Herman and the Garden on Spruce Island

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A man is kneeling in a vegetable bed, in the rain, apologising to a cabbage.

It is a perfectly ordinary cabbage. It is not the sort of cabbage that would have been noticed in a market. But it has been eaten, at the edges, by something with a great deal of patience, and the man is looking at it with enormous sorrow, as though he had let the cabbage down, personally, in front of its family.

Behind him, a very large bear is sitting at the edge of the forest, waiting to be given a piece of bread. The bear has been waiting politely for some time. The man has not forgotten it. He is simply, for the moment, a person with two things to be sorry about, and one pair of hands.

We will come back to the bear. We will come back to the cabbage, too.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves, and I think the best place to start is a very long way away.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is about Saint Herman of Alaska, a real monk who lived a little more than two hundred years ago, and whose life is well known in the broad outline. A few of the stories about him are traditions told by the people who knew him, and I will tell you which as we go. And a few of the small conversations, and two of the children, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let me set the scene, and it is a big scene, so I will go slowly.

Imagine a map of the world about the year seventeen hundred and ninety. Now find Russia, which is very large, and keep going east. Past the Urals. Past all of Siberia, which takes a while, and I am afraid you will have to take it on trust. Past the last town of any size, which is a port called Okhotsk, on a cold grey sea. Past that sea. And then keep going, over another much bigger and much colder sea, until you come to a place where the land begins again, in the shape of a long curving arm of islands and mountains and fog. That is Alaska.

At that time, in the year I have mentioned, nobody who lived in Saint Petersburg or Moscow had been there. Nobody they knew had been there, really. It was the sort of place that you heard about in the way you hear about the moon: a rumour, a rumour with fur on it.

The fur was the reason anyone went. Sea otters live in those cold waters, and their coats are about the thickest and softest in the whole animal world, and in those days there were merchants who would pay a fortune for them. So Russian trading companies had begun to build small settlements along the coast. And the people who really lived there, the people who had lived there for thousands of years, fishing and hunting and building boats that were as light as a sigh and as strong as a promise, were, I am sorry to say, not treated very well by some of those traders.

On the island of Kodiak, the people are called the Alutiiq. The Russians, who had a different word, called them Aleuts. I will say Alutiiq tonight, which is their own name for themselves, and I hope I do it justice.

Now. There is a second thing to set beside this. In Russia, in that same year, there was a monastery on an island.

It was called Valaam, and it stood in the middle of a lake. The lake, Ladoga, is so large that if you stand on its shore you cannot see across, and the island sits in it like a loaf of dark bread on a blue table. It was a place of deep woods and granite, and the monks there had lived in them for hundreds of years. They prayed. They fished. They kept bees and grew vegetables. They had, over the centuries, got extremely good at the particular kind of quiet that you can only get when you have nowhere to go.

So that is the situation. On one side of the world: a coast, and a people who needed friends. On the other side of the world: a monastery of friends.

I will let you guess what happened next.

In seventeen hundred and ninety-three, the head of the Russian trading company asked the Church for missionaries. He said, more or less, we have people out there who need priests, and there are a great many other people out there who have never heard the Gospel at all. Could the monastery at Valaam spare a few?

The monks of Valaam talked it over. I am told they talked it over for rather a long time, as monks do. And in the end, eight of them said yes. They were all men who had spent most of their lives within sight of one lake. They said yes to a journey of seven thousand miles, which, I should explain, they would mostly do on foot, or on a horse, or on a river barge, or in a small boat at the mercy of a sea whose name they could barely pronounce.

One of them was a monk called Herman.

We do not know very much about his early life, and I want to be honest about that. He was born, we think, about seventeen hundred and fifty-six, near a town called Serpukhov, in a family of merchants. He seems to have been a quiet, thoughtful, rather bookish boy. When he was sixteen, he left home and went to a monastery near Saint Petersburg, and he later moved to Valaam, and he stayed. He was, by then, in his thirties. He was not a priest. He was, in the old word, a simple monk, which means a man who has promised to spend his life trying to love God and to do the dishes.

It is not recorded that he was anyone's idea of a hero. People who knew him said later that he was gentle and a little shy, with a wry way of speaking, and that he could not bear to be thought important. Which means, I am afraid, that he was in the worst possible line of work. Because the thing you must understand about missions is that nobody sends the shy man to the end of the earth unless the end of the earth needs a shy man.

