Homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Lewisburg, PA, for the Feast of our Patron, Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco, on Tuesday June 19, 7532 (July 2, 2024, on the civil calendar).

This is the story of one person’s life who was touched deeply by the life of our patron St. John, whose memory we honor today. And how St. John’s light through that one person touched so many others. And this can be multiplied many times from the life of St. John.

This young American convert had grown up in Southern California, attended a top college there, and was a brilliant intellectual gifted in languages, and studying Chinese language and philosophy in graduate school in the San Francisco area in the 1950s. But there he had accepted a life of sin in the intellectual bohemian circles of the day, close to the beatnik culture that would flower in the counter-culture of the 1960s and grow deeper in corruption.

Yet his life was turned around by his conversion to Orthodox Christianity, an experience that was deepened by his getting to know Vladyka (Bishop), later Saint, John. The young convert wrote of himself modestly in the third person:

“…the heart of this convert, still taking his baby steps in Orthodoxy, longed to know how to believe, which means also whom to believe. He was too much a person of his times and his own upbringing to be able simply to deny his own reasoning power and believe blindly everything he was told; and it is very evident that Orthodoxy does not at all demand this of one—the very writings of the Holy Fathers are a living memorial of the working of human reason enlightened by the grace of God….”

But he noted that he could not find truth in the academic Orthodox so-called theologians of his day. He continued in his memoir:

“Our convert found the end of his search—the search for contact with the true and living tradition of Orthodoxy—in Archbishop John Maximovitch. For here he found someone who was a learned theologian in the ‘old’ school and at the same time was very much aware of all the criticisms of that theology which have been made by the theological critics of our century, and was able to use his keen intelligence to find the truth where it might be disputed. But he also possessed something which none of the wise ‘theologians’ of our time seem to possess…. [his] theology proceeded from a holy life and from total rootedness in Orthodox tradition. When he spoke, his words could be trusted—although he carefully distinguished between the Church’s teaching, which is certain, and his own personal opinions, which might be mistaken, and he bound no one to the latter.”

The new convert had observed an immediate change in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia Cathedral in San Francisco when St. John arrived as the new Bishop there, as we are told in the convert’s later biography. Services began to be held for relatively unknown saints especially of ancient Western European lands. A later biography of this convert summed up also his striking new experience of St. John, an exile from old Tsarist Russia, in early 1960s San Francisco, perhaps the most modern American of cities at the time, in this way: “There was something unearthly in this tiny, bent-over old man, who by worldly standards seemed hardly ‘respectable.’ Archbishop John’s hair was unkempt, his lower lip protruded, and he had a speech impediment that made him barely intelligible. He sometimes went about barefoot, for which he was severely criticized. Instead of the glittering jeweled mitre worn by other bishops, he wore a collapsible hat pasted with icons embroidered by his orphans. His manner was at times stern, but a playful gleam could often be seen in his eyes, especially when he was with children. Despite his speech problem, he had a tremendous rapport with children, who were absolutely devoted to him. Occasionally the Cathedral clergy were disconcerted to see him, in the middle of a service (though never in the altar), bend over to play with a small child.”

“Archbishop John,” we are told in the biography of the convert, “was a severe ascetic. Ever vigilant before God, he was in a constant state of prayer. He ate only once a day, at midnight, and never lay down in a bed. His nights he usually spent in prayer, and when he finally became exhausted he would catch a few hours of sleep before dawn, either bent over in a chair or huddled on the floor in the icon-corner. Upon waking, he would splash cold water on his face and begin the Divine Liturgy, which he served every day without fail.

“That he was a worker of miracles was widely known. Wherever he had been—China, the Philippines, Europe, Africa, America—countless healings had taken place through his prayers. There were also many cases in which he had appeared to those in need when it was physically impossible for him to reach them. He had also been seen levitating in the altar during prayer, surrounded by celestial light.”

But, the convert noted, people were not moved by the miracles themselves, as could be done by some false miracle-worker, but by something that moved their hearts about him. That something was his love, for he followed Christ’s new commandment to love others more than himself, in Jesus Christ.

This had been the case with the orphans he had rescued in Shanghai from the most crime-ridden neighborhoods, and brought through monsoon-ridden Pacific exile to the U.S. after lobbying Congress. Also of the Russian seminarians in exile in Serbia whom he watched over at night as they slept like a father. It had been true later in life of the Cathedral parish he had rescued from chaotic in-fighting in San Francisco, even while unjustly being dragged himself into court, to complete construction of the new cathedral. It was true of his work earlier as a Bishop in Western Europe, where he had added many of the ancient saints of the West to the Russian Orthodox Church calendar, renewing old bonds of Orthodoxy with his missionary vision, caring for those becoming Orthodox Christians again in lands such as France.

Within the convert from California, St. John saw in his love a heart burning with desire for God in Orthodoxy, even though the young convert had come from a life of atheistic and sodomite delusions. St. John’s true Christian love turned him around so that convert never turned back. He first became a faithful server on the kliros (chanting stand) as St. John served in the San Francisco Cathedral, then opened a Russian Orthodox bookstore nearby and published an Orthodox magazine with a fellow worker under Vladyka John’s active and full support. Likewise, St. John’s prayers and help led those workers to lay the groundwork for making the early Russian missionary Herman of Alaska a saint, and to establish a monastery in the back woods of northern California, without a phone but with plenty of bears and rattlesnakes on the premises.

Yet that tiny monastery in the woods, guided after St. John’s repose still by his intercession as they believed, began turning out many of the first English translations of classic Orthodox Christian works, and books by that unlikely convert, which in Russian translations became extremely popular underground publications in Soviet Russia as well. It’s safe to say that without those English translations and that convert’s writings in English, our humble mission would not have been founded, because they were so important to the Orthodox life of some American converts who helped found it, and to their looking to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia for starting the mission, to which St. John had belonged together with that convert after him.

This one convert in question, one of so many influenced by St. John during his earthly life and after, Father Seraphim Rose, today has been made a local saint in the country of Georgia, is featured on icons widespread around the world, and is often referred to as Blessed Seraphim Rose by many in Russia and America.

Icon of the Righteous Seraphim Rose from Uncut Mountain Press

Toward the end of his life, Blessed Seraphim wrote: “If you ask anyone who knew Archbishop John what it was that drew people to him—and still draws people who never knew him—the answer is always the same: he was overflowing with love; he sacrificed himself for his fellow men out of absolutely unselfish love for God and for them. That is why things were revealed to him which could not get through to other people and which he never could have known by natural means. He himself taught that, for all the ‘mysticism’ of our Orthodox Church that is found in the Lives of Saints and the writings of the Holy Fathers, the truly Orthodox person always has both feet firmly on the ground, facing whatever situation is right in front of him. It is in accepting given situations, which requires a loving heart, that one encounters God.”

Amen.

https://fb.watch/t45wtsV_Pc

Holy Saint John, pray to God for us!

Spraznikom, with the Feast!