Be Still and Know

Lives of the Wild Saints #10

St Seraphim of Sarov
Russia. Eighteenth century.

There are two kinds of animal in this world. I am of one kind. I needed to ask somebody what this meant, so I went to look for Father Seraphim.

This was when he was living in the forest. He lived there for twenty-five years, alone. They said he ate nothing but grass, though when I saw him he ate bread and drank water. He told me this was all a man needed.

When I was a young man, I tried to drown myself. It was winter. I threw myself into the Chyornoye Lake, and it was this sort of talk - this bread-and-water talk - that was responsible. That and my young man’s blood. I was born into a rich family - my father was a nobleman - but I wanted, more and more as I grew, to be a Christian. I didn’t know what this pull was, this pull from the world, but it was real. I was born to manage estates, to collect rent from serfs, to work in some government position, but I would wake at night, every night, with Christ’s instructions to the rich young man echoing in my mind.

If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come and follow me.

It was wanting to perfect that led me to the lake. I was not perfect and never would be and I saw no way to change this. Therefore I could never be a Christian so I may as well be dead, as God would never have me. This was what my young man’s blood told me. But God had other ideas.

I threw myself in. It was cold, it was freezing, there was a fog on the water; but I swear I saw the Mother of God standing on the shore, looking over at me with a kind of weary love. Mothers are so patient with their wayward children. I could almost hear her sighing through the frozen pines. After that, I couldn’t go through with it. I dragged myself out, wet and shamed.

But the echoes in my head never left me. I was not a Godly man, and I knew it. I had failed to drown, but I had also failed to live. What did it mean to be a Christian, anyway? Perhaps it was all rot. I knew I was no divinised being. I was just an animal, grunting about in the undergrowth, snuffling for money and fame and sex and all the usual things. I tried, but not hard enough. I didn’t seem to have it in me. And yet. And yet, Christ and His mother would never leave me alone. I would drink and dice and whore, but they would always seem to be there, standing quietly at my elbow, just visible when I turned my head.

So I thought to go and ask Father Seraphim, who they said was a saint, what it meant to be a Christian, and if I could ever achieve it. Whatever he said, I hoped that this holy haunting would stop.

I set out for Father Seraphim’s cabin.

He lived as they say saints are supposed to, in a wooden cabin in the vastness of the Taiga. No fire, not even any chair to sit on. He sat on a tree stump outside, and he slept on a board. He ate bread, as I said. He long beard was white, he was hunched, he walked with a stick. He looked the way I supposed a saint should look. The minute I saw him, my heart sank. He was all that I would never be.

My joy! he exclaimed, when he saw me coming. He had never met me before, but this was how he spoke to everyone, I had been told. All through our conversation he would call me my joy, or your godliness. That came out from his heart, straight from his heart. Part of me, I understood then, had wanted him to prove false. If saints were frauds, then Christianity was all rot and I could rest in peace. But there was no falseness in him, and I knew it straight away.