I subscribe to the NYT newsletter called “ Believing” I wish I were young enough, and healthy enough, to visit the place she describes. As I have often mentioned (apparently shared by visitors to this remote place) I feel,God most powerfully when in nature. The little church sounds like the epitome of Christian hospitality - cookies all through the night and waffles after the evening service . Open to all, no matter what their belief system is - or isn’t .
The fringes of things
There is a small wooden chapel at the edge of the world. It sits on Svalbard, an archipelago high in the Arctic Circle, where the vast ice sheet of the North Pole melts into rock.
The church is a simple red building facing a fjord. Its steeple points into a kaleidoscope of sky. Half the year, that swirls technicolor, with streaks of blue, pink and green painting the dark. The other half, the midnight sun shines in a perpetual day.
I was there a few weeks ago … during the midnight sun. The trip was an odd sort of pilgrimage for me. Svalbard has dominated my imagination for years, …I like the fringes of things: …It helps me look at life in a new light.
It turns out I’m not alone. The church’s Lutheran pastor, the Rev. Siv Limstrand, has been on the island for seven years. She told me that her congregation, in addition to the expected Christians, includes agnostics and Buddhist Thai immigrants. They all have one thing in common. “In Svalbard, people allow themselves to be a bit more open to more existential questions,” she said. “There’s a curiosity.”
The town where the church is located, Longyearbyen, is home to more than 50 nationalities. It's a Norwegian territory, but almost anyone in the world can come and live there; about 2,500 people do at any given time….
Now, many people come to do research. They map the Arctic climate, which is warming several times faster than anywhere else on Earth. They immerse themselves in the tundra, with its gumdrop mountains of snow gently sloping into sea. They carry a required rifle to ward off polar bears. And they face down solitude….
“I can tell you deliverance will not come from the rushing noisy centers of civilization,” Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian polymath …wrote after his Arctic expedition. “It will come from the lonely places.”
I felt that up there. I spent much of the week hauling my body to the top of mountains on skis, sweating and shivering. As I floated through the powder, … I felt as much joy as I ever have.
I told Limstrand, the pastor, that I thought I’d touched nirvana, and she nodded. “Many here say that they find God in the nature,” she explained. “That ‘nature is my cathedral, nature’s my church.’”….
Back in town, though, that joy felt harder to come by. Time began to slip in the sun, and I was sleeping less and less. It’s a common problem, Limstrand told me. She said people wander into the church at all hours. In the chapel, there are cookies and warm drinks set near sealskin table runners. A taxidermy polar bear haunts one side of the room. A stained-glass window refracts the changing sunlight into an altar with a pastel mural depicting the miracle at Galilee and the Last Supper. After a short evening service, they serve waffles.
“People who have never sung in a choir before, they suddenly find themselves singing in the choir, even if they have no relationship to church,” Limstrand said of her flock. I heard this again and again in town. In Svalbard, where everything is stripped of artifice, the chapel is a refuge. It’s a place to celebrate graduations and holidays. People gather there in the polar night to share a meal, even if they aren’t religious…
It felt resonant, too, about the chapel. There, on one of the least-habitable places on earth, belief and belonging persist. People gather to commune with one another — and to parse the theology of nature, ringing so loudly outside its walls.
Full article here.
It sounds like a lovely place to contemplate the existential questions, and experience some Christian hospitality..
ReplyDeleteWhen we were in Yosemite in 2013 we had the opportunity to visit the Mariposa grove of the giant redwoods. It felt very cathedral-like.
I’m 77 now. Only twice have I seen the night sky without light pollution. And the Milky Way which is the view toward the galactic center where a huge singularity resides. Jesuit brother Consolmagno who runs the Vatican Observatory said that during the blackout in LA caused by the 1973 earthquake, panicked people called the Griffith Observatory questioning what was wrong with the night sky. We lose so much inspiration not being able to experience this vision.
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