St. Herman’s Monastery

I’m finally back home, after wandering about slack jawed around parts of California.  It was a very fine trip.  I’m happy that I managed to maintain my focus, more or less.  If I wasn’t out strolling about, I steadfastly kept the television off, and spent my spare time reading.  I was, of course, utterly shameless in that department.  I returned with so many books that the airplane almost did not get off the ground.  The economy of San Francisco took a major boost from my visit, I’m here to tell you.

I could post all of my pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, but I suspect everyone already has a few of those.  But I did get some nice pictures of St. Herman’s Monastery near Platina.  Even accounting for the plywood and foam eggcrate beds, I wish I had another day or two to spend up there.  The monks were serious yet personable.  Seeing my frantic gulping of coffee after five hours in services, Father Nicodemus slid down the bench to sit next to me and whispered that he sympathized entirely, that he had been drinking coffee since he was eleven.  the Abbot, Father Gerasim, took time out of a very busy day to sit and talk with me and later, after the evening meal, we took a walk down the road.

At the present time, there seemed to be eight monks at the monastery.  They have another four on Spruce Island off the Alaska coast, and have a skete for nuns, St. Xenia, about eight miles away from St. Herman.  For those unfamiliar with these monastics, their avowed purpose is to live a desert life.  By that, they mean that they are following in the footsteps of the first great monastic movement, in the deserts of Egypt in the fourth century.  This tradition has continued in the Orthodox Church ever since, the latest significant flowering being in the vast wilderness of Northern Russia from the 17th century until the Revolution.  As such, there is no electricity, no telephone, no modern conveniences to speak of at Platina or at St. Xenia’s.  The surrounding woods are home to rattlesnakes, bear, mountain lions and the odd scorpion.  The cells are tiny, consisting of little more than a board bed, a desk and an icon corner.  They are up for services starting at 4:30 a.m. and then are more or less constantly active, either with physical labor, obediences or prayer, until compline ends around 8:30 p.m.  While I was there, it was brutally hot, probably close to 100 degrees there on top of the mountain.  The monks, wearing cassocks and cowls, were suffering terribly, but without complaint.  They are, for all intents and purposes, dead to the world.

In any event, these are some pictures from the monastery.

Entrance to St. Herman’s Monastery

Some of the original buildings.  The part with the high roof was all that was there when the first monastics moved on the property, and it was nothing more than a hunter’s lean to.  The other parts were built on over the years, including the small chapel dedicated to the Royal Martyrs of Russia, which is the portion to the right of the original building.

The interior of the Chapel of the Royal Martyrs.

The exterior of the main church and the refectory, glimpsed through the woods.  They are fairly impressive structures, and were built by the monks.

The interior of the main church.  It is very beautiful inside.

The interior of what the monks call the winter chapel.  It is below the main church, and is partly underground.  It is very small, and easier to warm in the cold of winter.

An insidious heresy confronted

I just returned to San Francisco from an all too short visit to St. Herman of Alaska Monastery near Platina, California.  It was a great visit, and when I get home and can upload some pictures, I’ll talk about it more. I must address, however, a startling revelation (well, not to me) that I hope will bring healing and wholeness to my older daughter, Olga.

It all started this morning, at about 9:30, when the monastery’s services, which had started at 4:30, concluded and we all processed to the trapeza for breakfast.  Among the items being offered was tuna fish salad.  Not your typical breakfast fare, I admit, but after five hours standing in Church, I was not going to argue, especially when coffee was also on the table.  The tuna fish, however, had a concealed message, one I was quick to pick up on.

A short word of explanation.  Olga long ago became infected with the insidious heresy that spicy brown mustard had to be added to tuna fish salad.  She picked up this notion from someone who I don’t argue with, but I have tried for years to show Olga the error of her ways.  Fortunately, my younger daughter, Marina, maintains a pure and steadfast opposition to the modernist trend toward spicy brown mustard.  This, however, made Olga’s intransigence all the more disturbing.

Returning to this morning, I immediately noticed that the tuna fish salad contained absolutely no mustard of any kind, nor was any present on the trapeza tables to tempt the diners, lay or monastic alike.  Here, I knew, was the  answer, the compelling argument that would bring Olga back into the fold.

Several hours later, when I left the monastery to return to San Francisco and reached a place where the cell phone once again worked, I immediately called Olga.  As I expected, her first reaction was one of desperate denial.  After a moment of stunned silence, she blurted out “You probably just missed it!”  That was weak and she knew it.

Then she fell back on an even weaker argument.  “You can still have mustard!” she whimpered.

“Can you?” I retorted.  “I think not.  The fact that a fully canonical monastery eschews spicy brown mustard is compelling evidence that you are wrong.  Wrong, my dear!  I think its time you awoke to the truth.”

“But….but….but” she moaned.

I am too kind a person to hit someone else when they are clearly defeated.

“Face it, honey” I said gently.  “Spicy brown mustard and tuna are an unnatural combination.  You’ll learn to enjoy tuna without it.  Please…please just give up this terrible delusion.”

