If you're looking for a relatively short introduction to the Life of Blessed Father Seraphim Rose, this article is a great place to start. Also ideal to share with seekers who are fighting against the world's zombifying, narcotic effect on us, and who yearn for the Truth, and are striving to find some way forward into the intensity of the Real Way. Father Seraphim found that intense Truth, that Real Way, that Ultimate Life, in following Jesus Christ in the Orthodox Church. He is worthy of the title the author of the below article applied to him.
The Lamp-Stand of America
From Death To The World Zine #28
Eugene Rose was born into a typical middle-class American family in San Diego in 1934. Like many young Americans, the materialistic attitude of the society that surrounded him did not satisfy his soul and an intense hunger and quest for truth began to arise from somewhere deep inside of him. The gnawing question of “what is truth?” began to completely consume him around the time that he graduated from high school. For the rest of his life, Eugene sought truth at all costs.
He rejected the “Christianity” of America, which he regarded as worldly, weak, and fake. To him, it seemed that this modern Christianity put God in a box and was not otherworldly; it seemed to be very much at home in this world that Eugene wanted nothing to do with. His zeal turned him to the writings of the mad prophet and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and he poured over his works until his words began to resonate in his soul with infernal power. The nihilism Nietzsche preached made sense to him in a collapsing godless world, however he then fell into total despair which he described in later years as a living hell. He felt that he didn’t fit into the modern world, or even into his own family, and that nobody understood him. It was as if he was somehow born in the wrong place and time. He loved to roam under the stars in the mountains of California, but believing Nietzsche’s lie he also felt completely isolated, alone, and without purpose. Alcohol became his “cure” and he began to follow in the footsteps of a man he once met, Jack Kerouac, one of the founders of the “beat generation.” Eugene would get totally drunk and would fall on the floor consumed with rage, screaming at God to leave him alone. Once while drunk on the top of a mountain he raised his fist to heaven, cursed God, and dared Him to damn him to hell. In his despair, it seemed worth being damned forever, if only he could know that God exists, rather than remain in a state of indifference. If God did damn him to hell, at least then he would, for that blissful moment, feel God’s touch and know for sure that He was reachable.
In later years he wrote:
Atheism, true ‘existential’ atheism, burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God whose ways are so inexplicable even to the most believing of men, and it has more than once been known to end in a blinding vision of Him Whom the real atheist truly seeks. It is Christ who works in these souls. The Antichrist is not to be found in the great deniers, but in the small affirmers, whose Christ is only on the lips. Nietzsche, in calling himself antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ…
After graduating from Pomona College in Southern California, Eugene started studying under one of the 50’s and 60’s counter-culture founders, Alan Watts, and became a Buddhist “bohemian” in San Francisco. He devoted himself to this self-proclaimed guru hoping to satisfy his intense pain and hunger for truth. However, it became increasingly apparent to him that Watts was a fraud. This self-proclaimed guru was using watered down teachings to fuel his appetite for material pleasure and luxury. For Eugene this was another proof of the counterfeit Americana he grew up despising; another plastic religion that was subjected to material culture. He then began to pursue more traditional Eastern religions and became fluent in Chinese in order to study the Tao Teh Ching and other ancient Eastern texts in their original language, hoping to tap into the heart of their wisdom and discover something he was missing. However, he again stared into the dark chasm of nothingness and felt the void of Buddhism’s impersonal sea of emptiness. The pain and struggle he felt lead him deeper into a search through various philosophers, sages, and cults of his time. Eugene had been seeking the truth with all his mind, but it constantly eluded him. Since his soul could not be satisfied he satisfied his flesh all the more and spent life living as extravagant as possible. He continued walking the streets of San Francisco drunk, yelling and cursing at God to leave him alone.
Under the influence of the philosopher Rene Guenon, Eugene began to view the world not in a constant state of evolution, going from the primitive ancient man to the sophisticated modern man, but in a movement toward deterioration and regression. Particularly in the arena of religion, Guenon hypothesized that the most primitive forms were the most authentic and sophisticated while modern religions had lost their authenticity. This spoke to Eugene and planted in him an admiration for ancient customs and traditions. However, he treated this pursuit academically and as if he was in a cafeteria of various religious beliefs that afforded him the luxury of taking a little of one here and another there. In this search of “collecting” various ancient religious traditions, Eugene was invited to visit an Eastern Orthodox Christian church. Later he wrote about his experience:
For years in my studies I was satisfied with being “above all traditions” but somehow faithful to them . . . When I visited an Orthodox church for the first time, something happened to me 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. I didn’t really know what this meant . . . With my exposure to Orthodoxy and to Orthodox people, a new idea began to enter my awareness: 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. And that is how I met Christ.
Eugene began to pour himself into this new tradition that was the answer to his life of searching. At his time it was rare to hear Orthodox services in English, so he learned Slavonic to begin to understand and read what was happening around him in the services. The lives of the Saints and the hymns that were entirely otherworldly and uncompromising struck him and began to transform his soul. They despised the modern world and like him wanted nothing from it, but their rebellion against the world was more profound than his ever had been. These saints lived in the world, but through an intense inner spiritual struggle rooted in the depths of the heart, they lived not for this world. They discovered the Kingdom of Heaven within and no matter what allurements the world offered they held on to their treasure even to the shedding of blood. This was solidified for Eugene when he met the person of St John of San Francisco. This saint, living amidst of hustle and bustle of San Francisco, embodied the saints of old and made it clear to Eugene that Orthodox Christianity was not some museum of ancient traditions but a living breathing reality that transported men and women to heaven. St John was a severe ascetic, meaning he lived a life of complete self-denial in order to obtain a pure heart and transformed soul in the midst of a decaying world. This attracted Eugene because he desired an ascetic faith that didn’t seek earthly desires and comforts, but rather redemption through intense struggle and sufferings on earth.
In his journal he later wrote:
"Let us not, who would be Christians, expect anything else from it than to be crucified. And we must be crucified outwardly, in the eyes of the world; for Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world, and the world cannot bear it, even for a single moment. The world can only accept antichrist, now or at any time."
Before he had found the truth he suffered for the lack of it but now having found it, he suffered for the sake of it. He devoted the rest of his life to living this truth and taking up intense ascetic struggle to give it to others...
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