Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (23 page)

Historically, Sámi women were in charge of the hearth. Sárákkhá, goddess of childbirth, is traditionally said to reside here. Today, even Sámi who no longer find a real sense of numinosity in Sárákkhá consider it rude to walk behind the hearth. The goddess’s place of residence was also a sanitary place for food. In Sápmi still, a reverence for fire is equated to a reverence for life.

The dirt floor of the structure is covered in a matrix of branches. They provide a layer of insulation under the deer hides that have been laid out for visitors. Johanna fills a sooty tin pot with water and pulls out a deerskin bag. The soft hide brushes my now-gloveless hand as she leans over to pour coffee grinds directly into the kettle.

She dumps a bag of raw deer meat into a pan, pushing it over the fire with a birch branch. Its bark curves and singes over the flames. When the meat is cooked, she folds it into traditional flatbread with spoonfuls of lumpy lingonberry jam. “I always eat this when I am in the mountains,” she says.

Johanna’s family is in the minority that still utilize
lávvu
tents. As recently as twenty years ago, some Sámi were living in traditional houses made of water-resistant birch bark and insulated with moss. And it’s still possible to find elders who grew up in those. But now most Sámi live in wooden houses, with only a small minority of herders spending time in traditional structures.

In winter, Johanna’s father tends the herds in the north but she and her brother stay busy closer to home, where they live in a wood-built home with their mother. But, come summer, they all travel north. For two months out of the year, they live in a
lávvu
as their ancestors did, hunting moose and elk as they trace the reindeer’s path. Some anthropologists muse that it was the reindeer that domesticated Sámi herders rather than the other way around. After all, Johanna—like generations upon generations of those before her—does not lead the animals who wear her earmark. She follows them.

Johanna pours lingonberry juice in a small pot and places it on the fire. “If weather is bad, sometimes we have to stay in the
lávvu
when we’re in the mountains. We sit like this and eat without telephone, computer, and TV.” She rolls her eyes to indicate that this isn’t always enjoyable. Sometimes, if she’s really bored, she’ll take her cell phone up to the top of a mountain where she gets spotty reception to check e-mail or call a friend. “But it’s not fun to run for two hours just to go look at a telephone,” she says. “I just leave it off.”

The juice has begun to steam. She pulls the kettle from the fire and carefully fills a grouping of hand-carved wooden cups shaped like measuring spoons. Bits of reindeer hair float on the surface of my ruby-colored beverage. They look like surface-skimming spiders.

I’ve been told that, in Sápmi, people tend to walk more closely during winters, linger a little longer by fires, talk a little more than usual. The dark days seemed to usher in a certain sense of intimacy. The funneled interior of the smoking
lávvu
can serve to do the same. “I like it, the Sámi life,” Johanna says. “It makes the best life I can have, I think.”

Female Sámi herders were not unheard of historically, but modernity has ushered in an opportunity that might not have been available to a twenty-two-year-old Sámi woman a decade ago. Johanna—who is now flashing cell-phone images of herself in traditional dress, with the pride of a high schooler showing off prom photos—says: “Sometimes, when I’m out in the mountains, the men say, ‘What are you doing out here?’ But this isn’t the old times, this is the new times.”

 • • • 

The village of Jukkasjärvi pretty much consists of the ICEHOTEL, a convenience store, a gift shop, and the church, a tiny clapboard building painted bright red. When the Bakers and I arrive, the church is bustling with ski-gear-clad tourists who’ve made the long walk from ICEHOTEL to see the place, famed as the oldest wooden building in the country, circa 1608. Its interior is lined with planks of whitewashed wood that have been pulling away from each other for years. Strings of paint hang between the separating boards like bread dough.

Its ceiling bears circles representing the moon in various stages, and the whole place smells like the yellowed pages of an antique book. George walks over to a wooden rack holding postcards. He takes one and slips a thick Swedish coin into a handmade donation box.

We turn to see Ann-Mari Hammarstedt Vilgats, local organist, walking down the aisle. She uncoils a scarf from her neck and begins to tell us the history of the artwork on the back wall. It is a 1950s-era wooden triptych meant to depict the revivals of Lars Levi Laestadius, a Lutheran minister who criticized the church’s treatment of Sámi people. To the right, there is a snow-covered mountain in the background, the sky above adorned with two bright strips of yellow light meant to represent the northern lights. “People who come in here sometimes ask if that mountain is meant to be the ICEHOTEL,” Ann-Mari says, her brow arched to show disapproval of this short view of history.

