The Chapel of the Snows stands out amongst the rough-and-ready prefab huts of McMurdo. Originally constructed during Operation Deep Freeze, when the base was built by the American military in the mid-1950s, it's drawn along the lines of a Midwestern village church, all whitewashed matchboard with discreet Gothic windows and a modest steeple. The first chapel burned down in 1978, to be replaced with a temporary structure which also burned down; the current building is more or less a reconstruction of the 1950s one, was consecrated in 1989, and as of the time of writing, hasn't yet burned down again.
It's definitely the nicest building on base. The Chapel's only rival is the Chalet, a 1970s cabin that currently houses the administrative offices, but the Chalet is rustic where the Chapel is quaint. With its carved and polished wood, decorative wall hangings, and stained glass window, in contrast to the steel-and-formica utilitarianism everywhere else, it feels like a place that has been loved and worn smooth by many hands.
On Sunday mornings the Chapel hosts Christian church services, but it serves a broader purpose to the McMurdo community. Other faith groups use it at other times for their gatherings, and it's also a concert venue, meeting space, and a place of quiet retreat for anyone wishing to escape the hustle of McMurdo life. Because of its central location at the bottom of the main drag, it's also the zero point for giving directions anywhere else. Everyone knows where the Chapel is.
The US military provides a Protestant chaplain on three-month rotation. I happened to meet the incumbent on one of my first days, as he attended the history talk I gave to the hut guides, but I'm still not sure whether he was Methodist or Episcopalian. I was told a Catholic chaplain is provided by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Christchurch, but I don't think there was one in residence during my time, as you will see further on. Other faith groups generally have to get by with a lay leader.
Now, before I continue, I should brief you on my own religious background: I was raised Catholic, and spent my teenage years in a deeply Mormon suburb of Salt Lake City, where my best friend was Evangelical. I started going to an Anglican church in my mid-20s, only a month before hearing the Worst Journey radio play that started all this. It proved a more fruitful spiritual home for me, and the combined forces of modern and Edwardian Anglicanism have guided the reformation of my adult life in tandem. So I come at this with a fair amount of personal knowledge and experience, but also awareness of a broader cross-section of the Christian ecosystem; the sole McMurdo Sunday service I attended therefore became a fascinating study that I have been chewing on ever since.
Because it serves a small gathered congregation from across the denominational spectrum, the Chapel of the Snows is a sort of Big Brother House of American Christianity. I had lived in the US but had been away for several years by this point, and while there is enough on the news to baffle international Christians as to the values of their American brethren, it still wasn’t enough to prepare me for being thrown in the deep end.
Out of a station population of about 900, the congregation numbered around twenty. This in itself was not very surprising, as Sunday is the only day anyone gets to sleep in, and brunch starts around the same time as the service. The choir consisted of whoever could sing confidently enough to lead, which on this Sunday was me and one other lady. Within five minutes it was obvious who the Catholics were, as they were resolutely doing all the gestures in defiance of the corrupting tide of Protestantism, with a conviction that I recognised from my teenage years. They had a spokesman who informed us at the start of the service that in the Catholic Church today was the Feast of Christ the King, and kept us updated on how things would go in the Catholic Church at every turn of the liturgy.
There was a spell in the middle where congregants raised matters to be prayed for. Among the litany of ill and bereaved friends and family who were struggling to afford medical bills was the solicitation to support a prayer vigil at a Texas brewery which was using Satanic imagery on their bottles. The chaplain's sermon hinged on a survey done in the 1950s, which found that the vast majority of Americans identified as Christian, but only a third regularly attended services or had other habits of observance which would signify them as practising; the same survey a few years ago found that those identifying as Christian had fallen to less than half, but the percentage actively practising was virtually identical to the 1950s. I thought this was leading to a point about the decline of hypocrisy, or possibly the resilience of faith despite overwhelming changes in popular culture; instead it was spun to indicate how people were now embarrassed to admit being Christian, that Christianity was such an unsightly label in our godless world that people didn't want to be associated with it. Are you one of the few, the brave, who will stand up and be counted? Ironically, he went from this to a rushed and awkward Eucharist, which looked very much like he was embarrassed to enact one of the central tenets of Christian practice, although being caught between the Catholics and the Evangelicals would have made anyone nervous. By this point, the other half of the choir had had to slip away, so I abused my power by selecting 'Onward Christian Soldiers' for the closing hymn. This was because it was Scott's favourite and was sung at the Polar Party's burial service almost exactly 107 years before, but I thought I could get away with it as it's not out of place for Christ the King. Then the Catholics took themselves off to a side room to pray properly, while the rest of us nattered over the strongest coffee on base and a pile of pastries that greatly overestimated how many McMurdites were not embarrassed to call themselves Christian that Sunday.
