Good news from a far country, glory to God! A report of growth of the Orthodox Church in Sweden heartens this Swedish-American (along with evidence of increased interest in Orthodoxy also in Norway, given that I am also part Norwegian-American among other ancestires). It brought back some memories of old Chicago Scandinavian neighborhoods.
I write this on the day after the Feast of St. Olaf of Norway on the Church calendar (July 29/Aug. 11), a reminder of how the early saints and worship of the region were Orthodox, and of the historic connections between early Scandinavian Christianity and early Russian Orthodoxy, Rus’ having grown from a Viking culture (St. Olga, a founding Russian saint, was of Scandinavian descent, her name also being St. Helga, for example). From the ruins of the dwindling Protestant state religions of Scandinavia, may there be a larger return to Orthodoxy in future.
Recently walking into a Snappy’s convenience store for a cold drink on a hot day in central Pennsylvania, wearing my garb as a Russian Orthodox priest, a young man came up to me to ask me about who/what I was. I explained, and he told me that he was a “Norse pagan” honoring his ancestors. Before I was baptized Orthodox, I had rummaged around in some of those demonic and re-imagined old attics too, looking there fruitlessly for Truth, but being led by God unworthily in my search to know Him, with me all along, as the Anglican writer CS Lewis (himself at the end of his life enamored by the beauty of Orthodox Christian liturgical practice) put it memorably at the end of his last masterwork Til We Have Faces, when the narrator, finally known as Psyche, says: “I ended my first book with the words ‘no answer.’ I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. Long did I hate you, long did I fight you. I might–” And Psyche dies.
We talked for a bit about connections between the Vikings and Russia, and Orthodox Christianity across both cultures. As the Old English “Dream of the Rood” poem portrayed in Germanic terms, Jesus Christ is the truest hero in His sacrifice on the Cross, and left us with His Church which has not been lost but remains among us. Philotimo in Orthodoxy is true heroism, self-emptying in Christ: A deep connection with God in what the Russians call sobornost, so that one is constantly moved to self-sacrificing love, full of gratitude towards God and our fellows. May the Lord lead that young man also to Orthodox Christianity, as He did this unworthy and sinful soul about a quarter century ago.
Much of my misbegotten youth was spent returning to and occasionally moping around the old Swedish neighborhood in Chicago where my mother had grown up. Known as Andersonville, and now a DINK (double-income no-kid) upscale neighborhood celebrating the counterfeit-virtue of Pride, it years ago was a working-class Scandinavian enclave. Its tendrils connected with the westerly Chicago neighborhood of North Park, too, where there is still a lone surviving neighborhood Swedish restaurant and gift store, to which my family and I return on Chicago visits (Scandinavian food also is reminiscent in many ways of Russian food, as I can attest living in a blended Russian and American home today).
Growing up in a Unitarian-agnostic home, I searched for ancient truth in what seemed to me the mammoth old Swedish Lutheran place of worship in Andersonville, Ebenezer congregation, as a teenager, to the puzzlement of my kind but religiously skeptical parents. Across the street was the old Swedish bakery my parents did patronize until it closed, where my mom had worked in high school. I did not find what I was seeking at Ebenezer Lutheran, however. The congregation had long before joined the ELCA mainline Protestant denomination, with all the liberalizing tendencies of the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism in the Cold War era. Yet, at the same time, I felt something calling me onward in my long journey toward Orthodox Christianity, at the time a total unknown in my life. But likewise, the first non-children’s Bible I remember acquiring came from the old North Park College bookstore in Chicago Swedish land, a plain black leather-plastic-style King James Version Bible minus Apocrypha.
Across years I spent too much time probably hanging out at dwindling Scandinavian establishments of Andersonville, their taverns full of holiday glögg aroma, and the deli where my neighbor Leif Olson used to hold court at a table. It was as if I thought I could inhale some deeper sustaining truth in the embers of a vanished culture, but never did beyond the glögg.
Later, after detours including a sojourn with the dwindling Christian Scientist tribe of Chicago (to which my mother’s family had defected from Lutheranism along with some other Chicago Scandinavian-Americans back in the 1920s and Depression), I tried for a time going to the old Norwegian Lutheran congregation in Logan Square. That was another vanishing Scandinavian neighborhood, but I remain grateful to the kindness of those there.
Still, all that time, our Lord was leading me, a willful sinner, through the back streets of Chicago and spiritual and sometimes demonic shadows, to the salvific beauty of the Orthodox Church, the Church of my forebears centuries before, and of the Apostles before them.
Now, from ancient roots rise new shoots of Orthodoxy in the northern lands, new converts are coming into American Orthodox missions like ours, and around the world we see a type of the dry bones from Ezekiel being resuscitated, glory to God!
May the old saints and martyrs of the Viking lands intercede for us in our mission work in America, that the people of all nations joyfully may await the Second Coming of Christ in His Body, the Orthodox Church, which is the continuing Church of the Apostles! Amen.