Animated story of the life of St. Seraphim of Sarov

H/T: evlogia

Even if you don't speak Russian, if you know his life's story it's enjoyable to watch. This would also seem to be a good time to mention St. Seraphim's Beatitudes: Blessings for Our Path to Heaven, which I have read to my children. It's one of the first books of my plan to get the children in the habit of reading hagiographies. Teaching the children how to learn from the lives of the saints is essential to their spiritual growth.

Kh. Frederica Mathewes-Green has spoken in the past about how difficult it is to get children interested in the lives of the saints. Here's an excerpt from her review of Veggie Tales entitled Lettuce Pray.

My granddaughter, Hannah, is a voracious reader, and I thought I’d try competing with the more colorful demands on her attention by giving her a volume of the lives of the saints. It wasn’t a success. The big words were a problem, but the stories themselves have an unfamiliar pattern, and the exciting ones tend to include graphic bloodshed—for the good guys, who die instead of defeating the bad guy. Hannah is very polite, but it was easy to see the change in her enthusiasm when she began to tell me about an episode of the Disney show, “Hannah Montana.” I admit it, we’re in a quandary here, and I don’t know the best way out.

It is very difficult - even for adults - to read the lives of the saints and apply anything to our lives. As with prayer, fasting, singing, riding a bike, or any other worthwhile endeavor the key to accomplishing your goal is to practice. You learn about how to glean wisdom and direction from the saints by... reading the saints. There is no shortcut. It is incumbent, then, upon parents to make reading stories of saints' lives a priority.

St. Gregory of Nyssa, in his Life of Moses speaks about this. He acknowledges that none of us will have the life Moses had, but points out that the thing we should always be looking at is virtue. The different backgrounds of the saints are secondary to the virtues they exhibit. Teach your children to find the virtues in the saints' lives and you will teach them how to see the virtue in every situation, in every person, in themselves. This virtue is the face of Christ we should be seeking in all men.