She skips over a bloodied, crown-of-thorns Christ in the artwork and points toward to a woman wearing a Sámi shawl, like the one Yvonne had tied around her shoulders. It is a depiction of Maria, the woman said to have inspired Laestadius’s movement. The sun appears as an ethereal crown, a halo, the auroral oval behind Maria’s head. “There were many churches built to mark the borders of Finland in Sweden’s early history. There were no buildings before then, just forest and woods. They built the churches because they wanted to connect with the Sámi people,” Ann-Mari says, “and they wanted to tax them, too.”

Ann-Mari directs our attention to the organ. Where I’ve been expecting a creaky, sinewy sort of ancient artifact, I find a polished, magnificent work of modern art. The organ is inset with ivory reindeer horn, playing a role that’s usually reserved for mother of pearl. Its center is shaped like the Sámi drum. “This is a Sámi organ, in a sense,” Ann-Mari says. “It is made of wood, antler, and reindeer skin.”

An image of the sun sits inside the drum’s outline. I have read that when the missionaries first came to Sápmi, Sámi people started incorporating Christian symbols on their drums, a way of assimilating out of fear or reverence. The symbolism of this organ, to Ann-Mari, is more overt. “The organ says please forgive us,” she says. “The Swedish were very harsh to the Sámi people. They burned the shaman drums.” Sometimes, particularly pious shamans—those who refused to give up their sacred instruments during missionary-led witch trials—were burned at the stake.

When the Sámi artist Lars-Levi Sunna installed this organ in the 1990s, it marked the first introduction of Sámi symbols to a Lutheran church in Sweden. It is an institution that reputedly still involves people who believe traditional
yoiking
—the art of embodying phenomena through song as hula embodies them through dance—is a form of witchcraft, and he was afraid of what would happen to him. This, despite the fact that it was the church that had commissioned him to create the casing.

When he delivered it, Ann-Mari expressed confusion over how to approach the Sámi instrument as a Christian organist. The artist’s advice still echoes in her memory: “Come as you are in front of God.”

“You must know,” she says, “that this is what the revival said to the Sámi people. It’s a really lovely message if you strip away the terrible history.
Come as you are.
This is an instrument of healing. The spirit is there whether you want it or not.” Then Ann-Mari, as Lutheran as a Lutheran can be, looks up at the organ and says: “This organ has many gods.”

Ann-Mari’s openness begins to open me. This is an organ that accepts mystery. It is a tangible admission of not having all the answers, of acknowledging that there are many different ways to find divinity. It is a skin-and-bone apology for historically using an abstract, institutionalized understanding of God to terrorize a visceral, sacred world. It is a symbolic attempt to make real the mystical,
unus mundus
heart of almost every world religion. It’s a reconciliation of two traditions. And, just maybe, it’s inspiring some sort of reconciliation within me.

“Are you ready to play?” she asks George, who simply nods.

Ann-Mari pulls a key from her pocket. The ancient wooden door to the organ loft shudders a little when she opens it to reveal a stairwell that is really more of a ladder. One by one we surface into the sunlight streaming from a high window. Ann-Mari cautions us to watch our step. The floor of the balcony is slanted so much that it’s nearly enough to make one lose balance. But then again, so is the organ. It is magnificent.

What can be seen from the ground is nothing compared to what is held here, in the heart of the loft. Every stop-knob of the organ register is antler, etched like the handle of a Sámi knife, and on each one appears a scene of characters taken from traditional mythology. The carvings have been rubbed with birch shavings to give the recessed grooves a coppery hue. Each ivory of the piano is etched with a star, and its keys are not stark ebony, but rather the soft brown of burled wood.

Ann-Mari tugs on a few organ stops. “The symbols go along with the tone,” she says. “There’s a message behind every one. And the darker the horn, the darker the sound.”

