Dear Alexey,<\/p>\n
Greetings in our Lord Jesus Christ. Enclosed are the articles for Nikodemos. Both are very good and lively. I\u2019ve made some comments in the text. We look forward to the next installments on Christianity in Britain\u2014it looks to be a very interesting series.<\/p>\n
Many thanks for the offer of the jeep\u2014were expecting David today or tomorrow. Also for the printing job which you sent with Hudanish. How much did Susan write the check for?<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve had so many visitors this past week that we\u2019re still dizzy. We had a good visit with John Hudanish, who is quite capable of understanding the finer points of today\u2019s Orthodox \u201cproblems\u201d; but he needs his feet a little more firmly on the earth if he is to withstand some of his temptations. Barbara McCarthy visited us for a week (her first visit for several months) and took an active part in helping with our visitors, especially the two young ladies, with whom she stayed up all night in the guest house talking! She had a long talk with Hudanish also, but wouldn\u2019t tell him where she\u2019s living now, and I think she even asked him not to mention that he had seen her here, so perhaps he didn\u2019t mention her to you on his return. (By the way, because Barbara doesn\u2019t seem to \u201chave an address,\u201d you may get some mail there addressed to her\u2014if so, please just forward it to us in an envelope with our name on the outside.)<\/p>\n
But the brightest part of the week was Mary Mansur and her friend Solomonia (a converted Jewess). We had more or less accepted Nina\u2019s diagnosis that she was already virtually \u201clost to the Protestants,\u201d and so we were totally unprepared for the reality. She\u2019s wonderful! She’s very much in Barbara McCarthy\u2019s spirit, brimming with life, not satisfied with \u201ccorrectness,\u201d wanting to give herself entirely to serving God\u2014but not capable of fitting into the \u201cordinary\u201d Orthodox situations of today. She became involved with a Protestant group partly out of youthful confusion, partly out of dissatisfaction with the luke-warm Orthodoxy she has seen. She visited Seattle (where she was told she would find a real and vital Orthodoxy community)\u2014and she found Fr. Neketas just as dissatisfying with his \u201cletter of the law.\u201d Outwardly she has much to learn, but her heart is deeply Orthodox\u2014it\u2019s just a matter of her finding her place to bear fruit. She and her friend have been more and more troubled by their involvement with Protestants, and now after visiting Vladika Andrew they are preparing to leave for New Diveyevo, where they will live outside the convent under Vladika. That\u2019s probably not the final answer for them, but hopefully they can get there a firmer grounding in Orthodoxy before their next step. (Salomonia had only two weeks\u2019 exposure to Orthodoxy before being baptized at Jordanville, just two months ago I believe.)<\/p>\n
They may be visiting you before they leave in the next few weeks\u2014and by all means you should encourage them to do so if they contact you. To us they seem another proof that a \u201cnew generation\u201d of Orthodox is springing up\u2014the Sergei Kourdakov generation (she is much inspired by him). She is already one step beyond Kourdakov in that she has seemingly overcome the fascination with Protestant \u201cactivity\u201d and is aware that there is something deeper in Orthodoxy if only she can get into it. Pray for them.<\/p>\n
With love in Christ,
\nSeraphim, monk<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dear Alexey, Greetings in our Lord Jesus Christ. Enclosed are the articles for Nikodemos. Both are very good and lively. I\u2019ve made some comments in the text. We look forward to the next installments on Christianity in Britain\u2014it looks to be a very interesting series. Many thanks for the offer of the jeep\u2014were expecting David […]<\/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-1418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1418","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=1418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}