Seraphim Rose - Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy

In 1962, Rose was received into the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in San Francisco. He quickly distinguished himself to the prelate of San Francisco, St. John Maximovitch, as a serious and studious convert. In 1963, Archbishop John blessed Rose and his new friend Gleb Podmoshensky, a Russian Orthodox seminarian, to form a community of Orthodox booksellers and publishers, the "St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood". In March 1964, Rose opened an Orthodox bookstore next to the ROCOR cathedral on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, which was under construction at the time. In 1965 the brotherhood founded the St. Herman Press publishing house, which still exists.

Increasingly drawn to a more reclusive lifestyle, Rose's community ultimately decided to leave the city for the northern California wilderness, where Rose and Podmoshensky became monks in 1968 and transformed the Saint Herman of Alaska Brotherhood into a full-fledged monastic community. Rose's parents provided the down payment for a mountaintop near the isolated hamlet of Platina, where Rose and some friends built a monastery named for St. Herman of Alaska. At his tonsure, in October 1970, Rose took the name "Seraphim" after St. Seraphim of Sarov. He wrote, translated and studied for the priesthood in his cell, a one-roomed cabin with neither running water nor electricity, where he would spend the rest of his days. He was ordained in spring 1977 by Bishop Nektary of Seattle, spiritual son of St. Nectarius of Optina, the last of the great Optina staretzy.

In his ministry, Rose spoke frequently of an "Orthodoxy of the Heart," which he saw as increasingly absent in American ecclesiastical life. He also spoke of the need for warmth and kindness of the spirit, especially when dealing with those with whom one disagreed, an increasing problem in American Orthodoxy and its conflict between so-called "traditionalists" and "modernists." One can be firm, Rose insisted, without having to compromise basic Christian teachings on lovingkindness, longsuffering, and mercy toward others.