Beulah Land

"I live in glory,
I drink from an eternal spring
And I eat manna;
I live in Beulah Land…"

That was a peculiar song my father always sang aloud when tending to mundane chores. I would tag along, listening, a small shadow absorbing the vision of a much better land beyond. "Beulah," in Inuktitut, sounds a lot like piulaaq, which means "the best" – and that's what I thought my father was singing. I only found out later that he was actually saying, "Beulah," and that left me utterly confused. No matter what he was singing, I couldn't figure out what he was talking about. Wherever did my father, according to this hymn-like song, think he was headed? A vision of a far off place, a much better land, danced in my head. Based upon the reverence and frequency with which he sang it, it was obvious that he was singing of some kind of personal paradise, and that thoughts of it swept his mind away from the dull repetition of knotting and unknotting countless little squares of fishnet.

My paradise, at that time, was a living one, with endless summer days under a stunning blue sky. The world was a kaleidoscope of vast wild flower patches, bird nests containing tiny, perfect, pale colored eggs; tundra as far as the eye could see.

Only children can actually make work out of intense play. There were the constant trips to a friend’s tent for games, where I would watch kids cook homemade candy over a camp stove, getting the caramel consistency just right by adding powdered milk. I was not allowed to play with food. Both sugar and milk were in scarce supply. To my parents, a couple of cups of sugar seemed a scandalous amount to waste on such an uncertain experiment. Was that what it was like to live on manna, I sometimes wondered, as in my father’s song? Was it being able to use as much of an ingredient for your cooking as you wished? Was that the manna, falling like snow?

I tried asking my father such questions, the answers never satisfactory. The limited answers only encouraged more questions. For example, if my dad died and went to Heaven, where would I be? Would I find him in the place some adults called quvianakturvik ("place to be forever happy"), that others called qilak ("dome of the sky"), and how exactly did one get up there? What if I got lost or taken somewhere else, like one of my friends who got sent to the wrong community upon returning from a prolonged stay at a southern hospital. Would "they" (whomever regulates the afterlife) know where to take me?

Most importantly, what if my father didn’t go to piulaaq, or Beulah Land (assuming they were the same thing)? What if he went somewhere else? Where would that place be, and did spirits have to "live" someplace? What if we died as children, never growing into adulthood – if my sister died first and I got to see her much later, as an adult, would she know that it was me?

I got the usual: Don’t ask so many questions. To this day, I don’t remember ever being given a satisfactory answer as to what happened to children when they died, except some stock thing about angels bringing children up to God (I never had a problem with wrapping my mind around angels, since I thought they were simply an order of spirits, in which every Inuk believed). I remember often thinking, in frustration: Who wants to go to Heaven? You would just have to listen to those angels sing all day, and that would be pretty boring.

What really haunted me was that song of my father’s, because I sensed, somehow, that he wasn’t singing about Heaven. This was something else, something deeper than that casual word of "heaven" people flung about. Nor was it really Beulah Land – a veneer term, a mask over what was really being said. It was piulaaq. It was where everything is the best.

You have to understand that my feeling, at that time, was intuitive. I had neither the faculties, nor the ability to attempt articulation of my gut instincts, that I have now. But children are canny in their own way: They have a gift for observing their world without conscious thought, and for sensing when something is wrong with it. In general, I was baffled by a lot of the beliefs that the adults around me seemed so comfortable with. It felt, at that time, that they were comprehending something my own brain simply couldn't get a grip on. I could never understand, for example, why the happy place of quvianakturvik was located in the sky. In fact, it was often assumed to be the sky, since it was at once called qilak — the atmosphere itself. I kept looking up there, thinking: How does anything stick? Does everything up there fly all the time, and never fall? It seemed impossible, so I simply suspected that it was a kind of secret or riddle, the answer to which I was not yet privy.

I remember thinking, in frustration, who wants to go to Heaven?
Hell was even more confusing… full of dust and only butterflies to eat…

Hell was even more confusing. Many of the adults, especially Elders, around me seemed to hold to the traditional belief that those who broke taboos went to a place in the earth that was full of dust; where people were eternally unhappy, and there were only butterflies to eat. Shamans, too, were said to visit this place, just as they also visited the qilak, the deep sea, and the moon. The adults, however, also spoke of a Hell, a place they called ikumaaluk ("terrible fire"), kappianakturvik ("fearful place"), or taaraaluk ("terrible darkness"). They always sounded like they were taking about the same thing, and yet the names for the place often sounded contradictory. If Hell was a place of darkness (i.e., taaraaluk), then how could it also be burning (i.e., ikumaaluk)? At the same time, non-Inuit people were telling me that the core of the planet was made of burning, molten nickel and iron, and the Elders seemed okay with this idea. Did that mean that people who went to ikumaaluk/Hell were somehow plunged into the Earth's core? If so, how could such suffering possibly be eternal, since they would be burned up in an instant? Also, how could such a place be reconciled with the dusty, chthonian Hell of Inuit belief — or were they separate places, both existent and adjacent to each other, but located somewhere underground? Whenever I asked questions about such things, the adults only laughed, pretended not to have heard me, or looked as though the questions deeply disturbed them. With no definitive answers, I became more than ever convinced that they were hiding something from me.

It took the onset of adulthood to help me realize that those adults had never been hiding anything from me: They had been hiding something from the world around them, the new world of missionaries and syncretic endeavors to convert them from their older, "heathen' beliefs. Those adults had been desperately trying to hold onto the beliefs that their Elders had taught, that had once given them comfort and connected them to the ancient cosmology of their ancestors. At once, they had been trying to hold onto such beliefs while embracing those aspects of Christianity that they had also felt comfortable with. Sometimes, such reconciliation had made sense; at other times, it hadn't. But they'd been doing their best to make the two cosmologies real in their minds, while abandoning neither — yet one more example of Inuit adaptability, and this one religious. And when the cosmologies had clashed, I, a little girl unaware of the memetic struggle raging around me, had been left to puzzle out what even the adults around me had but ill-understood.

Sometimes, when I’ve thought back upon my father’s answers concerning angels and Heaven in the afterlife, I’ve wondered: At what point did all that – his semi-conversion – take place? My father was brought up in a most traditional society. There shouldn’t have been anything in his background to make his ideas so Judeo-Christian. To this day, his adaptation of Christian cosmology still nags at me. Not the fact. Just the "when" and "how" of it. What does it feel like to be… converted?

Yet I suppose that Inuit have always modified everything to suit themselves, so their own form of Christianity – a traditional cosmology with the formal overlay of new religion – should not be a surprise. For behind those often-hidden, and sometimes conflicting, personal takes on religion has always lain the sacredness of the isuma: the inviolate secret cosmology of the individual, which all Inuit must respect. In this sense does every Inuk become own church. And that was why I wanted a glimpse at this Beulah Land, my father’s secret paradise, so perfect to him that he had to express it in song. Yet the fact that it was my father’s own vision precluded my ever seeing it.

The strangest thing happened a couple of years ago. I called my father to wish him a happy 82nd birthday. I ended up chatting with my youngest brother, mentioning that there was this hymn our father always sang during chores. My brother told me that he still hums that very tune.

Think of it: half a century, singing of Beulah Land; or, of that which is piulaaq – the best.

Pijariiqpunga. 

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