Faith arise!

Warfare by honor

"Honor is a decision we make to place high value, worth and importance on another person by viewing him or her as a priceless gift and granting him or her a a position in our lives worthy of great respect; and love involves putting that decision into action."

Our Daily Frybread is a daily email posting by Christian North American Native ministry. It opens an interesting window on Native lifestyle, thinking and spirituality. Behind this is an organisation called New Gatherings which has a visions of planting 1000 "new gatherings", culturally sensitive Native Jesus-following communities lead by Natives.

Some weeks ago they posted an excerpt from a book called "Warfare By Honor" by Alaskan Inuit couple called Qaumaniq and Suqiina. It speaks about the value of respecting people that the Native peoples have maintained better than we Western people did. We so often base both our own and other people's value on performance though everything we do is meant to be based on thankfullness and respect for God the Creator and his creation including ALL the people. One of the main ways Native people show respect to other people is by giving them time.

The posting is rather long but it's a great story, and Native generosity in honoring people is something that I've myself experienced having been left speechless. It's a great read, especially the Alaska Native-ways of honor at the end of the story.The posting is to be read here.

"Honor moves our hearts.It moves us when we recieve it and it moves us even more powerfully when we give it to others."

"The Father honored his son, Yeshua honored his Father and we are to honor both through lives of obedience and worship. How can we say we have the Spirit and and not have honor?"    

"I smile though I really feel like laughing"

A week ago I was wondering my life: no matter how much I try I can't imagine my future in Finland. So I was thinking that it's kind of funny that I don't really feel like I was ment to stay here but can't open any door to the future myself. As I was thinking about this I got a phone call and was asked to work as a substitute teacher for immigrant kids at a school nearby. So better to concentrate on the present then maybe...

Now I'm spending the next weeks teaching Finnish to kids with culturally diverse backgrounds. Many of the kids are much more lively and spontaneous than average Finnish kids. I'm sure we'll have a great fun (the best learning method ever!).

Exploring community

Mathias started a very interesting blog discussion on COMMUNITY. What does it mean to be community in Finnish context, how can we be open community to both Christians and non-believers, how can we stop doing church and become a living community? I especially like the comments Mathias wrote. Here some extracts: 

"We really have to figure out what our generation's sense of community is, and then figure out how we contextualise the Gospel into that situation. "

"It's true that building community within the church and outside it are two different things, and that it requires two different approaches. But to which extent do they differ? They both include love, friendship, fellowship, talking, crying, sharing feelings and worries, etc."

And I really like the idea of mother and child-cellgroup his wife is planning to form. I just love the real life examples how to connect meaningfully with people living around us. After all, aren't we Christian supposed to be the most normal of all people? 

It's a bit chilly...

I'm totally enjoying the REAL Finnish winter weather that we finally got: today it was -20 degrees celsius (but not as windy as yesterday). On that weather you can't feel your fingers anymore if you take your mittens off for half a minute. But I chose that to take these pictures. The lowest temperature of the day was measured in the Northern Finland, in Kittilä: -40,1!

The singing lands

For Native peoples and also for these Finno-Ugric peoples their own art is very important as means to express their cultural identity and represent the beauty of their culture. Culture is expressed through decorations and jewellery, songs, dances and clothing, through everyday-life things and everyone is part of maintaining their own culture, kids are taught to understand their own symbols. Talking about culture last weekend, we noticed that one sign of losing our own identity is that arts become solely professionalised. I think we Karelians also once used to be a singing people as the region of North Karelia is still called "the singing lands".

Our national epic, Kalevala, that was collected from rune singers in this region, is a collection of runes, songs, legends of pre-Christian Finnish heroes. Maybe there is still something good and Finnish in this way of singing our history as Finnish people in our own language? It is not these songs filled with the spirit of death and withcraft that we should be singing but after all I believe there is a song that we Finnish people should be bringing forth that is both godly and thoroughly Finnish. Song of persistant and honest people living in a beautiful land with thousands of lakes deep as the soul of its quiet, realistic people who have difficulty to stop worrying about life without substances. People who had difficulty to find themselves but even in the end are not too proud to partner with other people and see good in them. 

