Seraphim of Sarov and the Bear

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A man is kneeling in a clearing in a Russian pine forest, in the snow, with a very large bear sitting politely in front of him.

The man is old and bent over, as if he is carrying a sack that nobody else can see. He has a small round loaf of bread in his hands. He breaks it in two, and he gives half to the bear, and the bear takes it as gently as a cat takes a fish bone from a plate.

Then the bear sits and eats, and the old man looks at it and says, as if the two of them had known each other for years, "There. Is that better?"

And the bear, who has no opinion on the matter except that bread is wonderful, says nothing at all.

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 about Saint Seraphim of Sarov, an Orthodox saint of Russia who is much loved by Catholics too, and it comes from the accounts of people who knew him, written down soon after he died, and a few of the small conversations are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

We start in the town of Kursk, in the south of Russia, in the middle of the seventeen hundreds.

Kursk was a busy, practical sort of place. It sat on the road between Moscow and the south, and a great deal of grain, leather and gossip passed through it every week. If you have ever lived in a town where the main street is also the main road to somewhere more important, you know the feeling. Everybody is always on their way to something else, and the people who stay are the people who sell them lunch.

The family of a man named Isidore Moshnin did a little better than lunch. They were merchants. Isidore built things, and he was just beginning, in those years, to build a very large church in the middle of the town. Church building was a family business in more ways than one, because it cost a great deal of money and took a great many years, and there is nothing like a half-finished cathedral to make a household talk about little else at supper.

Isidore's wife was named Agathia, and she is the one the stories remember best. She was a woman of strong character and strong prayer. When her husband died, while the church was still unfinished, she did not sit down and wait for someone to help. She took over the building. She went to the site every day, they say, and told the workmen what to do, and the workmen, who had been prepared for a widow, found that they had been given a foreman.

Their youngest son was named Prokhor. That was his name before he was ever called Seraphim, so for now we shall call him Prokhor, and you can imagine him as a boy in the sort of coat that is a little too big because it is meant to last.

Now, there are two stories from his childhood that every account tells, and both of them are the kind of story that the whole family would have told for the rest of their lives, with one person saying "Do you remember?" and everyone else saying "Of course we remember."

The first is about the bell tower.

His mother, you remember, was building a church, and the bell tower was going up beside it. A bell tower, while it is being built, is a tall wooden frame with a very long drop. One day, when Prokhor was a small boy, she took him up with her to see the work. And the boy, who was curious and who had been told a hundred times not to, leaned over the edge to look at the ground.

And fell.

His mother, the old accounts say, came down those stairs faster than anyone in Kursk had ever seen a widow move. She ran to the place where he had landed, with her heart in her mouth and her whole life flying in front of her.

And there he was, standing up, brushing himself off, without a scratch.

The old story says she took him in her arms and wept, and thanked God, and did not let go of him for a long time. The family, ever afterwards, counted it as a mercy of God, and so, as far as we can tell, did Prokhor. That is the thing to notice. Whatever else Seraphim was, he was a man who gave away the credit for everything, and the habit began early.

The second story is about an illness.

When he was a bit older, Prokhor became ill. We do not know what it was. The accounts say only that he was ill for a long time, and that he got worse, and that the doctors did what doctors in the seventeen sixties did, which was to shake their heads and prescribe patience.

And one night he had a dream. In the dream, the Mother of God came to him, and told him that she would visit him and heal him.

Now, a few days later, a great procession went through Kursk. Kursk had, and still has, an icon of the Mother of God that is very precious to the people of that country, the icon called the Kursk Root. It was being carried through the streets in the rain. And the procession came past the Moshnin house, and the crowd was thick, and it turned out that the way to the icon, for a sick boy, was through the courtyard.

So his mother picked him up, and held him up so that he could touch the icon. And from that day, the old account says, he began to recover.

He grew up well. He learned to read, which was not a given in those days, and he read the lives of the saints, and the Psalms, and the Gospels, with the happy concentration of a boy who has found the one subject he cannot get enough of. He went to church more than his friends. He was not a strange boy, particularly, or if he was, the story is not telling us. He worked in a shop. He was good with people. He could have made a good merchant.

But somewhere around the age of seventeen, he began to talk to his mother about something else.

There's a scene here, and I confess I'm going to invent most of it. The old accounts tell us the outline and not the dialogue, but it is hard to imagine the day without some kind of dialogue.

So picture a kitchen in Kursk. Prokhor is eighteen, give or take. His mother is making something with cabbage in it, because it's Russia and that is a law of nature.

"Mama," he says. "I want to go to a monastery."

His mother does not say anything. She keeps stirring.

"Mama?"

