He Is of Our Lineage: The Making of a God-Bearer opens where every life opens - not with a halo, but with a household. A mother lighting a candle. A child in Kursk who would fall from a great height and live. A young man who heard something in Kiev that changed the direction of everything, and then took the road to Sarov and did not turn back.

This is the first volume in a three-part life of St. Seraphim of Sarov. It traces his formation from merchant's son to novice to the monk who entered the forest and let the forest do its work. The movement is unhurried because the making of a God-bearer is unhurried - shaped in learning and smallness, lit from within at an altar, carried forward through years the world could not see.

What the Chapters Carry

• The candle his mother lit - the household, the lineage, the first kindling of a life given toward God
• The fall that did not kill him - Providence moving through an ordinary disaster
• The icon through the streets and a voice in Kiev - the sacred encounters that turned him toward his vocation
• The road to Sarov and the discipline of becoming small - years of formation in community, labor, and obedience
• Fire at the altar - what was given to him there, and what it cost
• What the forest was waiting for - the long, hidden ripening of a saint

St. Seraphim was of our lineage: born of a woman, shaped in a household, formed in community, broken open by grace. He Is of Our Lineage does not keep him safely enshrined. It follows him through the actual years - the struggles, the silences, the slow and costly work of becoming what God intends every soul to become.

For Orthodox Christians, for seekers, and for all who have held his icon and wanted to know the man behind the golden light.

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