Not tourists, but pilgrims

Not tourists, but pilgrims


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Published: 21 July 2009

“Tourists,” said Veli-Pekka, our host “complain when things aren’t perfect, but pilgrims are always thankful. Remember that you have come here as pilgrims.”

Things happened that would make any tourist complain. When we checked in at Manchester Airport the computers went down and our luggage could only be checked to Helsinki which meant we missed our connecting flight to Tampere and had to go by bus! Returning to Manchester, two of us found our luggage was still in Helsinki. But we were pilgrims, and pilgrims are always thankful.

On retreat, we hoped to get a sense of Finnish spirituality, which we knew would be different from our own. For though Finns are in many ways like us – products of an advanced, market-based West European society – they are in other ways different. Their history is not at all like ours. They became independent of Russia only in 1917, when its empire fell. They live far to the north, in the ‘land of the midnight sun’. Finland is one of Western Europe’s biggest countries, yet its population is smaller than that of England’s North West. That means lots of space, and Finns live farther apart and closer to nature than we do.

Yet they seem closer to each other. Maybe that has something to do with sauna. Every Finnish house has its sauna. At Päiväkumpu the sauna was on the lake shore, so we could go for a cooling dip after a session in the steam. Each evening the women used it first, then the men. We soon found that sitting, sweating and naked, with a group of others, made stress levels drop and barriers fall.

If you’ve never experienced a retreat, you should try one. It gives you a chance to slow down, be quiet, think, explore your feelings, seek God, and pray. That really does you good.

Veli-Pekka divided our time between worship, silence, contemplation, group discussion, boating – and of course sauna. We worshipped in the chapel, a former drying-barn that looked like a Little House on the Prairie log cabin. We were silent each day from the end of Night Prayers until after breakfast the next day. We looked at pictures and natural objects, made pictures of our own, and found in them images of how we felt about life. We contemplated Bible passages, and looked for what God was saying to us through them. We discussed what we had found in small “spiritual direction” groups. We rowed 3 km down the lake to a little island and basked in nature’s beauty. We ate fish beside the lake, as the risen Jesus ate fish beside Lake Galilee with his disciples.

Our journey to Finland made us very thankful indeed.


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