"I heard you," she says.

Now, you might think this is where a mother of a brick-maker and a church builder, a woman who had spent her life raising a family and a cathedral, would object. Her youngest son. Her business, such as it was, needing someone to take it on. The old story says she did not.

What she did, according to the accounts, was something wonderfully practical. She put down the spoon. She took a large wooden cross, a plain one, we're told, from the house. And she blessed him with it, and said, "Go, my child, and may the Lord keep you. Never forget Him."

And he went. And the cross, we're told, he wore for the rest of his life.

It was not a short journey. Prokhor walked, with a few friends from Kursk who were going to Kiev on pilgrimage, across about two hundred miles of the Russian plain. And at the caves of Kiev, where holy men have lived for nearly a thousand years, an old hermit looked at him for a while and said, in effect, "Not here. Go to Sarov."

So he walked a long way back again, and then a long way further north and east, to a monastery in the forest, in the year seventeen seventy-eight.

Sarov is a very quiet place in the stories, and I imagine it was quiet in the sense of having a lot of trees in it. It was a monastery on a hill, with a river on one side and a forest on every other. The forest was thick, and the winters were long, and it was cold enough in January to make the bells sound brittle.

Prokhor came to Sarov as a novice, which is the official word for a person who is trying monastery life before he promises it. He was given a rule, and a great many jobs.

He baked bread. He worked as a carpenter. He served in the refectory, where the monks ate, which is the monastery word for a room with a lot of soup in it. And whatever the job was, he did it with a kind of cheerful steadiness. The old monks noticed. There are reports of him working in the bakery at night, so that the bread would be ready for morning, and then going straight to church for the prayers. He did not, by the reports, seem to mind. He seemed, by every account, to be rather happy.

But there was a hard patch.

In his third year at Sarov, he became very ill again, this time with dropsy, which is a swelling of the body from retained water. He was ill for about three years. He lay in his cell, swollen and uncomfortable, and the monks looked after him, and he did not want to be any trouble.

And once again, the accounts say, the Mother of God appeared to him. She looked at him, and she turned to two of the apostles, Saint Peter and Saint John, who were there beside her, and she said of Prokhor, in the Russian that has been repeated for two centuries: "This one is of our kind." Then she touched his side with her staff, and the water ran out, and he began to recover.

Now, I want to be fair about that story, because it's a story told by a man who was very sick, and some of the people who have told it since have told it with more certainty than the evidence supports. What we can say is this. He was sick. He recovered. He believed, with the sort of belief that does not need argument, that he had been visited and healed by the Mother of God. And everything he did for the next fifty years followed from that belief.

I think that is the right way to hold the story. Not as a scientific report, and not as a fairy tale, but as the thing that a man carried inside him, and the reason he was able to be so very gentle with everyone else.

In the year seventeen eighty-six, when he was a little over thirty, he took his final vows, and he was given a new name.

The name was Seraphim.

If you have been to church, you may know the word. The seraphim are the angels of the highest rank, the ones Isaiah saw around the throne of God, and the word means, in Hebrew, "the burning ones." It's a rather large name to give a baker. But the monks of Sarov, who were not sentimental men, thought it fit him. And fit him it did, because what everyone remembered about Seraphim afterwards was that he seemed to be lit from the inside.

And we'll come to that. But first, he had a notion that he wanted to try something else.

Let me explain what a hermit is, because it's a word we use loosely.

A hermit, in the Orthodox and Catholic tradition both, is a monk who has decided that the best way to love God and his neighbour is to go off alone, away from the noise, and pray. It sounds selfish. It is the opposite. The old teaching is that the hermit goes into the desert, or in this case the forest, not to get away from people but to make room for them. He prays for them by name. He holds the whole world in his prayer, and the world, in due course, comes to find him.

Seraphim had loved the forest since he first arrived. On his days off, he used to walk into it, and he found a place about three miles from the monastery, on the bank of a little river, where there was a clearing and a lot of old pines. He asked his abbot for permission to live there.

After a few years of asking, he got it. Around the year seventeen ninety-four, he moved into a small log hut in the woods.

I like to imagine the hut. It's not a thing you can find on a map. It was one room, with a stove, and an icon, and a bench. There was a bit of ground outside, and he dug it up and grew vegetables. He had a beehive. He kept a small garden of cabbage, and potatoes, and some herbs. It was Russia, so there was a great deal of cabbage.

He prayed. He prayed from before dawn. He prayed the psalms, and he prayed the short prayer that the Eastern monks have prayed for fifteen centuries: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." He prayed it quietly, over and over, with each breath, until it was less like something he said and more like something he was.

And in the forest, a surprising thing began to happen.

