The Sacred Forest

The Sunday Pilgrimage #13

Spruce Island, Alaska, USA

It’s been a while since I offered up one of these weekend pilgrimages, and I’ve been missing them. I’m looking forward to restarting this series properly in the autumn, after my book tour is finished. Visiting a holy place, and then writing about it, are both acts of pilgrimage in their own way. One is an immersion, the other a reflection. Both help to settle the Spirit within the soul.

We exist daily within the Empire that humans have built out of the stuff of politics, mechanism, status, passions, material clutter and self-love. All of this makes us, and we’re all part of it, and yet inside is something that is made for somewhere else: the place that Christ called ‘the Kingdom.’ This Kingdom, as he made quite clear, is ‘not of this world.’ He, like us, was just a visitor here.

It’s easy to mistake this place for our home, but it isn’t, really. This is what the Christian Way has taught us from the beginning, though a lot of Christians, especially in the West, have tried to fudge the matter. And yet we are not complete here. Once we get that into our heads, things become easier, somehow. We are sojourners on this Earth; pilgrims. We are just passing through. Our work here is to get our souls in order, and to try to practice the oceanic love that God is, which we often find so hard.

In that sense, one place, to a Christian, is much like any other. We go where we are called. At the same time though, as we can see when we travel, all places are in fact quite distinctive, whether in terms of human culture or wild nature. What does this mean for a Christian? I suppose I am still trying to work this out. The best I can do right now is to say that we are called upon to walk lightly across all of it, and to belong lightly to the place we are taken to, neither rejecting it nor attaching ourselves too hard to it. Maybe tomorrow we will be taken somewhere else, but for now we are where God wants us to be.

The life of the Russian monk who would become America’s first Orthodox saint, Herman of Alaska, is a good example of this kind of transformative lightness. I told Herman’s story in my ‘Lives of the Wild Saints’ series here last year. You can read a non-fiction version here. Herman came to Alaska from Russia, which then owned the territory, with a group of ten missionary monks in 1794. The monks gained a good reputation amongst the native people of Kodiak island, who they defended against the depredations of the Russian fur traders, and many of whom later became Orthodox.

But after a decade working in the mission, Herman decided that remote Kodiak island was not remote enough. He longed to live as a hermit, and so he rowed a mile across the strait to nearby Spruce Island, and built himself a hermitage in the forest. He slept on boards, ate a meagre diet and somehow survived the harsh winters. When he asked how he could possibly live in such a wild place alone, he famously replied, ‘I am not alone. God is there as He is everywhere. His angels are there. Is it possible to be lonely in their company? Is it not better to be in their company than in that of people?’

That’s what I call Christianity.

After my road trip to Alaska this summer, I decided I needed to see Spruce Island, and so I wrote to the small community of monks who now live there to ask permission to visit. They welcomed me, as they regularly welcome pilgrims. If I could get myself to Kodiak, they said, they would do the rest. And so it was that my daughter and I found ourselves flying in to the small town of Kodiak on an equally small plane on a pilgrimage I am unlikely ever to forget.

The first stop on the St Herman pilgrimage route, such as it is, is the tiny wooden Orthodox cathedral in Kodiak, whose onion domes peek out from behind the oil terminal that blocks the church from the sea. Inside the church are the relics of St Herman, which were transferred here from Spruce Island some years after his death. On top of the wooden casket containing his remains are perched his hat and the metal cross that he wore every day:

Next to the existing cathedral there is also a replica of what the original building, constructed in the eighteenth century, would have looked like:

What is fascinating about Orthodoxy in Alaska is the degree to which it caught on amongst the native population. At the divine liturgy in Anchorage cathedral the day before, I estimated that perhaps 70% of the congregation were native Alaskans, and much the same is apparently true of the Alutiiq population of Kodiak island. Much of this must surely be due to the way that Herman and his brothers approached these people originally: with love, gentleness and charity, rather than with the forced conversions or cultural eradication which were so often carried out by ‘Christians’ elsewhere.

Today, a small brotherhood of five monks lives on Spruce Island all year round in the St Archangel Michael Skete (a skete is a small monastery). We were met at the docks in Kodiak by Father Andrew, the Abbott, piloting the monastic skiff:

The journey over to the island takes about half an hour at most, but it’s stunningly beautiful. Away from the oil terminals, the wildness of ocean and forest takes over. As we power through the ocean, a fin emerges from the waters in front of us, and then another, and then another. Soon a school of Doll’s Porpoises, leaping from the sea like miniature orcas, are bow-riding our boat, as if escorting us to the island. ‘We don’t see that very often’ says Father Adrian, who is to lead us on our walk across the island. ‘St Herman must want you to visit.’

