NOTE: All reflections throughout the Advent and Christmas season will be available on our homepage and then archived on our Advent-Christmas 2025 webpage.
The reflection below is from Rose Marie Berger from the 2004 Advent reflection booklet, Syllables of the Perfect Word: Reflections for Advent 2004.
by Rose Marie Berger
Originally published for Epiphany Sunday 2005
Isaiah 60:1-6 | Ephesians 3:2-3, 5-6 | Matthew 2:1-12
They were overjoyed at seeing the star, and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother. They prostrated themselves and did him homage. Then they opened their treasures and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. — Matthew 2:10-11
The Russian Orthodox monk Seraphim of Sarov entered the monastery when he was 17 and left it at 31 to live as a hermit in the pine and birch forest. Next to his hut he planted a vegetable garden and kept bees. He worked, fasted, prayed, sang hymns, and read the New Testament. One dark and snowy Thursday afternoon Father Seraphim met a young man called Motovilov. “He began his conversation with me in a field adjoining his near hermitage, opposite the river Sarova,” wrote Motovilov in his memoirs, “at the foot of the hill which slopes down to the riverbank. He sat me on the stump of a tree which he had just felled, and he himself squatted opposite me.”
“The Lord has revealed to me,” said Father Seraphim, “that in your childhood you had a great desire to know the aim of our Christian life, and that you continually asked many great spiritual persons about it. But no one has given you a precise answer. They have said to you: ‘Go to church, pray to God, do the commandments of God, do good – that is the aim of the Christian life.’ Some were even indignant with you for being occupied with profane curiosity and said to you: ‘Do not seek things that are beyond you.’ But they did not speak as they should. and now poor Seraphim will explain to you in what this aim really consists.”
This introduces a remarkable, very earthy, exchange on how a person acquires the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Near the end of their conversation, when Motovilov wants to know exactly what a life in the spirit feels like, Seraphim touches him and reveals the brightness of his inner holy fire. “How do you feel now?” Father Seraphim asked. “Extraordinarily well,” replied Motovilov. “But in what way? How exactly do you feel well?” Motovilov answered: “I feel such calmness and peace in my soul that no words can express it. An extraordinary sweetness. An extraordinary joy in all my heart. An extraordinary warmth such as there is in a bath-house when the water is poured on the stone and the steam rises in clouds. And a smell. There is nothing on earth like this fragrance. When in my dear mother’s lifetime I was fond of dancing and used to go to balls and parties, my mother would sprinkle me with scent, which she bought at the best shops in Kazan. But those scents did not exhale such fragrances as this.”
This is the extraordinary beauty that Christians can bring as gifts to the world. This is the epiphany that we can share with the hungry hearts we encounter in our daily lives.
“Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we, let all within us praise his holy name!” Oh Holy Night
>> For more Advent resources and reflections, click here.