The animals came.

Now. This is the part where we have to be careful, and also where it gets very sweet.

Many of the saints, in both traditions, have stories of animals. We've met a few already, on this show. A lion who guarded donkeys. Otters who warmed a bishop's feet. A wolf who was persuaded to stop eating a town. It's a very old thread, going back to the first monks in the Egyptian desert, and I think the reason it keeps appearing is that people noticed something real. When someone is entirely peaceful, animals relax around them. Anyone who has sat quietly in a garden with a cup of tea and had a bird land on the table knows a very small version of this.

What the old accounts say about Seraphim is that visitors who came to his hut found him sitting on a tree stump, surrounded by creatures. Hares, they said. Foxes. Squirrels. Birds in the branches. And a bear.

The bear is the famous one.

The accounts do not give us its name. They say that the bear came to the hut regularly, and that Seraphim would go inside and bring out a piece of bread, and that the bear would take it from his hand, and eat it sitting there like a very large dog.

I don't know how a bear feels about bread. I suspect that we all do.

Now, I want to tell you what the sources really say, because it's a point of honesty on this show. The stories of the bear come from people who visited him, or who lived at Sarov, or who heard it from them. They were written down in the generation after he died. There is no photograph, of course, and no sketch made on the spot. What we have are the reports, and the reports are consistent, and they come from people who were there. That's as good as the evidence gets for most things in the eighteenth century. So I believe the stories, in the way that I believe a friend who tells me what happened at their grandmother's house. But I wouldn't put them in a physics textbook.

And then there's a small detail that I've always liked.

Let me imagine one visitor, a monk sent from the monastery with supplies, who found the old man in the clearing with the bear beside him. The monk, as you might imagine, froze. He had spent his whole life being told that bears were dangerous, and this was a good, solid example of a bear.

Seraphim, in our version, looks up and says, quite cheerfully, "Don't be afraid, my friend. She won't hurt you. She knows I have bread."

Which is about the most Russian sentence I can think of, and I have to confess it is entirely our own. Don't be afraid. She won't hurt you. She knows I have bread. It has comfort, theology and a plan, all in one breath.

And what the monk did, I imagine, was very slowly put down the sack of flour.

So the years went by in the forest, and they were mostly quiet.

But in the autumn of eighteen hundred and four, the quiet came to an end.

I am going to tell this part gently, because it's the hard part, and it's bedtime.

One day in September, Seraphim was working in his garden. He was chopping wood, with an axe, near the hut. And three men came out of the trees. They were local men, from the villages around. They had heard the stories about the hermit, as everybody had, and they had made a mistake that is as old as the world, which is to suppose that if a man is famous for holiness, he must also be rich.

They demanded money.

And Seraphim, who was a strong man then, with an axe in his hand, who could have driven the three of them off with one swing, did something that none of them were expecting. The old accounts say he let the axe drop, and folded his arms across his chest, and did not lift a hand to defend himself.

They did. I won't describe it. They struck him, and they hurt him badly, and they left him on the ground, and they went into the hut to look for the money.

And they found nothing. They found a bench, and an icon, and a few potatoes.

They ran. And Seraphim, who had been left for dead, dragged himself back inside, and prayed, and eventually the monks from Sarov came and carried him home.

He was ill for a very long time. The doctors, summoned from the town, examined him and said that he should not have survived. He recovered, slowly, in the monastery, over about five months. And for the rest of his life he walked bent over, leaning on a staff, with a back that never again stood straight.

The robbers were caught. And here is the thing that the whole of Russia remembered about this story.

Seraphim refused to press charges.

He asked that they be forgiven. He said that if they were punished, he would leave the district and never return. He wanted them let go. And they were let go.

I do not know quite what to say about that, except that it is one of the hardest things the Gospel asks of anyone, and the evidence that he did it is that the men went home.

Now. About the rock.

You may have heard that Seraphim spent a thousand days and nights praying on a rock. This is one of the best-known pieces of his story, and the old lives report it. I should say that it happened earlier than the robbers, in the first years of the eighteen hundreds, so I have told you the story a little out of order, the way people tell stories at bedtime.

Near his hut in the forest there was a large granite stone. And the accounts say that he would go out to it, and kneel or stand with his arms raised, and pray the same short prayer that he had prayed all his life. "God, be merciful to me, a sinner."

For a thousand days and nights.

Now, I'd like you to notice that this was in the Russian forest, which is a place of cold and mosquitoes. A saint is not a person who doesn't feel the cold. A saint is a person who feels the cold and prays anyway. I think that is worth saying, because the picture people have is of a serene man in a halo, and the reality was a man in a heavy coat, very likely with frost on his beard.

