Portage Glacier, Anchorage, Alaska

Photograph by Ella Deane via Unsplash

In early June, I accepted the invitation from the Executive Director of the American Baptist Home Mission Societies to join him and a group of colleagues on a weeklong sojourn to Alaska. During that time, we visited our partners at the Kodiak Baptist Mission and learned about their historic ministries and how the work has evolved in the current era. We participated in the biannual gathering of Alaska Baptist Churches, hosted warmly by our colleague Rev. Dr. Alonzo Patterson. And we learned about the wild and wondrous land of our forty-ninth state.

From the stunning sweep of the snow-covered mountains to the emerald magic of the temperate rainforests, I delighted in the beauty and diversity of Alaska’s landscape and climates. Observing bald eagles brooding over their nests, stalking a young moose along a roadside, laughing at the raucous (and noxious!) sea lions on their pier, I was also surprised (and humbled) to learn of the diversity among Alaska’s human inhabitants — including Native Alaskans (members of indigenous tribes), Alaska “natives” (whose European ancestors arrived four generations ago), Black and white transplants from the “lower 48” (many of whom were stationed with the military and remained with their families), and newer immigrants and refugees from the Philippines, Sudan, Congo, and Colombia to name a few.

Alaska is called the Land of the Midnight Sun, because summers see sunset after 11:00 pm and even the dusk never surrenders to full darkness. Conversely, that means winters are long and dark with only a few hours of gloaming each day. I learned that the military provides sun lamps to their servicemembers to help ameliorate the impact on health. For the general population, however, depression, anxiety, addiction, and the socioeconomic challenges that can accompany these mental health disorders are rampant.

Life in Alaska requires hardiness, grit, and a hope that endures. It demands a conviction that dramatic changes in light and dark, warmth and cold, rain and sun, mountains and sea, are all a part of God’s created cycle in life. And Alaska itself provides a dramatic metaphor for such resilient faith.

Our group had the privilege of taking one day to “do the tourist thing,” and included among the stops on our itinerary was a glacier cruise. The crew of The Ptarmigan took us across Portage Lake right up to the piedmont of the Portage Glacier, and their “resident” park ranger narrated the science and geography of glacier formation and evolution.

“A glacier is a slow-moving river of ice,” the ranger explained, describing how multiple factors must converge to create and sustain the ice that becomes a glacier.

The first is a climate conducive to cold and snow — and more specifically to snow that accumulates over time without melting or movement by wind or avalanche. So, glaciers only form at polar latitudes and high altitudes, both of which may be found in Alaska!

The second factor is related to the first: time. This is time not only for the snow to accumulate but also for it to become compressed by the weight of accumulation. That compression generates the third factor: pressure, by which a metamorphosis occurs in the fallen snowflakes themselves. The accumulated flakes become compressed into dense ice crystals — a density that produces the brilliant blue of glacial water and the ice seen within glacial crevasses.

But remember, these densely compressed and long-time accumulated masses are “rivers of ice.” And that requires the fourth factor: movement. Glaciers are on the move, pulled by gravity, sometimes advancing and other times retreating. According to Stephen Nelson, a physical geologist from Tulane University, “a glacier can change its size by accumulation, which occurs by addition of snowfall, compaction and recrystallization, and ablation, the loss of mass resulting from melting, usually at lower altitude, where temperatures may rise above freezing point in summer. Thus, depending on the balance between accumulation and ablation during a full season, the glacier can advance or retreat.” And their movement is both internal (called “creep” and caused by further compaction of the crystalline structures) and external (called “basal sliding,” caused by gravity and ablation).

How does all of this connect to a life of faith?

First and foremost, glaciers remind me of the importance of perspective. Nelson put it this way: “A glacier is a permanent (on a human time scale, because nothing on the Earth is really permanent) body of ice….” It appears permanent, but nothing is. And even its apparent permanence does not mean that it is static or unchanging. Movement is an essential aspect of glacial identity.

And movement — change — is integral to the human experience and to our identity being created in God’s image. Because while it may be true at some cosmic or existential level that God is immutable — our experience of God as deeply relational is testimony to God’s responsiveness. God may be “immutable,” but God is not immovable. In fact, we rely on God’s willingness to be moved by our prayers, by our suffering, by our repentance, by our lament.

Glaciers also remind me that advance and retreat, accumulation and ablation, creep and slide are cyclical. Whatever season or stage of life in which I may find myself — however bitter the cold, how biting the wind, how pervasive the darkness — it is part of a larger life cycle. It is part of a natural process. What is now is unlikely to be what will be in the next season.

So, when I consider the grief that swamped me and my family four years ago with the sudden death of my 17-year-old son, I compare its ongoing effect with the substantial calving of a glacier. Losing him created a deafening roar of anguish and a tsunami of displaced emotion that continue to swamp my spirit; the jagged edge of the rupture remains. It was all I could see, hear, feel, know in those first days, weeks, and months.

As time has passed and life has moved on without my lost boy, I begin to discern the more incremental effects that intimate and traumatic grief has had on my life of faith and my relationship with God and the church. I have clung to God, needing to believe that Spirit is still present and shares in my sorrow. Yet I have distanced myself from the church — the institution, not the people — because so much of Christian theology is inadequate or injurious to those who are brokenhearted. And so, I have noticed the internal creep as the crystals of my faith compress, compact, and reform into something more solid, more trustworthy, more brilliantly blue.

I have also learned that such glacial faith produces more than glimpses of beauty and a hope that endures. Glaciers (those that are landbound) also produce a mound of debris that results from its cycle of advance and retreat. The contrast between the stunning white and blue of the glacier’s snow and ice and the dung-like heap of sediment (called “till”) at its moving edge is dramatic to say the least.

While the glacier’s till looks like the dirty snow piles a snowplow leaves behind in suburban parking lots or along the berms of interstate highways, the till may become a moraine, a rich soil with potential for new growth. This is also part of glacial faith — when what has been pushed aside becomes fertilizer for whatever new thing God may be doing in the world.

To be clear, I am not offering a systematic theology or even a sermonic exhortation. I am simply noticing the ways in which God continues to speak to me through the Book of Nature, even when the institutional church and its representatives too often fail to offer any kind of coherent good news. I am embracing a metaphor for faith that endures, that can transmit brilliance and beauty, even out of the harshest of life’s conditions, and when the nature of faith itself requires incremental movement, internal and external, in ways that change faith itself and the context in which it adapts and moves.