Greetings in our Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you for your letter, the Old Calendarists, and the list of British Saints, all of which were received safely. Have you sent something besides the list of Saints? If so, we haven’t received it yet. We were very glad to see this, and look forward to other such projects. Have you thought of compiling a “source list”—i.e., a bibliography of the original Lives of British Saints which are already available in English? There are quite a few such sources which we have come across, but we Orthodox tend to overlook them and not value them properly since they are in heterodox editions. We will be trying to make a little introduction to this topic (more with regard to the Saints of Gaul) in our new Calendar.

Regarding your debt: we understand your difficulties, and your situation as a missionary rather than a commercial enterprise, and we are happy to give you literature at less than ”commercial” rates. Let us say that you owe us altogether 100 pounds, including this year’s Calendars (1976) and all the Orthodox Words for 1976. If you could send us 50 pounds soon, and another 50 sometime next year it would be fine with us. We have just sent you 19 copies (all we could scrape up right now— more will be sent later) of Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, and will send you 50 (or more) Calendars when they are ready—alas not for about a month. J

We welcome news of missionary labors in England. Why did Fr. Yves not come with his parish? Does he find our Church too “soft” on Constantinople? I fear there are problems for true zealots of Orthodoxy in our Church. On the one side Fr. Panteleimon of Boston is preaching a zeal not entirely according to knowledge and is setting a wrong tone of “expertness” in theology and superiority to the Russians who are all under “Western influence” (if only he understood what “Western influences” he himself is under and learned humility from it, as the rest of us have to do!)—and this only encourages an opposite reaction which wants to believe that everything is practically all right with Constantinople and even the Soviet Patriarchate. May God guide us in a true middle path between these unnecessary extremes. So much of interest is coming now from the Soviet Union that it would be tragic to misunderstand it by going to either extreme.

We ask your prayers for us.

With love in Christ,
Seraphim, monk