Saint Herman of Alaska
Most of the saints you hear about lived a very long time ago, in faraway places like Rome or Jerusalem. Saint Herman is different — he came to America, and less than three hundred years ago.
Herman was a Russian monk at Valaam Monastery, a quiet island monastery in the north of Russia, when in 1793 he volunteered for something almost no one else wanted: a mission across the entire width of Russia and an ocean, to a place called Alaska, to bring the Christian faith to the native people there. He and about nine other monks set out on a journey so difficult that most of them died along the way or soon after arriving. Herman didn't. He stayed in Alaska for the rest of his life — over forty years — and never went home.
What made Herman different from a lot of the other Russian traders and officials in Alaska at the time is that he actually loved the Alutiiq and Aleut people he'd come to serve, rather than seeing them as people to use. When the local Russian trading company's governor mistreated the native people — overworking them, punishing them unfairly — Herman confronted him directly and kept doing it, even though the governor had far more power than a monk on a remote island. He ran a school for native children, taught them to read and sing the Church's hymns, and eventually moved to his own small island, which he named "New Valaam," where he lived simply: the same deerskin clothing for years at a time, sleeping on a wooden plank, sharing whatever food he had with anyone who needed it. The people he served called him "Apa" — Grandfather.
Two stories about him are remembered above everything else. Once, when a flood was rising toward the village on Spruce Island and people were terrified their homes would be swept away, Herman took an icon of the Mother of God, set it down on the beach at the water's edge, and prayed. The water rose right up to the icon — and stopped there, never going further. Another time, a wildfire was burning toward the same village. Herman walked out, drew a line on the ground with his foot, and told the people the fire would not cross it. It didn't.
Herman never became a priest, never held any official position of power, and never returned to Russia. When he died in 1837, most of the world had never heard of him. But in 1970, the Orthodox Church officially recognized what the Alaskan people who knew him had believed all along — he became the first Orthodox saint ever glorified in America.
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