Losing my religion

Losing my religion

It’s risky, writing about something as personal as religion. If you are one of my friends but don’t really want to hear me talking about religion, I don’t mind. You’ll still be my friend. Religion makes some people uncomfortable. And to be honest, I have a very fuzzy notion of what ‘religion’ actually means. I think it’s organized spirituality with assumptions that all members ascribe to. I know that horrible things have been done in the name of religion, but that’s true for almost everything else – from education to mother love – so why you would throw the baby out with the bath water is not something I understand. My religion is a large part of who I am and why I act the way I do. I’m not saying I’m a goody-goody or better than anyone who doesn’t go to church. Maybe I just need that support more than others.

So here I go.

I was baptized a Lutheran when I was two months old in Zion Lutheran Church in Fairport Harbor, Ohio. This church had Finnish services at the time, but I think I was baptized in English – at least my baptismal certificate is in English. We went to Sunday school though I don’t remember my parents going to church a lot. It was probably difficult with six children.

One day, when my sister Kris and I were little, we came home from our Lutheran Sunday school class in tears. I think we had forgotten our offering, and we had heard that people who don’t give money to the church would go to hell. My mother (who was raised Presbyterian) apparently put her foot down then, and we started going to a different, non-Lutheran church that didn’t tell little children they were going to hell.

When I was 12, I was attending confirmation classes at St. Paul’s Methodist Church in Encino, California, and a few weeks before our big confirmation ceremony, my parents split up. Dad drove the car to Northern California, and we were left without a vehicle. Because I couldn’t get to church, I was never confirmed. I wonder if the pastor called my mother to find out what happened. Like so many other things that happened in my adolescence, I didn’t question it. It was just another loss.

During those years, I read the Bible a lot. When things got very difficult, I found comfort there. I didn’t go to church regularly again until I was married and pregnant. But I always believed there was a God – just not that He (I admit, yes, old-fashioned as I am, I think of He) always answers our prayers the way we’d like.

When I was pregnant with Erik, my oldest, my husband and I went looking for a church in Newtown, Connecticut. We went to several. After the Lutheran service, which I was eager and curious to try out, he had the same reaction my mother had had: “So grim!” We ended up in a Methodist church instead, a loving and accepting community where both my children were baptized and where my daughter Maija first showed her keen musical perception by crowing “Yay” at the end of every hymn.

After my divorce and a move to Oregon, weekend mornings became too precious to spend on sitting in a church pew with two squirmy young ones. But a letter from my ex-mother-in-law arrived,  scolding me for not bringing my children to church. I will always be grateful to her for that, because if she hadn’t written that letter, I would have continued to catch up on sleep on Sunday mornings instead of eventually finding my church home. I could write for hours about it, but it’s important to know two things: it accepted me and my two kids without asking about the absence of a dad, and it was no doubt significant in sending my children down the path of professional music.

I have to write about my pastor, Tom Dodd. He’s not your smiling, smarmy ‘God-blesses-Americans-and-the-rich’ type of guy. He’ll be the first to tell you that being a Christian is hard, not least of all because it means you have to love everyone. His sermons always talk about the Bible and how it applies to your life right now, and they are always really, really smart. He will also be the first one to admit his own faults and shortcomings. Once he told me the story that saved my life. I was at the end of my rope because nothing in my life was working. I’ll spare the details because they are pretty personal, but they had to do with tenure, parenting and men. I asked him how God could want me to be this miserable. He said there was a book in which rabbis put God on trial for the Holocaust. They brought evidence, they deliberated, and they eventually convicted Him. ‘So what happened next?’ I asked. He said, “They continued to worship.”

So here I am, a very flawed and petty and impatient and often ungrateful Christian. I can’t tell you why I believe. I simply do. I may have ‘lost’ my religion, but not my faith. I’m not a theologian. I’m not someone who loves to discuss Bible verses with other people. But I do like being in service to other people, and that’s probably why I’m a teacher.

With this long background, now we get to what I really want to talk about, and that is the experience of being a Lutheran in a country where that is something people can be without thinking about it at all. If you are born in Finland and your parents are Lutherans, you are assumed to be a Lutheran, and you have to go to the parish office to remove yourself from the church.

When I arrived in Finland, I went to see about joining a local church. The woman in the parish office seemed angry, not happy. I figured out why: almost nobody comes to that office to join a church. They come to get out. And she had no idea what to do about signing someone up for membership. And I found out that joining the church means you pay more taxes, which go to maintaining all the old and beautiful buildings where very few people actually worship anymore. But this was the thing that puzzled me most: in order to join and be able to pay more taxes, I had to provide proof of my baptism and my confirmation. So I can either go out and get confirmed really fast so I can be a member and pay taxes, or not join the church, not pay taxes and get to attend anyway.

I had a good chuckle about this, and you can guess which option I chose.

The parish office told me that ‘my’ church was the huge modern one on a hill not far from my side of town, Pielisensuun Church. So for my first Joensuu church visit, I went there. There was hardly anyone in that large worship space, and those who were there ignored me completely. Nobody seemed to care who I was or why I was there. And there didn’t seem to be any real joy. That’s one thing that makes my church at home such a great place to be: everyone seems happy to be there, happy to be part of this imperfect and unlikely family, happy to be singing and thinking and praying and caring about each other.

