He Spent a Thousand Nights on a Stone. Then He Opened His Door and Called Every Soul His Joy.

There is a man at the edge of a Russian forest who will not leave his rock for a thousand nights. He is being shaped - by cold, by silence, by the Mother of God herself - into something the world has rarely seen: a human being so filled with uncreated Light that those who walked toward his door through the snow came away unable to explain what had met them there. They only knew they had been seen.

That man is Seraphim of Sarov.

My Joy! Christ Is Risen! is a soul-portrait of the pivotal moments that formed the most solitary man in Russia into the most sought-after spiritual father of his age - from his withdrawal into the near desert, through a thousand nights of prayer upon stone, to the day he opened his door and greeted every broken pilgrim as his joy.

• Into the near desert - the deliberate withdrawal that began the saint's hidden formation
• The animals of the forest - what came to him in that wilderness, and what it signified
• A thousand nights on the stone - the fierce embodied asceticism that shaped him from within
• The night the robbers came - violence, a broken body, and a refusal of retribution
• The long silence - years of holy stillness and what the Church has always understood them to accomplish
• The Theotokos points to the door - the visitation that ended enclosure and opened the saint to thousands
• What he knew before you arrived - the uncanny, grace-given knowledge Seraphim carried into every encounter
• Father of the sisters - his role as founder and shepherd of the Diveyevo community
• The light on the snow - what was seen, what it means, and why the uncreated Light is a present and promised reality

Seraphim of Sarov is beloved - yet too often encountered as a single phrase on a prayer card.

Book Two of The Wonderworker of Sarov: A Life in Three Books.