Semiquincentennial of the United States of America
Saint Nicholas Cathedral, Washington, D.C.
Sunday, August 9, 2026
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
My beloved children in the Lord,
Today, on the day of the resurrection of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ, we also honor our most venerable father Herman on the day of his glorification. And on this same day, in obedience to the directive of the Holy Synod, we will shortly offer a Service of Thanksgiving for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of this nation’s founding. Before we do, let us spend a few moments with St. Herman, our patron and wonderworker, because he has something particular to teach us about what kind of thanksgiving we are about to offer.
Saint Herman’s own life very nearly spans the period in which this republic came into being and it may be worth remembering that both timelines were happening in the very same years, one in full view of history and the other hidden almost entirely from it.
In 1776, in the year the colonies declared their independence, the young Herman, who would have been in his early 20’s, had already given his life to prayer in a monastery near St. Petersburg.
Two years later, while Washington’s army was enduring its long winter encampments in the field, Saint Herman entered the Valaam Monastery on Lake Ladoga, which would become the school of silence that would form him for the rest of his life.
When delegates gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft a Constitution, Saint Herman was already known among his brothers at Valaam for slipping away into the forest, alone, for days of unseen prayer.
In September of 1794, the year our first President began his second term, Herman and seven companions from Valaam stepped off a ship onto the shore of Kodiak Island, and Orthodox prayer was raised on this continent for the first time.
Between 1811 and 1818, while a young nation fought a second time for its survival, Herman withdrew to a small island he called New Valaam — to a hut, a garden, and a life of hidden service to orphans and to the poor.
And in the winter of 1836, in the year this nation elected its eighth President, an old monk, alone on that same small island, entered into eternal life exactly as he had lived it: unseen, unnoticed, known to almost no one but God.
We should not draw any straight line between these two histories. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that, while a nation was being built in full public view — through debates, and battles, and declarations that fill our history books to this day — there was, at the very same time, another kind of building going on, hidden, silent, known only to heaven. And it is that hidden building, not the visible one, that gave us our patron saint. It remains, still, the pattern offered to us for how we are to live.
We might wonder why we gather today, in this Cathedral, so many thousand miles from Kodiak, to honor a man who died in utter obscurity nearly two centuries ago. Few of our American saints headline the history books, but St. Herman is perhaps, to the eyes of the world, the very least of them. But, as the Lord says, the least among us shall be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. St. Herman was constantly becoming less, reducing himself, humbling himself, both through service to the Alaskan natives and Russian settlers and through unrelenting prayer and asceticism. As we hear in a supplicatory canon written in his honor:
“In a wilderness cell thy soul suffered the birth pangs of holiness, O father, and only angels attended at thy struggles in Christ. Now in my mind I run to thy island hermitage, seeking shelter . . .”
Saint Herman’s holiness was cultivated in a secret. Like a sapling carefully sheltered against the ice and wind, like a plant kept in a secret garden, behind a wall, lovingly tended — so was the soul of St. Herman, carefully guarded by silence and asceticism during the days of his life. This monastic missionary had a true love for people, but that love for people was founded in a surpassing love for God the Savior.
This is what we should carry with us into the prayer we are about to offer. As we give thanks today for two hundred and fifty years of freedom in this land, let us remember that the deepest thanksgiving a Christian can offer is not measured in monuments or milestones, but in the hidden labor of a humbled heart. St. Herman built nothing the world would call great. He built a hut, a garden, a school for orphans, and a life of prayer that almost no one witnessed but God — and it is that hidden greatness which the Church has canonized, and which we now ask him to help us imitate.
Let us therefore faithfully follow St. Herman’s path of humility, self-abnegation, asceticism, unconditional love for God, openness to his neighbor in every need, preaching and living the Gospel commandments in all circumstances. If we do so, we will be offering the saint the greatest honor that our mortal nature can manage. And, in honoring St. Herman, we also honor the Christ the Savior, who lives in him and is glorious and wonderful in him.
Let us therefore become the least—reduced and humbled through asceticism, loving God above all, open to our neighbor’s needs, setting aside superficial kindness and slowly learning the true and Christ-like love and concern that we learn about in St. Herman’s life and that we encounter when we pray to him. And let us maintain this attitude as we turn to offer our own thanksgiving to God for this nation, this land, and every soul within it.
Through the prayers of our venerable father Herman, wonderworker of all America, may Christ our God have mercy on us and save us.