Dear Brother in Christ, Dimitry,
\nRejoice in the Lord!<\/p>\n
We were very glad to receive your letter and read it with great interest. We were touched at your defense of such \u201cunpopular\u201d ones as we. However, it would probably be best to discount a good part of what is said about our dire straights. Our last winter was a little harsh for the first month, but we were never in a very desperate condition; and after Christmas the weather turned quite mild. Fr. Cyprian apparently took too seriously some comments Fr. Herman made to him, which were not intended seriously. In January we received a letter from Fr. Cyprian: \u201cimmediately pack up and come to Jordanville by the beginning of Lent; we\u2019ll send Holowka to help you move. Your situation is hopeless and you\u2019ll fall into prelest, and besides Jordanville is dying off and in ten years there\u2019ll be no one left to do the work, and if you don\u2019t come nobody else will be inspired to come either.\u201d Needless to say, we took this as another temptation, of which we\u2019ve gotten quite a share since our tonsure (that, by the way, is supposed to be a sign that what we\u2019re doing is good after all), and we stayed put. Last month we saw Fr. C. again in S.F, and his refrain how is: \u201cYou\u2019re bezpopovtsi, you must get ordained or you\u2019ll fall into prelest\u201d (which logic is not too clear to us).<\/p>\n
Well, in the meantime we stay put, do our work (which never stops piling up), and remain more convinced than ever that we are right where we should be. By the way, so you will know: we aren\u2019t really trying to persuade anyone to join us. We didn\u2019t come here to \u201cestablish a monastery,\u201d but to save our souls and print the OW. If others are crazy enough to join us, perhaps God will bless a real monastery here; and if He blesses it, then He will give us the means of nourishing it, both physically and spiritually. Vladika John did tell us that he \u201cbelieved’ there would be a missionary monastery such as we dreamed of, but we wait to see what God\u2019s will is for us. We told a few people (you, Fr. Seraphim, and 3 or 4 others) that in case of need or if your heart feels so moved, there is a refuge here; whereupon Fr. Seraphim started looking for \u201ccandidates\u201d to send us \u2014 which we don\u2019t need! If a monastery here is God-pleasing, then it will \u201cbuild itself,\u201d or so we believe.<\/p>\n
But about you: you\u2019re undecided, the clergy give you various advice…. Can I \u201cadvise\u201d you too? If so \u2014 then don\u2019t take any advice too seriously, not even (or maybe even especially!) from bishops; 9 out of 10 bishops are entirely preoccupied with their own problems, such as finding priests, etc. The fact that you are undecided means \u2014 that you\u2019re undecided, neither more nor less. It doesn\u2019t mean you want to be in the white clergy, for that is a definite decision in itself.<\/p>\n
Vladika Andrey\u2019s advice to join the white clergy is probably not a revelation. Fr. Herman, for all his veneration for Vladika Andrey (he was his spiritual father), on several occasions found it necessary to go against his advice \u2014 once when he refused to bless him to go to the seminary, and again several years ago when word came through a third person: \u201cif Gleb isn\u2019t married yet, he should become a celibate priest.\u201d<\/p>\n
The most sensible advice right now, of course, is to finish the seminary. But not necessarily; there is something more important, and I don\u2019t know if anyone else will come out and say it to you, so I will. We recall your discouragement about Jordanville last year; last week a visitor told us that you walk around the monastery with a very discouraged look; and your letter repeats that Jordanville doesn\u2019t inspire you. Answer a question: Of that which was inside you two years ago and persuaded or inspired you to go to Jordanville, how much is left? Or another question: What (or who) does inspire you? The greatest mistake \u2014 or rather, sin \u2014 you could make would be to allow the spark that brought you back to the Orthodox Faith to go out. And if Jordanville is doing that to you \u2014 and it has been known to do it \u2014 then you had better get out. If you sacrifice everything to finish the seminary, and while doing it go around gloomy, accepting thoughtless mockery and humiliation for the sake of \u201chumility\u201d (while in your heart carrying not humility at all, but just fatalism), and not being inspired by anything \u2014 then you may finish the seminary, but you probably won\u2019t be good for anything! \u00b7<\/p>\n
Forgive me for being so bold, but I feel a certain responsibility for you, having known you since before the day when you said: \u201cIf I should ever become really Orthodox, I would want to be a monk.\u201d In fact, your sister even tells me that my vague answer to your question about drugs led you to take marijuana \u2014 so maybe I can make up for that!<\/p>\n
But what can one say by letter? We would like very much to have a good talk with you. But from this distance I will venture my opinion: down deep you are not undecided at all; it is circumstances, lack of inspiration, and no one to guide you that make you that way. Down deep you\u2019re burning with a converts zeal and thirst for podvig, serving the Church, weeping and shouting for joy at what God has opened up for you \u2014 that whole undreamed of heavenly world which the Church gives you the means to approach, as compared to the filth and stench of the state in which you once were. Do I need to say more? We\u2019re both converts too!<\/p>\n
Down deep you want the full uncompromising Orthodox life. You want not merely to \u201cserve the Church\u201d or find a place in the Church establishment\u201d (probably you don\u2019t want that!), but you want to give your whole heart and soul and strength to God. But what form does this take? Apparently you have no one to point the way or inspire you. And you\u2019re faced with an atmosphere wherein the Church has become a habit, even a career, a clique with its own jokes and vices \u2014 and worst of all, the means of deadening a living soul and putting out its spark. It\u2019s wrong to douse this spark in the name of humility, patience, obedience, or any other Christian virtue; these too can become habits and deadening. The spark of Christian faith must be nourished; it can survive for a time with little nourishment, but if there is nothing to inspire it, it will not survive long. You were stupid enough (let me be frank) to fall for Nikita\u2019s line, disregarding good advice and falling behind in your studies by doing so; but now if you let your disillusionment leave a scar on your soul, and you go around as an embittered, complaining, bored zombie, you will be no good to anyone, and it will be your own fault.<\/p>\n
