him five months to recover. The old story says the Mother of God visited him again in those weeks, and that he did get well, against what the doctors expected. But he never stood fully upright again. For the rest of his life, he walked bent over, leaning on a staff.

The robbers were caught. The local authorities wanted to punish them. And Seraphim, bent and bruised, said that if they were punished, he would leave the district and never come back. He asked that they be let go. He said he forgave them with all his heart. They were set free, and, the story says, they never troubled anyone again.

That is the whole of the chapter, and I do not think I need to add anything to it. I only want to point out that this is a man who was holding an axe, and who could have stopped it, and who put it down on purpose.

When he had recovered, he went back to the cabin. And, in a way, he went further in. The old accounts say that for a thousand days and nights he prayed on a great stone in the forest, kneeling or standing, with his arms raised, saying the same short prayer: "God, be merciful to me, a sinner."

Imagine that. A thousand days. Through the summer flies and the autumn rain and the winter snow, a bent old man on a rock, saying six words.

There are two things I would like to say about this. The first is that it is the Orthodox tradition's account, and the details of how many hours he prayed each day are hard to know. We tell it as the monastery's biographers did. And the second is that this is the part of his life that makes modern people most uncomfortable, because it seems so extreme.

I would say it this way. We are not asked to do it. Seraphim himself, when other people came and asked how to live, never told them to go and kneel on a rock. He told them to do what they could, where they were, with the people they had. The rock was his, a special calling given to one person in one forest. But the six words, I think, are for anyone. "God, be merciful to me, a sinner." You can say it in a kitchen. You can say it on a bus.

After the rock, he went into a long silence. For some years, the accounts say, he did not speak to anyone. He kept to his cabin, and when someone came he would bow and say nothing, and go on with his work. Then, in about eighteen twenty-five, when he was an old man, the silence ended. He was told, the story goes, in a vision, that his time of seclusion was over. He left the cabin. He walked back to the monastery. And he opened the door of his cell.

This is the part of the story that I love best.

The people came. First a few, and then dozens, and then, on some days, hundreds. They came from Moscow and from the villages. Mothers with sick children. Soldiers. Merchants. Nobles in carriages that stuck in the mud. Peasants who had walked for weeks. A great many of them were unhappy, or frightened, or tired, and they all had the same question, which was some form of: how do I live?

And the old man would meet them, bent over, on the path, or at the door of his cell, and he would look up at them with eyes that, everyone said, were the colour of the sky on a clear day, and he would say:

"Christ is risen, my joy!"

He said it to everyone. In the middle of winter. In the middle of summer. To princes and to beggars. Christ is risen, my joy. For those who do not know, "Christ is risen" is the greeting of Easter, the happiest sentence in the Christian year, which Orthodox Christians say to one another for forty days after Pascha. Seraphim said it all year, to everyone he met. As far as he was concerned, it was always Easter. And, in one sense, he was right.

He also called everyone "my joy". The old account says that if you asked why, he would say that every person is a joy to God, so he would not insult them by calling them anything else.

He did not give grand sermons. He gave short, ordinary advice, and he gave it with a kind of cheerful bluntness. He said, to a woman who was worried, that worry does nothing, and that it is better to pray. He said, to a young man in a rage, "Keep peace of mind. Never be discouraged." He told the grieving to look for comfort in the Gospel. He told the sick to hope and gave them what remedy he had, a little oil from the lamp of the icon, a little water. He never claimed that he was doing anything himself. When someone was healed, he looked embarrassed, and said that it was God, and could they please go and thank him.

The saying he is best known for is this. He said: "Acquire the spirit of peace, and thousands around you will be saved."

I like to think about that sentence, because it is quite different from what we expect. It does not say, "Fix the thousands." It does not say, "Give a good speech." It says, first of all, be at peace yourself. A calm person in a house is a medicine in the house. A person who is not anxious, in a shop, in a classroom, on a ward, changes the whole room just by sitting in it. It is what he was, on his rock and in the cabin, and it was what he was to every one of those visitors. They came in with their worries, and they went out lighter, and they could not always say why.

There was a landowner called Nicholas Motovilov, who had come to him, ill and low, in his thirties, and whom Seraphim had healed. He became a friend, and one winter day in eighteen thirty-one he sat with the old man in the snow in a clearing in the forest and asked him what the purpose of the Christian life was. Motovilov wrote it all down afterward, and it was published many years later. It is a long, beautiful talk, and Seraphim's answer, in short, was that the aim of life is to receive the Holy Spirit and to be filled with God's own peace and light. I will not retell it, because it is better in his own words and it takes an hour. But if you ever want to read something that sounds as if it came from the middle of the forest, that is the thing to find.

