By Fr. Barry Bercier, A.A.

There's a novel called No One Thinks of Greenland.  I haven't read it but the title until very recently made good sense.  Today people do think of Greenland...though it's less the land they think of, or the people on it, than the ice melting, supposedly because of things happening in the bigger world, the one we come from.   But Greenland really does exist and there are people there whose lives really matter, independent of the great self-preoccupations of the modern world.  It's in part their relative disconnection from our modern obsessions that got me thinking about Greenland many years ago.  Or, you might say, it's Greenland as the desert that has attracted me.  Or more generally, it is the far North, where things are stripped to the barest essentials, where there seems to be nothing more than rock, ice, sea and sky......it's that vast and awesome austerity, where even the sun and the day can vanish for months at a time, that beckons to me, and it's the people there whose whole lives breathe that austerity.   It's the North as the exact inverse of the "virtual" world that encloses us back here further south.  For me, the North is a cleansing remedy to the grotesque excesses that we have come to take for granted and even to seek out as if they were necessary.

Now the fact is that, for the ministry I had in Nuuk, Greenland's capital, the experience of the far North is softened considerably.  Most of my parishioners were not native, but were Filipinos.  Here are some of them celebrating their national day at my place...with a whole roasted pig set on banana leaves.

They are a remarkable people, these Filipinos, ready for the sake of their families to live and work in a place so perfectly alien to their homeland.  Their vitality, simplicity, generosity and unassuming self-sacrificial disposition are a wonder!  I am grateful to have been included, for however short a time, in their story there in Nuuk.

But again, Nuuk is a good sized town, about 16,000 people, with paved roads, cars and busses, decent plumbing...even internet.  One can be rather sheltered there from the full force of life in the Arctic and removed from the life of the Arctic peoples.  The native Greenlanders of Nuuk are mostly Lutheran, and outside Nuuk they mostly speak Greenlandic, an Inuit language, or Danish.  So there was little for me by way of ministry to them...

What I'm suggesting is that the experience in Greenland has not satisfied my desire for the North but, on the contrary, has intensified it.  A place people think about even less than Greenland is Arctic Canada, which is mostly English-speaking.  Catholic missionaries have planted a number of struggling Inuit communities that make their way with none of the conveniences one finds in Nuuk.   Their access to the outside world is much more restricted.  They are poor.  And as you might guess, they are very short of priests.  If the door were to open up, I would be ready to spend my last days with them, up at the end of the world!