Blog
01.May 2004 - 00:00
God, warming secret placesA religious autobiography
You were a secret, my mother's wonderful secret, whom she used to visit to dispel her sorrows and replace them with joy and laughter. Even a child noticed it, and why shouldn't she. When mother had spoken with You, she was like new, as if she'd been bathing in light. Some sorrow might take her behind the door of her room but joy brought her back. I loved such chambers and hide-outs. I went to have a look, and there was nothing there. And yet there was something. Before I learned to give it a name, I recognised a light, like warm sunshine. Such was God, warming secret places, the corners of the room. Him, I loved.
You didn't push your way into my childhood, but You attracted me irresistibly. From You came joy and everything beautiful. Mother, a woman in love with God, drew me into a wonderful sphere of power, without any coercion. Therefore I don't remember a time when I wouldn't have longed for God. This, I long for. And I long for more. " I Sing of Jesus, Jesus Only."
It was not until later that I realised what a happy child's faith I was given to live with. It was completely free from spiritual violence; there was at once freshness and warmth, with space to come and go. Mother understood how not to beat us over the head with God; many people, sadly, do not. Is it because their faith is weak? I don't know. But, perhaps, there may be some lack of trust when someone appoints himself as God's representative and takes on his shoulders complete responsibility for His Kingdom. Even more than God would, they want to make things sure and certain, and press others to join them.
I've had my share of this too. There was talk of a youth revival in my hometown at the end of the 60s. My older siblings got to know new friends, and I, a curious nine year old, wanted to go along and to be involved in everything. But, alas, my red dress was said to be the colour of Sodom and Gomorra. So, I sought out the story of these towns in my blue-coloured Bible and understood even less. And perhaps the point was that I was not expected to understand. Someone apparently needed to find enough things to oppose and condemn, be it a child's dress or mother's curtains. The curtains should have been changed too, but there was not a chance that mother would have done so. Mother, the daughter of an evangelical home, just laughed. "They will calm down; the Lord will clip their wings."
As I grew into womanhood, the revival movement in my hometown did not become any more cheerful. At the church's summer conference, a young man, glancing at me only furtively, shrieked: "What was the name of this sister, then?" As a sixteen-year-old, I summarised a woman's lot in my diary: "Sister, in third person, no eye contact."
Part of a woman's lot was carrying guilt about the way she walked and what she wore. Or was I just imagining it? At least I remember how I didn't understand anything when someone from the church, only few years older than me, broached the subject of the way I walked. "You walk gracelessly", this brother in Christ reasoned when I enquired what was wrong with the way I walked.
Gradually, we learned that we women were walking temptations. But actually, which women? It was safer for them to think of us as sisters. I remembered how at the age of eleven I once dreamed all the way home from school of being a woman and what it would be like having my period. Could I really ever feel completely down when my periods eventually started? I wouldn't need to do anything else than remember I was a woman. A Real Woman! I felt great, yet giddy, at the thought. I would have in my body a continuous antidote to sorrow, an inexhaustible joy, and I didn't believe that any setback could affect me with its full force any more. Now at the age of sixteen, I had all the delights for which I had eagerly waited. But instead of joy I had unspeakable shame about my gender: a particular part of me hindered others' faith and seemed to be a curse instead of a blessing
Then there came a phase when it was better as women to remain silent. If anybody had actually said this and openly emphasized it, probably nobody in our Lutheran church would have believed it. But when we were surreptitiously led to believe it, it worked. Once when we returning from a young people's trip on a bus, one of the boys said that "now those brothers who have something on their hearts can speak". It hit us girls like a blow in the stomach. We understood at once. I saw tears in my friend's eyes and a shock in her countenance – for some reason I couldn't cry. I had already given up playing the flute at the Conservatory, my dearest hobby, so as to be a better churchgoer. And if being better meant being silent, I would, of course, be silent, too.
I didn't cry. After all, whom could I have cried for or been bitter with? These were my friends; and I loved them. We had wonderful times together but we were also crazy. I can't blame anyone, save perhaps the spirit of the times and the collective subconscious with its religious sub-culture, which was so stern and repressive with its supporters. We young people were accomplices in our own treatment. We created our own harsh rules. Thoughtlessly, we competed with one another in spiritual radicalism. If we made mistakes, we were responsible for making them ourselves.
For over three years I didn't open my mouth in our young people's evenings – not even when the prohibition to speak withered away bit by bit. When I spoke again for the first time, my heart was pounding, my ears were burning and my voice cracked. I felt as if I was doing something wrong and although my intellect said otherwise, my body disagreed.
As an observer I had began to notice new things. For example, I saw that people were more likely to laugh at a joke if it came from a man's mouth. If a woman told a joke, people began to suspect her motive, why she had to say that. Was it a lust for power, a need to perform, or something else? I often tested this observation. I whispered a comment to a boy friend sitting next to me, which made him really laugh and he repeated it aloud. The reception was so different when one of the young men spoke that clearly it was not worth wasting my breath. As Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message", and you couldn´t do anything about it. And my poor boy friend knew nothing about the fact that I used him as a laboratory specimen to test attitudes toward gender differences.
The unspoken command to be silent was a hard blow for many girls who were active in the church. It depressed and wounded some of them for a long time. I would never repeat the experiment. I think there was something very wrong what happened. Yet, paradoxically, those dysfuctional experiences saved my own soul. I don't mean that they affected my eternal destiny but ironically, they kept me whole and complete. I learned an invaluable thing about myself: how dangerous it is when my soul begins to leak.
Those years of enforced silence awakened me to see the talkative side of my soul and perhaps prevented it from running dry. Before that, I had become used to trotting out words I didn't understand. But now I realised that incessant talking is a dangerous state in which we easily create non-existent realities. In C.S. Lewis' words: "Nothing is more unholy than he whose hands have been charred while handling holy things." I ended up in a world where there was no use for my faith and I could not turn it into emotion or to the satisfaction of grateful looks in young people's evenings. Instead, my faith just was; presence without compensation. In a different way, the words I read or heard and their shades of meaning became more meaningful as I was not able to spew them out and to put my thoughts into new words. Apparently, I was of no use; all I could do was to spend my time in the glow of love. Since my childhood, this was my first invitation to contemplation and quietness, to come back to the beloved, quiet God, warming those secret places.
