The Holiness of the Inhospitable

Wow, I'm sorry I haven't posted in such a long time. That last week in March was full of midterm papers and such, and then I've been in Iceland for the past week - which is what I really want to talk about. Hopefully I'll get a chance to write a more detailed account of my classes soon - they're really cool and I want to tell you all about them. But first things first: ICELAND!

I think that the past week has been one of the most amazing trips of my life - and I've been on a lot of great trips! It was a combination of many awesome things: we had a great, small group of students (there were 11 of us), we had amazing leaders and guides, there was a lot of excellent (and surprising) food, and everything we saw and experienced was positive; I can't think of a single low point of the trip, and it's hard to pick out any one highlight. We saw the volcano erupting (from a safe distance), saw the Northern Lights twice - once when we were at the volcano, went horseback riding on Icelandic horses through lava fields, saw many glorious mountains and waterfalls and hot springs and a geysir erupting three times, we went to the Blue Lagoon, we ate delicious food, and most of all we shivered and tried to comprehend how the Vikings could have possibly settled on Iceland. You can see the best pictures I took here.

The landscape of Iceland is so barren and unlike anything I've ever seen before. When we first arrived and were driving from Keflavik airport to our hotel in Reykajvik, I honestly thought we could have been on the moon or Mars! If I hadn't been able to see the clear blue sky and telephone poles and road we were on, I wouldn't have known where to look. I think that is one of the single most startling things about Iceland. The landscape is entirely uninviting - beautiful, but very uninviting - and the weather was really harsh while we were there. It was so hard to imagine the settlers arriving from Norway and carving a life out of these desolate rocks. Granted, the landscape was very different when they arrived: there were trees, for example, and the climate was warmer then. Human habitation has not been kind to Iceland.

Despite the strangeness of the landscape, though, everything felt holier in a way that is hard to describe. It's easy to see why many Icelanders believe in elves and otherworldly creatures. On Tuesday, when we did the "Golden Circle Tour" - the tour almost every tourist goes on of the geysirs and waterfalls and the Althing - we made a stop at a small church. The church is where the bishop's seat used to be (it later moved to Reykjavik). When we went into the church, the light from the stained glass windows was casting the simple white sanctuary in a brilliant red and yellow pattern of lights. I felt when we entered that this church, of all the churches I've visited this semester on tours, was the only one that felt properly holy and sacred. Even as we took our pictures and my travel companions posed, I felt like this was a sanctuary that was actually sanctified. I felt a little bizarre taking pictures, but I did anyway, trying to capture the way the light fell and hallowed the space. I think, even though Icelanders, like Danes and most Scandinavians, no longer practice Christianity to a great extent, the barrenness of the landscape combined with the simple, elegant beauty of the space made this small church feel worshipful in a way the cathedral in Ribe - with its tourist information desk and large, numerous tour groups - could not.

There's a lot more I could say about Iceland, but I think that was what I drew most from the trip: the delicacy and preciousness of life in an inhospitable, difficult setting feels much closer than in a place where it is easy to live.