The journey took the best part of a year and a half.

Let me give you the highlights. They walked, and rode, and sailed, across the whole of Russia and Siberia. They crossed mountains in the snow. They got to Okhotsk, where they were put aboard a ship that the sailors described, I am told, as optimistic. They sailed out across the open sea. They were not wrecked, which I mention because some of the voyages of that age ended that way, and a bedtime story should say so early.

They arrived on the island of Kodiak in the autumn of seventeen hundred and ninety-four, wet, thin, and, I have no doubt, extremely hungry.

And the Alutiiq came down to the shore to meet them.

I would love to tell you what the Alutiiq thought, when eight men in long black robes and tall hats climbed out of the boat. I really would. But no one wrote it down, and I will not invent it for them. I will only say that it is recorded that the villagers received the monks with kindness. And that many of them, over the following months, asked to be baptised. They did not do so because they were forced. In those first years, the monks were mostly not in a position to force anyone to do anything. They did it because the monks had come and sat down in the village and worked alongside them, and they were curious about what these strange men believed that made them so willing to be kind.

That was the good part.

Then came the hard part, which I will try to tell as gently as it deserves.

The manager of the trading company on Kodiak was a man called Baranov. He was a clever, brave, driven person who had done a great deal to keep the whole colony alive. He was also, to be fair to history, running a business a very long way from help, with too few men and too little food. And the business ran, in too many places, on the labour of the Alutiiq people, who were made to hunt otters for the company in dangerous waters, for very little in return, and who were separated from their families to do it.

The monks looked at that, and they said so.

They said it politely, and then they said it less politely, and then they wrote letters. The head of the mission, whose name was Joasaph, wrote to Saint Petersburg. And at about this point, the company began to treat the monks as a nuisance, which is the highest compliment that a business can pay a conscience.

I'm sorry to say that the mission did not have a very happy beginning. Joasaph was named a bishop and was drowned at sea on his way back to be consecrated. Others died, or fell ill, or went home. And over the following years, one by one, the monks of the first group were gone. By the end, there was one left on Kodiak who was not going anywhere.

Herman.

Now we come to the island.

Spruce Island is a small, steep, green place about a mile from the town of Kodiak, across a narrow strip of grey water. I am told it is very beautiful, in the way that some places are beautiful only after you have stopped trying to be impressed. It is covered with dark spruce trees, which is how it got its name, and its shore is a mess of rocks and kelp and driftwood. In summer there are berries. In winter there is a great deal of wind.

Herman went there around the year eighteen hundred and eight. I do not know whether he went there because he was tired, or because he was called, or because, as the old monks say, he had found the place that was meant for him. I suspect that all three were true.

He called it New Valaam.

I like that very much. He had come seven thousand miles, and he had lost nearly everyone he came with, and he had found himself on a small cold island at the end of the world. And what did he do? He named it after home. He didn't say, this is a poor place, a lonely place. He said: this is where the monastery is going to be.

And the monastery, for the first years at least, was one man.

He dug himself a little hut into the hillside. It had a low door, and a small bed, which I am told was a plank, and a few books, and an icon of the Mother of God. He lit a candle in front of it. He sat down.

And then, because he was a monk, and a monk's first rule is "pray and also do something about the weeds," he went out and began to build a garden.

Now I would like to talk about the garden, because I think it is the best part of the whole story, and the part that gets left out.

You cannot grow much on a cold island. The soil is thin, the summers are short, and the wind has views. But Herman, who had grown cabbages at Valaam for years, was a determined man. He carried seaweed up from the shore, basket after basket, and he dug it into the ground. He used fish, too, when there were fish, and it is recorded that he used them very freely, and that this made the garden smell like a harbour. He built raised beds. He planted potatoes, and turnips, and cabbages, and radishes, and, I like to think, a few things that he was not sure would grow, just to see.

And they grew.

I want you to think about what that meant, in that place. This was a settlement where the supply ship came once a year, if it came, and where the winter, in a bad year, could really mean hunger. And here was a monk who had worked out how to grow his own vegetables, and then, because he was the sort of man he was, worked out how to give them away.

He gave them to the sick. He gave them to the hungry. He gave them to whoever came across the water and knocked on the door of his hut, and he never asked who they were. He baked bread, too, for the same purpose. And he made kvass, which is a Russian drink made from old bread, and which I have been told is an acquired taste, and I will say only that anyone who can make a delicious drink out of old bread has a good deal more imagination than most of us.

