III

When this resolution of the Most Holy Synod was made known for general public information through the reading of the said “Act” in all the churches of Orthodox Russia, a general popular and pan-ecclesial preparation began, so to speak, for the celebration of July 19. Accounts of the life and labors of Saint Seraphim of every kind, as well as the most diverse depictions of him—including icon-like ones in their outward appearance—began to appear and spread everywhere in countless numbers. The pilgrimage to Sarov to venerate the saint, to his not-yet-opened little grave, increasing day by day, grew by July 19 to extraordinary proportions, from tens to hundreds of thousands. Alongside this general popular preparation went governmental and ecclesiastical preparations. In and around Sarov, lodgings were being built for pilgrims; within the monastery itself, quarters were prepared for Their Imperial and Royal Highnesses who had expressed the desire to be present at the celebration; on the clearings of the Sarov forest surrounding the hermitage, about a hundred wooden barracks were built, forming a whole small town—for ordinary pilgrims—along with several guesthouses. Despite this, some of the pilgrims had to make do with tents they had brought, or in the wagons they had arrived in, or even on bare earth under the open sky. Various commercial establishments and bakeries were also located there. To meet the spiritual needs of the pilgrims, chapels were erected at various places around the monastery, in which Sarov hieromonks—and, for lack of them, those summoned from other monasteries, as well as parish clergy of the Tambov and Nizhny Novgorod eparchies—were to serve first memorial services and from July 19 onward prayer services; everywhere icons and booklets were sold, and water from Saint Seraphim’s spring in small bottles. By thousands, and in the last days before the celebration by tens of thousands, pilgrims—some on their own behalf, some on behalf of families, institutions, and even whole cities—brought as gifts to the monastery various church items and furnishings such as: sacred vestments, coverings for the relics, lamps with whole poods of oil, sacred vessels, altar crosses, Gospels, processional banners, and much more. These banners, distinguished by the beauty of their forms and the variety of materials from which they were made, were brought as gifts to the Sarov and Diveyevo monasteries by banner-bearer societies from Moscow, the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, Nizhny Novgorod, Tambov, and other cities. Chief of all these offerings, of course, was the reliquary shrine and canopy over it for the relics of the saint, made by the zeal and at the expense of Their Imperial Majesties.