If I may be permitted to speak thus, how rumbustious, dogmatic and self-assured was our God of the seventies. We meant well but did we not at the same time mock Him? We had our Rotring-pens and our notebooks in which we drew and wrote in small and clear script, putting God and the cosmos in order. We knew ourselves and our place, grabbed at everything and delighted in our achievements, in a system where everything was submitted to faith, to that superior intellectual system. Oh God, how must You have seen us then, we who believed in our belief? Were You amused or weeping, I would like to ask.
And yet, hidden God, you were not far off after all. Through all our dust, froth and frivolity You consented to awaken in me that same longing: "I Sing of Jesus, Jesus Only". I was mad about You, in love with You.
I was in love, but was my love blind? Of course, I had to ask myself whether my love could withstand the truth about the world, its distress and suffering; and the obvious absence of God, atheism, other religions, those who have never heard? Had I been brought up in a barrel, albeit a lovely one?
Thus, in a way, this same love which, like a magnet, drew me near to God , also drove me away. Because of the love itself, I had to expose my faith to all possible objections. I was studying philosophy, other religions, theology. Thus, I tried to prepare myself so that I would not naively succumb to the intellectual dishonesty of provincialism and compulsive religious movements. If the truth couldn't stand up to reality, so much for the truth.
Critical thinking, of course, never ends. In order to believe anything at all, one probably has also to be ready to give it up at some point. Otherwise faith becomes a desperate mage of make-believe lacking true dependence on God.
But an honest person cannot remain open only to doubts. One has to be open also to faith, to the possibility that God exists and that we cannot necessarily do anything about it. We also have to accept the fact that God may be different than would seem fitting to the 21st century mind.
The study of philosophy and comparative religion taught me that everyone at one time or another has to make choices and take leaps of faith. It is part of being human, and not even a scientific realist can honestly preserve his dignity as a supposedly objective observer. That right is not given to us human beings clinging with all our senses to the world. We cannot jump out of our skins, or expect to find an Archimedian Point outside ourselves.
Even more difficult than intellectual questions is the problem of suffering. Certainly we had it solved on paper: we knew in theory that God had taken a great risk by creating us human beings in His image, that is, free. This meant that we would also be free to destroy and ravage, turn our backs on goodness, and bring about suffering.
Yet the suffering of the innocent strips me of any desire to explain. I was confronted with perhaps the most difficult question of my life when my seven-year-old daughter looked at her sick little brother and expressed the concern: if God loves us, why does he allow our baby to suffer like this?
The question both horrified and impressed me. How could such a little person find words that could shake the strongest faith? With a child's honesty, she had struck the nerve: why does a loving, good God allow it?
Of course, the question was a familiar one. But I had heard it presented usually as a theoretical, intellectually fascinating question. I remember as a student how, in our foundational course of logics, we had – perhaps for our amusement – done an exercise about God's existence and the perceived imperfections in the world. We came to the conclusion that the suffering in God's world did Him no credit at all. Thus, necessarily either God is not good or He is not omnipotent. The teacher looked at us, amused. We students smiled quite smugly, as if to pity such a God who could so easily be humiliated by a syllogism of logic.
That theoretical question didn't disturb my faith, but my daughter's question was different. It lacked any intellectual vanity or desire to impress. She didn't quibble or try to find a pretext, but neither did she try to dismiss the problem by just believing blindly. Nothing I had learned was of any help to me then. What could I say to rescue my child's faith?
As I was searching for words I realised that there were none. There is no intellectually satisfying answer to the problem of suffering. Because if there were, it would become a weapon whereby human crises would be cut short by the intellectual violence of the arrogant: just read the answer from a book! It would spoil the chance of grieving through a grief, at the risk of becoming authentically disillusioned. If there exists faith and hope, they may come at their own pace, without being forced. Even though a person is thus left without the satisfaction of an airtight explanation, this doesn´t mean that he is left alone, abandoned. I found myself believing thus.
There are no ready words. Perhaps it's meant to be like this so that we will seek the answers behind the words and we ourselves will become part of the answer. The answer of the Christian faith to the problem of suffering is a person, God, who became man. Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest expresses it like this: "If God was the God of pagans or philosophers, he could escape to the highest heaven and our misery would cast him down from there. But you know that he has come toward us. You can shake your fists at him, spit in his face, whip him and in the end nail him to the cross, it doesn't matter. It has already happened, my daughter…"
This kind of answer to pain and suffering is not easy or to be pronounced lightly – you can't ignore it. It says: don't become bitter with God because there is suffering in the world – for the God who became man challenges us: “Do something.” And if you want to ask Him why He allows so much suffering, even though He could do something about it, be careful; He may ask you the same question.
My pondering of these issues led me to take a job in a development aid organisation. I wondered beforehand whether my faith would endure the reality that there are people whose prayers clearly don't seem to get answered. But the question kind of melted away. It felt as though there was no time to ask this sort of question; there was so much work to be done and so few workers. These kinds of questioning seem like unaffordable luxuries when people are fighting for survival. I saw so much faith, hope and love where I would not have expected it. Karl Marx´s taunt that religion is just opium for the people was shown up as a myth – a myth invented by those who have stayed away from the poor, at least as far as the Christian faith is concerned. Faith is more likely to prompt action than to lull us to sleep.
Perhaps I had to go looking as far as Rio's favelas and Calcutta's slums, before I realised how far off-track our Western faith has come. Rio's huge statue of Jesus looked completely different when I looked at it standing with one its destitute street children, as did the crucifix I saw on Mother Theresa's wall at her unit for deserted children in Calcutta. I looked at you, Jesus, and swept.