And so, slowly, the island began to fill up. Not with a monastery. Not exactly. With people.

Because the thing about a man who gives away vegetables, and bread, and a place to sit, is that people come. They came from the town. They came from the villages along the coast. They came from the ships. Some came to be fed. Some came to ask a question, and stayed to ask three more. And a great many, I am glad to say, came because they were in trouble, and had heard that there was a man on Spruce Island who would listen.

He listened. That is the thing that they all said afterward, the people who knew him. He listened, and he never hurried, and he never told them that their trouble was small.

He was also, I should say, very funny. Not in a loud way. He had a dry, sideways way of speaking, a way of saying a very serious thing as though it were an offhand remark. One of the people who wrote about him, a man called Simeon Yanovsky, who was for a while the manager of the whole Russian colony, and who ended up a friend of the monk, said that Herman could be so quiet and so mild that you did not notice you had been told off until you were halfway home.

Let me tell you a little about Yanovsky, because he matters to the story.

When he first came to Kodiak, he was a young naval officer, a bit proud, a bit impatient, and extremely sure he knew how to run things. He had heard that there was a hermit on an island who made trouble for the company. He went to see him, I think, in a thoroughly bad mood.

And Herman, as the story goes, sat him down and gave him a cup of something hot, and a piece of bread, and asked him a question about his mother.

I do not know what Yanovsky said. I know only that he came away, and that he went back again, and that for the rest of his life he wrote about the monk with the kind of warmth you cannot fake. It was he who set down so many of the stories we have. And if it was he, rather than some saint's biographer, you can trust that he was not easily impressed.

Let me tell you about the children.

At some point, perhaps in the eighteen-teens, a great sickness came to Kodiak. It was one of the diseases that arrived on ships, the kind the Alutiiq had no defence against. I will not describe it. It killed a great many people, and it left behind many children who had no one.

Herman did not go away. He went among the sick, as nearly as we can tell, with no thought of his own health at all, and he nursed them, and he buried the dead, and he prayed. When it was over, there were orphans. They needed somewhere to go.

So he took them in.

On Spruce Island, he built a small school, a bit of a house, with a stove and a long table, and a room where the children could sleep. He taught them to read. He taught them their prayers. He taught them to garden, and, I would like to think, he taught them that a cabbage is a creature of some dignity. He taught them in their own language as well as in Russian, which was not something every teacher of that time would have done.

I am going to tell you now about two of the children, and I must say plainly that they are our invention. They are not in the old records. There were real children, many of them, whose names we mostly do not know. I want to give you a picture of what it might have been like, and so I have made two up, to stand in for the real ones. They are called Anna, and Peter.

Anna is nine. She has a plait that never stays tied, and a way of asking questions that begins with "But why". Peter is seven and does not ask questions. Peter watches. Peter has been on the island for one winter, and he has said almost nothing. He eats what he is given, he does what he is told, and at night he lies on his bed and looks at the ceiling.

Herman does not make him talk. He has noticed, I think, that a boy who has lost a great deal is not helped by being asked for words. He simply gives him a small job.

"Peter," he says one morning, in the garden, "I need a person who is good at counting."

Peter looks at him.

"I have a row of cabbages," says Herman, "and I think there are fewer than there were. I need someone to count them, and I need it done carefully, because I suspect a thief."

Peter counts. It takes him a long time, because he is determined to be exact. There are twenty-two.

"Twenty-two," he says, and it is the first thing he has said in a week.

"Twenty-two," says Herman gravely. "That is what I thought. And on Monday, there were twenty-four." He sits down on an upturned bucket and looks very thoughtful. "A thief with a taste for cabbages. What sort of thief would that be?"

Peter looks at the ground. Then he looks at the forest. Then, very slowly, he looks back at Herman. And there is something in his face that is not quite a smile, but is its older brother.

"A rabbit," he says.

"There are no rabbits on this island."

"A deer."

"A possible deer."

"A bear."

"Ah," says Herman. "Now that is a better guess."

And I should tell you about the bear now, since I promised.

It is one of the best-known stories of Saint Herman, and I am going to tell it as the people who knew him told it, and I want to be clear that this is a tradition, told by his students and his neighbours, and not something that can be checked like a date in a record. What it says is that there was a bear on Spruce Island, and that Herman fed it.