And yet it was not grim. We know it was not grim, because everything about him afterwards was joyful. If the rock had been a penance of pure endurance, he would have come off it hard and sad. He came off it, instead, as the gentlest man in Russia.

So what was he doing up there?

I think he was learning to be still. And I think that, in the end, is the only thing the saints have ever really learned: that if you sit still enough, and long enough, and honestly enough, something comes and sits with you.

The next part of the story is one of silence.

After the robbers, and his long recovery, Seraphim went back to his hut and did something even stranger. For many years, from around eighteen ten until eighteen twenty-five, he stopped speaking. He spoke to no one. If a visitor came, he would bow and look at them, and they would sit with him for a while, and then he would bow again, and they would go home. He did not even answer questions.

I suppose this is the moment to say that I find this a bit hard to imagine. I have trouble going an afternoon without commenting on something. But the monks of Sarov considered it normal for a hermit. Silence is a kind of listening, and he was listening.

And then, in the year eighteen twenty-five, something changed. The old accounts say that after an illness, and another vision of the Mother of God, he understood that his time of silence was over, and that he was to receive people.

And so, at the age of about seventy, an old, bent-over man with a beard like a snowdrift came out of the forest and started talking again.

And this is the part where the whole of Russia comes to find him.

You have to picture the scene. It's the eighteen twenties and thirties, in the Russian Empire. It's a country of vast distances and a great many poor people. There are no trains yet. A journey of a hundred miles takes a week, in a cart, in the mud. The people of Russia are mostly peasants, and they are mostly poor, and the great majority of them have buried a child or two. They live by the weather and the harvest, and they take their troubles to the church because there is no one else to take them to.

And word goes round that there is an old monk at Sarov, who is very kind.

They came in their hundreds. They came in their thousands. Peasants, merchants, nuns, soldiers, noblemen, the occasional priest in disguise. And the thing that all of them said, afterwards, in letter after letter and memoir after memoir, was that he greeted every one of them in the same way.

He would come out of the hut, or the cell, bent over his staff. He would look at the person in front of him, whether it was a general or a woman with a baby. And he would smile, and bow to the ground, and say:

"Christ is risen, my joy!"

Every one of them. Every day of the year. In January, in July, on a Tuesday in Lent.

Now, "Christ is risen" is the Easter greeting. In the Orthodox world, it's what you say to each other from Easter morning for forty days. It is, in a way, the whole Christian faith in three words. And Seraphim said it to everybody, always, as though it were always Easter.

And I think that is what people were responding to. Not any special power, or any miracle, though the accounts record many. They were responding to being greeted by a man who looked at them and saw, instead of a peasant or a sinner or a case, a person for whom Christ had risen. He called them "my joy." He called them "my treasure." He called them "my dear one." In the Russian of the time, the diminutives that he used to people are tender enough to make you wince.

Let me give you one scene, which I'm going to invent, though I think it is true to the many that are recorded.

It's winter. A man has walked all the way from a village two hundred miles away. His wife is ill. He has never been to Sarov before, and his boots have holes in them. He arrives at the hermitage at dusk, in the snow, and an old monk is standing in the doorway, as if he had been waiting.

"Christ is risen, my joy," says the old monk.

The man bursts into tears. He has not wept in years. He doesn't know why he is weeping. He had a speech prepared, a long, careful one, with all the details of his wife's illness and the money he'd spent on doctors. And he can't remember any of it.

"Come in," says the old man. "It's cold. You've walked a long way. Have you eaten?"

And that, the stories say, is what happened to most people. They had a speech. And somehow they never made it, because the first thing the old man did was to ask whether they had eaten.

I have to tell you about one more conversation, and it is the most famous thing Seraphim is known for outside Russia.

In November of eighteen thirty-one, near the end of his life, a young landowner named Nicholas Motovilov came to see him. Motovilov was a man in his early twenties, educated, intelligent, a bit of a questioner. He had once been cured by Seraphim of a long illness, and he had become a friend. And on a cold winter day, the two men went into the forest together and sat on tree stumps in the snow.

Motovilov, many years later, wrote down what was said. It is a long conversation about the Christian life, and I won't try to give it to you whole. I will give you the one sentence that has outlived it, and that Seraphim is said to have spoken more than once.

"Acquire the spirit of peace," he said, "and thousands around you will be saved."

That is a very beautiful thing to say. It's very easy to misunderstand, and I want to be careful. He did not mean that peace is a mood, or that you have to feel calm, or that you should never be upset. He meant something harder, and simpler. He meant that if you can become a person in whom God's peace is at home, that peace spreads. It goes out from you to everyone you meet, without your doing anything. A peaceful person in a house changes the house. A peaceful person in a village changes the village.