My Finno-Ugric people

Spent my weekend in Jyväskylä with old friends. Bunch of travelling people that we are we got to talk about what it means to be Finnish, and what would we consider typically Finnish.

Maarit just got back from Australia and Anna spent three months in Birsk, Central Russia. Eeva attended a Finno-Ugric Christian conference a week ago in Komi and learned to know other believers from our relative peoples all over Russia. Many of the people are struggling to maintain their own (nearly extinct) culture in the midst of main (Russian) culture.What we realised is that it's very natural for us Finns to identify with other Finno-Ugric people, maybe more natural than with Scandinavian or other European people. I think there are certain similarities in the character of the people of North-East Europe. Still, our histories are very different but again our prehistory seems to be shared.

What Eeva noticed was that those small people groups still had a strong culture of laughter and they seemed to use every opportunity for dancing and singing together. They seemed to be proud of their own culture and exited to celebrate it. That's something that we Finns seem to have lost somewhere on the way. Eeva met Nenets people (indigenous reindeer herders, not Finno-Ugric people) who had become Christians some time ago. Right after their conversion they formed a group that travels around towns of Nenetsia to perform their folk dance and folk songs and share Christ with their own people (Does it mean that we're not going to hear any Hillsongs in Nenets language??).

There is something in those connections that could help us understand us as Finns, I think. It also led me to think my father's family being Karelian, that's one of the Finnish cultural regions with it's own dialect and typical cultural characteristics. So my explodition might start here. What are the special blessings God has given through Finnish people? And if the glory of God is man fully alive, how could we find our God-given identity with which Finnish people become fully alive?

Being planted

Laura commented on my previous post by sharing piece of the writing from Thomas Merton. It inspired me to write a few lines about it. Thanks for sharing this, Laura!

"The eyes the saint make all beauty holy

and the hands of the saint consecrate

everything they touch to the glory of God,

and the saint is never offended by anything

and judges no man's sin because he does not know sin.

He knows the mercy of God.

He knows that his own mission on earth is to bring that mercy to all men."

Indeed, the difference we make in the world has to be SEEING LIFE THROUGH MERCY, uncommon grace that is enbodied in us. We're to concentrate on his mercy, see it and hear it, speak it and radiate it, snowboard it and dance it...u got my point. The challenge is that to throughly see life through his grace, we first have to discover it ourselves on real-life level.

Personally I would say that after all decent studying of reformation and Christianity as lifestyle, this would be my refoundation, feels like I'm finally being planted in a God's creation that allows me to be healed and restored to connection with my family and my nationality, with people and culture around me and eventually find ways to communicate Christ through MYSELF. I love the word PLANTED because without roots I'm not able to stand on the common ground with others and without knowing who I am I can't really communicate. After all, faith is described as a seed but the earth on which we're planted is shared with everyone else on this planet.

I think being planted on common ground is the actual recovery from religion and from always knowing how. That's like in the movie Narnia, that I saw couple of weeks ago. In the end of the movie, it briefly tells what will later on happen to each one of children. About Susan it says, that she turned from clever to gentle. Something in me says that's what it means that "the whole creation waits in eager expecatation for the sons of God to be revealed".   

A beautiful day - the beautiful creation

I fully enjoy my new digital camera (yes, that's a different story, I'll share it with you later). This afternoon it was -6 celsius and sun was shining, so I decided to go out and worship God by letting his creation make me awe. I just love the blue winter colours and the moon in the sky in chilly winter days. It's all so clear and clean. I got some nice shots which I then sent to my friends in Canada as an authentic blessing from Finland.