Meanwhile, he looked after a small community of women at a village called Diveyevo, who had been placed under his care by a dying friend, and he sent them food and advice, and sent them, the story says, an unlikely project involving a ditch. I will tell you about the ditch another time.

By the end of eighteen thirty-two he was old, and his body was worn out. He had a bent back, and bad legs, and a lifetime of fasting. He knew, the accounts say, that his time was short. He told a few people so. He asked the sisters at Diveyevo to be good to one another. In the last weeks he stopped receiving pilgrims, and spent more and more time in prayer.

On the second of January, eighteen thirty-three, a monk who lived nearby went to the cell early in the morning, and smelt smoke. He came in. The old man was kneeling in front of his icon of the Mother of God of Tenderness, with his arms crossed on his chest and his head bowed. A candle had fallen, and some papers had caught. But the old man was not hurt by it.

He had died, kneeling, in the middle of the prayer.

It is, I think, a wonderful way to go. The monks said he looked as though he had gone to sleep in the middle of a sentence and had simply not woken up on this side of it.

He was buried at Sarov, in the cathedral grounds. And, as these things go, nothing happened for a long time. Then, slowly, as people remembered, the stories grew. Pilgrims came to the grave. The word got around. And in nineteen hundred and three, seventy years after his death, with the emperor and enormous crowds in attendance, the Church glorified him.

The next century was hard on the monastery. Sarov was closed and, in the end, swallowed up by a secret city, and the pilgrims were kept out for a very long time. The relics of the saint were lost, and many people believed they had been destroyed. Then, in nineteen ninety, as the old order was ending, they were found in a museum in Saint Petersburg, and the next year they were carried back, in a great procession, to Diveyevo, where the women he had looked after had gone on praying for a hundred and fifty years.

And that is perhaps the most Seraphim thing about the whole story. Nothing that was done to the place could stop the praying. Hundreds of years of heavy weather, and the prayers outlasted it.

So that is the end of the life. Let me bring us back to the clearing.

An old man is sitting on a log in a very large forest. The sun is going down behind the pines. A bear is sitting at the other end of the log, and the bread bag is empty, and neither of them has the least interest in leaving.

The old man looks up. He sees, through the trees, someone coming along the path, someone tired and worried, who has walked a very long way. And he stands up, slowly, leaning on his staff, and he smiles, and he says the thing he has been saying to every person who came along that path for years.

"Christ is risen, my joy."

Close your eyes now. Let your breathing slow. If you carried a worry into bed with you tonight, you may put it down on the log, beside the bear. He will not mind. It is allowed to wait until morning. Whatever you did not finish, whoever you did not forgive, whatever you are afraid of tomorrow: set it down. Acquire a little peace, just for tonight, and see what happens to the room.

Breathe out. The forest is very quiet. The lamp is burning in front of the icon. The pine cones are dropping, one by one, onto the soft ground.

Now, notes for the curious, which we do at the end of every episode, so that you know what you have just been told.

The broad outline of Seraphim's life is well documented. He was born in Kursk, entered Sarov, became a monk and a priest, lived as a hermit, was attacked by robbers in eighteen hundred and four, and spent his last years receiving visitors. He died in eighteen hundred and thirty-three, and was glorified in nineteen hundred and three. These come from the monastery records, and from the many people who knew him.

The healings, the visions of the Mother of God and the thousand days on the rock come from the early Lives written at Sarov and Diveyevo, and from what he is said to have told others. The Church keeps them as part of his story, and we have told them as the monks told them, with the words "the old story says". The bear is told by visitors and pilgrims. We cannot prove it, and the Church does not ask us to insist on it, but it has been told about him for nearly two hundred years and it fits what everyone says of his character.

Two things we have left out on purpose. The long conversation with Motovilov is a rich and difficult text and deserves more than a paragraph, so we only pointed to it. And the stories of the community at Diveyevo are an episode of their own.

What this episode made up is the colour: the weather, the manners of the bear, some of the small remarks and a good many of the jokes. We have not added any event, and we have not changed what any of it means.

That's the story of Saint Seraphim of Sarov for tonight. The Orthodox Church keeps his memory on the second of January by the old calendar, which is the fifteenth of January on the civil one, the day he died. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And may Christ, who is risen, give you his peace tonight, may the Mother of God cover you with her prayers, and may you wake up tomorrow to find that it is, once again, a little bit Easter. Goodnight, and God bless.

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