Gontrans de Poncins

 The Ice Saint

In Kabloona, his memoir of life among the Eskimos, Gontrans de Poncins begins the chapter about his visit to Pelly Bay thus: “I am going to say to you that a human being can live without complaint in an icehouse built for seals at a temperature at 55 degrees below zero, and you are going to doubt my word.” Poncins explains that an icehouse for seals is a hole dug into the permanently frozen earth on the side of a hill to store seal meat during the summer. An igloo, according to Poncins, is a thousand times warmer, but Father Henry preferred his icehouse.

A visitor has to enter Father Henry’s abode sideways along a ten-foot passage, at the end of which is a door. The door opens onto a space four and a half feet long and maybe somewhat more expansive that serves as Father Henry’s bedroom, parlor, kitchen, dining room, and chapel. When confession is given, the penitent stands in the bedroom, parlor, kitchen, dining room, and chapel while Father Henry sits in the passage “under the vitreous eyes of a frozen seal.”

Poncins questions Father Henry about his lack of common possessions of civilization, and the priest replies, “Those things make no sense here.”  He does not have napkins because they freeze stiff as a board. He does not have ink because it also freezes. As does kerosene, so only the weak flame of seal oil lamps lights his darkness. Father Henry gave up his luxury of a pipe because the bishop suggested that his priests make a personal sacrifice. His diet consists solely of frozen fish, which the priest loves, although he has to blow and suck on it to warm it up before he takes a bite. (Poncins agrees with the priest about frozen fish eaten whole. He claims that after ingesting, it gives a sustaining warmth against the arctic cold for hours.)

Father Henry’s one pride of possession is his team of dogs. He makes the interesting observation that the behavior of the dogs reflects the behavior of the Eskimos and is quite different than the dogs in other cultures who mirror, in their canine habits, the people they live with.

Father Henry is no hermit. Like most missionaries, he is intimately involved with his flock.

The naturalness of his asceticism is what is most surprising. There isn’t the angry spirit of sacrifice or showy martyrdom. He simply doesn’t care. Poncins writes of Father Henry, “’Cold’ to him was merely a word, and if he stopped up a door, or livened up a lamp, it was merely for my sake he did it. He had nothing to do with ‘Those things,’ and this struggle was not his struggle: he was somewhere else, living another life, fighting with other weapons.”

Poncins tries to grasp and explain this personality: “Had he been dependent only on human strength, he would have lived in despair, been driven mad.”

And again: “His mystical vestment was shelter enough against hunger, against cold, against every assault of the physical world from which he lived apart.”

Isn’t that like many conceptions of the state of souls in heaven? I mean this question as a challenge, not rhetorically.

Poncins goes on, “Once again I had been taught that the spirit was immune and irresistible, and matter corruptible and weak. There is something more than cannon in war, and something more than grub and shelter in the existence in this conqueror of the Arctic. If seeing what I had seen, a man still refused to believe this, he would do better to stay at home, for he had proved himself no traveler.”

For Poncins, there was no point to travel without the willingness to encounter the human spirit in its many manifestations. I am aware that vague encompassing terms like “human spirit” are out of fashion with many, so let’s try to be more precise. If we are merely instincts and appetites in a causal chain, these can usually be satisfied more easily at home. Whether they arise from the material—flesh transcendent, so to speak—or are sourced from a higher power—spirit incarnate, let’s say—our dreams, delusions, great music, great loves, and even our great crimes make no sense without spirit. By “making no sense,” I mean without spirit, our explanations of ourselves are inadequate.

Father Henry is one example of the inexplicable without the existence of the human spirit.