Total Time: 71 minutes

Description:  A talk given by Hieromonk Seraphim Rose on Sunday, August 8, 1982, during the 1983 St. Herman Summer Pilgrimage, St. Herman of Alaska Monastery, Platina, California. It was the final pastoral talk of Fr. Seraphim’s life—the fruit of his spiritual growth as an Orthodox Christian and his matured outlook as an Orthodox pastor. It contains many of the themes that he emphasized during the final years of his life: the need to have one’s Orthodox Faith enter into and transform the whole of one’s life, not just certain compartments of it; the need to cultivate a loving, merciful, and forgiving heart, to be simple and innocent in one’s spiritual life; the need to have a conscious Orthodox Faith, an Orthodox worldview, so that one will not be easily influenced by worldly ways of think­ing and behaving; the need to be aware of the signs of the times and of the totalitarian demands that the modern world makes on one; the need to be down-to-earth and at the same time to have one’s heart in the other world with Christ; the need to nourish oneself with the Divine services, the Holy Mysteries, the Holy Scriptures, the Lives of Saints, and the writings of the Holy Fathers; the need to form the soul through the best artistic expressions of Christian culture, including Western Christian culture; and finally the need to take lessons from the experience of suffering Orthodox Christians behind the iron curtain.