I was ashamed of my big head and my whole attitude for which faith was a matter of the mind only. Whether we are for women's ordination or against it; whether we deny the Virgin Birth or admit it, the end result is exactly the same. In Western faith, the most important issue seems to be what opinion is buzzing around in one's head. Everything else is incidental.
"There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himsel – as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist!" C.S. Lewis' words in his work The Great Divorce express an awkward fact: a human being is able to make an idol of anything, even his god. It’s dangerously easy to become spiritually macho, to puff and fume on God's behalf, to presume to guard His honour and the purity of doctrine – and to confuse this with being intimate with God. Therefore, those of us who love to engage in discussions of doctrines and ideas should at the same time be horrified at this possibility. Hardness of heart can be found among the holy just as readily as among the evil.
Religious or spiritual numbness has perhaps led us to exploit the person of Jesus in the worst possible way. Our Western religion tends to focus obsessively on the extremities of Jesus' life, on his birth and death. They are decisive for the Christian faith because it is through them that the uniqueness of Jesus is demonstrated. But where does that lead us? The unique Jesus, Son of God – but what for? As if our good Lord had had nothing else to do than to come here to pay us a fleeting visit.
Dear Jesus, you have become a victim of religion. Not only when the religious leaders of New Testament times executed you but also at our hands in our own time. If you are the most significant person in the history of the world, as the church clearly assumes, why do we speak so little of your own message? Why do we know your will so poorly?
I’m aware that I'm in danger again, with these words too. I will be always in danger of becoming too attached to words, things with which to hit others; doctrine, which could be worshipped while forgetting the object. No Christian is safe from spiritual numbness. Speaking, we cannot avoid. But we need a fresh awareness that words are not nearly enough.
The abandoned baby girls of Calcutta, the lame and deformed beggers sitting under a Nokia advert, a body burning beside a river, homeless children at the station; these images derailed my thoughts and sent them spiraling down into a sea of turmoil. What use would my thoughts be here? Was my faith tuned in to the right frequency at all? If you want to find out whether someone in Finland is a believer, you ask where they stand on a range of opinion. What would come to an Indian's mind?
"Of course she will be alright. We love her with the love of Jesus and God's grace will heal her", an Indian nun replied at Mother Theresa's house. I looked at a baby girl saved from a rubbish bin and wondered whether someone so small and bony, with an old woman's face, would ever make it. The nuns told me that the youngest babies there were reclaimed from abortion clinics as seven months old fetuses. I also saw little boys in the disabled section. Never have I seen such deformities!
What a blessing those nuns were. Seeing Calcutta, I couldn't call myself a human being unless I could also be certain of the existence of real love in the world. I also saw many other things, things not usually written or spoken about. The hero of the story is invisible. It brings to mind Dostoyevski's words about love in action. Where sentimental love wants "instant heroic acts which will soon be rewarded and which everyone sees", love in action is "work and endurance, for many perhaps also learning".
Those are heroes too, who, amidst the appallingconditons of India, bother to think about how to improve the lot of women and little girls, how to help young people get work, how to encourage those in the slums to organise themselves and how to prevent migration from the countryside into the hopelessly overburdened cities. They prevent human suffering as much as the Mother Teresas who mend the destitute´s wounds.
Meeting Mother Teresa and her nuns changed my life. I can't exactly define how, but I know I didn't leave her mission as the same person. I remember how I had to look around to see if everything was as it should be; whether the light was normal. I wondered if the walls would crack from the shock wave of her words.
Nothing unusual happened. She greeted and kissed me. She asked about the size of my family and gave a cheap locket for each member of my family. By hand she wrote a blessing on a card on which was printed Mother Teresa's perhaps most famous maxim:
"The fruit of silence is prayer
The fruit of prayer is faith
The fruit of faith is love
The fruit of love is service
The fruit of service is peace"
After that moment, I noticed myself believing that there is something in the world that must simply be called holy. Perhaps one has to abandon the attempt to put it into words – trying to explain it seems as absurd as giving an icon painter an interior decorator's roller to use, or putting a saw in the hand of a plastic surgeon.
"If, way back, I had looked at the crowd I would have achieved nothing", Mother Teresa is quoted as saying. That is perhaps the key to her secret. To her, life was always and in all circumstances, holy. Her way of devoting herself to one person at a time, as if each were the only person in the world, enabled her to concentrate completely and work in peace. In this respect, one could say that Mother Teresa was Wittgensteinian.
Wittgenstein offered the thought that no one can be in greater distress than a single human being. I suppose he meant something like this: There is no greater unit of consciousness than the consciousness of one person. It is not possible to add up all the pain experienced by one individual. No sum of consciousnesses could suffer more than one person. If I succeed in helping one, I help the greatest possible unit, the whole world of one human being.
Even though this breakdown of world suffering into individual, atomic units doesn't solve the world's problems, it frees anyone concerned about the amount of pain in the world, to help another person. It's not a tiny act; it's immense.
In Brazil, I heard a story of how difficult it can still be to help. A Methodist pastor in Belo Horizonte described how difficult it was for Christians to forget their doctrinal disputes and consent to practical ecumenism: "Someone said he’d sooner see children starve to death than watch a Catholic say his grace.” That sentence was the most depressing one he said he had ever heard.
We met in a tumbledown slum area where small children were cared for and fed in a sparkling, clean house; their older siblings received schooling or vocational training. These children had the means of avoiding the usual fate of a street child – the fate of a thief or prostitute – because their families were supported right where the problems are born, in the slums.
The director of the centre described the difficulties different denominations initially had in co-operating with one another. When the Catholic church offered the premises needed, other Christians shunned their hosts. They even argued about who could say the grace. Eventually, though, the stubborn dream came true and now this ecumenical undertaking saves lives.
When I think of the word 'ecumenism', it’s those children in Brazil that come to mind. Their misery eventually forced the Christians to come together. At the same time, I know that ecumenism sounds threatening to many believers. It arouses feelings of alienation and insecurity; images of hardened but smooth-talking denominational representatives who, having long ago forgotten their God and love, travel the world drawing up their boring reports. Do they even love Jesus? Are the ecumenical bureaucrats to be counted among those spineless pharisees, whose attitude to church teaching is a matter of such indifference that compromises are frequent and easy?