That is the whole of the story. There is no great struggle in it, and no dramatic rescue. A large, wild animal came out of the forest, and the monk, instead of running, gave it a piece of bread. And then it came again. And again. And, the stories say, the bear grew so used to the monk that it would sit at the edge of the trees and wait, quite politely, until it was fed.

There are others like it. In the stories, he feeds the ermines, which are small, quick, very beautiful animals, and which, when he sat down in his garden, would come and sit on his shoulders. And I will tell you what the point of those stories is, because you may have heard a few like them from other saints, and I want to be careful here.

The point is not that Herman was a wizard. He was not. The point is not that he had power over animals. The point is that a person who has stopped being afraid, and has stopped wanting anything from the world except to love it, begins to look at the world in a different way, and the world, I think, looks back. In the old tradition, a holy person is somebody who has become a little like Adam, in the first garden, before the quarrel. It is not magic. It is a kind of peace. And the old stories say that the animals can tell.

And one more thing, because Peter would want to know. The old accounts do not say that the bear ever stole a cabbage. That part is our own joke, and the bear, I think, would deny it.

Let me tell you about the wave.

This is another tradition, and again I will tell it as it was told. A story from the monk's neighbours says that one day, after an earthquake, a great tide came out of the sea. It is quite possible that something of the kind did happen, because earthquakes there are common and tides after them can be dangerous. The people of the island were terrified, as you would be. They ran to Herman.

And Herman, the story says, took an icon of the Mother of God, and set it up on the shore, and knelt down in front of it, and prayed. And he told the people: do not be afraid. The water will not come past this place.

And it did not.

Now, I want to say something about this story. I am telling it as it was told. I do not know exactly what happened that day, and neither does anyone else. A good historian would say that what we have here is a memory handed down for some years before it was written, and that the details may have changed along the way. A good believer would say that God answers prayer, and sometimes in ways that look like a small miracle, and that God, and not Herman, was the one who held back the sea.

Both can be true. The one thing I think we can all say is that a monk who kneels on a beach and prays, instead of running, is a very good person to be standing next to when the sea comes in.

There is a letter that survives from Herman. I think it is one of the most important things we have from his own hand, and I would like you to hear about it.

By then, there was a new governor on Kodiak. The company, as companies do, had gone on treating some of its workers badly. Particularly the Alutiiq. Particularly people who were of mixed Russian and Alutiiq family, whom the Russians called Creoles. And Herman, who was by this time an old man, and who had spent years being quiet, sat down and wrote a letter.

He wrote it to the governor, and he did not mince words. He said that the people of that land were being treated unjustly. He said that they were being asked to do work that was too hard for too little. He asked, in the plainest terms, that it be stopped.

He did not write it to make an enemy. He wrote it because it was true.

This matters to me for a reason. We sometimes think of holy people as soft, as people who never say a firm word. And it's true that Herman was gentle. But he was not weak. He could sit in a garden and feed a bear, and he could also write a letter to a governor. They were, for him, the same thing. It was all the work of love: tend the cabbages, teach the children, and when the strong are hurting the weak, say so.

I am told that the governor, who was by now Yanovsky himself, took the letter to heart.

Time is passing now, and the story begins to slow down. That is how it should be, at this hour.

The years go by on Spruce Island. The garden grows, and sometimes it fails, and then grows again. The children grow up. Anna learns to read, and then to teach reading. Peter, who is no longer a silent boy, becomes the best gardener of his year, and, they say, he never again counted cabbages without smiling. The first children of the school grow up and move to the villages, and become the people who teach the next children, and help the next old woman to bake the bread.

Herman gets older. He is by now past seventy, with a thin white beard and a stoop. His hands are rough, and his clothes are patched, and his bed is still a plank. He has not been in a city for forty years. He does not seem to miss it. When a ship comes to Kodiak, the captain sometimes rows across to the island, and finds an old man in the garden, up to his elbows in seaweed, and does not at first understand who he is looking at.

Then he sits down, and has a cup of something hot, and by the time he leaves, he understands.

In the winter of eighteen thirty-seven, Herman fell ill.

He was about eighty-one. He had known for some time that he would die soon, and he had been quietly getting ready. He called his students to him. There were only two or three by then, and I am told that they knelt by the bed and listened to what he had to say.

It was not much. He told them to love God above all things. He told them to look after the island. He asked them to bury him in the place where he had lived, and not to put him in a grand tomb, and to remember that a person is not remembered by what he builds but by whom he loves. And then he asked them to go out of the room, so that he could pray alone.

