If you spend any amount of time on social media or amongst recent converts to the faith, you will inevitably hear the name, Fr. Seraphim Rose. Why is it that Fr. Seraphim is so present in contemporary Orthodox discussion amongst converts? It boils down to a simple answer, he was uniquely American. Fr. Seraphim represents the ideal figure that so many people aspire in the United States to be like, using him as a recent example of what the faith can achieve in not only someone’s life, but through them as well. Born in San Diego, California in 1934 as Eugene Rose, he grew up with World War Two, the Korean War, rock music, and the hippie revolution. Slightly older than what we would call the “baby boomer” generation, he had the life experiences of being immersed in what is often deemed the golden age of American culture. Not only this, but Eugene was also raised in San Diego, a place that was subject to the movement of people to California to live a more “free” life. His parents were average middle class hard-working Americans, who had typical western European heritage. Eugene was all American, in a way that people can identify with in a way that is different from others like St. John of San Francisco who simply had wonderful ministry in the country but were not native to the land.
Beyond this, Eugene lived with the trends of his time, for a period of his life, following the hippies in San Francisco and completely immersing himself in the study of eastern philosophies. Popular at the time, it can be seen today how these practices have filtered into what is often called the “New Age” movement. Later when he found Orthodoxy and became a hieromonk, so much of his work focused on combatting these false philosophies and worldviews, due to how prevalent they had become in the United States during this time. One such practice that has remained from this time is manifestation, which social media has increasingly popularized. It promotes the idea that people can just think about what they want to come into their life and that it will materialize, putting all the power for their life within their own person, and not on God. Fr. Seraphim focused his work on combatting such false philosophies that had crept into pop culture, ensuring that there was an Orthodox answer to these ideas. Furthermore, Fr. Seraphim lived as a monk in the forest of northern California, eschewing the modern materialism that America had become so infatuated with. For modern Orthodox converts who come from the materialistic culture that the western world is focused on promoting, this is a radical change from what they are used to seeing. Thus, there is stark difference between the comfort that the world offers them and the suffering for Christ that is offered by the example of Fr. Seraphim to those who wish to follow in his footsteps
Featured Image Credit: Андрей Николаевич Миронов (A.N. Mironov), CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Collin Cooper 