California Son
On the Patron Saint of Lost Western People
I haven’t been well these last few days, and have not been able to write my usual Sunday Pilgrimage instalment. I hope to be back on the road next week. Instead, I’m offering up this essay, which was recently ‘printed’ in the Free Press in the US. It’s about the life of a pioneering American Orthodox figure whose journey has both intrigued and inspired me.
Last year I was invited to give a talk about Christianity and nature at Canisius University in Buffalo, New York. After the talk, I took some questions from the audience. One of the questions, asked in sweet innocence, was a deadly honeytrap for a visiting Englishman:
“What do you think of America?”
I had just been talking about the dangers to the soul of the technological culture of Silicon Valley, and the impact of its machine-like ways of thinking on the world, so I said the first thing that came into my head. This is rarely a good idea, especially in public.
“America is Babylon,” I said. Then, remembering I was speaking to an audience of Americans, I quickly added a qualification.
“It’s Babylon,” I said, “but it might also be the place that counters Babylon. It’s as if one force somehow begets the other. After all, California is home to Silicon Valley, but it’s also home to the monastery of Seraphim Rose.”
Somebody else in the audience put their hand up.
“Who’s Seraphim Rose?” they asked.
It was a fair question. The strange name I had conjured is hardly widely known. It is the name of a man who in many ways embodied the twentieth-century West’s aching search for meaning. A man who pushed himself out of the desert of modern materialism, through a banquet of “alternative spiritualities,” and into an ascetic, monastic life in the oldest and most traditional stream of Christianity: the Eastern Orthodox Church. Seraphim Rose is the unofficial patron saint of lost Western people, and only America could have made him.
Today, with the Orthodox Church in the U.S. growing faster than it ever has, and with young people flooding many of its parishes, interest in his life and work has reached new heights. Sales of his books continue to grow, his grave has become a place of pilgrimage, and there are more and more persistent calls for him to be recognized as a saint of the Church. Slowly and quietly, he may be helping to remake America.
Eugene Rose was born into a middle-class family in San Diego in 1934. Shy, intense, and clever, he became disillusioned, as he grew, with both the materialism of consumer America, and with what he regarded as the shallow, worldly Christianity of his suburban upbringing that did nothing to challenge it. After graduating magna cum laude in Chinese philosophy from Pomona College in Southern California, Eugene went on to study for a master’s degree at Berkeley, where he wrote an acclaimed thesis on the Tao Te Ching. Fiercely intelligent, he consumed philosophy, history, and theology at a rate of knots, in search of both truth and meaning, but none of it seemed to answer his questions: What was truth? What was life for? And what should he do with his?
One thing Rose did become sure about as a young man was that religion was a lie. Baptized a Methodist, he had grown to reject the Christian faith as empty and meaningless. He had read Nietzsche, he had met Jack Kerouac, and by the time he was a student he was cursing God in drunken fits of rage for having created an empty and meaningless world. Later, Rose described such passionate atheism as a “spiritual state. . . a real attempt to grapple with the true God whose ways are so inexplicable even to the most believing of men.”
If there was no God, though, what was there? The blossoming counterculture of San Francisco offered different kinds of answers, and the young Eugene threw himself into it with gusto. For a while he studied under the “beatnik guru” Alan Watts, who he believed might have the answers to his growing spiritual questions. But Eugene became disillusioned with Watts, whose pseudo-Eastern combination of booze, acid, Zen, and yoga came to seem like yet another example of the consumerism that was devouring his country.
The ’50s and ’60s counterculture as a whole presented the same problem: However much music, drink, drugs, or sex Rose experimented with, the void inside him just kept growing. “Disease, suffering, death,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “these are reminders, convenient reminders, that man most profoundly is not of this world. . . . Whatever the ‘eat, drink, and be merry’ school says, self-conscious man must face this problem.”
In the mid-1950s, when he was in his early 20s, Rose met another young seeker, Jon Gregerson. Gregerson was a Finnish-born Russian Orthodox Christian; he was also to become Rose’s lover. As part of Eugene’s endless search for meaning, one day he went along with his partner to the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in San Francisco. It was an experience that would alter the course of his life.
It was Easter—Pascha, in Orthodox terminology—and the cathedral was holding a night service. The Orthodox liturgy is over a thousand years old, and the Paschal service is particularly deep and intense. Typically, it will last for several hours on either side of midnight, culminating in a priest emerging from the altar into a blacked-out church, holding a single candle and declaring “Christ is risen!” The overall effect, especially after the week of heavy fasting that the Orthodox Church prescribes, can be extremely powerful. Rose had never seen—or felt—anything like it. “Something happened to me,” he later wrote of his visit, “that I had not experienced in any Buddhist or other Eastern temple; something in my heart said that I was home; that my search was over.”
