Christmas at Thule

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Today’s guest post is from Fr. Barry Bercier, who herein describes his trip to Greenland. 

CHRISTMAS AT THULE

Toward the end of last year, Fr. Christian Noval, a priest from the Diocese of Copenhagen who, besides his duties in Denmark, has charge of Greenland (the whole thing!) asked me if I’d be willing to do Christmas mass for the Catholics at the American Air Force base in Thule.  That way he could be available to the other Catholic community, in the capital Nuuk.  Getting me to Thule would entail a complex interplay of authorities: the Military Archdiocese of the US, the Diocese of Copenhagen, the Assumptionists, the US Air Force, the Danish government…all together a bureaucratic morass and not my cup of tea!

But the Catholic Church has the narrowest of footholds in Greenland, that largest of the islands on Earth: one little parish in the capital, Nuuk, in the south, and a chapel at the base in Thule, 930 miles farther north, 750 miles above the Arctic Circle.  Given the critical priest shortage, it’s a real question how much longer the Church will maintain that foothold at all… But places outside the noisy network of our distracted times suit me fine, and I’d spent spring break and then half the summer with the parish in Nuuk… so a trip to Thule seemed worth the bureaucratic tangle.

 

There was a full moon on Christmas–that doesn’t happen very often–and at Thule the moon doesn’t set–it just travels round and round the horizon.  But still it was the dead of night all day.  And cold! Forty-seven below when the once-a-week cargo plane touched down.

The base has about six-hundred people, about a hundred and sixty airmen and the rest support staff mostly from Denmark.

Outside the base, under the moonlight, it was lunar landscape, rock, ice, a frozen sea and a luminescent night sky.  On the base, there was housing, a big dining hall, a gym, the chapel, all sorts of Air Force related buildings…and radar!  Lots of radar.  They watch satellites in polar orbit…and they keep an eye all the time on their neighbor just over the pole, Putin’s Russia.  The radar is the principle reason for the existence of the base.

It took a couple days to get used to the idea that there would be no days, just night, but toward the end I saw there was something to it.  The perpetual starry sky, the depths of the cosmos always staring straight down at you…it has its appeal, believe it or not.

But the best thing was the people there at the base.  In that isolated and frozen darkness, they learn quick how to be life-supports to each other,  People were remarkably cheerful, friendly, open, eager for conversation, not the least bit shy of serious questions, ready to engage with this old guy Catholic priest.  Living there at the very edge of the world, palpably on the borders of eternity, they spend a lot of time thinking.  Watching computer images of the former Soviet Union, looking for possible launches of an apocalyptical confrontation, far from their families at home, they have a lot to think about.  And they have the natural wherewithal for thinking: it’s smart people they put in charge of the work to be done there.

My only regret was having to leave after just a little over a week. I was very grateful for the opportunity to have gone and for the friends I had made there, but I was also a little down as the plane at midnight on New Year’s Eve flew by the northern lights over silent Greenland and Baffin Bay, heading toward the glare and noise and clutter of our megalopolis.

I hope to head back to Nuuk this coming summer.  The situation there is about to become more difficult than it’s been because the Little Sisters of Jesus, who have lived there with the poor for the last 35 years, are being retired shortly after this coming Easter…with no one to replace them.  It will be important to have someone present at the parish to keep it afloat until Copenhagen finds a more permanent solution.

Fr. Barry