Andrew Koenig

KIVALINA, Alaska — Long before the heart pounding fear of death began to keep him awake at night, Andrew Koenig was a lively hunter. His grandfather’s Eskimo name, the name given to him at birth, meant “point man.” He could travel 50 to 70 miles a day on the ocean in a boat the size of a pickup truck, in search of whales. He would head out across the ice and snow on his snowmobile, looking for animals whose meat his family could eat and whose fur he could trade for food and gas. He enjoyed flying in helicopters and airplanes.

And then, one day, sometime in his 40s, this fearless joy stopped. He and his wife, who’d had six kids together and their own whaling crew, divorced. Fear prevented him from going too far off shore. Fear came at him at all times, day and night.

“Everything seemed to fall down, you know, like the Book of Job in the Bible. My life is almost similar to that one,” said Andrew, sitting inside Kivalina Episcopal Church in the village he has lived in all his 53 years.

“What happened?” he asked. Somewhere along the way, he began, he said, to fear death.

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KIVALINA, Alaska — Sometimes God or fate has a way of turning life upside down, in a good way.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, if you’d asked the Rev. Anna Frank what her purpose in life was, she would have said to bear children, which she had done, happily.

Then a priest encouraged her to become ordained as a deacon in the Episcopal Church.

“God saw that I had gifts that I could use and taught me how to use those gifts,” she said, explaining how that encouragement, plus 10 years of being a deacon – a job she loved – gave way to eventual ordination as a native Episcopal priest in Alaska.

It is a job that has been at turns frustrating and rewarding.

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KIVALINA, Alaska — My original idea was to follow a missionary on spiritual rounds between villages in the interior of Alaska, preferably when it was warm, like in springtime.

The Rev. Anna Frank had other plans.

Specifically, she wanted to send me to the Arctic Coast. A village church she oversaw there as native missioner for the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska had a huge singing celebration during the Easter holidays.

So, I asked, just how cold is the Arctic Coast in late March? She chuckled.

For months, while driving around the country for Finding Faith, I had been seeking answers to questions like, Where are we going to stay? What will it be like? Is there electricity? Running water? Wireless? Cell phone service?

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KIVALINA, Alaska — I suspected we might be in trouble about 30 seconds before the woman behind me screamed.

The commuter plane we caught in the Arctic Coast village of Kotzebue was flying parallel with what looked like a short, plowed road flanked by snow drifts and surrounded by ice plains. High winds rocked the airplane from side to side. We were clearly about to run out of road. And I tried not to glance sideways at the long-red haired woman with freckles who was flying the plane.

Just as there seemed to be no way we were going to make the runway, I spotted a row of crosses to the right of the tiny landing strip. Oh great, these are the people that crash landed before us, I thought in a fit of eye-rolling.

Lately, I've found myself clinging to a steering wheel on icy roads, peering off the edge of a cliff or heading for a hard landing, repeating the words, have faith. And it occurs to me that Finding Faith, which is about chronicling other people’s faith stories, is also about my own journey of faith, my own efforts to try to understand some unseen force in the universe.

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ELLIOT HIGHWAY, Alaska — Melanie Titus blasted down the highway at the wheel of my rental car like a Native Alaskan born to drive on snow and ice – confident, fearless and totally in command.

“Does this thing have 4-wheel drive?” she asked, a couple miles into our trip from Minto to Fairbanks.

Melanie is the Rev. Bessie Titus’s niece. She works in the village, keeps a young Malamute chained behind her log cabin, heats mostly with wood, and lives much of the winter off the moose meat and salmon her uncle and stepdad hunt for her. She is also direct, forthright, and doesn’t mess around.

“I’m not a full-blown Christian,” she said.

She believes in God. She has faith. She believes in “the Word” as it is written in the Bible. But she sees men and women of what seems like greater faith all around her, people like her Aunt Bessie and some of the elders in the village.

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MINTO, Alaska — In a log cabin filled with photographs, plaques, trophies and other artifacts of a long and vibrant life in this native village, one picture stood out somehow.

