02/23/2022
The education of youth today, especially in America, is notoriously deficient in developing responsiveness to the best expressions of human art, literature, and music. As a result, young people are formed haphazardly under the influence of television, rock music, and other manifestations of today's culture (or rather, anti-culture); and, both as a cause and as a result of this-but most of all because of the absence on the part of the parents and teachers of any conscious idea of what Christian life is and how a young person should be brought up in it-the soul of a person who has survived the years of youth is often an emotional wasteland, and at best reveals deficiencies in the basic attitudes towards life that were once considered normal and indispensable. … Such is something of the background, the “cultural baggage,” which a person brings with him today when he becomes Orthodox. Many, of course, survive as Orthodox despite their background; a few come to some spiritual disaster because of it; but a good number remain crippled or at least spiritually underdeveloped because they are simply unprepared for and unaware of the real demands of spiritual life. + Hieromonk Seraphim Rose
