On Archimandrite Gerasim (Schmaltz) of Spruce Island (1888-1969)

 

Although the letters of Fr. Gerasim to me do not show any theological or literary pretensions, they are nevertheless quite indicative of the attitude towards many Church matters typical of many like Fr. Gerasim who carried the burden of Orthodox Christianity in the 20th century. He wrote these letters to a seminary fledgling who was just beginning his ecclesiastical career in these harsh times for traditional Orthodox Christianity at the end of the 20th century. He felt that his ecclesiastical orientation must be properly understood, and he attempted to transmit it to his brothers who cared to follow him. His position was simple: he accepted all Orthodox Churches in the New World, outside of their natural countries of origin. And he objected to any innovations and departures from that Orthodoxy in which he was formed and to which he was loyal until his death. It is fair to tell now the truth of Fr. Gerasim’s attitude to the church divisions, which are painfully present in America and outside of it.

As to the Greek Church, he objected to the spirit of renovationism, ecumenism and Greek chauvinism, and the hierarchs’ participation in Masonic lodges; but of course he revered Byzantium.

The Moscow Patriarchate was to him a legitimate Church, but he vehemently objected to Sergianism while also understanding that the Church in Russia was in captivity. He objected to the Red hierarchs who were denying the persecution of religion in Russia throughout the whole world while enjoying Western freedom.

He objected to the spineless and cunning attitude in the American Metropolia dominant in Alaska, accusing their bishops of harshness, lack of pastoral zeal, small-mindedness, disdain towards old traditions and Russian monarchy, and illegitimate usurpation of power, but he did not deny their apostolic succession. He could not tolerate the “New” Autocephaly coming from a soviet concordat through Metropolitan Nicodemus, chief Sergianist and ecumenist of the day (who even died in Rome at the feet of the Pope). When in 1969 Bishops Theodosius and Juvenal visited Fr. Gerasim in his Kodiak bungalow and told him of the Autocephaly (OCA foundation), he literally kicked the bishops off his porch, and they tumbled down, which was seen by neighbors.

The Russian Church Outside of Russia, wherein lay his sympathies, he criticized for its extremism and self-righteousness to the extent of denying grace in other jurisdictions. He saw in this the roots of Old Believerism. His severe criticism was best expressed in his correspondence with and irritation towards Archimandrite Constantine of Jordanville.

He knew very well that the cause of the “New Calendar” in Greece and Renovationism in the 20th century in the Orthodox Church was “given flesh” only thanks to communist indoctrination; even Patriarch Tikhon was at one time tempted by this.

His lamentations mostly centered upon the all-encompassing march of Western Christendom’s Apostasy, since most of the Orthodox Churches, even if they denied such influence, did nothing to defend traditional Orthodoxy.

As for the Brotherhood he founded, he felt that their sacred duty was to adhere to the above-mentioned convictions and attitudes which he held. The Brotherhood in return, so well expressed by Fr. Seraphim Rose, consciously upheld their founder’s positions, promoting them widely in their publications throughout the world and, consequently, receiving abuse from the “powerful of this world” who up to today grumble against them.

This Brotherhood grew slowly, as the path they chose was as thorny as that of their founders. During his lifetime Fr. Gerasim did not reach the English-speaking world in his stand for Orthodoxy, yet through his solitary stand he spoke adequately enough for oppressed and suffering traditional Orthodoxy. Ten years after I last saw him I wrote my impressions of him for an article in our magazine, The Orthodox Word. Fr. Gerasim poured out many prayers at the grave and relics of St. Herman for this magazine.

* * *

I visited Fr. Gerasim on Spruce Island near Kodiak, Alaska, when he had already had twenty-five years of desert dwelling and was worn out from the unjust suffering inflicted on him for his refusal to adjust himself to church politics; this struggle also undermined his spiritual strength. He lived in a small hut 500 steps from the roaring ocean shore in an extremely thick spruce forest. So dense is this northern jungle that one cannot walk through it save on the laid-out paths. Farther on in the thicket is the chapel built in 1894 over the grave of St. Herman.

