96

Forming Young Souls

No source of instruction can be overlooked in the preparation for the
great battle of life, and there is a certain advantage to be derived from
the right use of the heathen writers. The illustrious Moses is described
as training his intellect in the science of the Egyptians, and so arriving
at the contemplation of Him Who is. So in later days Daniel at
Babylon was wise in the Chaldean philosophy, and ultimately
apprehended the Divine instruction... [But] we must not take
everything indiscriminately, but only what is profitable. It would be
shameful for us in the case of food to reject the injurious, and at the
same time, in the case of lessons, to take no account of what keeps the
soul alive, but, like mountain streams, to sweep in everything that
happens to be in our way.
—St. Basil the Great (†379)1

N OT too many years ago, a young monastic aspirant went to Mount Athos.
In talking with the venerable Abbot of the monastery where he wished to
stay, he told him, “Holy Father! My heart burns for the spiritual life, for
asceticism, for unceasing communion with God, for obedience to an Elder.
Instruct me, please, holy Father, that I may attain to spiritual advancement.”
Going to the bookshelf, the Abbot pulled down a copy of David Copperfield by
Charles Dickens. “Read this, son,” he said. “But Father!” objected the disturbed
aspirant. “This is heterodox Victorian sentimentality, a product of the Western
captivity! This isn’t spiritual; it’s not even Orthodox! I need writings that will
teach me spirituality!” The Abbot smiled, saying, “Unless you first develop
normal, human, Christian feelings and learn to view life as little Davey did —
with simplicity, kindness, warmth, and forgiveness — then all the Orthodox
spiritual writings will be of little benefit to you.”2
Fr. Herman liked to tell this story, based upon a true occurrence, as he sat
with his brothers around the refectory table. He himself had experienced
something similar when, as a nineteen-year-old boy, he had been told by Fr.
Adrian to read classic Russian novels. While he had longed to discuss
“spirituality,” Fr. Adrian had instead turned the topic of conversation to some
character or idea in the works of Dostoyevsky, Goncharev, etc.
Fr. Seraphim, from his own experience in dealing with young people, saw
the wisdom behind the approach of Fr. Adrian and the Athonite Abbot
mentioned above. In an essay entitled “Forming the Soul,” he carefully
articulated the Orthodox philosophy behind it:
“The education of youth today, especially in America, is notoriously
deficient in developing responsiveness to the best expressions of human art,
literature, and music. As a result, young people are formed haphazardly under
the influence of television, rock music, and other manifestations of today’s
culture (or rather, anti-culture); and, both as a cause and as a result of this — but
most of all because of the absence on the part of the parents and teachers of any
conscious idea of what Christian life is and how a young person should be
brought up in it — the soul of a person who has survived the years of youth is
often an emotional wasteland, and at best reveals deficiencies in the basic
attitudes towards life that were once considered normal and indispensable.
“Few are those today who can clearly express their emotions and ideas and
face them in a mature way; many do not even know what is going on inside
themselves. Life is artificially divided into work (and very few can put the best
part of themselves, their heart, into it because it is ‘just for money’), play (in
which many see the ‘real meaning’ of their life), religion (usually no more than
an hour or two a week), and the like, without an underlying unity that gives
meaning to the whole of one’s life. Many, finding daily life unsatisfying, try to
live in a fantasy world of their own creation (into which they also try to fit
religion). And underlying the whole of modern culture is the common
denominator of the worship of oneself and one’s own comfort, which is deadly
to any idea of spiritual life.
“Such is something of the background, the ‘cultural baggage,’ which a
person brings with him today when he becomes Orthodox. Many, of course,
survive as Orthodox despite their background; some come to some spiritual
disaster because of it; but a good number remain crippled or at least spiritually
underdeveloped because they are simply unprepared for and unaware of the real
demands of spiritual life.
“As a beginning to the facing of this question (and hopefully, helping some
of those troubled by it), let us look here briefly at the Orthodox teaching on
human nature as set forth by a profound Orthodox writer of the nineteenth
century, a true Holy Father of these latter times — Bishop Theophan the Recluse
(†1894). In his book What the Spiritual Life Is and How to Attune Oneself to It,
he writes:

Human life is complex and many-sided.... Each side has its own faculties
and needs, its own methods and their exercise and satisfaction. Only when
all our faculties are in movement and all our needs are satisfied does a man
live. But when only one little part of these faculties is in motion and one
little part of our needs is satisfied — such a life is not life.... A man does
not live in a human way unless everything in him is in motion... One must
live as God created us, and when one does not live thus one can boldly say
he is not living at all...3