I let her hang up then, but my work is done.  When I return home tomorrow night, I’ll find a calmer, more rational girl.  A girl devoted to tuna fish with what it really needs….sweet salad cubes.

If it only had an Indian chief…

I am really embarrassed to say this, but I felt obliged today to do something touristy.  I mean, I’m an unabashed spiritual tourist, but it struck me that I could not reasonably visit a city like San Francisco and not go and at least look at what everybody else was doing.  With that end in mind, I strolled out of the hotel and walked to Powell Street, where I climbed aboard a picturesque sardine car…er, make that cable car.  It was absolutely packed with people, and I spent the journey looking at the hair of the woman in front of me.  Nice hair, but I’ve seen better.   Finally, the conducter type person announced that we were at Fisherman’s Wharf.  We all disengaged, like you have to do after playing Twister, and I followed the crowd down to the waterfront.

A short digression.  Near where I live, the town of Cherokee opens its arms to tourists from all over the country.  You can buy anything you want there, as long as it is either plastic or a t-shirt, and assuming you have a fondness for inexpensive goods from Hong Kong.  Tomahawks, war bonnets (although the Cherokee never wore war bonnets), snow globes, knick knacks…you name it.  In addition, you can get your picture taken with a hungover Indian Chief (wearing a war bonnet) or a morose bear.

Here is what I discovered today:  Fisherman’s Wharf is just like Cherokee, minus the Indian theme and the Indian chief.  Oh, and the bear.  But otherwise it was enough to drive me to homesickness, or some kind of sickness.  I did invest in a boat ride around the bay, remembering what a great time my wife and I had riding a ferry in Quebec City.  It was OK, but as soon as we docked, I skedaddled out of the area and down the waterfront to the Embarcadero (spelling highly suspect).  It was quieter there, at least, and I eventually caught the subway back to that great outdoor entertainment known as the Powell Street station.

I don’t want to give it away, so if my daughters are reading, don’t read this.  This is a secret.  I got them both t-shirts that say:   “My Minor Clergy Dad went to San Francisco, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”.

I can hear the shrieks of joy even now.

I did find a job I decided I wanted to have.  I thrust my way into a record store, and discovered a girl sitting in the elevator on a folding chair.  She was reading a magazine and had a CD player at her feet.  You got on the elevator, told her what floor you wanted, and without looking up from her magazine, she reached out and punched the button!  It was mind boggling.  “Where,” I thought, “can I go to school to learn to do that?”  But I had this awful feeling that having a middle aged guy sitting in the elevator, reading a magazine and punching buttons would not offer the customers the same cachet.  Very sad.

Anyway, tomorrow morning I’ll wander down to the new Cathedral for liturgy, and then pick up a car and head north.  After Fisherman’s Wharf, I feel prepared — nay, anxious — to reach the monastery.

Why I have been so silent

I am in my hotel room in San Francisco, and as I write this, the icon of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco is staring at me.  Well, not so much staring as looking intently at me, as though he sees something that he thinks I should know about.  St. John, you see, is why I am 3000 miles away from home, sitting above Union Square.  I came here specifically to visit St. John, and his spiritual child, Father Seraphim.  The fact that St. John has been dead for almost 40 years, and Father Seraphim for about 25, means nothing to me.  In Orthodoxy, the veil between the living and those who are technically dead but alive in Christ is but paper thin.

I have been trying to prepare for this trip for a while now, which at least partially explains my lack of postings.  Although I am the clumsiest of pilgrims, a trip like this is a pilgrimage and such a journey requires preparation.  Some extra prayer, some additional reading of scripture and the Fathers — generally an effort to align one’s spirit with that of the Church to as great an extent as possible.  I am not particularly good about that.  The things of the world hold powerful sway over me, but I wanted to make as much of an effort as I could.

The genesis of this trip is unusual.  About a year ago, I was bumped off of a flight and received a voucher for a free ticket.  I tried to use it for my monthly trip for school, but United didn’t want to take me to Pittsburgh.  Time was running out on claiming the ticket.  Where should I go?

Because my wife had gone to England earlier this year, she was not going to go on this trip.  It felt odd to think about going off on my own, so I had to think about what I hoped for out of the journey.  There was no question in my mind that I wanted it to be primarily spiritual in nature.  I considered going to St. Anthony’s monastery in Arizona, but was skittish because of the heat.  Even though I’m a southerner, I don’t mix well with heat.  I thought about going to New York, to visit the great number of churches in that part of the country.

In the end, though, it was no contest.  San Francisco not only has a significant Orthodox heritage, it also has the relics of St. John, a man who was glorified only a little over ten years ago when his body was found to be incorrupt.  For my non-Orthodox readers, that means that he had not decayed.  While that is not the only mark of sanctity of a saint, it is a significant one, and all over the world one finds such relics kept in churches and monasteries.  St. John is in his former Cathedral, Holy Virgin, on Geary Street.  In addition, several hours north of San Francisco one finds St. Herman’s monastery, now under the Serbian Church.  Father Seraphim Rose, an American convert to the Faith, labored there for many years.  Father Seraphim has not officially been declared a saint, and to be honest, he is a controversial figure among Orthodox.  Some of his writings were vehemently criticized by others, including Archbishop Lazar Puluho, who I wrote about a month or so ago.  Still, whether he was right or wrong or some combination thereof is beside the point.  He is still an extraordinary figure, and I wanted to pray at his grave.

