What’s in a Name?
I’m sometimes asked why — with the blessing of the Bishop — we named the Monastery for St. Peter. Initially, the Monastery was planned as a skete of St. John Monastery in Manton, California, and both Bishop Benjamin and the Abbot of St. John officiated at the moleban service in which the land was blessed and designated as a skete in honor of St. Peter. As I recall, we made three prayerful considerations in choosing this name.
First, it seemed to us that the ranch sloping down to Harrison Lake with over a mile of shoreline and another mile of Philosophy River feeding the lake bears a striking resemblance to the Galilee with its Jordan River no larger than our creek where Peter and his brother Andrew grew up and practiced their trade as fishermen. Mostly wheat is now grown on our dry rocky rolling hills sheltered by snow-clad mountains for much of the year. As it happens, Philosophy River is one of Montana’s favored fishing spots. It is also the river in which Montana Fish and Game found Rainbow Trout resistant to the dreaded whirling disease and milked the wild trout to repopulate the rivers of the West with disease–resistant trout.
Second, our wide valley, like most of Montana’s valleys, is sparsely populated by ranchers and farmers and their families. Most of them are Protestant Christians or unchurched. Orthodox Christianity and the saints of the Ancient Church, through no fault of our neighbors, are largely unknown to them. No one came to tell them about the Ancient Church and its saints. Orthodox Christians in North America generally stayed in their own ethnic enclaves. For this reason, we wanted the Monastery to bear the name of a recognizable Christian saint, and a famous fisher of men to boot!
And finally, Peter is, arguably, the saint who most reminds us of our selves and our fate in the modern world. He appears repeatedly in the Gospels brimming with confident faith one moment and riddled with doubt the next. This all-too-human condition, we Orthodox believe, calls for a life of perpetual repentance. It is perhaps best captured in the icon the Greeks call “Peter and the Waves”. The story is told by St. Matthew (14:22-33) of a time when Jesus was alone praying while his disciples were out on the Sea of Galilee, fishing presumably, when a sudden storm came up. It is night, and Jesus comes to them walking on the water. Seeing this, the disciples, already afraid, think they are seeing a ghost, but Jesus calls out to them, “Be of good cheer. It is I; do not be afraid.” Peter, the bold one, answers, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you.” Jesus says simply, “Come”, and Peter scrambles out of the boat and begins walking on the wind-tossed waves until the violence of the storm shakes his confidence and he begins to sink. In that moment, he throws up his hands crying out, “Lord, save me.”
That is our moment too — when the world is too much with us, when our earthly cares and ambitions engulf us, when the noise of all our gadgets and entertainments drown out the silence of prayer, contemplation and reflection, when demonic theories of resentment, division and strife enthrall our secular minds, when our insatiable craving for things and for sensual pleasures consumes us, and when we come to believe that doubt and distrust is the only way forward. Having taken our eyes off Christ, as Solzhenitsyn warned us in his Harvard and Templeton addresses, we learn too late that none of our drugs and therapies can save us from drowning. In this moment we know: only God can save us.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us sinners and save us, O Good One.
David V. Hicks
