Abbot Herman. Basil Willow

For the sake of readers, the amount of unique Orthodox material that was placed on Abbott Herman's lap to translate and publish to the English speaking world is staggering. Most of it pre-revolutionary, about incredible holy ones whom most of us have never heard of, as well as the numerous ones who passed through Stalin's gulags, some surviving, many not, but still require their lives to be published.

I literally saw him in tears overwhelmed by the cross of this mission placed on him. One evening after vigil at Platina Monastery, he gave such a homely at the dinner table (at night under a beautiful, moonless night, pitch black, except for the occasional candle), that I was scared he would die that night.
I insisted to sleep on the floor by his bed, just to check on him from time to time.

He actually did get quite sick and the next day was a 50 mile trip in a bomb of a truck to Redding hospital.

People do not realise how excruciatingly hard it is just to produce one issue of an Orthodox magazine. First he slaved with Fr Seraphim Rose, using letter press technology, mainly for Orthodox Word magazine, then slowly to computerised systems, as these became available.

In 1982 he started us up with Orthodox Australia, which we continued until my health failed around 2006, and we now are working on its digital version in
Orthodoxaustralia.org,
by a group of dedicated and specialised knowledgable workers.
Which by no means is yet refined to our liking, but please support it, even just by telling others and perhaps sending us inspiring articles from your life or elsewhere.

Hopefully his Russian contingent of workers will continue with publishing these valuable texts, in English, as they have been doing in another incredible journal called "Thomas", but it is still in Russian for now.
We also await Bl. Fr Seraphim's magnum opus book, about Christ and antichrist.