FINNS: An Oral History- Keeping Services
Keeping Services - Interview with Walter Ketola
FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region
Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.
Keeping Services - Walter Ketola
The Bible teaches that Christians should remain excluded from the world. “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord.” And those things are taken literally in the 9 Apostolic Lutheran [Laestadian] Church, as I think they should be. Not to the extent that you go and take monastic vows, but I think that we have to be careful that we do not lightly and foolishly mingle with them. For example, recently a preacher at our church exhorted us as to which public events a Christian should attend. We all have social demands placed on us because of our families or our business lives or whatever. He said that perhaps one good rule of thumb might be that any place where people cheer whatever’s happening, whoever’s there: maybe that’s not a place for a Christian to be. He said that nowhere is that type of activity seen in God’s word.
The only cheering that’s allowed in the Bible occurs when there is a movement that is of the heart. For example, there was the time when the Ark of God was returned to Israel and David shouted and danced in front of it. This was a heartfelt rejoicing of the spirit. And when the Israelites returned to Jerusalem after their captivity in Babylon, we read “…the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of weeping of the people.” 10
Here is how Laestadians are defined in Baker’s Dictionary:
Members of a sect originating in Scandinavian Lutheranism who follow the teachings of Lars Levi Laestadius, 1800-1861. They wear a special costume, oppose baptism, prefer lay preachers, and insist on coming to God through other Christians.11
The ‘special costume’ is probably a confusion with another Pietist movement in Finland. In the Laestadian church, even as in all Lutheran churches, we practice child baptism; we’re not opposed to baptism. I think where that came up is that Laestadians do not hold with mainstream Lutheranism, which has such great emphasis on baptism as a way of salvation: the covenant. Laestadianism is a Pietist movement. The matter of coming to God through other Christians is the doctrine and practice of
II Corinthians 6:17. 9
Ezra 3:13. 10
Donald Kauffman, ed. Baker’s Pocket Dictionary of Religious Terms (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 11 1980), 281.
laying on of hands in the proclamation of forgiveness of sins to penitent souls. Even today, the majority of Laestadians look askance at trained preachers, feeling that the best teachers are those educated in the “School of the Holy Spirit.”
At first I had trouble with translating sermons from Finnish into English: the philosophy at that time being, ‘What if the preacher says something I am not in agreement with? I can’t translate that. It would be against my principles.’ But I’ve since changed my thinking on it. And I don’t think it’s because I’ve become liberal. I just have to remember my role—that of a moderator—to keep the meeting going and not to take sides. And the translator—his job is just to be true to what was said. And if I have heard something being preached that I think is wrong, then it’s my charge to talk to the preacher afterwards. And having an extraordinary translator, as I would say Wilfred Sikkila [is], helps. Wilfred knows much of the Finnish scripture by heart. This helps because sometimes the verses are so different translated from Hebrew or Greek into Finnish than into English. I don’t know if the issue of language contributed to it or not, but you have to remember that Laestadius didn’t speak Finnish. He spoke Swedish and Lapp—his mother was a Lapp—the Saami language.
The Laestadian movement is one that is inward-looking. And the Finnish theologian Pekka Raittila talked about that in a seminar in Minneapolis over ten years ago. The problem with being inward-looking is that you have your back to everybody else, and there’s a tendency not to do mission work. And the only one of the Apostolic groups that did foreign mission work was a group called the New Awakenists; they were criticized soundly by the other groups. Now the other Laestadians have begun foreign mission work.
One of the other Pietist groups prior and somewhat parallel to Laestadianism was The Readers. Their love of literacy; it’s a disease. It’s in this house, too. My son Nicholas was once walking home from school and walked into a ditch, reading a book. But I did, too. Every study hall, I’d get a pass to go to the library. And I’d trade in my books and get new ones. But I didn’t spend that time reading those books I checked out because I was saving them for the 20-mile bus ride home. I spent study-hall time reading the periodicals and anything that I couldn’t take out of the library. So at the end of ninth grade, Mrs. Varney, the librarian, said, “Walter, how many books have you read?” I hadn’t thought about it. And she said, “976.” Sometimes three books a night. Our bedroom was next to my parents’ and if the light was on at two in the morning and my mother happened to wake and notice it, she said, “Walter, put the light off.” She never said, “Warren,” my brother’s name. When our children were small, the older ones played ‘services’ on our stairs. Someone would be the preacher and they would sing. One thing that was always part of the play services was the children would go to each other and ask forgiveness. And they would outwardly rejoice. When our younger children played church, they too preached and sang. But they didn’t have any rejoicing. Nobody asked forgiveness because they had rarely, if ever, seen this. Elvi recalls that recently our two granddaughters were playing church and were asking forgiveness from each other. And one would say to the other, “Well, cry hard now! Cry!” And the other would say to her, “No, cry harder!” And our daughter said she and her husband had to go in the other room so as not to disturb them. I’ve been at church services here during the 70s where it’s been midnight and no-one had left yet. We had been there at the church since seven or seven-thirty that evening. During these services, you didn’t think about how tired you were. Time was nothing for the place was on fire and eternal matters burned in our hearts. Elvi recalls once at church we had what we refer to as ‘warm’ services. All of a sudden, our baby girl disappeared. Walter and Karen Aho were sitting behind us. And Walter poked me and said, “She’s here.” She had jumped over the bench. That’s the way the services were and the children were right there with us. Little children, too; I remember them climbing back and forth. What Elvi is talking about in this example is that the hearts of the people were moved during the service. They were penitent, they repented, and they rejoiced.