I have been able to meet different kinds of ecumenists. They are committed to their own denominations; and their love shines through. The reason for their ecumenism is being able to serve the suffering. Their creed includes a humble article of faith that says: "I believe this firmly. But I also believe that I am probably thoroughly mistaken about something. Mercy is enough even then."
What if that really was in the churches' creeds? The earth's spiritual tectonic plates would shake. People would need one another. We could break out of our frightening self-satisfaction and exalted individualism where my personal Jesus becomes something like my personal computer and there is no connection to the wider community of God's people.
I have a worldview that I'm not ashamed of. It has saved me from despair. It includes a trust that the fundamental truth about existence is goodness and that behind every conflict is love. I admit it is a luxury among worldviews to dare to think like this. It does put all experiences in a different light, the personal tragedies as well as the absurdities one meets in the world. There is nothing for me to boast about; it just happens to be so. Rather, I feel greatly indebted to the One who is the object of my faith.
But why is it so difficult to speak about this? When I try to open my mouth, why do my words seem to sound so syrupy? Why is it that believers' testimonies sound so similarly saccharine? Why the inevitable serene ending? Does coming to faith have a habitual by-product, a form in which everything under examination is mangled? An obsession with forcing a happy ending? Whatever I talk about, whether the subject is religious or not, I'm in danger of following the same structure which is already familiar to those who know the Finnish children's story, the Good Shepherd.
It was something like this that the late TV playwright Dennis Potter probably meant in his TV interview that proved to be his last. He who admitted to being tied with many bonds to his Christian inheritance and childhood songs about God, at the same time wanted to wriggle out of these and distance himself from this religious culture. Its immense conventions and impassiveness troubled him. It was as if the remedy had been offered before the malady had even been diagnosed. The end result was a kind of numbing effect. And he wanted to see it differently: "Faith to me is a wound, not a remedy."
This is also how the French philosopher and writer Simone Weil saw it. In her work Gravity and Grace she differentiates between two forms of atheism, one of which she says means purifying the concept of God: "Religion as a source of comfort is the obstacle to real faith: in that sense atheism means cleansing. I have to be an atheist with that part of my being which is not created for God." I understand that she speaks of religion that has become a commodity, become too utilitarian. She probably was disturbed about turning a religion into a product: its usage settled, its content explained to death.
"He who builds his life on his faith in God, may lose his faith. But he who builds his life on God himself, he will never lose it. We have to build our lives on such a base that cannot be touched. It is impossible. It is death. That we have to do", says Weil.
We thus find ourselves in an area where nothing happens automatically but suddenly everything can happen; in an area that fascinates and horrifies; in an area that cannot be controlled. "The Israelites feared God because He could do anything, and at the same time this fear was connected with unlimited hope, because God could do anything", says the Finnish writer Anna-Maija Raittila.
Dennis Potter's agony of faith brings to my mind Aila Meriluoto who wrote in her diary: "I can never become a Christian, because I see a thousand edges at the same time, I cannot wear blinkers or follow a straight line (26.2.1962)." Oh God, even she thought that You could only be loved by being blind and got in line. I, too, thought for a long time: In my diary as a young mother, I asked: "Do I have to have a narrow outlook as I walk on your narrow way, God? Or does my very asking show that I no longer walk on it."
I wonder what You think of it all. I wondered about it even as a child. How does God bear to listen always to the same stories: how fed up He might be with floundering poems, the same graces at meals and evening prayers. I wondered at the children's mission camp whether He didn't dislike rhyming poems, even though He has to listen to them all the time because that’s His job. My son pondered similar things recently as he evaluated a Christian radio station: "Would even God like all those ditties? If I was God I really couldn't bear to listen to all that worship. There's masses of it."
God, shall I say it straight out? Your people include some strange folk. I shall never learn to understand them, or even to understand myself. Faith produces some strange phenomena on the extreme fringes of things, which I would like to understand. Why does it yield obviously bad things in some people and why do others flourish by the power of the same faith? One becomes a banal, spiritual stereotype; another becomes more courageous than ever. Both the worst blows that I have received and the most tender love and care have come from the same source: from Your own people.
I would also ask, where does the fervor comes from that tries to conquer and posses the world with the aid of faith? And why, for others, does faith mean an invitation to be tranquil and unassuming, the courage to be vulnerable, honest, and naked in the face of life.
Aren't You by now getting tired of Your decrepit people? We who are hurt and timid hurt more. People make use of You to hit and force others although You yourself never forced anyone.
I'm sure that almost all life, for us Christians, is spent recovering from wounds received from fellow believers, wounds not so painful because of the perpetrators but because of the weapon they use. I could harden myself, adopt a bearing and attitude where I do not hurt or feel the pain. But I am scared to death that I would fell only numbness, exactly where and when it was supposed to hurt.
You, my God who warm the corners of the room, You are our only possible recourse. We escape into Your arms when people use you to strike others. And You – the one who hold us in His arms are also the one who receives the threats when we are intimidated by those who presume to guard Your Book. As a child I noticed light and warmth there, and now I understand why: everything is by mercy.
Eija-Riitta Korhola
This article is dedicated to the memory of my ex-colleague Tapio Saraneva (1943-2003), doctor of theology, Director of the Finnish Church's Foreign Aid.
Bibliography:
Georges Bernanos: The Diary of a Country Priest
Fedor Dostojevski: The Brothers Karamazov
José Ignacio Conzález Faus: The Logic of the Heavenly Kingdom
C. S. Lewis: The Great Divorce & Christian Essays of an Ex Atheist
Aila Meriluoto: Vaarallista kokea, päiväkirja vuosilta 1953 –1975
Anna-Maija Raittila: Vehnänjyvän päiväkirja 1963 –1989
Simone Weil: Gravity and Grace
Ludwig Wittgenstein: General Notices
Suomalaisen Jumala tänään, May 2004
You were a secret, my mother's wonderful secret, whom she used to visit to dispel her sorrows and replace them with joy and laughter. Even a child noticed it, and why shouldn't she. When mother had spoken with You, she was like new, as if she'd been bathing in light. Some sorrow might take her behind the door of her room but joy brought her back. I loved such chambers and hide-outs. I went to have a look, and there was nothing there. And yet there was something. Before I learned to give it a name, I recognised a light, like warm sunshine. Such was God, warming secret places, the corners of the room. Him, I loved.
