Father Gerasim, the desert-dweller chosen by St. Herman of Alaska to revive his monastic "heavenly abode," left an abundance of letters, which serve as a veritable testament of his solitary life in the deserted New Valaam Monastery and of his stoic stand at the post of Orthodox monastic concerns of the twentieth century. These letters remain now as a document--almost as a chronicle of the severe ascetic life of a desert-dweller.
These letters bear witness to Fr. Gerasim's uncompromising stand for truth before an apostate world. For thirty years he kept solitary vigil before the relics of St. Herman, receiving divine strength to endure to the end, and passing on his precious spiritual inheritance from Holy Russia to his Brotherhood. His words reveal that he knew God through a life of struggle and prayer, of constantly "standing before God." It is living Christianity that ignites the hearts of the searching people of our day and sheds the light of Christ into the darkness of this world.