“From these words of Bishop Theophan one can already spot a common
fault of today’s seekers after spiritual life: Not all sides of their nature are in
movement; they are trying to satisfy religious needs... without having come to
terms with some of their other (more specifically, psychological and emotional)
needs, or worse: they use religion illegitimately to satisfy these psychological
needs. In such people religion is an artificial thing that has not yet touched the
deepest part of them, and often some upsetting event in their life, or just the
natural attraction of the world, is enough to destroy their plastic universe and
turn them away from religion. Sometimes such people, after bitter experience in
life, return to religion; but too often they are lost, or at best crippled and
unfruitful.”4
Fr. Seraphim saw this “plastic” approach to religion most graphically when
a young pilgrim, having spent time at another monastery in America, came to
Platina talking all about elders, hesychasm, Jesus Prayer, true monasticism, and
the ascetic wisdom of the Holy Fathers. One day Fr. Seraphim saw him walking
around the monastery singing rock songs, snapping his fingers and bouncing
with the rhythm. Surprised, Fr. Seraphim asked him if he didn’t think this might
go against all his interest in spirituality, but the young man just shrugged his
shoulders and replied: “No, there’s no contradiction. Whenever I want
spirituality, I just switch on the Elder” — meaning that he could take out his
rock tape and put in a tape of his Elder giving a spiritual discourse.
The fact that this young man could compartmentalize his life like this, Fr.
Seraphim understood, showed that something was missing in the basic formation
of his soul. To explain what is meant by this formation, he again referred in his
article to a passage from St. Theophan the Recluse:

A man’s needs are not all of equal value, but some are higher and others
lower; and the balanced satisfaction of them gives a man peace. Spiritual
needs are the highest of all, and when they are satisfied, then there is peace
even if the others are not satisfied; but when spiritual needs are not
satisfied, then even if the others are satisfied abundantly, there is no peace.
Therefore, the satisfaction of them is called the one thing needful.
 St. Theophan the Recluse (1815–94), Bishop of Tambov and Vladimir. Icon printed in Russia
after his canonization in 1988.

When spiritual needs are satisfied, they instruct a man to put into
harmony with them the satisfaction of one’s other needs also, so that neither
what satisfies the soul nor what satisfies the body contradicts spiritual life,
but helps it; and then there is a full harmony in a man of all the movements
and revelations of his life, a harmony of thoughts, feelings, desires,
undertakings, relationships, pleasures. And this is paradise!5

“In our own day,” Fr. Seraphim pointed out, “the chief ingredient missing
from this ideal harmony of human life is something one might call the emotional
development of the soul. It is something that is not directly spiritual, but that
very often hinders spiritual development. It is the state of someone who, while
he may think he thirsts for spiritual struggles and an elevated life of prayer, is
poorly able to respond to normal human love and friendship; for If a man say, I
love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar; for he that lovest not his brother
whom he hath seen, how can he love God Whom he hath not seen? (I John 4:20).
“In a few people this defect exists in an extreme form; but as a tendency it
is present to some extent in all of us who have been raised in the emotional and
spiritual wasteland of our times.
“This being so, it is often necessary for us to humble our seemingly
spiritual impulses and struggles to be tested on our human and emotional
readiness for them. Sometimes a spiritual father will deny his child the reading
of some spiritual book and give him instead a novel of Dostoyevsky or Dickens,
or will encourage him to become familiar with certain kinds of classical music,
not with any ‘aesthetic’ purpose in mind — for one can be an ‘expert’ in such
matters and even be ‘emotionally well-developed’ without the least interest in
spiritual struggle, and that is also an unbalanced state — but solely to refine and
form his soul and make it better disposed to understand genuine spiritual texts.”6