You didn't push your way into my childhood, but You attracted me irresistibly. From You came joy and everything beautiful. Mother, a woman in love with God, drew me into a wonderful sphere of power, without any coercion. Therefore I don't remember a time when I wouldn't have longed for God. This, I long for. And I long for more. " I Sing of Jesus, Jesus Only."
It was not until later that I realised what a happy child's faith I was given to live with. It was completely free from spiritual violence; there was at once freshness and warmth, with space to come and go. Mother understood how not to beat us over the head with God; many people, sadly, do not. Is it because their faith is weak? I don't know. But, perhaps, there may be some lack of trust when someone appoints himself as God's representative and takes on his shoulders complete responsibility for His Kingdom. Even more than God would, they want to make things sure and certain, and press others to join them.
I've had my share of this too. There was talk of a youth revival in my hometown at the end of the 60s. My older siblings got to know new friends, and I, a curious nine year old, wanted to go along and to be involved in everything. But, alas, my red dress was said to be the colour of Sodom and Gomorra. So, I sought out the story of these towns in my blue-coloured Bible and understood even less. And perhaps the point was that I was not expected to understand. Someone apparently needed to find enough things to oppose and condemn, be it a child's dress or mother's curtains. The curtains should have been changed too, but there was not a chance that mother would have done so. Mother, the daughter of an evangelical home, just laughed. "They will calm down; the Lord will clip their wings."
As I grew into womanhood, the revival movement in my hometown did not become any more cheerful. At the church's summer conference, a young man, glancing at me only furtively, shrieked: "What was the name of this sister, then?" As a sixteen-year-old, I summarised a woman's lot in my diary: "Sister, in third person, no eye contact."
Part of a woman's lot was carrying guilt about the way she walked and what she wore. Or was I just imagining it? At least I remember how I didn't understand anything when someone from the church, only few years older than me, broached the subject of the way I walked. "You walk gracelessly", this brother in Christ reasoned when I enquired what was wrong with the way I walked.
Gradually, we learned that we women were walking temptations. But actually, which women? It was safer for them to think of us as sisters. I remembered how at the age of eleven I once dreamed all the way home from school of being a woman and what it would be like having my period. Could I really ever feel completely down when my periods eventually started? I wouldn't need to do anything else than remember I was a woman. A Real Woman! I felt great, yet giddy, at the thought. I would have in my body a continuous antidote to sorrow, an inexhaustible joy, and I didn't believe that any setback could affect me with its full force any more. Now at the age of sixteen, I had all the delights for which I had eagerly waited. But instead of joy I had unspeakable shame about my gender: a particular part of me hindered others' faith and seemed to be a curse instead of a blessing
Then there came a phase when it was better as women to remain silent. If anybody had actually said this and openly emphasized it, probably nobody in our Lutheran church would have believed it. But when we were surreptitiously led to believe it, it worked. Once when we returning from a young people's trip on a bus, one of the boys said that "now those brothers who have something on their hearts can speak". It hit us girls like a blow in the stomach. We understood at once. I saw tears in my friend's eyes and a shock in her countenance – for some reason I couldn't cry. I had already given up playing the flute at the Conservatory, my dearest hobby, so as to be a better churchgoer. And if being better meant being silent, I would, of course, be silent, too.
I didn't cry. After all, whom could I have cried for or been bitter with? These were my friends; and I loved them. We had wonderful times together but we were also crazy. I can't blame anyone, save perhaps the spirit of the times and the collective subconscious with its religious sub-culture, which was so stern and repressive with its supporters. We young people were accomplices in our own treatment. We created our own harsh rules. Thoughtlessly, we competed with one another in spiritual radicalism. If we made mistakes, we were responsible for making them ourselves.
For over three years I didn't open my mouth in our young people's evenings – not even when the prohibition to speak withered away bit by bit. When I spoke again for the first time, my heart was pounding, my ears were burning and my voice cracked. I felt as if I was doing something wrong and although my intellect said otherwise, my body disagreed.
As an observer I had began to notice new things. For example, I saw that people were more likely to laugh at a joke if it came from a man's mouth. If a woman told a joke, people began to suspect her motive, why she had to say that. Was it a lust for power, a need to perform, or something else? I often tested this observation. I whispered a comment to a boy friend sitting next to me, which made him really laugh and he repeated it aloud. The reception was so different when one of the young men spoke that clearly it was not worth wasting my breath. As Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message", and you couldn´t do anything about it. And my poor boy friend knew nothing about the fact that I used him as a laboratory specimen to test attitudes toward gender differences.
The unspoken command to be silent was a hard blow for many girls who were active in the church. It depressed and wounded some of them for a long time. I would never repeat the experiment. I think there was something very wrong what happened. Yet, paradoxically, those dysfuctional experiences saved my own soul. I don't mean that they affected my eternal destiny but ironically, they kept me whole and complete. I learned an invaluable thing about myself: how dangerous it is when my soul begins to leak.
Those years of enforced silence awakened me to see the talkative side of my soul and perhaps prevented it from running dry. Before that, I had become used to trotting out words I didn't understand. But now I realised that incessant talking is a dangerous state in which we easily create non-existent realities. In C.S. Lewis' words: "Nothing is more unholy than he whose hands have been charred while handling holy things." I ended up in a world where there was no use for my faith and I could not turn it into emotion or to the satisfaction of grateful looks in young people's evenings. Instead, my faith just was; presence without compensation. In a different way, the words I read or heard and their shades of meaning became more meaningful as I was not able to spew them out and to put my thoughts into new words. Apparently, I was of no use; all I could do was to spend my time in the glow of love. Since my childhood, this was my first invitation to contemplation and quietness, to come back to the beloved, quiet God, warming those secret places.