The next church visit I made was to the Finnish Orthodox church. (I’m not going to lie: the scene from ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ when Golda goes to ‘the enemy’ to find out news about her third daughter was running through my mind.) Here there was a lot of what I was missing from home: the joyfulness, the community, the loving greetings. And one person smiled at me. But all the kissing of icons, the lighting of candles, the constant crossing and genuflecting, the incense, and the very patriarchal feel of the place made me realize that I would always be a foreigner in a worship setting like that.

Finally, last Sunday I went to the large Lutheran church downtown. (According to the woman in the office, I am not supposed to go there because it is not my local church. But I took a chance.) Here, finally, I felt some glimmerings of ‘home’. I was greeted right at the door, I followed the service easily because the preacher spoke very, very slowly, and the liturgy followed the same order as at home. Oddly enough, all of the celebrants were women. The interior was so appealing – the vault was painted with patterns from local trees (sprigs of pine and birch, for example). And several women had, like me, arrived by bike and carried their helmets in, stowed their gear in the coatroom, and strolled into the sanctuary in pants.

Well, this was a long post, and I congratulate you for getting all the way here. I have lots more to say about religion, and losing it, but I will save it for another day. 

Settling in

It’s been almost two months since I moved to Finland. You can tell I’m not quite settled in, because those words “moved to Finland” still give me a little electric shock of – what? Horror? Surprise? Delight? I think it feels mostly naughty. Not ‘oh you horrible person’ naughty; more ‘wow, did you actually do something for yourself for once?’-naughty. Friends tease me about my ‘Lutheran’ sense of duty and how it sometimes goes overboard. I can see now that sticking with a part-time job where I was working full-time hours was, despite all the joys of teaching high-school students (and I mean that with utmost sincerity) and of working with kind, generous and funny colleagues, not the best idea in terms of my financial well-being. And, in the US, that also meant not good for my health. I would have ended up with no pension, no health care and probably nowhere to live. Add to that the fact that I was usually working in the evening as well – sometimes until midnight or 1 a.m. – and getting little exercise – and I suppose I was heading for something I’d rather not consider just now.

So I revel in my naughtiness. It’s a naughtiness that makes me cheerful. And sometimes I even start laughing while riding around on my bike because it feels so good. I suppose a few years from now Joensuuvians (how’s that for a word?) will talk about that crazy English professor who rides around on her bike, cackling. Maybe by then I’ll really be settled.

What does ‘settling in’ look like? It means I have a routine down for loading my bag and bike in the morning, and for packing up to go home around 4 each day. It means I have enough dishes and furniture to make things cozy in my strangely empty apartment – things I have enjoyed seeking out on a Facebook fleamarket site and in local Good-Will type shops. (And today I even found a chair next to the dumpster, which I quickly laid claim to. Now I can have three people over for dinner.) In fact, tomorrow I am getting a red velvet sofa for my bedroom. That room is the emptiest because it’s big and only has a bed and night table in it. A red sofa might be just the place to recline and read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Finnish.

Settling in may mean that my Finnish is getting better. Today I met two separate people and wrote to a third about items I had bought. All these transactions took place in Finnish, and none of these people let on that they thought/knew/suspected I was a foreigner. I don’t shrink from my e-mails anymore, and for the first time today, I left the house without my dictionary. I’m thinking that ‘click’ of feeling comfortable in a foreign language may happen sooner rather than later.

It means I have a pretty good idea of what to buy in the grocery store when I walk in rather than strolling the aisles reading every label. Though today I found the largest grocery store yet – where they actually had kale! – so I spent some time enjoying the large selection. It must have felt this way to East-Bloc citizens coming to the US for the first time and seeing no empty shelves anywhere, and I surprised myself feeling almost giddy at the capitalistic joy of long rows of shiny consumer goods.

Settling in also means that all my classes have started. It’s a full load, but having no more than 18 students in any one class means that the grading is minimal and manageable, and co-teaching three of them means that the classes have basically been prepared for me. My MA-level course called ‘Translation Project 1’ is fun because I managed to get the students a real commission. I get to talk to them about the translator life for an hour each week, and mentor their teams for the second. Teaching something you love has to be one of the greatest privileges on earth.

And finally, settling in means I have some friends. I can count on Stuart the Canadian to want to go to lunch at about the same time I do. Emma the Swede lives in the apartment building next door, so I’ve gone there for tea. Greg the Australian has kindly driven me and various pieces of furniture to my apartment, and Cathy the American (of course she had to be a Cathy) has taken me out for Chinese food. Michael the Liverpudlian/German and I organized a successful student pub night, ostensibly for practicing English, that had a great turnout. And Nina in Helsinki has not only been the biggest fan of this blog (and has even said I should turn it into a book!) – she is one of the most amazing hosts I’ve ever had the privilege of staying with. She makes it look effortless as she whips up delicious meals and desserts, picks me up and drops me off or arranges for someone else to do it, offers a bed and sauna and her fun company – all while being a mom and wife and avid Bruce Springsteen fan and working full-time. It’s great that she’s in Helsinki, because I’ll probably be flying out of there quite a bit – but I wish she lived closer.

No, not finally after all. I have to say something about the weather, because settling in means that the year is progressing. You can feel it very strongly and see harbingers of it everywhere. The outdoor tables and chairs have been removed at most restaurants and pubs. Cars and bikes have their lights on in the morning when I go in to work now at 8 a.m. The wind was stronger today than I’ve noticed before, and yellow leaves were whirling all over the place. The earth is turning. We’re settling towards darkness.