A Finland Diary
A Journey into the Religious Past & Present of Finland
by Jim Forest
Friday, May 8, 1998 / New Valaam Monastery: There’s thunder in the distance and a waterfall-like roar all around the building. I’ve opened the window—three layers of glass—just to better hear and feel it. It’s cool outside but not freezing, though there is snow here and there on the ground and the adjacent lake is still under ice. I’m a lot farther north than I was when I put on my spring jacket and flew out of Holland this morning. This is the Finnish part of Karelia. The nearest city with an airport is Finland’s easternmost city, Joensuu, 375 kilometers northeast of Helsinki and 65 kilometers west of the Russian border. Ten years ago I was on the other side of the border not far from here.
It was an easy flight, clear skies the whole way. After admiring the patchwork patterns made by polders near the Ijsselmeer, I had a fine view of the Wadden Zee and its sandbar-like islands, then across the North Sea to Denmark, over Sweden, then to Finland. There were three hours on the ground in the Helsinki airport before boarding a crowded plane to Joensuu, where I was met by Juha Riikonen, staff member of the Lay Academy at New Valaam Monastery.
We drove to the monastery, passing through a shower so heavy that it made me think of Noah’s flood. It was hard to see anything. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started, revealing the wilderness of rural Finland—dense forest and lakes. Finland has a population of five million people and nearly 200,000 lakes: one lake for every 15 people. We had a fine view of a vermilion setting sun sandwiched between gray clouds over lake and black forest.
There was a bag supper waiting when we arrived—by then it was past nine, when the kitchen closes. Before eating it in my little room, I walked around just to get a sense of the place. The main structure is a handsome, white-walled, copper-domed church in the old Russian style. The mosaic icon over the entrance indicates the church is dedicated to the Transfiguration.
Saturday night, May 9, 1998: Kristus nousi kuolleista! Totisesti nousi! (Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!) The Paschal greeting is hard enough to write, still harder to pronounce correctly.
It’s 10:00 p.m. and I’m in an office of the New Valaam Lay Academy adjacent to the icon painting room where a dozen skillful amateurs are busily at work despite the hour. Icon painting is one of the most popular courses here. The quality of the work is impressive, though all the students at this session are Lutherans except their Orthodox teacher, Alexander Wikström. Lutherans come in great numbers to New Valaam—about 150,000 visitors a year, probably 90 percent of them Lutheran. One of the monastery’s vocations is to be a place where non-Orthodox people can learn about Orthodox Christianity. It must be one of the reasons that about 600 adults each year join the Orthodox Church in Finland—this in a country in which the Orthodox population altogether is roughly 60,000.
The day began with the Divine Liturgy in the church. Before the service, I was able to venerate Finland’s most treasured icon, the Konevits Mother of God, painted six centuries ago on Mount Athos and given to the Valaam Monastery from its foundation. It has miraculously survived many fires and wars.
This afternoon I gave a lecture on prayer with icons to the icon students plus about thirty participants in other classes. By and large Finnish Lutherans, however attracted to icons and other aspects of Orthodox Christianity, seemed surprised at the idea that it might be a good thing to a have an icon corner in one’s home and to use it as a place of daily prayer. I read them Gorky’s vivid description of his grandmother’s time of morning prayer (from the introduction to Praying with Icons), then spent the next hour talking about what we could learn about the fundamentals of prayer from this hard-pressed, uneducated Russian woman who died before the 1917 Revolution.
The Lay Academy has about 3,000 students per year. The average course is three to five days and can be on a wide range of topics that have some bearing on Orthodoxy: Liturgy, prayer, icons (not only painting them but learning to see and understand icons), church architecture, church history, monastic life, literature by Orthodox authors, the social dimension of Orthodoxy, and so on. All students take part in some of the services in the church and get a glimpse of monastic life.
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