This article delves into the research domains of lived religion and Practical or Pastoral Theology, with a particular focus on the experiences and strategies of Finnish and Swedish Orthodox and Eastern Rite priests. Given that the informants were priests grappling with the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, this study provides unique insights into the interplay between lived religion, as conceptualized by scholars like Nancy Ammerman, and institutional religion. Consequently, this article aligns with contemporary scholarly discourses in both practical and dogmatic discussions of Eastern Orthodoxy, particularly in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Among the notable works addressing similar themes was the early collection of articles titled “Gottesdienst auf eigene Gefahr: Die Feiern der Liturgie in der Zeit von Covid-19” (edited by Feulner, 2020). These and other recent scholarly contributions have raised numerous questions about the practice of Orthodoxy during the pandemic, especially within the Scandinavian, Finnish, and Swedish contexts.
Accordingly, this article examines the pastoral responses of Finnish and Swedish Orthodox priests to the COVID-19 pandemic. Data was gathered through interviews from April to June 2021 and from different media. Four interviews were conducted in Finland and three in Sweden, one of which was a double interview of a Coptic priest and his deacon assistant (altogether 109 pages were transcribed). One Orthodox bishop preferred to answer the interview questions via email, an anomaly. Thematic content analysis was used as the primary analytical approach.
This small sample of interviews made it possible to get a deeper look into the practical problems that emerged during the pandemic, the theological questions that became essential, and the priests’ understanding of the changing togetherness of the church. Interviewed priests shared touching and troublesome experiences, but they also described new digital methods and alternative ways of reaching out to their parish members, as exemplified by a local ecumenical initiative launched to help people in a remote region.
It is important to note Finish and Swedish Orthodox churches differ. In Sweden, the framework of church and parish activity rests on several Eastern Orthodox and oriental churches with large immigrant congregations. In comparison, the Orthodox Church of Finland is positioned as the second minority state church, a relevant distinction.
Care for Health and Lives
… and then people, then I all the time had to think for them as to how to act as priest so that they feel safe. I have been giving the Eucharist at the church door, outside (Int. 2). The local churches, as well as ours, which belongs to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, dealt with the appearance of the pandemic with great prudence. In fact, we must emphasize that the decisions have always been in line with those of the state committees set up in each country by epidemiologists and have the sole purpose of protecting humans. (Int. 5)
Priests reported feeling anxious for the safety of both their colleagues and parish members. Many priests knew people – parish members, bishops, and also other priests – who passed away after falling ill with coronavirus. Therefore, it became crucial to deliberate how to keep people safe – and how to keep them away from the church.
Restrictions had to be maintained and followed according to changing government and local administration regulations, at times creating tension. In particular, at one Easter night service in Sweden in the spring of 2020, safety protocols were ignored, since the congregation desperately wanted to come to the temple, participate, and still feel the Easter joy as a community. But there was also frustration caused by the carelessness and denial of the gravity of the situation by some communities and their priests: “Some communities continue celebrating the Liturgy [in a usual manner] regardless of the restrictions” (Int. 7).
In addition, there was shock felt towards the gradually changing of protocols that kept further limiting the number of participants able to attend the Divine Liturgy. Eventually, the number of attending people was reduced to a single priest and a deacon; the same measure was applied to other sacraments and services, too. Exhortations for prayers at home were given in Sweden; in Finland, several parishes made efforts to screen services to the faithful online.
Priests encountered another problem during the pandemic: it was difficult to understand the complex guidelines stated in the restrictions and recommendations as well as how to apply them in worship. These guidelines were regularly modified from March 2020 to May 2021. In both countries, at certain times, if a temple met a minimum size requirement and there was a low number of coronavirus cases, sometimes twenty people could attend services with no body contact, but these restrictions changed during the duration of the pandemic. The strictest restrictions were implemented at beginning of the epidemic in the spring of 2020; then authorities relaxed the measures during the summer and autumn of the same year, only to reinstitute the strict restrictions in the winter of 2020–2021, and then again in the winter of 2021–2022.
Yet another issue surfaced during the pandemic that created difficulties for the priests. Parishioners began to compare Orthodox restrictions to the restrictions of other churches and communities: “Why can the Catholics congregate and not us? Why is it different in the neighboring diocese?” (Int. 3). Under these circumstances, priests had to become flexible and inventive. It was especially difficult to conduct worship safely, which practically meant not touching, keeping a safe distance at all times, and abstaining from kissing icons and the Gospel, which could seem blasphemous, not to mention the restricted access to services. Safety precautions not only meant abstaining from or suspending liturgical practices, but they also gave rise to new ones with the goal of protecting parish members. An especially challenging situation involved the act of partaking in the sacrament of repentance. A special Swedish solution called “syndabekännelse” (joint confession of sins by the congregation) was implemented to overcome this problem. This appears as an interestingly Western solution that has its counterparts in many Western worship traditions.