Your heart will say whether all this is right. But what to do? I\u2019ll tell you what I\u2019ve felt for a long time, since the time when what we have now was still a dream and you didn\u2019t know what you believed: that if God opened your heart to Orthodox faith, you would think and feel as we do, and you belonged here with us. But you have to have something more definite than that to guide you, and our existence here is, frankly, so precarious that we couldn\u2019t ask anyone to join us who didn\u2019t come to it by himself. And we couldn\u2019t accept you without first having a good long talk with you and presenting to you the real difficulties that face us, which are somewhat more serious than firewood and \u201cprelest.\u201d But first of all comes your own heart, which must find a place where it can be nourished so that you can produce fruit. If that place is with Fr. Panteleimon, we would be more than glad for you, because we believe he can nourish the \u201cspark\u201d as few others seem to do.<\/p>\n
We fear most for you that \u201cpublic opinion\u201d will force you into a category into which you don\u2019t belong, and that you will be weak enough to accept this and get stuck in it for life \u2014 or even worse, as happens too often, get bored with the whole thing and quit the Church altogether. You\u2019re probably not in high repute in Jordanville \u2014 a weakling who thinks too much, gloomy, behind in his studies, knows English better than Russian, with some kind of shameful sins in his past; he won\u2019t amount to much \u2014 put him in the korovnik, and maybe we can find a parish or some such place for him. If this is anything like the truth \u2014 don\u2019t accept it! You\u2019re called to more than that. You still have the \u201cspark\u201d \u2014 and you\u2019re called to keep it alive and communicate it to others, producing fruit on Christ\u2019s harvest, perhaps in an unconventional way. Don\u2019t forget it! And don\u2019t let anyone tell you to be \u201chumble\u201d and \u201cobedient\u201d and let someone else \u2014 who doesn\u2019t see your heart or care who you are \u2014 fit you into a conventional mould that doesn\u2019t fit you.<\/p>\n
Keep in mind Vladika John; pray to him. He\u2019s our guiding star, and when we sometimes get gloomy and begin to think that it\u2019s pointless to go against the conventional view, that after all the Church is supposed to be a career and not something to get inspired about and inspire others with, that what we’re doing is too risky, that it\u2019s better to let our enthusiasm die out and let someone else tell us where we can be of \u201chumble service\u201d to the Church \u2014 then we bring to mind Vladika John and somehow everything makes sense again, and the \u201cconventional\u201d view doesn\u2019t make sense at all and if this attitude continues to prevail among Russians abroad they will fulfill the threat of Vladika John in 1938 and uzrezhetrcr ________. And then we go back to our lives of Saints and Holy Fathers and get our inspiration from them.<\/p>\n
Our relationship to Vladika Nektary, by the way, is quite good, and in fact, although Archimandrite Spyridon (and not Fr. Mitrophan) is officially our \u201cstarets,\u201d we do not get to see him too often, and this function is actually performed for us by Vladika Nektary, who has comforted us greatly in our trials, and who tells us: I (Earlier he tried to persuade us to join him at his podvorye in Alameda (not Burlingame), but our soul was just not in the kind of monastery he wanted, and it would have placed our mission of the printed word in a decidedly secondary position, which we viewed as dangerous. And besides, we have always been very sensitive of the rule of St. John Cassian: \u201cIt was the advice of the Fathers, an advice always in season, that a monk should at all hazard flee the society of bishops and women; for neither women nor bishops permit a monk to remain at peace in his cell, nor fix his eyes on pure and heavenly doctrine.\u201d Monks and bishops are of most benefit to each other and to the Church when they are independent of each other, we\u2019re thoroughly convinced!<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve already heard about the Coptic service in Jordanville, and are only puzzled how it could have been allowed. But then, we ourselves were thoroughly chastised by Fr. Panteleimon and the Greeks about our Zeytoon article, although our minds are still open on that subject.<\/p>\n
Fr. Theodore Tenkevich I knew for several years before he went to Jordanville, and was well acquainted with some of his strangenesses. We somehow thought he had \u201coutgrown\u201d them, but alas…. He was one of the original \u201cfounders\u201d of our Brotherhood, and when he returned from Greece and wrote us he wanted to come to us, we had hopes; but Fr. Panteleimon painted us a dismal picture of him, and his sporadic correspondence with us only confirms it.<\/p>\n
Pray for us. Write. We would love to see you, but will wait and see what God sends. Local folk tell us we’re in for a real winter this year, but we go forward blindly. The Post Office recently tried to take away our 2nd Class mailing permit on a technicality, that we don\u2019t have an office in the city in which we mail. But the outcome was happy: now we mail in Platina instead of Redding, and if the snow is deep, our winter OWs will go down the hill on sleds! (Don\u2019t tell that to Kippie!)<\/p>\n
With love in Christ our Saviour,
\nSeraphim, monk<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dear Brother in Christ, Dimitry, Rejoice in the Lord! We were very glad to receive your letter and read it with great interest. We were touched at your defense of such \u201cunpopular\u201d ones as we. However, it would probably be best to discount a good part of what is said about our dire straights. Our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}