His cell, which he built himself, had a little annex, his bedroom, where he conducted his prayer-rule, and a low closet for firewood near his stove. Everything was neat and orderly to perfection: freshly painted and often-swept floors, quilted rugs, lace curtains and a bedspread over a hard-board bed, and many inexpensive icons with a number of hanging lamps. I immediately recognized that his excessive tidiness was a means of keeping sanity in this intense loneliness and the overwhelming growth of the wilderness. The coziness was for the sake of warmth but not comfort, which is deadly for a Christian everywhere and always.

Like St. Herman, he occasionally had to go to take care of his Aleut flock, who lived at the other end of this impenetrable island, but he preferred to stay permanently in his beloved hermitage, caring for St. Herman’s grave. There he unfailingly performed all the monastic church services, praying alone for the world, lost in the denseness of the Alaskan wilds.

During the Dormition fast he served akathists in his cell every day at 5:00 p.m. and commemorated all the people he had met in his life. The lists were endless, and so were his tears. I was shaken to the depths of my soul at that prayer. I was caught up in the fervency of his pleading, imploring prayer, and I could not help but weep my heart out, as I never had before or after. But the tears were not tears of sorrow, but of some sweet, unexplainable contrition of heart. There before me, in the commemoration of his friends, passed the whole panorama of his life, for I recognized the names of his parents, monks, bishops, Athonites, fellow laborers in the vineyard of Christ in Alaska, and endless names of his spiritual children whom he had baptized, married, and then sung burial services for—many of them lost in the cold waters of the stormy ocean.

About this I wrote then in my journal the following: “I think that for his hard life on Spruce Island, the Lord, through the prayers of Fr. Herman, strengthens him and manifests him as a true ascetic. I say it because of the following personal experience I had, which, however, could be interpreted in various ways.

“The very first day of my arrival, that is on the eve of the Transfiguration, after Divine Liturgy, a meal and a pannikhida in the chapel over the grave of Fr. Herman, Fr. Gerasim said to me with an air of embarrassment, prefacing it with his constantly repeated, favorite expression ‘Forgive me’ (in Russian prosteete, which he stresses with the prolonged sound ‘EE’): ‘Forgive me; but during Dormition Fast I have the habit of reading the Akathist to the Theotokos every day from the Prayer Book and commemorating those on my list of commemorations.’

“I was also a bit embarrassed with his embarrassment and in turn begged his forgiveness for my intrusion, but wanted very much to at least be present at his prayers. And he began to pray in his tiny bedroom. (This bedroom was where I slept while he, giving me his bed, slept in his main cell on a sofa.) His bed consisted of simple hard boards but was covered with elaborate lace pillow coverings with old-fashioned bows, as I had seen in Russian homes in my childhood. But I understood this as his longing for his homelife in Russia, as well as his love for neatness and cleanliness.

“He stood at an analogion (near an old, large life-size oil painting-icon of St. Seraphim of Sarov) and behind him I stood near the door, just a few steps from him. A pure, heartfelt prayer began to flow out of him with exclamations—the fervent pleas of an old man which came straight out of a living soul. I was singing along at the refrains.

“But after the akathist, he began to commemorate both the living and the dead—all whomever he knew during his 73-year-old life. And here I, it seemed without any apparent reason, began to weep with repentant tears. My whole soul, it seemed to me, sobbed not from sorrow but from some spiritual joy, which is impossible to describe or even understand. I saw before me a man sincerely praying and remembering people with such great warmth; a man forgotten and abandoned by the whole world, imploring God to have pity on it, a man in the midst of this impenetrable wilderness, faraway in this northern jungle. All this was too much for my poor soul. And I wept and sobbed....

“What I then felt, listening to his prayer, I believe was a breath of the Holy Spirit touching my evil and sinful soul! And he, as if oblivious to my presence, went on and on. He prayed and I wept.”

