Of all the Russian saints, St. Sergius is perhaps the most unfathomable and mysterious. His life was so simple, so transparent, that one can only gaze upon it—from his childhood he loved God with a simple and wholesome love, and throughout his life he was simple and did everything simply, so that in the final analysis, when you look more carefully, you feel ever more incapable of saying something about it. Of all the Russian saints he seems to be the most distant, shrouded in the most profound contemplative silence. But at the same time, he is amazingly close—he is close because although he stands with an undivided heart, an undivided mind before the face of Lord, he prays for all of us. And at times we can feel how powerfully the grace he received through his prayer returns to us.
So let us pray with constancy, with extreme simplicity, with all the purity of heart we have at our disposal to the humble, simple, and at the same time inexorably wholesome and pure saint of the Russian land; let us pray for ourselves, so that by his prayers we might also find the path of simplicity and integrity; let us pray for the whole world, pray also—and especially—for the land that he so deeply, vividly, and sacrificially knew how to love, so that just as after the terrible Tatar yoke, upon it may come a grace-filled thaw, peace, love, and oneness of mind among its people, founded upon faith in God, faith in mankind, and faith that the Lord is the Lord of earthly history and that all events in life are in the end a mystery of the salvation of the world.
But in order to pray like this, we ourselves must believe to the end that the Lord is truly in our midst, that He truly rules mystically—at times even very terribly—the events of the earth. And we must believe it not only as words, not only with our minds, but by our lives. And we must commit ourselves into God’s hands, penetratingly read His word, and without pity for ourselves but with extreme mercy for others, be creators and not just hearers of God's word, the words of the Holy Spirit. And then, if by our own lives we heed God and fulfill His will, if we enter into the mystery of silence and prayerful contemplation, then grace will come through us upon people around us as it did through St. Sergius, albeit to our own small measure, further and more widely to those whom the Lord so loved as to give His Only-Begotten Son to crucifixion and death, only so that people might be able to believe in love—both divine and human. To believe and begin to live according to faith. Amen.
