St. Herman of Alaska

Herman, by birth a Russian peasant from the small town of Serpukhov south of Moscow, entered the monastic life at the Trinity-Sergius Hermitage near St. Petersburg as a young man and was tonsured with the name Herman in 1782. From there he was transferred to Valaam Monastery on the great northern lake, where he lived in deep silence and quickly grew in the inner prayer.

In 1793, a new mission was being prepared. The Russian-American Company had a monopoly trade contract with the imperial government to harvest furs from Alaska; the Empress Catherine ordered the Holy Synod to send monks to evangelize the indigenous Aleuts and to be a Christian moral witness in the colony. A small party of eight monks from Valaam — Herman among them — set out across Siberia, sailed from Okhotsk, and arrived at Kodiak Island in September 1794 after a journey of more than seven thousand miles.

The mission was an initial flowering. Within three years some twelve thousand Aleuts had been baptized, schools opened, churches built. But the conflict with the Russian-American Company over the brutal treatment of the natives — the company depended on Aleut labor and was hostile to anything that organized the Aleuts as a community — turned the colony against the missionaries. The other monks were withdrawn, killed, or returned to Russia. Father Herman remained.

From about 1808 to his death in 1837 he lived alone on Spruce Island, a small wooded island a few miles from Kodiak, in a log hut beside a small chapel. He kept a school for the Aleut children, ran a small farm, tended the sick, fed the orphans, and defended the natives from the company's overseers with all his small authority — sometimes traveling great distances to plead their case. The Aleuts loved him as a father, called him simply "Apa," and brought their dying to be blessed by him. When a tsunami threatened the village he set an icon of the Mother of God at the shore and prayed before it; the wave broke at the icon's foot. When the village was struck by epidemic, he nursed the sick for a month without sleep.

He reposed on Spruce Island on December 13, 1837. He had instructed his disciples not to weep; he had been with them long enough. His body lay for thirty days in the small church on Spruce Island, the Aleut weather staying calm in his honor for that whole month. He was glorified by the Orthodox Church in America in 1970 — the first canonized saint of the Orthodox Church in America. His feast is December 13 and August 9 (the glorification).