From Merchant to Monk
Before his monastic life, Vasily Muraviev was a prosperous merchant in Saint Petersburg, working in the fur trade. The OCA records that around the age of thirty he began distributing most of his wealth to monasteries, and that he entered monastic life only once his son had matured.
His tonsure at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra came amid the upheaval that followed the Russian Revolution. He and his wife Olga entered monastic communities together; she was tonsured Christina and later received the schema name Seraphima, while he was tonsured Barnabas and later took the schema name Seraphim.
Ministry as Confessor and Elder
As confessor to the monks of the Lavra, he heard confessions extensively, the Mystagogy account noting that he would sometimes spend two days without any break. This labor, together with the strain of his ascetic life, contributed to the illnesses recorded in his later years, including intercostal neuralgia, rheumatism, and venous congestion of the legs.
The OCA relates that he received the gifts of clairvoyance and healing, and that many people came to him seeking help and advice, including a recorded instance in 1927 in which he counseled Bishop Alexei and foretold his future patriarchate. At Vyritsa he became widely sought as a spiritual elder.
From the mid-1930s he undertook a new ascetic labor (podvig), praying on his knees upon a rock over a period of years in imitation of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, a practice the Mystagogy account records he continued daily through the years of the Second World War.
Persecution
His monastic life unfolded under Soviet persecution of the Church. The OCA records that he was arrested fourteen times beginning in 1929 and maintained his ministry through that period, returning from the camps in 1933 to settle at Vyritsa.