After years of exploring every idea he could find in search of truth, he had seen something he never expected: “That Truth was not just an abstract idea, sought and known by the mind, but was something personal—even a Person—sought and loved by the heart,” he wrote later. “And that is how I met Christ.”
Eugene threw himself into a new exploration of Orthodox Christianity with the same intensity he had applied to his searches through Zen, Taoism, and perennialism. Just as he had previously taught himself Chinese in order to study the Tao, now he taught himself the Slavic languages in order to understand the Russian Orthodox hymns. Attending the cathedral regularly, he met its archbishop, John, who had recently arrived in San Francisco from Shanghai, where he had lived after fleeing his Russian homeland during the Bolshevik revolution. In China, John served as bishop under the Japanese occupation, later working in a refugee camp after the communist revolution and then fleeing to Paris, before being appointed bishop of San Francisco in 1962. Throughout it all, he refused to sleep in a bed, ate just one meal a day, went barefoot, and gave all he had to the poor.
St. John of San Francisco—as he now is—was an entrancing figure for the young Eugene, like an ancient saint who had walked into the modern world. In Russian Orthodoxy, and especially in the figure of St. John, he had found what he was looking for: a faith that emphasized not self-indulgence but self-sacrifice. This was no new claim—it was, he came to understand, the very foundation of Christianity, but it had been lost in the modern, comfortable versions of the faith with which he had grown up.
“Let us not, who would be Christians, expect anything else from [life] but to be crucified,” he later wrote, “and we must be crucified outwardly, in the eyes of the world; for Christ’s kingdom is not of this world.”
If there is a secret to the growing significance, and the growing veneration, of Rose as a modern Christian figure, it is perhaps the insight that he gained from watching St. John at work—that suffering and struggle are the key to wisdom and truth.
When Eugene Rose was received into the Orthodox Church in 1962, it was both the end of a spiritual search and the beginning of a remarkable transformation. Eugene was a man who never did anything by halves, and now that he had discovered what he considered to be the true faith and the true church, he wanted to explore it in its fullness. Above all, he wanted to be transformed by it.
In the cathedral, he befriended another young Orthodox newcomer, Gleb Podmoshensky, and soon they were hatching plans. By 1964, they had opened a bookstore in San Francisco dedicated to selling Orthodox texts. A year later they purchased an antique, hand-operated printing press and set to work producing their own magazine, The Orthodox Word, featuring stories of ancient forest-dwelling saints, lessons from the Desert Fathers, and teachings from Christian texts.
Reading and writing about the lives of ancient saints who had fled to the Russian wilderness to live for God alone, Eugene and Gleb felt a pull to do the same. In 1967, they bought a parcel of land in the wilds of northern California near the small hamlet of Platina, and formed a Christian brotherhood named after St. Herman of Alaska, America’s first Orthodox saint. Soon, the brotherhood became a monastery. It was a simple, stark, and unworldly place. Most of it was built by hand by Eugene and Gleb, using wood from abandoned mining shacks. There was no running water, electricity, or telephone, but there were bears and rattlesnakes aplenty. Here, both men were tonsured as monks by St. John of San Francisco. Eugene took the name Seraphim, and Gleb became Herman. Father Seraphim Rose was born.
For the next 15 years, Seraphim Rose used his life at the monastery to effect his own personal transformation and that of the nascent Orthodox faith in the U.S. He lived a severe, ascetic life in a small wooden cabin he built himself, sleeping on boards, never cutting his hair or beard, fasting regularly, and dedicating himself to prayer. It was a harsh existence, but one that seemed to deeply energize him. He was beginning to experience the paradox of ascetic Christianity that the monks of the Egyptian desert had noticed and taught a thousand years before: that the more you sacrifice for God, and the simpler your life, the more freedom and joy is available to your soul. The less attached you are to the world, the closer you come to God.
This was, and remains, a message so alien to modern consumer cultures as to be almost incomprehensible to many. But not, it turned out, to all. Slowly, more young men came to the monastery, seeking a radical Christian life away from the outside world, many of them drawn in by reading The Orthodox Word, which the brotherhood continued to produce. Like Rose before them, they sought a meaning that their culture could not give them.
Working by candlelight in his often-freezing wooden cell, Rose began to translate and then write his own books: God’s Revelation to the Human Heart, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, The Soul After Death, and other works poured out of him. During the 1970s, with Russian communism in full force, these titles were produced in samizdat translations in the USSR, where many remain bestsellers today. In the West, meanwhile, Rose’s teachings and writings are growing in popularity—and in some cases, relevance. Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, for example, is a blistering examination of the role that digital technology and fashionable occultism will play in the coming of the Antichrist. In the age of WitchTok, and a burgeoning neo-paganism among the young and very online, it’s hard not to read it and shiver.