WHAT Fr. Seraphim said here of spiritual fathers is even more true of
natural parents, for the “formation of the soul” should begin in early childhood.
During a lecture at the 1982 St. Herman Pilgrimage, Fr. Seraphim gave parents
some practical advice on how to use whatever is positive in the world for their
children’s benefit:
“The child who has been exposed from his earliest years to good classical
music, and has seen his soul being developed by it, will not be nearly as tempted
by the crude rhythm and message of rock and other contemporary forms of
pseudo-music as someone who has grown up without a musical education. Such
a musical education, as several of the Optina Elders have said, refines the soul
and prepares it for the reception of spiritual impressions.[a]
“The child who has been educated in good literature, drama, and poetry and
has felt their effect on his soul — that is, has really enjoyed them — will not
easily become an addict of the contemporary movies and television programs
and cheap novels that devastate the soul and take it away from the Christian
path.
“The child who has learned to see beauty in classical painting and sculpture
will not easily be drawn into the perversity of contemporary art or be attracted
by the garish products of modern advertising and pornography.
“The child who knows something of the history of the world, especially in
Christian times, and how other people have lived and thought, what mistakes and
pitfalls people have fallen into by departing from God and His commandments,
and what glorious and influential lives they have lived when they were faithful
to Him — will be discerning about the life and philosophy of our own times and
will not be inclined to follow the first new philosophy or way of life he
encounters. One of the basic problems facing the education of children today is
that in the schools they are no longer given a sense of history. It is a dangerous
and fatal thing to deprive a child of a sense of history. It means that he has no
ability to take examples from the people who lived in the past. And actually,
history constantly repeats itself. Once you see that, it becomes interesting how
people have answered problems, how there have been people who have gone
against God and what results came from that, and how people changed their lives
and became exceptions and gave an example which is lived down to our own
times. This sense of history is a very important thing which should be
communicated to children.
“In general, the person who is well acquainted with the best products of
secular culture — which in the West almost always have definite religious and
Christian overtones — has a much better chance of leading a normal, fruitful
Orthodox life than someone who knows only the popular culture of today. One
who is converted to Orthodoxy straight from ‘rock’ culture, and in general
anyone who thinks he can combine Orthodoxy with that kind of culture — has
much suffering to go through and a difficult road in life before he can become a
truly serious Orthodox Christian who is capable of handing on his faith to others.
Without this suffering, without this awareness, Orthodox parents will raise their
children to be devoured by the contemporary world. The world’s best culture,
properly received, refines and develops the soul; today’s popular culture cripples
and deforms the soul and hinders it from having a full and normal response to
the message of Orthodoxy.
“Therefore, in our battle against the spirit of this world, we can use the best
things the world has to offer in order to go beyond them; everything good in the
world, if we are only wise enough to see it, points to God, and to Orthodoxy, and
we have to make use of it.”7

YEARS earlier, when he first gave his “Orthodox Survival Course” in 1975,
Fr. Seraphim spoke specifically about how the best products of culture can help
children to grow up with proper sexual morality:
“In our present society, boys by the time they are fourteen or fifteen years
old know all about sexual sins, much more than even married people used to
know. They know exactly what is going on in the movies, they see it, and the
whole atmosphere in which they live is one of indulgence. ‘Why fight against
this sort of thing?’ it is said. ‘It’s natural.’ Obviously, they are being prepared for
a life of indulgence in sin.
“Such a boy may be given the standard of truth, which is chastity, virginity;
but this is a very high and difficult standard if all he has in his mind is the
abstract idea of chastity in order to fight against this all-pervading atmosphere of
sensuality which attacks not only the mind but also the heart — and the body
directly. He sees everywhere billboards which lead to temptation, and the
magazines which he can now look at are frightful; and all this is much stronger
than the single idea of being pure. In fact, everybody will laugh at that idea, and
the poor boy will have a very difficult time not just in resisting, but even in
seeing that he should resist temptation, because all the evidence is against it
except for that one little abstract truth that he should be pure. In this respect he
can be helped by literature....
“The boy can read something like David Copperfield, which describes a
boy growing up: not some kind of monk or ascetic hero, but just an ordinary boy
growing up in a different time.... It’s true that this is a worldly book about people
living in the world — but that world is quite different [from today’s world].
Already you get a different perspective on things: that the world has not always
been the way it is now; that the standard which is now in the air is one kind of
world and there are other kinds; and that this is a different, normal world in
which, although the element of sex is present, it has a definite role. You get
strength from seeing what was normal in that time, from the way Dickens
describes this young boy growing up and falling in love. He is embarrassed to be
around the girl and never thinks about dirty things because nothing like that ever
comes up; whereas if you read any contemporary novel that’s all you get. This
book shows a much higher view of love, which is of course for the sake of
marriage, which is for the sake of children. The whole of one’s life is bound up
with this, and the thought never comes up in this book that one can have some
kind of momentary satisfaction and then pass on to the next girl. David
Copperfield is full of dreams of this woman, how he is going to live with her and
be a big man of the world. It is assumed that he has sexual relations after he is
married, but this is involved with what one is going to do with one’s whole life.
“Again, this gives strength to a boy who is himself occupied with precisely
these temptations. When he asks questions like, ‘How do I behave towards a
girl?’—an abstract sort of standard doesn’t help much. But if he sees how this
fictional person, who is very true to life at a different age, was so embarrassed,
so concerned, so polite, so idealistic and tender, this inspires him to behave
himself more normally, according to past standards. And in such a novel we see
how many sides there are to the whole question of love and sex, how
complicated it is in our whole human nature. Although no Orthodoxy is
preached, the whole atmosphere is filled with at least a large remnant of
Christian values, and this gives a definite help to the boy on his own level, not
on a spiritual level, but on the level of his leading an everyday life in the world.
“Also, Dickens communicates an extremely warm feeling about life, about
human relationships, which is not given in school today. And this very feeling of
warmth about human relationships might have more effect on keeping a boy
pure than giving him the abstract standard of Orthodoxy....
“The warmth of Dickens can help break through one-sided rationalism
better than years of arguments, because even if you accept the truth you can still
be cold and rationalistic and insensitive. Simply reading Dickens can already
produce in one tears of gratitude for having the true religion of love. The
earnestness and compassion of Dostoyevsky can help break through one’s self-
love and complacency. Even someone like Thomas Mann, who doesn’t have the
qualities of great warmth and compassion, can give one a deeper insight into the
wrongness of the path of Western life.”

