Father Gerasim of New Valaam

Father Gerasim of New Valaam includes a preliminary Life of this righteous confessor, together with selections from his letters and three of his articles, all of which are largely autobiographical. From his words there emerges a warm, loving and endearing man, close to God’s creation. At the same time, we see him as a mystic of the holy Optina tradition; a knower of God to who contact with the other world was a common reality. We can only marvel at how he was able to preserve the simplicity of his blessed childhood, with its fresh, guileless reactions to the joys and sorrows of life, and how he managed to preserve, on a wild island so far from his native land, a microcosm of Holy Russia.