Ann-Mari has taken off her insulated boots. She’s in her stockings. There are some dress shoes stored in her desk—shoes that would allow more mobility than her insulated gear—but she reports that a family of mice have taken them over. She pads around, increasingly eccentric. Her air of oddity is reinforced when she takes a paper cup of water and opens a wooden door to the back of the organ, saying, “The birds need water!”

“You keep
birds
in there?” Yvonne says, incredulously.

Ann-Mari laughs and walks back over to the organ. She plays a note. It sputters. It gargles. But then, a water-fed, metallic organ feature begins to chirp. The balcony, the entire church, is suddenly alive with birdsong. Twittery tweets bounce off the walls as if we’re standing in an open-air tree house. “There are other organs in the world that have birds,” she says, referring to the pipes that allow the instrument to tweet, “but not many.”

Ann-Mari points to the organ pull that makes the birds sing, and she says, “The artist told me that this was symbolic. In the Bible it says all the tongues will disappear. All God’s word will be the same.” Creation as creator.
Let the phenomena speak.

“Are the birds written into songs?” George asks.

“No,” Ann-Mari says. “I have never seen a written note for the birds. I just use it when I feel it’s needed.”

“Are the stories of all the symbols written down?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “There is no written record,” she says, “but I know many of the stories because the artist told them to me.”

When I was a child, I don’t remember it ever being brought to my attention that the Bible is full of mystical-minded phenomena: smoking volcanoes, swirling winds, lightning strikes. I didn’t grow up in a cathedral full of saints’ stories and visceral rituals involving cloud-evoking incense. My Protestant church was quiet. The air was still. The chosen sacred text was regarded as a destination rather than a travel guidebook. For me—and I know it’s not so for everyone—this literal worldview was encouraged at the expense of the very thing I hoped to find: Enchantment in a disenchanted world.

But that’s what I’m finding here.

Would it have been easier to be born into a religious tradition that spiritually felt right? Probably. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have had to go through this spirit-seeking process anyway, to experience what Jung called individuation, the process of more fully becoming myself—the authentic me rather than the me I think I’m
supposed
to be.

Mysticism is the phenomenal essence of religion. It is direct observation of the divine. And the religions that came from the individual, phenomenal experiences of Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus, and Krishna purport through their more mystical traditions—and their most arduous rituals—that this sort of personal experience and relationship is possible for followers, too. They suggest that the individual, the self, has a direct line to divinity. But it’s not a party line; the direction is different for everyone.

I started this phenomena chase of my own accord, yet I’m still not sure how I got here, how I’ve arrived at this very moment. I don’t know how this pilgrimage to wonder has turned into such an intensely spiritual quest. What I do know is this: I’m beginning to see my own life as part of a magnificent, ever-unfolding story.

Ann-Mari pulls another stop, presses another key. “This is the Sámi wind god,” she says. “The wind god is the tremor of the organ.” It’s a note that often jumps out in the song, creating a sense of surprise. “Who can say when the wind comes?” Ann-Mari says.

The voice of the wind god fills the church. Nature, life, is bringing me what I need—in its own time, in its own way. But, even after all that I’ve experienced, I’m still in the infancy of trusting this.

Ann-Mari—she who controls the winds—seems determined to help me make some pretty big leaps, though she couldn’t possibly know the role she’s playing. She raises her head from the organ and asks, as nonchalantly as anyone could, “Would you like to hear a Sámi drum?”

Is this selective perception? Coincidence? It doesn’t matter. Not to me. Not in this moment. It’s all I can do to nod my head to indicate that, yes, I would like to hear the said-to-be-nearly-extinct instrument. I have been told that surviving drums are held in locked cabinets. How could Ann-Mari have gotten her hands on one?

Ann-Mari points to two wooden pipes that are set away from the brass organ. They produce a note that mimics the echo of long-silenced Sámi drums. Ann-Mari plays it, and the entire church reverberates with a percussive sound. The walls shake. The floor itself begins to throb.

Her index finger wanders: “And here’s the central sound. It is the sun. The central sound gives life to the organ. This is meaningful because the sun gives life to us all.” Then, of a particularly elaborate organ pull, she says, “That’s the frost man with his staff. He’s beating down the snow.” She plays the note and the frost man beats the ground as if the soil itself is a percussive instrument, making way for new growth:
Dun da da dun
.