And I think that is what the pilgrims felt in the forest, with the old man and the bear. They did not feel preached at. They felt as though they had walked into a room where the temperature was right.

The last few years of his life were full of people, and full of work.

Besides the pilgrims, he took an interest in a community of women, in a village called Diveyevo, a few miles from Sarov, who were trying to live as nuns. He worried about them, and helped them, and sent them food, and gave them a rule. He was, by all accounts, almost absurdly practical about it. He gave them a great deal of practical advice, down to how the sisters should farm and keep their mill.

And he was growing old. On the second of January, eighteen thirty-three, in the early hours of a winter morning, one of the monks, passing his cell, smelled smoke. He opened the door.

Seraphim was dead.

He was kneeling in front of his icon of the Mother of God, the one that he had called "Tenderness," his arms crossed over his chest, in the posture of prayer. The smoke came from a candle that had fallen. He had died, the monks believed, praying.

He was about seventy-eight, or seventy-three, depending on which year you think he was born. He was buried at Sarov.

Let me slow down now, and tell you what happened afterwards.

The pilgrims did not stop coming. If anything, there were more of them. His grave became a place of prayer, and people carried home stories of help they had received. The little community at Diveyevo grew, and flourished, and became one of the great convents of Russia.

In nineteen hundred and three, on the first of August, with a vast crowd and the last tsar of Russia present, the Russian Orthodox Church declared Seraphim glorified, which is its way of saying that he is a saint. It was one of the last great public celebrations of the old Russia.

And then, as you may know, the twentieth century happened. The monastery of Sarov was closed by the Soviet government in the nineteen twenties. The relics of Seraphim disappeared, and for many decades no one knew whether they still existed. The town of Sarov became a closed city, where secret scientific work was done, and no ordinary pilgrim could go.

And then, in nineteen ninety, his relics were found in a museum in Leningrad, and in the summer of nineteen ninety-one they were returned to the church, and carried in procession to the convent at Diveyevo, among the women he had looked after.

I find that I cannot say that without being moved. After everything, after the bell towers fell and the monasteries closed, the people he loved were waiting for him.

And what became of the bear?

The old accounts do not say. They go quiet on the matter, which I think is characteristic. They tell us about the saint and the bread and the clearing in the snow, and then they stop, the way a story does when the storyteller has gone to bed.

But I like to think that one winter, when the old man had gone back to the monastery, and the clearing was quiet, the bear came out of the trees as she always did, and sat there for a while, waiting. And that perhaps another monk came, years later, and found her there, and held out a crust.

I don't know whether he did. But I do know this: that every few years someone, somewhere, discovers that it is possible to sit in a clearing, in the cold, and be at peace, and that the world comes closer when you do.

Let that be the last thing for tonight.

Notes for the curious.

Saint Seraphim of Sarov is a real person, and a great deal is known about him. He was born Prokhor Moshnin in Kursk, in seventeen fifty-four or seventeen fifty-nine, depending on which source you read. He entered the monastery of Sarov in seventeen seventy-eight, took the name Seraphim in seventeen eighty-six, lived as a hermit from about seventeen ninety-four, was beaten by robbers in eighteen hundred and four, kept silence for many years, and received pilgrims from eighteen twenty-five until his death on the second of January, eighteen thirty-three.

The main sources are the lives compiled at Sarov and Diveyevo in the nineteenth century, from the testimony of people who knew him, and English translations of them by Archimandrite Lazarus Moore and by Valentine Zander. The conversation with Nicholas Motovilov was written down by Motovilov himself many years later, and scholars treat it as valuable but shaped by his memory.

The bear, the thousand nights on the rock, the greeting, and the healing visions are all reported by people who knew him or knew those who did. They are told here as stories carried by the pilgrims. Nothing in this episode is meant to claim more than that.

What we invented: the kitchen in Kursk, most of the dialogue, the monk who meets the bear, the pilgrim in the snow, and every thought we attributed to anyone. The words of the Mother of God, the greeting and the saying about peace are as the old lives and Motovilov report them. They are in the spirit of the originals, and we hope they do no harm to them.

Seraphim is a saint of the Orthodox Church. He is not canonised by the Catholic Church, but his writings and his life have been read and loved by many Catholics.

That's the story of Saint Seraphim of Sarov for tonight. The Orthodox Church keeps his memory on the second of January, the day he died, and on the first of August, the day he was glorified. 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 the Lord, who gave Saint Seraphim his joy, give us the grace to greet one another, even on an ordinary Tuesday, with the news that Christ is risen. Goodnight, and God bless.

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