Eucharist Celebrated on North Pole by 83-year-old Episcopal Priest
Episcopal News Service. October 18, 1991 [91202]
Episcopal Life staff
When the Rev. Frederick A. McDonald of San Francisco leafed through his morning paper one day last summer, he saw news of an international scientific expedition to the Arctic that gripped his imagination.
Icebreakers from the United States, Sweden, Germany, and the Soviet Union were commemorating International Polar Year by a cooperative effort to collect scientific data and reach the North Pole.
The Soviet ship would also try to become the first surface ship to cross the Arctic ice mass from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and was offering passage to 100 paying adventurers.
It took the 83-year-old, intrepid Episcopal priest only a few telephone calls to track down a travel agency that had the information he wanted -- there was one berth left on the Soviet ship. Within 24 hours McDonald's passage was confirmed.
Within 14 days McDonald was bound for Murmansk in the Soviet Union, with his cold-weather clothes and his "professional gear," consisting of a clerical collar, a tippet, a white stole, a box of communion wafers, and prayer book.
To little amazement of his friends, McDonald -- whose ministry has included parishes in Rhode Island, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Jerusalem, Italy, and France -- had embarked on another adventure.
On August 4 at 6:15 A.M, as the nuclear-powered icebreaker edged close to its goal, 25 of the ship's passengers gathered with McDonald in the ship's lecture room for an ecumenical service of hymns, Scripture lessons, and prayer. In addition to its ecumenical complexion, the contingent was international -- participants had traveled from India, South Africa, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Japan, and the United States to be part of history.
Of particular meaning, McDonald recalled, were the verses from the Benedicite that speak about winter, frost, cold, ice, snow, seas, floods, whales -- and all creatures that move in the waters -- praising and magnifying God forever.
When Morning Prayer had ended, McDonald invited the passengers to stay for the Eucharist. "I didn't ask them what denomination they were affiliated with," McDonald said of his 14 communicants. "I just invited them to share if they wished."
Minutes after the service concluded, at 8:20 A.M., passengers and crew joined in another celebration as the Sovetskiy Soyuz, one of the nuclear-powered icebreakers in the Soviet fleet, passed directly over the North Pole.
"Once you get there, you can't stay long," McDonald said, explaining that broken ice mass and sea currents kept pulling on the ship.
The event was the first Anglican worship service conducted by a chaplain aboard a Soviet icebreaker and, according to Robert Keith Headland, curator and historian at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University and also a passenger on the icebreaker, it was undoubtedly the first Eucharist at the North Pole.
At the service, Headland memorialized those explorers who had "sailed but not returned." Headland said that the Arctic explorations have had more than their fair share of tragedies and lives lost. "If we are talking about the North Pole it has been hundreds [of lives lost]; if we are talking about the Arctic it has been thousands," he said.
McDonald's 20-day voyage was the subject of California Bishop William Swing's letter to his clergy last month. "While the rest of us are sitting around tables trying to figure out what to do about the Decade of Evangelism, it's refreshing to have someone in our midst, with decades of evangelism, also searching for new spiritual frontiers," said Swing. "Perhaps Fred is what the decade is all about."