Having finished this prayer, as if nothing had happened he was cheerful again, offering me tea and salmon pie of his own baking; and only the starry sky far above the gigantic dark spruces bore witness to the length of his standing before God. But my heart felt unusually light, and a burning inspiration transfigured all my being.

He told me much during my unforgettable stay with him, about his Kaluga childhood and the Holy Russia he bore in his loving heart, about the Optina Elders, his Athonite period, and the early days of apostolic labors in Alaska. He spoke with sobriety and truth and warm sincerity: about the miracles of Saints Herman and Seraphim that he had seen with his own eyes, and his bitter years of persecution. As his “leitmotif” he frequently returned to his deep sorrow: “Love for God is leaving this planet. Love for Christ is evaporating from the face of this earth.”

His standard was basic Christianity of the heart. He was a genuine transmitter of the authentic experience of Orthodox Russia, placed in the context of 20th-century America, and yet so few valued him, or simply misunderstood him. Most of the clergy who were in contact with him were not guarding the age-old Byzantine world view as he was, but were men of a “party” mentality who despised him for his straightforwardness. He knew the truth better; he knew that Orthodox truth ever since the Soviet Revolution was destined to be persecuted and thus suffer belittlement or various forms of distortion. He knew well the spirit of “renovationists.” Yet he also knew well that the Truth will make men free, and his conscience commanded him to speak out—and so he spoke, eloquently, to the point, with humbleness of heart, uncomplicated and brief. While Archimandrite Gerasim is not considered a theologian by those whose concept of theology requires learned homilies and advanced degrees, he is indeed a theologian in the true and ancient sense of the word—one who knows God. He knew God not simply through book-knowledge, but by a life of true Christian struggle and prayer. It is precisely this living Christianity which ignites the heart and sheds the light of Christ into the darkness of the world.

The days were long and warm, late in August. We took walks together, and he showed me spots of unbelievably abundant ripe boysenberries. I ate to satiety, but he only picked berries and made a pie for me. There he used to meet bears and other wild animals. The craggy shores abounded with multicolored wildflowers, and the constant flow of his tales of the saints of old and Russian ascetics involuntarily transported my imagination to St. Herman’s Valaam or Fr. Gerasim’s beloved Mt. Athos, where he knew and corresponded with many righteous slaves of God.

There also, at the grave of St. Herman, my spiritual life was transformed and a dedication to the cause of St. Herman was born. We spent together the hundredth anniversary of the canonization of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk in solemn all-night vigil. I read to him my seminary thesis on this Saint, which in the tenderness of his heart brought tears to his eyes.

I covered many important subjects with him, and I was exposed to a new, indispensable dimension which my seminary education had not covered: what America and our 20th-century world needs is to have a living link with the universal Apostolic Tradition, a link which no books or learned lectures can give; this is, as it were, the mystical aspect of apostolic succession.

When I was leaving him, an abandoned, even despised old man standing there in tears alone on the shore of Monks’ Lagoon, I knew then that I had beheld, contrary to my expectation, a spiritual giant who breathed into me a life of decision, a resolve for a living continuation of St. Herman’s work for the glory of God in His Orthodox Church, and that, with God’s help, nothing could take this away from me.

Upon the prayers of Fr. Gerasim our Brotherhood became not only outspoken defenders of the positions he held, but also disseminators of the now rare, beautiful, “inner world” he loved, through their translation and publication. It was this “better part” (cf. Lk. 10:42), this “Living Tradition” of the essence of Christianity that is such a stumbling block to the worldly “wise and prudent,” so easy to miss, and yet so precious, that gave Fr. Gerasim the strength to endure in the path God had appointed for him to tread.

Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou has been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord (Matt. 25:21, 23).

Abbot Herman
January 21/February 3, 1998
St. Maximus the Confessor

 

Source: Abba Gerasim and His Letters to His Brotherhood, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Platina, 1998, Appendix VI, pp. 229-236.