IN the same lecture Fr. Seraphim recalled an incident from his youth in
which his own soul was formed according to a standard of truth:
“In college, before I had much sensitivity about architecture, my German
professor[b] gave a talk one day as we were walking between two buildings built
about thirty years apart in much the same Spanish stucco style. He asked, ‘Can
you tell me the difference between those two buildings? Look closely: one has
bricks, it has lines; the other is of cement, it’s flat, nothing. One is warm, the
other cold; one has some kind of human feeling to it, the other has nothing, it’s
just abstract; one is suitable for a person to live in...’ This gave me a very deep
lesson, that even a small thing like the presence of lines or the small ornaments
on Victorian architecture which are in no way utilitarian — all this gives some
kind of quality. Today the feeling for anything more than what is absolutely
necessary has been lost. This utilitarianism, this practicality, is very deadening.
Of course it is cheaper to make things purely utilitarian and therefore all this is
logical; still, we have lost a great deal. When parents can at least show a child
that ‘This building is good; that one is not, it’s rather dead,’ such a basic
education will help him so that he will not simply think that whatever is modern
or most up-to-date is the best. This is not simply a course in art, but a course in
life, part of growing up which parents and teachers can give between the lines of
a formal education. All this involves a sense of art. By contrast, the
contemporary upbringing in schools emphasizes crudity, coldness, and inability
to judge what is better and what is worse — total relativity, which only confuses
a person and helps fit him into the world of apostasy. There must at least be a
minimum of a conscious battle to help raise a child with different influences.”