When they came back, he was gone.

It is said that his face was bright. It is said that the room was filled with a kind of light. I will say plainly: I do not know. I was not there, and neither was anyone who is alive now, and I am not going to tell you that it was surely so. But I will tell you that the people who loved him said so, and that they did not exaggerate about much else. And I will tell you that he died, as he had lived, in the garden he had made, among the children he had raised, and in the place he had named after home.

And now, let me slow right down.

They buried him on Spruce Island, as he had asked. They put a wooden cross over the grave. The spruce trees stood around it. The sea went on breathing, a little way off. And for a long time, hardly anyone outside Alaska knew his name.

But the people of Kodiak remembered. They told their children. They went to the grave. They told one another what they had seen, and what they had heard, and what had happened to them when they prayed there. Slowly, over a hundred and thirty years, the memory of the monk on the island grew, and was handed from one generation to the next, like a loaf.

And in nineteen seventy, the Orthodox Church formally recognised what the people had known for a long time. On the ninth of August of that year, at Kodiak, Herman was proclaimed a saint. He was the first saint to be glorified in North America.

There is a small chapel there now, on Spruce Island. People still go. Not many, because it is hard to get to. But some. They walk up the hill through the spruce trees, and they come to a clearing, and I am told there is a garden, again. I do not know if it is the same garden. I like to think it is, in the way that rivers are the same river.

Here is what I take from it, and then I will leave you to sleep.

Saint Herman's story says: you may find yourself, one day, a very long way from where you thought you would be. Your friends may be gone. The plan may have failed. You may be on a small cold island, with a basket of seaweed and nobody for company. And that, it turns out, is a perfectly good place to begin.

And it says: if you plant something, and tend it, and give it away, it will grow in directions you cannot see. One garden fed a hundred people. One school taught a generation. One letter, written by a tired old man, moved a governor.

And it says one thing more, which is the one I like best. That the most powerful thing you can be, in a hard place, is not clever or strong or famous. It is kind, and it is steady, and it is there. You do not have to change the world. You only have to be a person that others can come and sit with.

So, tonight, if you are lying awake, and you feel far from home, or a little small, or as though nothing you do will matter, I hope you will think of an old man on an island, apologising to a cabbage. And I hope you will remember that he fed the hungry anyway, and taught the children anyway, and wrote the letter anyway. And I hope you will let the day go, and the night come, and the sea go on breathing, a little way off.

And leave the rest to the one who sends the rain, and the seaweed, and the bread.

Notes for the curious.

Saint Herman of Alaska is a real person, and the broad outline of his life is well documented, though not every detail. He was born in Russia about seventeen fifty-six, became a monk, and lived at the monastery of Valaam on Lake Ladoga. In seventeen ninety-four he arrived on Kodiak with a mission of Russian monks. He lived for many years as a hermit on Spruce Island, which he called New Valaam, kept a garden and a school for orphans, helped the Alutiiq people against harsh treatment, nursed the sick in the epidemic of eighteen nineteen, and died in eighteen thirty-seven. He was proclaimed a saint by the Orthodox Church in America on the ninth of August, nineteen seventy. His feast is kept on the thirteenth of December, the day of his death, and again on the ninth of August.

He is an Orthodox saint. He has not been canonised by the Catholic Church, and I would not want to claim otherwise, but many Catholics honour him and are very welcome to.

The stories of the bear, of the ermines, and of the wave that stopped at the shore are traditions, told by his students and neighbours and written down some years after the events. We have told them as traditions and not as established history. Most of what we know of Herman's sayings and his character comes from the recollections of Simeon Yanovsky, a manager of the Russian colony who knew him well.

What we invented: Anna and Peter, the cabbage-counting conversation, the weather, the details of the garden beyond what the sources say, and the jokes. No miracle is attributed to Herman here that the tradition does not already tell, and the reading of those stories, that God and not the saint is the one who acts, is the Church's own.

If you would like to know more, look at the lives of Saint Herman in the Little Russian Philokalia, at the history of the Orthodox mission in Alaska by Gregory Afonsky, and at Michael Oleksa's book, Orthodox Alaska.

That's the story of Saint Herman for tonight. The Orthodox Church keeps his feast on the thirteenth of December, and again on the ninth of August. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And may the prayer of the Orthodox night go with you: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. Goodnight, and God bless.

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