There was a lot to unpack from that interesting social hour. My first impression was that, in spite of my efforts to remind myself that the loudest voices do not necessarily speak for the whole, American Christianity was indeed in a very strange place, and that what we could see from across the sea was not as unrepresentative as I'd hoped. My second impression was how desperately they needed to believe that they were a persecuted minority, when in fact they hold the most political power of any faction in the most powerful country in the world. In our immediate context, the political party they’d voted into government had the power of life and death over McMurdo Station; its anti-science disposition and branding of government-sponsored research as wasteful hung like the Sword of Damocles over us all. Most were inclined to believe that if the American presence in Antarctica weren't strategically valuable, the US Antarctic Program would be defunded. It was bemusing that the people gathered in this building couldn't see the obvious paradox.
My third impression was that they had not actually asked any of the heathens in their midst why they might be disinclined to associate with Christianity. If they did so, they might have found that Christianity's image problem has little to do with being “uncool”, and a lot to do with prioritising beer labels over honouring their leper-healing, privilege-flouting founder by working to ensure everyone has access to medical care regardless of income or employment status. Most of my friends have been godless heathens, and I can tell you they have a better grasp of Christian values than a great many Christians I have known.
I am being critical, of course. They were all thoroughly lovely people, who did not withhold their welcome to a stranger, and nor did their welcome extend only as far as the chapel door. For the rest of my time there, these people whose names I barely recalled, who knew they would never see me again after a few weeks, made me feel like one of their own, inviting me to eat with them in the Galley and making warm and friendly small talk in the corridors. It was just what one would hope for in a community. But I could never quite shake the suspicion that I just happened to fall on the right side of a line they had drawn through the universe. For all I know, they had the same misgivings about the sermon that I did, and this may be an unfair assumption. But my lifetime of tiptoeing around us/them divides drawn by exclusive tribes does not get erased easily.
In a funny way, McMurdo Station is not enormously different from a monastic community. There is a lot more sex, to be sure. The food is ample and rich – the vat of prawns at Sunday brunch is anything but abstemious. But it is a small and isolated self-contained society; the selection process is exacting; the work is long and arduous; discomfort is a given; privacy is not; those called to it have eschewed a normal life and, often, dependable income, stability, or even a home and family. It is telling that both the consecrated religious and the Antarctican refer to the sphere occupied by most of humanity as "The World." Out there, where people conduct business, and holiday in the Seychelles, and speculate over who will win Strictly, is The World; here, out of the world, is a different place altogether. Whether lost in contemplative prayer or following the data trail of a neutrino, it's another kind of existence, and in comparison The World just seems like so much chaff. For all they don't turn up to church, the Antarctican almost certainly has greater insight into the religious ideal than a devout churchgoer at home.
Part of the Christian calling (and, indeed, most other religions) is to free oneself from the tawdry preoccupations of The World, and religious buildings are designed to feel set apart. It was paradoxical, then, that in the Chapel, which ought to be set-apart within the set-apart, The World seemed closer than anywhere else. In Antarctica one could easily forget that there was Satanic imagery or breweries in Texas, or indeed that there even was a Texas, but here the threads back to The World were stronger and more plentiful than anywhere else. The relationships between congregants and those far away, as well as tangible tokens of civilisation – the Gothic details, the Navy flags, the hymnals and kneelers like any other church anywhere – all knitted the Chapel of the Snows more inextricably to The World than anywhere else at McMurdo. What did the motifs of wheat and grapes have to do with anything, here?
Before I left Cambridge, someone in the church group I frequented had asked me if there was a church at McMurdo. Yes, I replied, though why one would want to sit in a little wooden box instead of the vast cathedral of Creation was beyond me. “It's probably warmer,” was his response, and I had to admit he had a point. But the image of a puny shed in the midst of almost incomprehensible grandeur stuck with me as symbolic of the pettiness of human religious constructs in the face of the Divine. “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” wrote T.S. Eliot, and when faced with the mild-melting enormity of the Ultimate Reality, human kind must shrink it down or cut it up into small enough pieces to digest. The priest in his chapel, the marine biologist in her tank, the artist in the historic hut, the glaciologist with her cores, the pilot in his sky, the wastewater supervisor with her bacterial cultures, the chef in the kitchen, the videographer in his ice cave, the astrophysicist with her antennae, the meteorologist up his tower – they are all working on their tiny tiny piece of the whole, more than enough for one or even several to handle, but only an infinitesimal fraction of What Is. The trick is not to fall under the illusion that the piece which fills the whole of your field of vision is, in any way, all that matters. How they fit together gets you closer to the point, and leaving any bit out pulls you further away. This is the problem with Us and Them. Exclusivity is the enemy of wisdom.
The future of the Chapel of the Snows is doubtful. Not, as some might want to believe, because of insidious secularism, but because the grand plan for a renovated McMurdo is to include a chapel in the central building that will comprise the Galley, administration, and some dorms, like a prayer room at an airport. This is not a popular plan. Very few McMurdites would ever consider worshiping in it as a chapel, but it is a hub of McMurdo life, and practically the only building that isn't Work in some way. Its entanglement with The World is a comforting shred of familiarity. Having a space set aside to be different is valuable no matter what your religious convictions are, and the Chapel is an important building to nearly everyone in their own way. But the NSF works in mysterious ways, and a budget spreadsheet is more persuasive than a sociologist, so the little shack in the midst of a cathedral may not be long for the little world outside The World. McMurdo will be a poorer place for loss of it.