Writings like this made Rose a controversial figure in some quarters. Some of the claims he made in his books are argued over by theologians, and in some circles he is seen as an extremist or even a fanatic, for the ascetic lifestyle he insisted on leading, for his particular interpretations of Orthodox theology, and for his radical condemnations of what he regarded as the corrupt nature of modern society. In many ways, the criticism is understandable: Rose was a man driven to seek the truth at almost any cost to himself, and he brooked no compromise with a rapidly secularising world which likes its Christianity to be cosy and unthreatening. In the eyes of that world, his life and work do indeed seem extreme or even inexplicable—but then, so did the life of Jesus, and all of his apostles.
As Father Seraphim, he took literally Christ’s call to leave the world and head for the kingdom instead. In this, he may have been closer to historical Christianity, with its litany of martyrs, saints, and ragged desert fathers and mothers, than many of his comfortable critics. As the Orthodox scholar David Bentley-Hart has put it, “one thing in remarkably short supply in the New Testament is common sense. The Gospels, the epistles, Acts, Revelation—all of them are relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism.” It is, in fact, precisely this lack of sensible, worldly “moderation” that has made Seraphim Rose an increasingly significant spiritual figure in modern America more than forty years after his untimely death.
That death came unexpectedly in the early 1980s, when Rose was in many ways at the height of his powers. Working in his cell, he began to feel a series of excruciating pains in his abdomen. His fellow monks wanted him to see a doctor, but Rose refused for several days. Eventually, when the pains became unbearable, he was taken to hospital, where it was found that a blood clot had killed part of his intestines. It soon became clear that his illness was fatal. The monastic brotherhood gathered around him in his hospital bed, holding an all-night vigil and singing hymns as he slipped in and out of consciousness. He died in September 1982, aged 48.
The end of Rose’s life, though, was to be the beginning of his reputation, which continues to grow among many who see him as an inspiring and uncompromising example of a genuine, unworldly Christianity. Today, there is a growing thrum of support for the notion that Seraphim was, and is, a saint, and that the Orthodox church should recognize him as one. Whether or not that happens, his life and works seem more and more relevant by the year, as the culture war continues, the materialism of the West intensifies, and as young people in particular begin seeking older, deeper, and more serious forms of faith in order to fill the void of meaning that has opened up around them. The endless political arguments and cultural divisions of the modern West, which seem only to grow, can easily disguise what Rose saw beneath: a spiritual void. Without a wider and deeper meaning to life—which in Rose’s view meant without Christ—only nihilism beckons. More and more people, especially the young, seem to agree.
Eugene Rose, who became Father Seraphim, was in this sense an American spiritual pioneer. He was prepared to throw everything off—even his own life—to find the truth that he had always sought so passionately, regardless of what the world thought of him. “When I became a Christian,” he once said, “I voluntarily crucified my mind, and all the crosses that I bear have been only a source of joy for me, I have lost nothing, and gained everything.”
It is a strange and terrible mercy that America—this modern Babylon, as you have rightly named her—should also be the reluctant cradle of new saints. Out of the glare of neon and the quiet, dead hum of the machine world, the figure of Seraphim Rose rises like a bone from the desert, bearing witness to what the heart still dares to hope: that Christ has not left us, even here, even now.
There is something profoundly incarnational in Rose’s journey, something that whispers of that deeper Christianity which the world has nearly forgotten—the Christianity that does not float in abstractions but plants its feet in the dust of the earth. In Rose’s life, and in the harsh soil of Platina, the mystery of the Word made flesh finds a new and fearsome echo. His was not an escape from the world, but a transfiguration of it; a rediscovery that the very wood of abandoned shacks, the calloused hands, the hunger of the body, and the sorrow of the heart, are not obstacles to grace but the very instruments through which grace carves a man into the image of the Crucified.
This, perhaps, is the lost inheritance we are only now beginning to seek again: incarnational mysticism. Not the airy flights of intellect or the sterile ecstasies of sentiment, but the trembling realization that God has pressed Himself into the grain of our days—the rough, weather-beaten world where men still bleed and labor and love poorly. Rose saw that the soul’s ascent to God is not through some gnostic ladder, but down, down into the agony and the beauty of real life, where Christ has already pitched His tent among us.
It is easy, too easy, to imagine salvation as something clean and elsewhere. But the Orthodox bells that startled Rose’s heart on that Paschal night still toll for us, if we have ears to hear: Christ is risen not in theory, but in the very sinews of this sorrowing world. He is hidden in the smallness of our lives, and it is only the willing crucifixion of our cleverness, as Rose understood, that allows us to see Him.
Father Seraphim’s legacy is not merely in his writings, though they are precious; it is in his terrible and beautiful insistence that God is not far from any of us. Even the deserts of Babylon are soaked, if we but knew it, with the blood and breath of the living God.
Thank you for the introduction to Father Rose. After seeing your essay in The Free Press last week, I read Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future. It came at the right time and saved me from a multitude of errors.