A FINNISH EASTER - The Tablet, 15 April 2006

Faith, culture and popular custom interact in intriguing ways in a Nordic celebration of the events of Holy Week



In Finnish one of the many different words for snow is karstanne. It’s a spring snow with a crust hard enough to support a man and which barely yields to his footprint. Tonight in central Finland hundreds of people will trudge through the frost and snow to St Nicholas’ Orthodox Cathedral in Kuopio for the Easter Vigil.

Members of Finland’s sixty thousand strong Orthodox church celebrate Easter according to the Western calendar (and not next weekend, as will other Orthodox Christians). After midnight, as St Nicholas’ fills with light and celebration, the congregation will exchange the age-old greeting Kristus on noussut, totisesti Kristus on noussut, (Christ is risen. Indeed He is risen.). After a four-hour service some will break their Lenten fast with the traditional Finnish Easter delicacy Mämmi made from rye flour and malt, served with a dollop of rich cream.

In Finland, faith, culture and popular custom interact in unexpected ways with evocations of the Easter story going hand in hand with folk tradition. This far north, willow twigs, garnished with feathers, or crepe shaped into flowers, were used in place of palms at last Sunday’s Eucharist. Afterwards, the children dressed as witches, rather like our Halloween, and made trick-or-treat calls on neighbours, tapping them with their ‘palms’, and reciting their begging rhyme: virvon varvon tuoreeks terveek, tulevaks, vuodeks……….

Part of Orthodox Christianity’s success here is that it went with the grain of native tradition and kept memory alive. After the reformation, the Lutheran Church, to which most Finns belong, condemned the old customs and many were lost. But they survived in areas where there were Orthodox clergy, and it is to them, in part, that Finland owes the survival of its national epic, the Kalevala. This mythological account of creation and of ancient warriors (with fleeting references to the Christian story) would have perished had not the Orthodox clergy encouraged the rune singers, who passed its verses from generation to generation until they were eventually written down in the nineteenth century. Unlike the Lutherans, the Orthodox priests did not see the old stories as a threat to their parishioners’ souls.

Even today Orthodoxism mines a deep seam into Finland’s rich subconscious. Its practice is public and passionate, in contrast to Lutheranism’s relative austerity. Both are state churches, with each tradition in a sense, the other’s shadow. Despite this, both come together in many common causes and in Kuopio they co-sponsor the city’s open-air Passion Play that has been performed in the Bishop’s Park just across the road from the Orthodox Cathedral every night in Holy Week.

It all began when Father Elias Huurinainen of the small Orthodox parish of Iisalmi, sixty miles to the north, devised a Via Dolorosa to heighten the drama of Holy Week for his congregation. While it was a pastoral success, attracting many visitors, it was too expensive for a small community. Now the play is performed instead in Kuopio, where hundreds of people crowded the city centre every night this week to watch a cast of more than a hundred local people re-enact the Easter story. In an almost Mediterranean spectacle the cast paraded through the icy streets downhill from the Lutheran Cathedral to the Bishop’s Park with an advance party of Roman centurions followed by jugglers, prostitutes, flame-throwers, moneychangers, and temple-dancers. “Welcome to Jerusalem”, they shout at passers-by. At the city gates, a wrathful Jesus stops this slightly surreal carnival in its tracks.

By now it’s ten o’clock at night and freezing, and the audience huddles in its seats wrapped in blankets. Akseli Pesa, the young actor cast as Jesus speaks – declaims, more like - his lines into a bitter east wind from Lake Kallevesi nearby (this is nothing special, he tells me; he is well used to performing in temperatures of eighteen degrees below freezing. It adds to the challenge, he says). This is a village play, following closely the text of St Mark’s Gospel. It has few pretensions, making its impact where it strives least for it. As Jesus breaks bread at the Last Supper, there is a sudden flurry of snow as a pale moon breaks through the clouds. No stage director could contrive such dramatic effect.

In the crowd I met Archbishop Leo, the Orthodox Primate of All Finland. He’s pleased with the play and at how it has set the scene for his Easter liturgy. “We Orthodox are a demonstrative people”, he told me. “Our services are also like plays – with great dramatic heights that congregations can relate to. And when we celebrate, we do it thoroughly. Easter is our most joyful time; it is something we want to share this with everybody.” (A contemporary footnote to the passion of Orthodox celebration; Minna Jaakkola of the Finnish Orthodox Museum told me how lipstick smudges from repeated kissing was causing serious damage to icons. It’s a big challenge to conservationists).

On the lake, just a few hundred yards away, the ice is still several feet deep. The change of season, any day now, will be sudden and dramatic. And as the snow and ice melt, the ground will crack open and blossom in a frenzy of growth. In medieval Finland, they hymned the onset of spring. The Piae Cantiones is a collection of Finnish sacred music published in the sixteenth century, one of the few windows on the country’s Catholic culture before the reformation. One set of verses, which celebrated the spring, linked it with Christ’s resurrection:

Tempus adest floridum, surgent namque flores
Vernales in omnibus, imitantur mores
Hoc quod frigus laeserat, reparant calores
Cernimus hoc fieri, per multos labores.

A time to grow,
As the good earth flowers again,
Its promise renewed.
A time to heal,
As the gentle heat soothes
the winter’s ravages,
And a time to toil.

Living alongside their Orthodox neighbours and their highly developed sacramentality, Finnish Lutherans have been encouraged to renew contact with their own roots in medieval Catholicism. In the absence of a strong contemporary Catholic culture in the country, they’ve drawn inspiration from Orthodox pieties, from the folk customs of Palm Sunday to the richness of the Easter Vigil. The Orthodox Easter Troparion (Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life) is also recited in Lutheran Churches. Small wonder then that the Lutheran Bishop of Helsinki suggested recently that Finland had the world’s most Orthodox Lutherans and the world’s most Lutheran Orthodox Christians.

Brendan McCarthy was a guest of the Finnish Tourist Board. http://www.kuopioinfo.fi/english/ for details of Kuopio’s Passion Play