If I may be permitted to speak thus, how rumbustious, dogmatic and self-assured was our God of the seventies. We meant well but did we not at the same time mock Him? We had our Rotring-pens and our notebooks in which we drew and wrote in small and clear script, putting God and the cosmos in order. We knew ourselves and our place, grabbed at everything and delighted in our achievements, in a system where everything was submitted to faith, to that superior intellectual system. Oh God, how must You have seen us then, we who believed in our belief? Were You amused or weeping, I would like to ask.
And yet, hidden God, you were not far off after all. Through all our dust, froth and frivolity You consented to awaken in me that same longing: "I Sing of Jesus, Jesus Only". I was mad about You, in love with You.
I was in love, but was my love blind? Of course, I had to ask myself whether my love could withstand the truth about the world, its distress and suffering; and the obvious absence of God, atheism, other religions, those who have never heard? Had I been brought up in a barrel, albeit a lovely one?
Thus, in a way, this same love which, like a magnet, drew me near to God , also drove me away. Because of the love itself, I had to expose my faith to all possible objections. I was studying philosophy, other religions, theology. Thus, I tried to prepare myself so that I would not naively succumb to the intellectual dishonesty of provincialism and compulsive religious movements. If the truth couldn't stand up to reality, so much for the truth.
Critical thinking, of course, never ends. In order to believe anything at all, one probably has also to be ready to give it up at some point. Otherwise faith becomes a desperate mage of make-believe lacking true dependence on God.
But an honest person cannot remain open only to doubts. One has to be open also to faith, to the possibility that God exists and that we cannot necessarily do anything about it. We also have to accept the fact that God may be different than would seem fitting to the 21st century mind.
The study of philosophy and comparative religion taught me that everyone at one time or another has to make choices and take leaps of faith. It is part of being human, and not even a scientific realist can honestly preserve his dignity as a supposedly objective observer. That right is not given to us human beings clinging with all our senses to the world. We cannot jump out of our skins, or expect to find an Archimedian Point outside ourselves.
Even more difficult than intellectual questions is the problem of suffering. Certainly we had it solved on paper: we knew in theory that God had taken a great risk by creating us human beings in His image, that is, free. This meant that we would also be free to destroy and ravage, turn our backs on goodness, and bring about suffering.
Yet the suffering of the innocent strips me of any desire to explain. I was confronted with perhaps the most difficult question of my life when my seven-year-old daughter looked at her sick little brother and expressed the concern: if God loves us, why does he allow our baby to suffer like this?
The question both horrified and impressed me. How could such a little person find words that could shake the strongest faith? With a child's honesty, she had struck the nerve: why does a loving, good God allow it?
Of course, the question was a familiar one. But I had heard it presented usually as a theoretical, intellectually fascinating question. I remember as a student how, in our foundational course of logics, we had – perhaps for our amusement – done an exercise about God's existence and the perceived imperfections in the world. We came to the conclusion that the suffering in God's world did Him no credit at all. Thus, necessarily either God is not good or He is not omnipotent. The teacher looked at us, amused. We students smiled quite smugly, as if to pity such a God who could so easily be humiliated by a syllogism of logic.
That theoretical question didn't disturb my faith, but my daughter's question was different. It lacked any intellectual vanity or desire to impress. She didn't quibble or try to find a pretext, but neither did she try to dismiss the problem by just believing blindly. Nothing I had learned was of any help to me then. What could I say to rescue my child's faith?
As I was searching for words I realised that there were none. There is no intellectually satisfying answer to the problem of suffering. Because if there were, it would become a weapon whereby human crises would be cut short by the intellectual violence of the arrogant: just read the answer from a book! It would spoil the chance of grieving through a grief, at the risk of becoming authentically disillusioned. If there exists faith and hope, they may come at their own pace, without being forced. Even though a person is thus left without the satisfaction of an airtight explanation, this doesn´t mean that he is left alone, abandoned. I found myself believing thus.
There are no ready words. Perhaps it's meant to be like this so that we will seek the answers behind the words and we ourselves will become part of the answer. The answer of the Christian faith to the problem of suffering is a person, God, who became man. Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest expresses it like this: "If God was the God of pagans or philosophers, he could escape to the highest heaven and our misery would cast him down from there. But you know that he has come toward us. You can shake your fists at him, spit in his face, whip him and in the end nail him to the cross, it doesn't matter. It has already happened, my daughter…"
This kind of answer to pain and suffering is not easy or to be pronounced lightly – you can't ignore it. It says: don't become bitter with God because there is suffering in the world – for the God who became man challenges us: “Do something.” And if you want to ask Him why He allows so much suffering, even though He could do something about it, be careful; He may ask you the same question.
My pondering of these issues led me to take a job in a development aid organisation. I wondered beforehand whether my faith would endure the reality that there are people whose prayers clearly don't seem to get answered. But the question kind of melted away. It felt as though there was no time to ask this sort of question; there was so much work to be done and so few workers. These kinds of questioning seem like unaffordable luxuries when people are fighting for survival. I saw so much faith, hope and love where I would not have expected it. Karl Marx´s taunt that religion is just opium for the people was shown up as a myth – a myth invented by those who have stayed away from the poor, at least as far as the Christian faith is concerned. Faith is more likely to prompt action than to lull us to sleep.
Perhaps I had to go looking as far as Rio's favelas and Calcutta's slums, before I realised how far off-track our Western faith has come. Rio's huge statue of Jesus looked completely different when I looked at it standing with one its destitute street children, as did the crucifix I saw on Mother Theresa's wall at her unit for deserted children in Calcutta. I looked at you, Jesus, and swept.
