Damian Costello
Other than a small bell tower out front and an icon of an Indigenous holy man etched in black granite, St. Jacob’s of Alaska in Northfield Falls looks like just any other plain New England church.
But not inside. You walk into another world, that of “superluminous darkness,” darkness that is not the absence of light but light mostly beyond the ability of the human eye to see. Yet not beyond the ability to feel.
The light comes at you in waves, from the flickering lamps and beeswax candles.
Faces surround you. Large murals tower in front, clusters of smaller icons blanket the side walls. Even the white spaces are pregnant with faces, waiting for the resources and time each needs to be born. The faces and flames dance, leaving you not sure which enlivens the other.
The faces — or icons — are not merely representations. In Orthodox tradition, icons are windows, portals even, through which the Holy People encounter those who enter the church.
At St. Jacob’s of Alaska, the Holy People sing with the human voices. They float in the clouds of incense, call in the bells of the incense censer swinging before the icons, and circulate with the priest through the church, enacting the ebb and flow of all creation’s praise with the sustaining power of the Holy Trinity.
St. Jacob’s icon greets you in the back of the church. I remember seeing his icon on State Street in Montpelier back in the ‘90s, recessed in a doorway a couple storefronts down from the donut shop, at the bottom of the stairs that led to the second-floor chapel.
St. Jacob of Alaska Netsvetov (1802-1864) was the son of an Aleut mother and Russian father. He became the first Orthodox priest born in Turtle Island (an Indigenous term for North America) and spent his life ministering to the peoples of the Yukon River basin.
Jacob, as much as anyone, personifies the long and vibrant intersection of Alaskan Native and Russian Orthodox spiritualities. The encounter was not without complication — what encounter is? — but very unlike the ways other Christian traditions complemented and often magnified colonial expansion. Alaskan peoples incorporated the new ways into their old, their vision of the sacredness of life in and all around them not overwhelmed but deepened by the new stories.
A beautiful such meeting point occurs at St. Jacob’s every Saturday evening. Midway through vespers, “O Gladsome Light,” one of the oldest hymns in the Orthodox tradition, marks the end of the day — “We have come to the setting of the sun and behold the light of evening” — but even more so greets the coming dawn.
Jacob came to central Vermont when a parishioner journeyed across Turtle Island to Alaska. She brought back his story and in 1994 the congregation became the first with St. Jacob’s name. They bought the old Methodist church in 2001 and began adding faces to the blank walls. Or maybe allowed what was already there in the superluminous darkness to emerge.
One face is that of St. Matushka Olga (1912-1979), “Mother Olga,” a Yupik woman who as a traditional midwife and the wife of an Indigenous Orthodox priest became the spiritual anchor of the region. She died in 1979 and was officially recognized as a saint only a few months ago, in 2023. Mother Olga’s icon hangs on the southern wall amidst a constellation of Alaskan saints, a grandmother of the church.
St. Jacob of Alaska is a mission of the Orthodox Church of America, but with its Alaskan Native Orthodox presence, it’s also a mission of the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island.
The late, great Orthodox priest Reverend Dr. Michael James Oleksa (1947-2023) spent decades learning “to be a real human being,” or the traditional lifeways of Yupik and other Alaskan peoples. Through their practices of deep reverence for and reciprocity with all life, Oleksa relearned the core of the Orthodox faith: God became human because God so loved the cosmos — not just human beings, but every facet of the vast and diverse universe.
In the Orthodox tradition, like in many Indigenous traditions, the church space is the cosmos in miniature. Vespers finishes, and you return to outer cosmos. Over the cemetery that recedes to the steep ridge of Paine Mountain hovers the full moon, the great Theotokos, or God-Bearer, reflecting the light of her Son that will rise in the morning.
Orion and the rest of the winter stars shine above, the snow and St. Jacob in the black granite returning the light, every facet of the vast and diverse universe reaching out with a superluminous embrace.