The incomparable sacred treasure of the Sarov monastery is of course the holy relics of Saint Seraphim; but in a holy person, as the first hierarch of the Russian Church, His Eminence Metropolitan Anthony of St. Petersburg, said so wonderfully well—everything is holy and grace-filled, even the shadow, even the garment, and not only the body or the bones. Hence it is entirely understandable that the preparations for the celebration of the glorification of Saint Seraphim pertained not to his holy relics alone and the place of their repose, but also to other objects that had this or that relation to him. Among these objects the first place belongs of course to the stone cell of the saint, in which he lived, labored, and departed in prayerful labor. Therefore the preservation and adornment of this sacred treasure could not but concern the venerable admirers of the saint, and the best means for this is the construction of a holy church in the saint’s name over his cell. Such a church had been laid as a foundation already two years before, and by the day of the opening of Saint Seraphim’s holy relics it was already ready for consecration. In its structure it presents an original construction in the Russian-Byzantine style with five cupolas; its cost is estimated at more than 200,000 rubles. On the western side of this church—between the choir and its central part—is situated the cell of the saint, outwardly fashioned in the form of a chapel with a four-sided scalloped roof of light bronze, with a row of kokoshniki along its lower edge and a golden cross on its cupola; the outer walls of this chapel-cell are adorned with sacred images from the life of Saint Seraphim. Inside the sacred cell, in the left corner in a richly adorned bronze icon case, are the icons of the Savior and of the Mother of God “Tenderness”—a copy of the icon before which Saint Seraphim died kneeling; before the icons is an ever-burning lamp, candle holders for candles, and a lectern with a cross and holy Gospel for the serving of prayer services. Along the walls of the cell, in special glass display cases of light bronze with mirror glass, erected at the expense of the Moscow banner-bearers, are enclosed the mantle, the little cap and leather prayer beads of the saint, two cypress pectoral crosses carved by his own hands, the stone upon which the saint prayed by day in his distant hermitage, one of his teeth and hairs from his head, and the Gospel scorched in the fire that broke out in the saint’s cell at the time of his repose. Another church in the name of Saint Seraphim, ready for the celebration that has taken place, was built in the Diveyevo women’s monastery founded by the saint—this church, forming the left chapel of the majestic Holy Trinity Cathedral of the monastery, is especially remarkable in that it was built simultaneously with the cathedral as far back as 1875 and had remained unconsecrated from that time until now. The Diveyevo orphans, as the saint loved to call the nuns of this monastery that he himself had founded, always believed so unshakably in the holiness of “Father” Seraphim, hoped so firmly for his glorification, that already 25 years ago they decided to dedicate the left chapel of the newly built church to the name of the saint whenever it should please God to glorify him, and now at last their expectation has been fulfilled. How fervently the Diveyevo orphans loved and venerated Saint Seraphim may be judged by the fact that it was they who preserved the greater part of the objects left behind by the saint. It was they who preserved the authentic icon of the Mother of God “Tenderness,” before which he prayed and before which he died; this icon, painted on canvas stretched over a cypress board, is adorned with a silver-gilt riza with an ever-burning lamp before it. It was they who also preserved both the nearer and the farther hermitages of the saint. The simple log hut that constituted the nearer hermitage stands in the cemetery church of the monastery in exactly the same state as it stood in the Sarov forest. Around it a light corridor has been arranged, where behind glass are placed the bast shoes, leather boots, mittens, small axe, caftan, fur coat, cap, kamilavka, woolen and leather short mantle, and prayer beads turned from wood by the saint himself. In the altar of this same church are kept the Gospel with the Psalter in a leather binding that the saint always carried with him, the stole and cuffs in which he received the holy mysteries, and a portion of the Menaion with an inscription in the saint’s own hand. Also preserved in the Diveyevo monastery in exactly the same state as it was during the saint’s lifetime is his farther hermitage, in a special small wooden structure that serves as a kind of case for it. This hermitage is likewise a small log hut—but with a stove; between the wall and the stove there is a small space in which only one person can stand, and into which the saint sometimes withdrew for prayer; here stands an icon with a burning lamp. In this same hermitage are kept the cut stump of a tree that served the departed as a chair, and a portion of the stone upon which he prayed.

“On the clearings of the forest surrounding the monastery, we said, about 100 barracks were built, which formed as it were a whole small town, as this settlement is now called. In these barracks more than 30,000 people can be accommodated. But that is not the point, nor is it that they, packed to the utmost limit, could hold only a third of the pilgrims who had come to the celebration; the point is that these pilgrims had to form and did form in those memorable days, as it were, a living temple enclosing within its depths the holy relics and all the other most honorable remains of Saint Seraphim. And who was not here! Here at the grave of the saint there gathered of their own free will representatives of every rank, station, and age, from every part even of the most distant regions of our vast fatherland, with at the head of them all our most pious Sovereign himself with the Empresses—wife and mother—and other members of the Imperial family, whose presence in those days in Sarov—among his own people—so vividly recalled the devout journeys of the grand princes and tsars of pre-Petrine Russia. In this crowd of more than a hundred thousand were representatives of every order of the Church—bishops with the first hierarch of the Russian Church at their head, and priests, and monks, and laypeople; there were people of every spiritual condition, with the exception perhaps of those schismatics from the Church who deify themselves. In short, here in miniature was, as it were, all of Orthodox Russia, all the Orthodox-Russian Church, gathered to pay homage to the newly manifested saint of God.”

But the most precious offering of all—we believe, even in the eyes of God—with which those gathered prepared themselves for the imminent celebration of the opening of the holy relics of Saint Seraphim, was the cleansing of the pilgrims’ consciences through the mysteries of confession and holy communion. Like a wondrous vision, at the remembrance of this, there comes before us our truly most pious Sovereign and Empress, who on the very day of their arrival in Sarov on the evening of July 17, having confessed to the hieroschemamonk of the hermitage Simeon, communed of the holy mysteries the next day at the early liturgy in the side-chapel of the Dormition Cathedral!

But enough of the preparations for the celebration of the Church’s glorification of Saint Seraphim; let us tell of how it was accomplished, making use for this purpose chiefly of the words of His Eminence Metropolitan Anthony of St. Petersburg—to whom the Most Holy Synod had entrusted this holy task—from his report to the Holy Synod of July 21 of this year, supplementing what he said with the testimony of other eyewitnesses.