So I arose at 4:00 a.m. Atlanta time on Saturday morning, hied myself to the airport and landed in San Francisco at about 9:30.  A short BART ride into town and I was at the hotel.  I’ll confess that my first impression was decidedly mixed.  It seemed to me that every crazy person on the planet must be in the vicinity of the Powell Street BART station, carrying signs, panhandling, or simply yelling at the top of their lungs.  My rural roots had not yet adjusted to urban realities.

Still, I knew I couldn’t hide in the hotel room all week, so I dashed back out through the crowd and took a muni train out to the Sunset district to an Orthodox bookstore I had heard of, Archangels Bookstore.  We don’t have such things where I come from, except for the one at Ascension Monastery, and I knew I couldn’t miss it.  It was both good and bad.  The bad was that I did what I thought I would do and spent way too much money.  The good is that I struck up a conversation with Alexandra, who was running the store yesterday.

Alexandra, put there by angels, has turned this trip into an extraordinary event.  First, she got on the phone to find out when I could get into the Cathedral to venerate St. John’s relics.  She discovered that at 5:30 Saturday evening, a molieben was being served to the saint.  That was excellent information for a clueless pilgrim to have.  I then mentioned that I wanted to visit the old cathedral on Fulton Street.  She laughed.  “That’s where I go!” she exclaimed.  She then not only told me what time they started (9:00 a.m.), but also volunteered to contact the priest, Father James, and see if he would conduct a molieben for me.

All of this was like blessings dropping, one after another, from heaven.  Stunned by the turn of events, I took the train back to the hotel, rested a bit, and then jumped on a bus going out Geary Avenue.  There, I arrived in time to attend the molieben to the saint.

A molieben is a short service of prayer and supplication.  It can be adapted to any number of purposes — for those who are traveling, for those just generally in need of prayer (and aren’t we all?) or for supplication to a saint, such as St. John Maximovitch.  The Cathedral is beautiful — very lovely iconography, and at that time of day, the sun shone through a stained glass window directly onto Saint John.

For my non-Orthodox readers, a short word on relics.  This is one of the difficult things for Protestants, in particular, to wrap themselves around.  It is not that we worship the Saints, or their relics, as some sort of substitute for Christ.  Yet what saints show us is the way that God works in man (and woman), that the Holy Spirit can so fill a person that they become truly holy, truly righteous.  By way of analogy, consider a person who stays in the sun for a very long time.  They will become sunburned — the power and action of the sun has changed that person.  In the same way, saints, being people who have strived for the Holy Spirit and put aside all other passions, all other desires, are able to enter the Uncreated Light, the presence of God.  They are changed by that Light, and become sanctified.  One sign of that is frequently found in their remains, which do not decompose.

St. John is in a glass case in the Cathedral.  His hands are the most visible part of him.  They are dark in color, but perfectly whole, as is the rest of him.  He is far from the only example of this.  A couple of years ago, at Simonos Petra on Mount Athos, I kissed the hand of Mary Magdalene.  It was dark brown, soft and pliable and, after 2000 years, still warm to the touch.  As we like to sing from the Psalms “God is wonderful in His Saints.”

So, I managed to venerate the relics of St. John and pray in the Cathedral.  It was an amazing experience.  As I left to return to my room, I thought that nothing after this would compare.  I was, of course, wrong.

This morning I went to the old Cathedral, located on Fulton Street.  It was originally an Episcopalian Church, built around 1870 out of redwood.  It has a very high arched ceiling, and the walls are covered with icons.  It is a beautiful church.  As one of the parishioners, Barbara, pointed out to me, the church itself was a convert to Orthodoxy, just like so many of the rest of us.  In a sense, the atmosphere there was at least as impressive as in the new Cathedral.  St. John served there for many years, and it is the first Orthodox Church that Father Seraphim, then known as Eugene Rose, ever walked into.  More than that, though, I found that I had stumbled into a building which housed a congregation as sweet, and a priest as wise, as any I have ever seen.

The Liturgy was beautiful, and afterwards I stayed for trapeza, the communal meal after the service.  The priest, Father James, talked to us about monasticism (he is a priest-monk), and the meal was delightful.  I cannot say enough about the people:  Father, Alexandra, Barbara, Samantha and many others were warm and welcoming to this stranger.

Afterwards, we went back into the church, and Father served a molieben.  It was extremely moving.  Afterwards, I stayed and talked with Father for a while.  It was a long and very wonderful day.  Let’s just say that if I actually lived in San Francisco, I would make the old Cathedral my parish home.

It is hard to imagine that this trip can continue at the same high level.  We’ll see.  A day at a time is the watchword for the trip.  On Tuesday, I will drive north to Platina.  I’ll return here on Thursday, and fly out on Friday.  For now, I sit in my room, and look back at St. John.  If nothing else at all happens on this pilgrimage, I am content and happy.