I’d gone on the National Weather Service web site to check the temperature in Kivalina shortly before heading north. It was -40 degrees.

“Where are you taking me?” my fiancé Tom had said, staring at the weather forecast from his comfortable apartment in sunny Northern California.

Once in Kivalina, we found ourselves wondering what next. Anna was stuck overnight in Kotzebue with all flights out canceled due to weather. But she had sent word ahead to some of her friends to deposit us at the coffee shop and help find us shelter for the night.

Heat blasted inside the coffee shop, a welcome contrast to the frigid temperatures outside. Here, a feast was being prepared. Women fried donuts and laid out ingredients for exotic-sounding dishes like caribou stew and meals of whale blubber and what looked like a walrus snout. Children played and teenagers hung out on benches around the edges of the room. Men in parkas, fresh in from the outdoors, wrapped their hands around Styrofoam cups steaming with coffee.

And I looked over to find Tom – much to the raised eyebrows of some onlookers -- sampling some sort of blackened meat strips reported to be bearded seal blubber.

I once read a book called "The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred." In the forward, theologian Huston Smith writes, “The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life.”

We had thrown down that challenge. And now we would simply abandon ourselves to the kindness and mercy of strangers.

And that, too, made me wonder: Is having faith abandoning one’s own fears and skepticism or simply clinging to something else, something safe?

How do people here respond to the challenges of everyday life?

On the plane ride in, the village had resembled a small narrow island on a vast horizon of ice and blowing snow, framed in the distance by mountains. It was difficult to tell beneath the blanket of white where land ended and water began. But several miles out, the ice gave way to navy blue water, home to the bowhead whales, belugas, walruses and bearded seals, which are food for the native people.

“Out here, the snow and the ice, it’s a living thing,” Anna would say. “It becomes alive. To total strangers, just dead ice. For us, it’s very spiritual. We have faith that things could happen in this cold place.”

To me, the ice looked inhospitable, dangerous even. It looked like you could head out toward the horizon and never be seen again. And, I learned, people sometimes did.

Kivalina in winter can reach -57 degrees with windchill. Transportation is by all-terrain vehicle, snowmobile or boat. People are poor. Unemployment is high. Many families live off subsistence hunting and whaling.

The village is a collection of homes surrounding several large water towers with a school, an airstrip, two churches – Episcopal and Friends, a store, a post office, a medical clinic, a community building known as the coffee shop, and fuel tanks.

Some 400 people live on 1.9 square miles. Houses are small by “lower 48” standards. Most are one story. From the outside, some resemble sheds cobbled together with spare lumber. A few lack running water or modern toilets. It is not unheard of to have a big screen satellite TV but no indoor plumbing. Caribou legs and heads spill out of boxes outside one home. Caribou skins dry on a rack outside another. The long curved bows of wooden whaling boats rest gracefully on wooden stands, or on the frozen ground. Whaling season usually gets under way a couple weeks after Easter, I was told.

One wide snowy track circles the outside of the village and cuts through the middle. Giant sandbags have been laid in an attempt to keep the physical borders of the village from erosion. The sandbags are a visible reminder that Kivalina made international headlines earlier this year because it is suing oil companies over the effects of global warming.

The Episcopal church in Kivalina is located next to the coffee shop. It is a long low military-looking building painted forest green, with a small wooden cross perched on top of the roof. The walls sport faux wood paneling. Fluorescent lights beam down from the ceilings. Like life, the pews here are hard. During services, ATVs and snowmobiles hooked to wooden and metal sleds are clustered outside.

On Easter weekend, it is a center of activity, a magnet for the faithful from surrounding villages.

On Good Friday, the Friday before Easter, the service opened with a sermon from which one might draw the conclusion that with hard work and prayer come nice snow machines. Soon, the building began to fill with families. One by one villagers – some in traditional dress, others in jeans and work boots -- took the podium to testify and to sing. Two or three men with guitars plucked out tunes to accompany their selections. The people, some with trembling hands, clutched small wrinkled pieces of paper or sheet music or books or the microphone.

Under the harsh glow of fluorescent lights, there is something genuine and loving about this humble outpouring before the community as villagers take turns testifying about cured ailments, or about God’s mercy that spared a loved one, or about persevering through misfortune.

This public display of faith is, in a way, their own challenge to everyday life, a pilgrimage of a different sort.

It doesn’t matter whether they can sing or not. It doesn’t matter what’s outside the four walls. All that matters is that they’re there.