I was ashamed of my big head and my whole attitude for which faith was a matter of the mind only. Whether we are for women's ordination or against it; whether we deny the Virgin Birth or admit it, the end result is exactly the same. In Western faith, the most important issue seems to be what opinion is buzzing around in one's head. Everything else is incidental.
"There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himsel – as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist!" C.S. Lewis' words in his work The Great Divorce express an awkward fact: a human being is able to make an idol of anything, even his god. It’s dangerously easy to become spiritually macho, to puff and fume on God's behalf, to presume to guard His honour and the purity of doctrine – and to confuse this with being intimate with God. Therefore, those of us who love to engage in discussions of doctrines and ideas should at the same time be horrified at this possibility. Hardness of heart can be found among the holy just as readily as among the evil.
Religious or spiritual numbness has perhaps led us to exploit the person of Jesus in the worst possible way. Our Western religion tends to focus obsessively on the extremities of Jesus' life, on his birth and death. They are decisive for the Christian faith because it is through them that the uniqueness of Jesus is demonstrated. But where does that lead us? The unique Jesus, Son of God – but what for? As if our good Lord had had nothing else to do than to come here to pay us a fleeting visit.
Dear Jesus, you have become a victim of religion. Not only when the religious leaders of New Testament times executed you but also at our hands in our own time. If you are the most significant person in the history of the world, as the church clearly assumes, why do we speak so little of your own message? Why do we know your will so poorly?
I’m aware that I'm in danger again, with these words too. I will be always in danger of becoming too attached to words, things with which to hit others; doctrine, which could be worshipped while forgetting the object. No Christian is safe from spiritual numbness. Speaking, we cannot avoid. But we need a fresh awareness that words are not nearly enough.
The abandoned baby girls of Calcutta, the lame and deformed beggers sitting under a Nokia advert, a body burning beside a river, homeless children at the station; these images derailed my thoughts and sent them spiraling down into a sea of turmoil. What use would my thoughts be here? Was my faith tuned in to the right frequency at all? If you want to find out whether someone in Finland is a believer, you ask where they stand on a range of opinion. What would come to an Indian's mind?
"Of course she will be alright. We love her with the love of Jesus and God's grace will heal her", an Indian nun replied at Mother Theresa's house. I looked at a baby girl saved from a rubbish bin and wondered whether someone so small and bony, with an old woman's face, would ever make it. The nuns told me that the youngest babies there were reclaimed from abortion clinics as seven months old fetuses. I also saw little boys in the disabled section. Never have I seen such deformities!
What a blessing those nuns were. Seeing Calcutta, I couldn't call myself a human being unless I could also be certain of the existence of real love in the world. I also saw many other things, things not usually written or spoken about. The hero of the story is invisible. It brings to mind Dostoyevski's words about love in action. Where sentimental love wants "instant heroic acts which will soon be rewarded and which everyone sees", love in action is "work and endurance, for many perhaps also learning".
Those are heroes too, who, amidst the appallingconditons of India, bother to think about how to improve the lot of women and little girls, how to help young people get work, how to encourage those in the slums to organise themselves and how to prevent migration from the countryside into the hopelessly overburdened cities. They prevent human suffering as much as the Mother Teresas who mend the destitute´s wounds.
Meeting Mother Teresa and her nuns changed my life. I can't exactly define how, but I know I didn't leave her mission as the same person. I remember how I had to look around to see if everything was as it should be; whether the light was normal. I wondered if the walls would crack from the shock wave of her words.
Nothing unusual happened. She greeted and kissed me. She asked about the size of my family and gave a cheap locket for each member of my family. By hand she wrote a blessing on a card on which was printed Mother Teresa's perhaps most famous maxim:
"The fruit of silence is prayer
The fruit of prayer is faith
The fruit of faith is love
The fruit of love is service
The fruit of service is peace"
After that moment, I noticed myself believing that there is something in the world that must simply be called holy. Perhaps one has to abandon the attempt to put it into words – trying to explain it seems as absurd as giving an icon painter an interior decorator's roller to use, or putting a saw in the hand of a plastic surgeon.
"If, way back, I had looked at the crowd I would have achieved nothing", Mother Teresa is quoted as saying. That is perhaps the key to her secret. To her, life was always and in all circumstances, holy. Her way of devoting herself to one person at a time, as if each were the only person in the world, enabled her to concentrate completely and work in peace. In this respect, one could say that Mother Teresa was Wittgensteinian.
Wittgenstein offered the thought that no one can be in greater distress than a single human being. I suppose he meant something like this: There is no greater unit of consciousness than the consciousness of one person. It is not possible to add up all the pain experienced by one individual. No sum of consciousnesses could suffer more than one person. If I succeed in helping one, I help the greatest possible unit, the whole world of one human being.
Even though this breakdown of world suffering into individual, atomic units doesn't solve the world's problems, it frees anyone concerned about the amount of pain in the world, to help another person. It's not a tiny act; it's immense.
In Brazil, I heard a story of how difficult it can still be to help. A Methodist pastor in Belo Horizonte described how difficult it was for Christians to forget their doctrinal disputes and consent to practical ecumenism: "Someone said he’d sooner see children starve to death than watch a Catholic say his grace.” That sentence was the most depressing one he said he had ever heard.
We met in a tumbledown slum area where small children were cared for and fed in a sparkling, clean house; their older siblings received schooling or vocational training. These children had the means of avoiding the usual fate of a street child – the fate of a thief or prostitute – because their families were supported right where the problems are born, in the slums.
The director of the centre described the difficulties different denominations initially had in co-operating with one another. When the Catholic church offered the premises needed, other Christians shunned their hosts. They even argued about who could say the grace. Eventually, though, the stubborn dream came true and now this ecumenical undertaking saves lives.
When I think of the word 'ecumenism', it’s those children in Brazil that come to mind. Their misery eventually forced the Christians to come together. At the same time, I know that ecumenism sounds threatening to many believers. It arouses feelings of alienation and insecurity; images of hardened but smooth-talking denominational representatives who, having long ago forgotten their God and love, travel the world drawing up their boring reports. Do they even love Jesus? Are the ecumenical bureaucrats to be counted among those spineless pharisees, whose attitude to church teaching is a matter of such indifference that compromises are frequent and easy?
