A Silent and Secluded Evangelism?

These different variations of St. Seraphim's famous quote can carry slightly different emphases, but there seems to be another issue with this quote and how it challenges our understanding of salvation and “missions” in the Orthodox Church. There seems to be a thread of anti-monastic sentiment among Orthodox Christians today, as if the monastic life is something different than “normal” Christian life, and especially seeing monastics as anti-evangelical. This is theologically problematic, to be sure, but here, I will focus only on the desired re-interpretation of St. Seraphim’s quote.

One respected source of Orthodox missions thinking today, a statement I heard with my own ears, suggested that Frederica Mathewes-Green was right in suggesting we have a misunderstanding of this quote, that is, the monk going out in the “desert” does not “save” anybody. I could not confirm any place that Frederica Mathewes-Green suggested this. Instead, she writes:

"Being a saint is not a private attainment, a kind of spiritual mountain-climbing. Its goal is not simply to accumulate more spiritual experiences. ...The real mark of a saint is, instead, that his transformed life overflows for others. The Christ-filled person acquires nothing for himself; he dies to self. In that dying he receives life, and gives it to all. ...It calls to mind a saying from Saint Seraphim of Sarov: 'Acquire the Spirit of Peace, and thousands around you will be saved.'"

She seems to be suggesting a more traditional understanding of the life of the saint drawing the whole world into that same depth of communion with Christ. Still, the original statement reveals an undertone which questions this notion.

Fr. Stephen Freeman clearly states that this quote is misunderstood in his article "What St. Seraphim Meant", stating that it was really about living a life in God, a life of grace. Maybe he was referring to a problem with understanding the desert ascetic as an evangelist, but he never returned to the quote, either to connect it with grace, nor to explain any of the misunderstanding about it.

What may be of help in confirming the core idea of St. Seraphim’s quote is a similar quote from yet another saint, St. Nikolaj Velimirovic, but using completely different wording:

"A monk carries his soul like an unlit candle into the desert, into solitude, in order to light it by prayer, fasting, pondering, and toil. If he succeeds in lighting it, his light will be visible to the whole world, and the world will go after him and find him."

Sticking with St. Seraphim’s business-minded terminology, which I will explain more later, his quote could be restated like this: if we invest our time and efforts into the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, our “spiritual riches” will become the success story that thousands of like-minded entrepreneurs will rush to copy.