It showed a lean young man dressed in a headband, a shirt and jacket and long dark hair, a pickup truck and a red building in the background. Dark glasses hid his expression, but he appeared to be looking at something or someone in the distance. The photo was slightly faded. Someone had carefully embroidered tiny beaded images of a moose, an eagle, a Canadian goose, a dog sled, and the village name into the leather frame.

Thirty years ago, Sarah Silas had been Minto’s nurse, called to the scene of a car accident.
The lives of seven young people from the village hung in the balance. A helicopter was on the way. She saw her son, the one in the picture, dead on the road.

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MINTO, Alaska – This is the tale of two churches. And one Alaskan village. And a road trip with an Episcopal priest.

I met the Rev. Bessie C. Titus at the Chena River Convention Center in Fairbanks. Bessie was sitting behind a laptop at a registration booth next to a table where beaded wallets, beaver skin hats and other native crafts were being sold.

Ten minutes into our conversation about faith, Bessie suggested I visit a village in Alaska's interior. I jumped at the opportunity.

The drive to Minto winds into the Alaskan Interior over mountain passes with blowing snow, icy pavement, steep hills, and semi-trucks hauling supplies to Prudoe Bay. Roads are few. There are Moose, bears and other animals.

I was traveling with a priest, I reassured myself. How bad could it be?

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SALINAS, Calif. — The vision came after failing to cross the border for a month.

Migrant farm workers Ana Dolores and her common-law husband Marcos Barajas had taken a chance returning to Mexico to visit her parents after 10 years in America.

The couple’s children were still in the United States. Now they didn't know when they would see them again.

“It had been a month and I couldn’t cross,” she told me and a friend Isaiah Guzman, who grew up bilingual and agreed to help translate. “We couldn’t cross, and my husband had said that we had to go, we had to because our children were here.”

Dolores begged God for help. “Praying with all my heart, I asked him,” she said. “He told me that I would dream how he would answer my prayers to be able to cross.”

That night, she said, she had what she believes was a divinely inspired dream. In it, she said, she saw clearly how they would cross the next day. And that’s exactly what happened, she said: Because of faith, they crossed the border the following day in the backseat of a Datsun, no questions asked.

“I think that then is when I learned that with faith everything is possible,” she said.

To Dolores, an out-of-work strawberry picker who grew up in Mexico and came to this country seeking work, faith is simple and all encompassing. God is in everything, in any place, on any occasion, she said during an interview inside a one-room makeshift church.

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Marina Ocampo

SALINAS, Calif. —The beautiful grandmother Marina Ocampo has burst into tears, waving off the camera.

This is not the first time I have unintentionally made someone cry. Last week it was the Rev. Joseph Leon in San Jose, recalling a man who has been working in this country for eight years but is not sure, now that he’s ready to go back to Mexico, how his wife who he has been supporting all these years will receive him.

This time, it was the simple question: Why are we here?

I never know what I’m going to get when I ask this question. Some people, like Tim Weste, the San Antonio evangelical I talked to earlier this month, haven’t really thought about it. Some, like Jim Oldread, the homeless man I interviewed last year in Boston, say we’re here to “do good,” to help other people.

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SALINAS, Calif. — The way to Steinbeck Country winds down the Pacific Coast past fishing villages, past fat sea lions lounging on weathered docks, past brightly painted shacks promising the local delicacy, deep-fried artichokes.

A sharp turn inland reveals the vast furrowed earth that gives birth in the California sun to rows of lettuce, artichokes, strawberries, cauliflower and other crops that come to rest on America’s dinner tables. It is not uncommon to see men and women dressed in sweatshirts, hats and other work clothes, advancing down field in waves as they pick crops. Large tractors weave in and out of traffic on residential and commercial streets. Outside local stores, objects depict the Virgin Mary as well as the revolutionary Che Guevara. Signs for Castroville, the next town over, proclaim it to be the artichoke capitol of the world.

This valley where novelist John Steinbeck lived, the land he wrote about, has been home to Sister Lydia Schneider for 40 years. She belongs to the order Sisters of Charity of the Infant Mary. Gray-haired, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned, Sister Lydia tends to the needs of a mobile and ever changing Hispanic community.

“If we recognize one another as having God present in each other, why should it matter where this other person’s come from?” she said. “We share a very basic bond of belonging to the human race.”

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