FROM all that has been said, one can get a sense of the seriousness with
which Fr. Seraphim regarded the education of the boys and young men whom
God had placed under his charge.
By the school year of 1981–82, Theophil was in his “Twelfth-Year
Course,” in which Fr. Seraphim strove to teach him English grammar, Russian
grammar, world literature, music appreciation, history, Church music, and
Typicon.
During the same year, Fr. Seraphim taught a course on the “Orthodox
Worldview.” An extended version of his “Survival Course” of 1975, it required
tests and term papers. His first incentive to teach it had come in August of 1981,
when an eighteen-year-old Jordanville seminarian had visited the monastery
with his parents. The parents, who were long-time friends of the Brotherhood,
were worried about their son’s future. Like so many people his age who had
been raised in our modern fragmented society, the seminarian was unable to
express or face his emotions and ideas, and was unsure of what was going on
inside himself. As Fr. Seraphim noted: “He does not want to do anything else but
prepare himself for service in the Church, but he is also very much afraid of the
depression which came over him last year in Jordanville (and lasted for months),
based upon idleness, inability to apply what he reads in spiritual books to the
reality of his life, etc. He is presently in a ‘bored’ state, and without close
supervision he is afraid (and we agree) that he will lose all interest in serving the
Church.”8
Learning all this from the seminarian and his parents, the Platina fathers
came up with an idea: to let him stay at the monastery and do his course work
there, under Fr. Seraphim’s guidance and instruction. After praying about it and
receiving Holy Communion the next day, the young man accepted the proposal.
Fr. Seraphim wrote to Bishop Laurus in Jordanville asking if he could still
receive his seminary degree under this arrangement. “From what we know of
him over the past several years,” Fr. Seraphim wrote, “he seems to be a highly
gifted and motivated boy who could easily perform the necessary work; and
under close supervision we believe his emotional problem (which seems to be
bound up with immaturity) can also be handled.”9 After some discussion, the
Jordanville faculty accepted Fr. Seraphim’s proposal.
Soon another eighteen-year-old Jordanville seminarian, George, also came
to do his course work at the Platina monastery. Of Protestant background,
George was from Redding and had been baptized by Fr. Seraphim, his family
having been introduced to Orthodoxy by the man whom Fr. Herman had met in
the Redding bookstore.
During the 1981 Summer Pilgrimage, yet another young man came to stay
at the monastery: a college student named Gregory from the Orthodox
fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz. (It had been at Gregory’s
apartment that Fr. Seraphim had stayed when he had gone to Santa Cruz back in
May.) An earnest young man with shining blue eyes and a wild mop of red hair,
Gregory had recently converted to Orthodoxy from Anglicanism and what he
now called “charismania.” He had always longed for a life of self-sacrifice and
closeness to nature, and upon encountering Orthodoxy he had become inspired
with the idea of desert monasticism. He would carry The Northern Thebaid
around the college with him like a textbook. When he came to the monastery in
August and decided to stay, the fathers noticed that he was always looking after
and caring for others, and by this they knew that his desire for a desert podvig
was a genuine one, not just an egotistic escape. He also had an incredibly quick
mind. Clearly, here was another young soul just begging to be filled, to be given
an Orthodox formation. Gregory was clothed as a novice, and began the next
school year in Fr. Seraphim’s “Orthodox Worldview” course.
Including both monastery brothers and “lay” students, seven men took part
in the full course, with several more young men and women coming up to attend
lectures regularly on the weekends. A tremendous amount of material was
covered in a nine-month period. Fr. Seraphim devoted much time to dogmatic
theology and the history of the Church, acquainting the students with the lives
and thought of a great many Holy Fathers. At the same time, he taught much of
what they would normally learn in universities, again according to a definite way
of seeing that made sense of it all. Among the people covered in the course were
the religious teachers Joachim of Fiore, Martin Luther, and Teilhard de Chardin;
the Western philosophers Thomas Aquinas, Kant, Voltaire, Hegel, Marx,
Rousseau, and Proudhon; the scientists Copernicus, Kepler, Lamarck, Lyell,
Darwin, and Haeckel; the literary figures Homer, Dante, Milton, Samuel
Richardson, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift,
Jane Austen, Diderot, Byron, Pushkin, Leontiev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Poe,
Dickens, and Wordsworth; and the political figures and thinkers Julian the
Apostate, Oliver Cromwell, Boris Godunov, Peter I, Nicholas I (Fr. Seraphim’s
favorite Tsar), Weishaupt, Babeuf, Bakunin, Fourier, Burke, Pobedonostsev,
Owen, Napoleon, Hitler, Donoso Cortes, Saint-Simon, Metternich, and de
Maistre. Fr. Seraphim discussed the works of scores of painters and sculptors
from the ancient to the ultra-modern. He taught about the music of the
Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods, and about the new
standards of music which came after these; even the contemporary phenomenon
of the “Beatles” was examined according to the Orthodox worldview.
Fr. Seraphim’s students did not know then how fortunate they were. This
was by far the most in-depth course he had ever taught, and he would not live to
give another one. As he himself well knew, such a broad education in world
knowledge and experience based on Orthodox principles is virtually extinct in
our times.
In addition to the Orthodox Worldview course, Fr. Seraphim taught a
course in English grammar-poetry-composition, and Fr. Herman taught one in
Church history and literature. The students spent about twelve hours per week in
these classes. To this the two seminarians added another ten hours of supervised
work for the second-year seminary course, the materials for which had been sent
by the fathers and teachers at Jordanville.
The reading of classical literature was an important part of the curriculum.
In September of 1981, Fr. Seraphim recorded: “Our two seminary students have
started their ‘pre-theological’ studies. Theophil is finally seeing the value of
some non-religious learning as a preparation for theology (right now he’s
reading Plato), and ———, after reading two Pushkin plays, has discovered that
the missing ingredient in his education up to now is precisely worldly literature!
The ‘jumping suddenly into theology’ syndrome does seem to be a cause of
many problems, both individual and in the Church as a whole.”10
One of the young seminarians was unable to concentrate on reading more
than a page at a time or to retain what he had read. For him Fr. Seraphim
extended himself by having him read interesting books such as Crime and
Punishment out loud to him every day, with a brief discussion following. This,
he recorded, “had immediate good results, both in level of understanding and
interest.” Elsewhere he remarked on this course of oral reading: “The question of
Orthodox ‘awakening’ seems to come down to some simple things like that.”11
Fr. Seraphim wrote an outline for the third, fourth, and fifth-year seminary
courses for the two boys from Jordanville, which were to include all the main
classes offered at Holy Trinity Seminary;[c] but he died right before the third-
year course was to begin.

