My Year on Spruce Island: An Interview with Anthony Linderman

You talk about the monks' generosity in teaching practical skills like fishing and wood splitting. Did any of these lessons lead to a personal breakthrough in your understanding of reverence for creation?

The fish and the wood were heavy with glorious life. It was that tactile knowing of something through its weight that has stuck with me. The Hebrew word for the Glory of God in Scripture is kabod, which also means great weight. Glory is heavy. The net we strained to pull in was heavy with holiness as were the rounds of spruce wood we carried up the hill.

Before, I had known the heaviness of sin and guilt. I knew heaviness as a large fridge to carry up a flight of stairs. But on Spruce Island, I encountered heaviness neither spiritual malady nor physical obstacle, but instead a weightiness of life and beauty. That was different.

It makes sense of the old way of describing a pregnant lady as “heavy with child.” Who can deny that pregnant women are not full of glory and the weight of life?

Having grown up as a missionary child in Albania, how did that international Orthodox experience compare to a more remote, monastic setting like Spruce Island?

Growing up in Albania we were sheltered under the branches of the mighty tree that was His Beatitude Abp. Anastasios of Albania of blessed memory. Like a tree, he established good order, spiritual boundaries, and a center-point for our spiritual lives. He created this center through his iconicity as a hierarch, through the rebuilding of countless churches, and his leadership. Even though Albania is a small autocephalous church, it was still a center of an ancient Orthodox see.

Conversely, Alaska is relatively new to Holy Orthodoxy. It has just begun being sanctified by the holiness of the saints who have lived and reposed there from the 19th century onward. It’s wild and huge, and St. Michael’s Skete is not the center of it as the Metropolis of Tirana is the center of Albania. The mission of the Skete is to “keep the monastic vigil lamp lit” on Spruce Island. It is an outpost, a lighthouse, a beachhead on the far edge of the world. Even by virtue of being a Skete, it is under the spiritual authority of St. Herman’s Brotherhood in Platina, California.

So, there was no program of church building, schools, or public ministries. Instead, there was a (sometimes frightening) negotiation with the elements even to complete daily tasks. The focus was more insular, on keeping the canon of services at night and during long summer days, and short winter days. I felt like an imposter on the land, and that every time I returned safe from a hike, mail run, or supply run was a gift, a successful foray across wild places. 

You hope readers will trust encounters with divine beauty, even in small things like a changing leaf. What advice would you give to someone struggling to recognize these moments in a busy, urban environment?

At the monastery I got to do a deep dive into reading Fr. Zacharias of Essex, who was a disciple of St. Sophrony. He offered a really helpful key that I would gladly share. In one of his books, he describes how Orthodox hesychastic tradition encourages the faithful to condemn themselves while on earth so they won’t be condemned on the Day of Judgment. One of the most famous examples of this is the holy cobbler St. Anthony met who looked out of a little shop in Alexandria and repeated of the passersbys, “All these are saved, only I am lost.”

However, Elder Zacharias knew how psychologically and spiritually weak most of us are and such self-condemnation, instead of being an act of humility, might overstress a fragile psyche or be done with egotistic self-loathing. So, he proposed the following prayer: “God, thank you for the changing leaves, although I am unworthy.” In this way it starts with the beautiful blessing, the changing leaf, God’s beauty delivered to us in the moment, which consoles us for the taking of the bitter medicine of self-condemnation—although I am unworthy.

The condemnation is the key to passing through the beautiful thing so that it becomes an icon of Divine Beauty. I love this because the problem isn’t a failure to notice beauty. There is beauty in every single form around us. Pick anything! The difficulty that makes us miserable is that we’re on the outside of it; every moment we feel locked out of innumerable doors. Elder Zacharias offers the key of humility to every single door in a prayer which combines gratitude and self-condemnation. “God, thank you for this thing, although I am unworthy.”

At St. Sophrony’s monastery in Essex I saw one of the icons he painted of St. Paisius Velichovsky. On the scroll the saint held was written the words, “Humility never fails, for it lies beneath all things.” Let’s direct that quote to the failure of being outside the locked doors of beauty. St. Pasius was explaining that humility succeeds through its lowliness, through its smallness. If we’re on the outside of a locked door, we must become small enough to fit through the keyhole. Or maybe the door isn’t locked at all, it’s just very small, and we can’t fit through. Or maybe since humility lies beneath all things, we can access what’s on the other side by entering in humility on our side. By being humble we join ourselves to Christ who lies beneath all things, sustaining their weight. Then the dialectic of inside and outside collapses. We can say like St. Porphyrios, “Lord send me, if you will, to hell; only do not be parted from me.”

Looking back, if you could revisit Spruce Island for another extended stay, what aspect of the monastic life there would you most want to explore deeper, and why?

I would want to be quiet. I did not embrace the silence. It’s the aspect I experienced the least and as such it would be a new kind of adventure, one I wouldn’t write about.

You mention your interest in fairy tales and storytelling. What role do you think monasteries like Spruce Island play in "re-enchanting" the world?

I am with Dr. Martin Shaw on this one: the world doesn’t need to be “re-enchanted.” Even gray concrete is full of the uncreated energy of the Lord.  As Shaw and C.S. Lewis point out, enchantments are often bad. Instead, Shaw tries to wake people up through his storytelling from the thousand false enchantments of our age. When he tells a story, especially if you are blessed enough to hear him in person, he and the story make your heart ache with a pain sweeter than any honey. And in the ache is longing for something and Someone real beyond all the enchantments you’ve settled for. That strange ache ruins every other pleasure because it is qualitatively different from anything enchanted. It’s a starving man dreaming of a banquet who stumbles on bread that actually fills his stomach.

Monks and nuns refuse to settle for anything but that bread. The monasteries are designed to reject all enchantments, and to strive for real Bread in a fallen world of dream food. The mountain vistas, the nourishing meals, and the quiet all around are never to be settled for. Instead, they all point to a fulfillment in Christ.

(Of course, I have to be careful to clarify here, that things only become dream-like when they cease to be iconic and become idols. It is not the wonderful things themselves that make the enchantment but setting them up as rivals to Christ.)

Anthony Linderman is the author of A Year in the Company of Angels: A Pilgrim on Spruce Island (Ancient Faith, 2025). 

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