Walking outside I started to think how very different Native people's understanding of spirituality is. We say that we don't accept the compartmentalisation of life. Still, it's so hard for us to really live the way that acknowledges that God moves through all of his creation, through physical and spiritual things. For example, we can thank God for providing us food and thus see food as something God also takes care of in our life. But it's hard for us to understand God as Creator and food as part of his creation.

I think we Finnish Christians still largely live in a dualistic world where we separate between spirit and matter. Failing to recognise God's work and blessings in creation by fully enjoying nature, music, friendship, movies we  are left to excersice our spirituality in "Christian" settings. Just as Christianity has become minority or sub-culture in Europe, we seem to think that God has also become minority God or sub-Creator who has created only part of creation called Christian culture.

I think it's sad, because after all, aren't we Christians the people who are supposed to know how to really live. Instead we make so many rules how to avoid the misuse of God's creation (misuse happens everywhere, but who was it who said that everything you can use in a right way, you can also use wrong) that we forget to enjoy it the right way.

In the end, he is Sovereign Lord and he is the Creator of all things, so we are to live with him and learn from him and not to be afraid of life. I pray that God will teach me how to relate to his creation so that I don't need to flee and hide the world but that there would be rediscovery of godly ways to relate to our culture and restoration of  healthy stewardship over creation. Then maybe next time God wouldn't need to sent a director of Greenpeace at airport to remind me of this??

   

Connected???

So many unfinished thoughts, but I try to share couple of them with you. I think these days the question on all my journeys is how to become more contextual (as world would say), more human (as Bible says) or more Christlike (my Spirit says) as Christian. I think networks I'm part of are deeply committed to this end, but very much on the way still. It's because of our past both as individuals and as western Christianity.

I'm shocked to realise how attitudes I've learned in church are actually something that psychology calls "coping mechanisms".One of them is called splitting and it means dividing world into good and bad to sustain inner sense of balance or control of your own life.

When I was growing up in the student church I learned to divide people around me into "Christians" and "non-Christians" and started seeing people as objects of evangelism. It's naturally true that some people around us have ongoing relationship with God and others don't. But if we look at Jesus' life we notice that that never was a reason for him to exclude or separate people. We never see Jesus identifying someone as pagan(though he acknowledged that some people were Hebrews and other people were culturally heathen, non-Hebrews) and using that as an excuse not to relate with these people sincerely and respectfully. Actually I think Jesus' attitude towards people who didn't know him was something more than empathy towards sinners. He must have seen the original beauty of having been made into God's image in everyone he met. That's why we speak of restoration.

We know this all so well. But where do these attitudes then come from. Partly even from our society that has lost sense of interconnectedness. In Native cultures person's primary ties are still to (extended) family and people who live close or share same cultural backround. So you're born to be a member of these groups whereas in western Christianity your membership in groups is mostly contractual, so we choose it ourselves. And that's not the biblical model in itself but leads into segregation. We make our own personal choises and make other people objects of our actions or supporters of our choises thus causing unintentional division and losing sight of being part of something bigger, God's creation. Native peoples understand there is collective responsibility for all people, "our people" we're part of both in good and bad.   

Being part of networks like Connect Europe, it seems like an appropriate question to ask: How (inter)connected are we really? Are we able to see ourselves as part of what God is doing, part of somethign very corporate happening in all of Western Christianity now.

If we want to be culturally relevant church, first step is to become culturally sensitive when it comes to one person and his/her culture, his/her identity.         

BE is the beginning

       ...of beginning

 

BE is the beginning of believing

Be is the beginning of belonging

Be is the beginning of becoming

Be is the beginning of behaving

Be is the beginning of Beloved and

You're my Beloved says the Lord.

         -Jason Upton-

Returned from two-week travel to Edmonton, Canada on Tuesday. Had a great priviledge to spend Christmas in a friend's Native American family. Many thoughts about identity (I think I've never written about this before??!) and community that I will share later. It's all so simple. Only thing complicated about identity is that there is very little you can do and that it takes your whole lifetime to grow into who you were supposed to be. So let's enjoy the journey!