Goulet.pdf

Edmund Searles
She had recently participated in a search for a five-year-old boy
who had become separated from his father during a snowstorm. She
“freaked out” the father of the boy because she was able to describe
in detail the position of the body and the clothing the boy was wear-
ing when they found him. The image appeared to her as if on a tele-
vision screen in a shop window—she thought her friends were play-
ing a joke on her because it seemed so real.
What is interesting about Meeka’s spirituality is that it involves a
combination of passivity and activity. When I first met her, her involve-
ment in so many different activities and programs in Iqaluit impressed
me. She had recently started her own business. She was a counselor
in the local outward-bound program that takes high school students
on multiday excursions of hunting and camping. She had been nom-
inated to sit on Nunavut’s Wildlife Management Board, which over-
sees the regulation of both subsistence and commercial hunting and
fishing activities in Nunavut. At the same time, she believed that her
destiny was not entirely in her hands. She illustrated for me the con-
cept of ajurnarmat or ajurnaqtuq, meaning “it cannot be helped.” Inuit
use it to refer to difficult situations in which few options exist. When
someone is trapped in a snowstorm, the only possible solution is to
sit tight, because it cannot be helped. Some confuse this attitude with
a sense of futility. Meeka regarded it as both empowering and disem-
powering. She remembered one story of a hunter who was alone and
trapped in the ice. He knew that if he were not rescued within sev-
eral hours, he would not survive. He was able to survive, and he de-
scribed being pushed and helped to safety by a mysterious force. He
had let go of a world in which he was in control, because he knew it
could not be helped. Ajurnarmat can lead to feelings of anxiety and
fear but also to feelings of tranquility and comfort.
I am now much more curious to learn about these visions and other
extraordinary experiences in the Arctic, both in terms of how they
frame her life and how they reveal a particular variety of religious ex-
perience, which is both similar and dissimilar to my new-found ap-
preciation for the Episcopal Church and its creeds of inclusivity, gen-
erosity, and love. I feel prepared to approach all these topics with a