My Joy! Christ Is Risen!

About this volume

This is the second volume of a three-book life, and it opens where the first left off, with an oak gate closing behind a forty-year-old monk who has already given up his family, his name, and now the walls that held him for sixteen years. What follows is not a retreat from the world but a going-in, deeper, to the forest cell that will become the ground of everything Sarov's wonderworker is remembered for. Readers who come to this volume are coming for the hermitage years: the bears and the birds that gathered at his door, the granite stone he knelt on through a thousand nights of prayer until his knees would no longer straighten, the robbers who came for a treasure he did not have and left him broken for the rest of his life. This book takes those years at the pace they actually asked of him, slowly, in silence, in a solitude that was never quite empty.

The chapters trace a single, patient arc: from "Into the Near Desert" through "The Long Silence," the volume follows St. Seraphim into the discipline that Orthodox monasticism calls podvig, the ascetic labor undertaken not for its own severity but as a door opened toward God. The book does not flinch from the hardest turn in his life, the night the robbers came, the beating that left him stooped for the rest of his days, nor does it rush past it toward easy resolution. It sits with what silence cost him, and what it gave back. Then comes the turn that changes everything: the Mother of God appearing to point him toward the door of his cell, toward people, toward the ministry of receiving pilgrims that would make him, in his final years, the most sought-after elder in Russia. The famous words that give this volume its title, "My Joy! Christ is Risen!", are given their full weight here, not as a slogan but as the greeting of a man for whom Pascha had become the permanent season of his heart.

The later chapters turn from the cell to the door left open. "What He Knew About You Before You Arrived" and "Father of the Sisters" take up the discernment for which he became famous, the uncanny clarity with which he met each visitor, and his particular care for the community of women at Diveyevo, whom he guided with a father's specific, unsentimental attention. The volume closes with two of the most quietly astonishing moments in the whole life: the light that came down on the snow before the eyes of his spiritual son Nikolai Motovilov, a conversation about the acquisition of the Holy Spirit that Orthodox readers have returned to for generations, and the elder kneeling before his icon of the Mother of God in the hours before his own repose. These are treated with the same unhurried attention as the years of silence that came before, no leap to spectacle, no distance from the wonder either.

What makes this volume worth a reader's evening is its refusal to separate the hermit from the healer, the stone from the open door. St. Seraphim's asceticism is presented here as the very soil out of which his gentleness grew; the thousand nights alone are not opposed to the thousand conversations that followed, but their necessary root. Readers who have walked through the first volume's account of his youth and novitiate will find here the deepening they were promised; readers coming to him for the first time will find a life recounted with the specificity his tradition has always insisted on, a granite stone, a forest path, an icon wrapped in cloth, a voice that could turn "My Joy" into a form of address for every soul who came through his door.