I have been able to meet different kinds of ecumenists. They are committed to their own denominations; and their love shines through. The reason for their ecumenism is being able to serve the suffering. Their creed includes a humble article of faith that says: "I believe this firmly. But I also believe that I am probably thoroughly mistaken about something. Mercy is enough even then."
What if that really was in the churches' creeds? The earth's spiritual tectonic plates would shake. People would need one another. We could break out of our frightening self-satisfaction and exalted individualism where my personal Jesus becomes something like my personal computer and there is no connection to the wider community of God's people.
I have a worldview that I'm not ashamed of. It has saved me from despair. It includes a trust that the fundamental truth about existence is goodness and that behind every conflict is love. I admit it is a luxury among worldviews to dare to think like this. It does put all experiences in a different light, the personal tragedies as well as the absurdities one meets in the world. There is nothing for me to boast about; it just happens to be so. Rather, I feel greatly indebted to the One who is the object of my faith.
But why is it so difficult to speak about this? When I try to open my mouth, why do my words seem to sound so syrupy? Why is it that believers' testimonies sound so similarly saccharine? Why the inevitable serene ending? Does coming to faith have a habitual by-product, a form in which everything under examination is mangled? An obsession with forcing a happy ending? Whatever I talk about, whether the subject is religious or not, I'm in danger of following the same structure which is already familiar to those who know the Finnish children's story, the Good Shepherd.
It was something like this that the late TV playwright Dennis Potter probably meant in his TV interview that proved to be his last. He who admitted to being tied with many bonds to his Christian inheritance and childhood songs about God, at the same time wanted to wriggle out of these and distance himself from this religious culture. Its immense conventions and impassiveness troubled him. It was as if the remedy had been offered before the malady had even been diagnosed. The end result was a kind of numbing effect. And he wanted to see it differently: "Faith to me is a wound, not a remedy."
This is also how the French philosopher and writer Simone Weil saw it. In her work Gravity and Grace she differentiates between two forms of atheism, one of which she says means purifying the concept of God: "Religion as a source of comfort is the obstacle to real faith: in that sense atheism means cleansing. I have to be an atheist with that part of my being which is not created for God." I understand that she speaks of religion that has become a commodity, become too utilitarian. She probably was disturbed about turning a religion into a product: its usage settled, its content explained to death.
"He who builds his life on his faith in God, may lose his faith. But he who builds his life on God himself, he will never lose it. We have to build our lives on such a base that cannot be touched. It is impossible. It is death. That we have to do", says Weil.
We thus find ourselves in an area where nothing happens automatically but suddenly everything can happen; in an area that fascinates and horrifies; in an area that cannot be controlled. "The Israelites feared God because He could do anything, and at the same time this fear was connected with unlimited hope, because God could do anything", says the Finnish writer Anna-Maija Raittila.
Dennis Potter's agony of faith brings to my mind Aila Meriluoto who wrote in her diary: "I can never become a Christian, because I see a thousand edges at the same time, I cannot wear blinkers or follow a straight line (26.2.1962)." Oh God, even she thought that You could only be loved by being blind and got in line. I, too, thought for a long time: In my diary as a young mother, I asked: "Do I have to have a narrow outlook as I walk on your narrow way, God? Or does my very asking show that I no longer walk on it."
I wonder what You think of it all. I wondered about it even as a child. How does God bear to listen always to the same stories: how fed up He might be with floundering poems, the same graces at meals and evening prayers. I wondered at the children's mission camp whether He didn't dislike rhyming poems, even though He has to listen to them all the time because that’s His job. My son pondered similar things recently as he evaluated a Christian radio station: "Would even God like all those ditties? If I was God I really couldn't bear to listen to all that worship. There's masses of it."
God, shall I say it straight out? Your people include some strange folk. I shall never learn to understand them, or even to understand myself. Faith produces some strange phenomena on the extreme fringes of things, which I would like to understand. Why does it yield obviously bad things in some people and why do others flourish by the power of the same faith? One becomes a banal, spiritual stereotype; another becomes more courageous than ever. Both the worst blows that I have received and the most tender love and care have come from the same source: from Your own people.
I would also ask, where does the fervor comes from that tries to conquer and posses the world with the aid of faith? And why, for others, does faith mean an invitation to be tranquil and unassuming, the courage to be vulnerable, honest, and naked in the face of life.
Aren't You by now getting tired of Your decrepit people? We who are hurt and timid hurt more. People make use of You to hit and force others although You yourself never forced anyone.
I'm sure that almost all life, for us Christians, is spent recovering from wounds received from fellow believers, wounds not so painful because of the perpetrators but because of the weapon they use. I could harden myself, adopt a bearing and attitude where I do not hurt or feel the pain. But I am scared to death that I would fell only numbness, exactly where and when it was supposed to hurt.
You, my God who warm the corners of the room, You are our only possible recourse. We escape into Your arms when people use you to strike others. And You – the one who hold us in His arms are also the one who receives the threats when we are intimidated by those who presume to guard Your Book. As a child I noticed light and warmth there, and now I understand why: everything is by mercy.
Eija-Riitta Korhola
This article is dedicated to the memory of my ex-colleague Tapio Saraneva (1943-2003), doctor of theology, Director of the Finnish Church's Foreign Aid.
Bibliography:
Georges Bernanos: The Diary of a Country Priest
Fedor Dostojevski: The Brothers Karamazov
José Ignacio Conzález Faus: The Logic of the Heavenly Kingdom
C. S. Lewis: The Great Divorce & Christian Essays of an Ex Atheist
Aila Meriluoto: Vaarallista kokea, päiväkirja vuosilta 1953 –1975
Anna-Maija Raittila: Vehnänjyvän päiväkirja 1963 –1989
Simone Weil: Gravity and Grace
Ludwig Wittgenstein: General Notices
Suomalaisen Jumala tänään, May 2004