Who Is St. Seraphim of Sarov?
Our puzzlement might surprise Eastern Orthodox Christians, who count this monk among their greatest, most popular saints. In Russia, where Seraphim was born on July 19, 1759, his memory survived all efforts to obliterate it. The Communists destroyed the Sarov monastery and the nearby forest where he spent sixteen years as a hermit, and confiscated his relics. Nonetheless, says biographer Michael Plekon, people told “beautiful stories” about Seraphim’s continuing presence. “Soldiers were greeted by a smiling little man in a white smock; lost travelers were guided in howling blizzards by a little old man in white.” Peasants brought fresh pine branches into the anti-religion museum in the former Kazan cathedral, where the relics were thought to have been hidden away—“for the little father,” they would tell museum guards. “They remind him of home.”