WE have mentioned how the Platina fathers had taken time out to form
the souls of the younger generation by having them listen to classical music.
Nowadays, however, it is not only the youth who need such a formation: most of
today’s parents also have been formed on crude forms of music. At the St.
Herman Pilgrimages, therefore, everyone was given a taste of refined Christian
culture through the fathers’ musical presentations. At the pilgrimage in 1979,
when Fr. Seraphim was giving his course on the prophecies of Daniel, he played
a recording of Handel’s Balshazzar’s Feast, based on the book of Daniel; and in
1981, while giving his Genesis course, he played Haydn’s Creation Oratorio. Fr.
Herman would play other pieces, especially by his favorite composer, Mozart,
and would talk about them.
Even the modern art form of film was used by Fr. Seraphim as a means of
forming the soul. As he once explained: “Some parents say, ‘Oh, the world is so
bad, I refuse to let my children go to the movies; I refuse to have anything to do
with the world, I want to keep them pure.’ But these children will get involved
with the world no matter what, and the fact that they are deprived of any kind of
dushevni diet — i.e., that which feeds the middle part of the soul — means that
most likely they will grab what they can get when they can get it. Therefore, it is
better to choose those movies which at least have no evil in them and cause no
inclination to sin.”12
Right after the Feast of Christmas in the years 1980 and 1981, Fathers
Herman and Seraphim rented a movie-projector and carefully selected films for
the young people to view: classics such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Dickens’
Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol,[d] and The Pickwick Papers, as well as
Tom Brown’s School Days.
With all that Fr. Seraphim said above about Charles Dickens, it should be
mentioned that, during his early years of Orthodox zealotry, he had been like the
monastic aspirant on Mount Athos in dismissing Dickens’ works as “Victorian
sentimentality.” Now, however, after years of warming his heart and regaining
his innocence in Orthodoxy, he was free to appreciate The Pickwick Papers just
as he once had as a boy, when he had stayed up late at night reading it under the
covers. When he saw the English movie of it a year before he died, he was like a
child again, chuckling at Dickens’ endearing humor, and weeping when Dickens
drove home a Christian message.
Once Fr. Seraphim was asked about movies that portray Christian virtue.
“There are a lot of them,” he replied, “but they don’t make them any more.
Maybe they do once in a while, but it is very rare. Old movies, especially ones
that are dramatizations of novels or classic plays, are often very well done and
there is a point to them. Everything in Dickens is that way; it is full of
Christianity. He doesn’t mention Christ even, but it is full of love. In The
Pickwick Papers, for example, the hero Mr. Pickwick is a person who refuses to
give up his innocence in trusting people. Finally he gets put in the debtors’
prison because he trusted someone. There comes to him the man who put him in
prison and seduced his relative, and who has now been put in prison himself. Mr.
Pickwick weeps over the man and gives him money so he can buy a meal,
because the man has no money to buy food in debtor’s prison. One sees this
man, this criminal who has been taking advantage of everyone, and one little tear
forms in the man’s eye. In the end Mr. Pickwick is triumphant, because he
trusted men; and he wins because people’s hearts are changed.
“There are lots of old movies like this which show either the passions of
men, the innocence of men, or various Christian virtues. In fact, these
nineteenth-century novels on which they are based are very down-to-earth and
real; and they show how to live a normal Christian life, how to deal with these
various passions that arise. They do not give it on a spiritual level, but by
showing it in life, and by having a basic Christian understanding of life, they are
very beneficial. I don’t know of any movies nowadays that are that way. Maybe
here and there you can find one, but they have all become so weird.... For
example, Dickens is heartwarming with regard to normal, everyday life, but the
recent movie E.T. is heartwarming with regard to some kind of freakish thing,
which becomes something like a saviour.
“I think that we should seek out more of these old movies. For a group —
say, a church group — to get together and show these old movies would be very
good, especially for the young people.”13
Besides showing films on special occasions, Fr. Seraphim took time out to