The skiff drops us on the sands of the appropriately-named Monks Bay, and Fr Adrian points us through the vast, mossy, Tolkeinesque forest, up a path through the trees. Head up there, he tells us, and we will reach the little church which is built on the spot where St Herman lived. Fr Adrian tells us he will catch us up when we have had time to savour the place and its atmosphere.

And it needs savouring. There is something about this forest that I have never quite experienced anywhere else: a deep and abiding peace. It is very hard to put into words. At first I assume that the whole of the island must feel like this, but after I walk on later I realise that, in fact, it is only the area around St Herman’s cell that has this atmosphere. There is a kind of radical stillness. When Fr Adrian arrives ten minutes he later I tell him about it. ‘Yes,’ he confirms, ‘everybody who comes here feels this, whether they’re Christian or not. It’s as if the forest itself is praying.’ Or, I think, as if St Herman is praying too, somehow, for or in the place he once called home.

A tiny wooden chapel stands today on the spot where St Herman lived as a hermit in these woods:

The building was restored in the 1990s, and the monks painted a series of little frescoes inside, telling the story of St Herman’s life. I love the simplicity of them. They are like children’s paintings, in the best possible way:

Walking on from the chapel, winding paths take us through forests studded with icons and hung with huge lampadas of green moss:

Deep in the forest, we pass the cell of Fr Gerasim Schmaltz, whose life deserves an essay all of its own (and in fact you can read one here.) He was a Russian monk who was sent to Alaska in 1916, only to be stranded here when the Bolshevik revolution happened. He lived the rest of his life on Spruce Island, often entirely alone (the current monastic brotherhood arrived later, in the 1980s), and his cabin has been preserved as it was on his death in the 1960s, complete with books, his own small chapel, and a series of beautiful natural dioramas he made with moss and twigs from the forest, perhaps to help the dark winters pass by more easily:

Fr Gerasim’s grave is outside his cell, and we pay our respects to him before passing on through the woods. Soon enough we come to another chapel - a bigger one, this time, and with a curious little door which appears to lead to a dark space beneath:

This door leads to one of the most important sites on the island: the original grave of St Herman. When the saint died here in 1837, he was buried on this site. In 1969 though, when Herman was canonised, his relics were transferred from this site to the cathedral in Kodiak. Pilgrims today still crawl beneath the chapel here to pray at the saint’s original grave, and sometimes to collect some soil to bring home. I have a little pot of it on my icon table as I write this.

My daughter and I both pray at the grave site. Then we all picnic outside the church before Fr Adrian leads us through an open meadow studded with iris and salmonberry that looks like it ought to be in the Alps rather than in Alaska.

Soon enough we come to another beach, where Fr Adrian waits with the boat. We are to be taken over to the St Nilus Skete, an even smaller island just offshore, which is home to a small community of nuns. The sisters are brimming with welcome. The feed us tea, cake and strips of dried salmon, then take us on a tour of their gardens, their chapel and a place they call ‘the Celtic cliffs’, where tufted puffins nest in holes in the rock:

My daughter would be happy to stay with the nuns for a while, I think, as I would with the monks. She leaves with an open invitation. Personally, I can’t think of anything more tempting. Both islands are strewn with little wooden cells which at different times have been inhabited by hermits or pilgrims. The monks and nuns catch their own king salmon in the water around the island, and share food, firewood and prayer. I suppose the six months of darkness might not be to everyone’s taste, but I think I could get used to it.

Anyway, there is something about this place; something very special. I have been on pilgrimages to many Orthodox places in many different countries since joining the church, but this place speaks to me in a way that none of the others quite have. I don’t know why that is, but there is some affinity. Overall, I am left with a wonderful confirmation of the mystical wildness of Orthodox Christianity. Monks stomping through mud in long black cassocks and wellington boots; sleeping in crumbling log huts in a forest of moss; netting salmon from skiffs; picking berries in mountain meadows. Compost toilets, fires on the beach, icons affixed to tree trunks. A forest of prayer.

It’s all primal and real and full of the Spirit, and you can feel it everywhere. It feels like you have fled far from the over-civilised West - and yet this is modern America. Orthodoxy is a paradox, all the way down.

But we have to leave, in the end. One day was not enough with either the brothers or the sisters, but it’s all we have. We end the day with vespers in the new chapel, crafted by church designer Andrew Gould, then eat dinner: salmon and rice, then a short talk and a welcome from Fr Andrew, even as we prepare to leave. It seems as if we have been here longer than a day, and maybe we have, in some way, in some time. We arrive lightly and leave lightly.

As we hum across the water on the skiff, back to Kodiak, a gull pulls alongside us, and shadows the boat for a while, before turning away and heading back out to sea. Welcomed by porpoises, waved off by gulls. Farewell, brother bird. Perhaps we will return.