bring the young laymen at the monastery to live performances of classical
drama. Noting this and other attempts of Fr. Seraphim to form young souls, Fr.
Alexey Young recalls:
“Several times Fr. Seraphim came by our house on his way to and from
Ashland, Oregon, where he’d taken some of the lay brothers to see various plays
at the Shakespeare Festival there. One of these times — I’m almost sure it was
early in the summer he died — he took the ‘boys’ to see Romeo and Juliet,
which they’d been reading and studying beforehand. When I expressed surprise
at the young students being taken to see such a play, he said: ‘But why not?
They’re human beings, and have feelings and passions like anyone else. It’s
better for them to be exposed to this in a supervised and controlled way rather
than just struggling alone with it.’
“This was consistent with instruction he gave me whenever Theophil came
to spend the summer: ‘Let him watch TV — even soap operas!—if he wants,
and take him to movies. Theophil is fascinated by the world, and it’s best that he
get it out of his system now. Just be sure that you watch everything with him and
discuss it thoroughly so that he can put it in a true spiritual context.’ This seemed
very wise to me, too. He believed that a small, regulated ‘dose’ of worldliness
could act like a vaccination and might ultimately result in ‘immunity’ from
worldly attractions.
“On one occasion he asked me to take Theophil to see Mozart’s Don
Giovanni at the San Francisco Opera, which we did; and another time he asked
me to take him to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in Ashland. He knew these works
very well, and even spelled out for me the specific ‘lessons’ I was to draw from
these productions and share with Theophil. Always he requested a detailed
‘report’ from me afterwards as to how Theophil (or others) had reacted, whether
they’d ‘got the point,’ etc.
 “I also recall how he encouraged Michael Anderson[e] to read Plato and
other philosophers, discussing all of this with him in detail as Michael
laboriously made his way through these texts. Fr. Seraphim showed him how all
of this was linked up with Orthodoxy and Patristics....
“Similarly with music: quite early on I’d told him that I supposed we would
have to give up Mozart, etc., if we were going to be really serious about spiritual
growth. His response: ‘You poor man!’ I can still hear him say it! Then he
explained the place of beauty in the spiritual world, and how great art of any
kind works with the totality of man’s spiritual nature. This was the first time I’d
been introduced to this idea. Later on I discovered it myself in some of the Holy
Fathers, and I’ve often shared it with others in the ensuing years. But until then
I’d had a somewhat ‘puritanical’ view of these things....
“Years after Fr. Seraphim left us I came across this verse (II Tim. 1:7) and
immediately thought of him, as it seems to summarize his own approach —
anyway, as I experienced it—: ‘For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but
of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.’... In general I would say that
anyone who really opened up to him — and unfortunately that wasn’t very many
— received a veritable treasure-trove of wisdom from him. Little of this was
appreciated until after he was dead.”14

LIKE any father, Fr. Seraphim suffered over the sons in his care. Each of
the young souls he was helping to form, including those we have not mentioned,
had its own secret wounds and scars. One of them had been an unwanted child,
formed in a loveless environment with no father and a religiously unbalanced
mother; another, although he did come from a loving home, could not seem to
“find himself” as he grew into manhood and no longer had his parents to buffer
him from the hard realities of life; another young man, who had come from a
broken home and been moved about from father to mother, had wounds that still
needed healing; and yet another brother had come to the monastery out of a dark
underworld of drugs, crime, and black magic — influences that still plagued
him.
Late at night, Fr. Herman would often see Fr. Seraphim praying for these
young men and for all the troubled people who had entered his life: victims of
the nihilistic modern society whose essence he had identified so many years
before. The boys themselves would already be sleeping soundly in their beds,
while Fr. Seraphim, in the cold, dark church illuminated by a lone candle, would
be prostrated before the Holy Table. Weeping, he would implore God to bless,
protect, and heal them.
The brothers never knew of this until after his repose, when they fully
realized what a true father they had had in Fr. Seraphim.