Altogether, safety precautions immediately became liturgical in this liturgical setting. When basically everything was performed by corporeal liturgical actions, and when corporeality was at the core of the performances of the people in their lived religion, then both movement and gestures and not performing them became meaningful. For the priests, the pandemic posed serious challenges, considering they had to consider simultaneously the different safety, practical, administrational, and theological aspects of worship.
Care for the Soul
Yes, yes yes, that dimension of care is really important. Experience of it. Oh yes [sigh]. It became a great many practical issues, theological questions, and dimensions of pastoral care. (Int. 2)
Priests also confronted the challenge of how to continue to provide pastoral care during the pandemic, to aid the spiritual and mental wellbeing of their respective parishioners. Questions arose. How could people cope when dealing with health problems, financial difficulties, and acquiring medication? Spirituality was not separate from practicalities. In one rural parish, it was the priest who delivered medication to people with the help of his Lutheran colleague. This was done both to help the elderly and people hindered from accessing medication because they lived long distances from pharmacies, especially during the dangerous phases of the pandemic. Another aim of the priests was to create and maintain social relationships; they aided their parishioners experiencing isolation by providing contact with people.
A remarkable Orthodox feature was the care for souls associated with the eucharistic ecclesiology of the Church. Priests felt anxious because they could not administer the Sacrament to the laity freely in Divine Liturgies during lockdown. And after lockdown, the number of faithful congregation members allowed into the temples was reduced to only twenty and less than twenty people in smaller temples. Thus, people did not have full access to the source of salvation and healing – as the Eucharist is understood in Orthodox spirituality. Non-access to the Mystery meant lacking koinonia, togetherness and unity, and affected the very essence of the Church. Several solutions were used to solve this problem.
Priests decided to administer the Eucharist after the Divine Liturgy to the faithful outside of the churches, on the doorsteps of the temples, or while visiting people’s homes but still on the doorsteps. They took to relying on digital technology: they streamed Divine Liturgies in the effort of creating visual substitutes for the Eucharistic participation. The adoption of these substitutes, however, created both practical and theological problems, for the streamed services were not always experienced as authentic, and neither were they easy to conduct.
The most serious problem was obviously the incapability of digital technology to deliver an authentic corporeal and spiritual experience during the partaking of the Mystery. Digital means could give glimpses of how the Mystery was celebrated, even behind the iconostasis, but the technology could not generate the corporeal-spiritual koinonia of the gathered congregation with Christ and his sacrifice. Here in terms of all the interview data, a unanimous pastoral and spiritual-theological experience was expressed. I call this experience “spiritual-theological,” but it could be also referred to as “corporeal-theological,” since in the lived Orthodoxy of these interviews, there was a strong tendency to emphasize the material and corporeal dimensions of faith and spirituality.
Yet, paradoxically, restrictions and exceptional circumstances emphasized the significance of the Eucharist and its “correct” Orthodox understanding. The priests felt compelled to communicate to the people the meaning of the Eucharist, especially regarding the participation of the laity. Online services were, however, organized sporadically in the parishes of the interviewed priests, depending on local resources. Other pastoral responses to the restrictions and lockdowns involved counseling via cellphones and on the web, confessions (the sacrament of penance) via cellphones, and online priest meeting hours. These digital religious practices are telling: notwithstanding the criticism shown towards the meshing of digital religious services and support with the lived realities of Orthodoxy, these practices were still developed and used – albeit differently by different priests. Care for the soul demanded new practical solutions.
Care for the Tradition
Well, why in Finland they use wooden spoons whereas in, for example, Greece they dispense it [the Eucharist] with one spoon. … And then that the Holy Gifts are so holy that they don’t infect…. That they are so holy that viruses don’t have effect in there. And then … one needs to emphasize that from the point of view of faith they are holy, but we people infect each other (Int. 3). So, in a sense it [the Divine Liturgy] became a performance for the camera. (Int. 6)
The digital solutions implemented by the priests during the pandemic partially allowed them to communicate with and meet the needs of their respective congregations. But the technologies also raised the question whether the faithful were still worshipping according to the Orthodox Tradition. Odd feelings arose when the Divine Liturgy was celebrated without a congregation and online. Streaming came with ample technical difficulties. However, these complications appeared in this Orthodox context not only as technical or personal problems but were also seen as entangling with or modifying the Holy Tradition.
The notion of tradition (often with capital T) is significant in understanding the actions and position-takings of the Orthodox. The Church is believed to be living within the Holy Spirit-inspired stream of tradition: Biblical texts, worship, spirituality, and normative aspects of Orthodoxy are understood as interrelated. Therefore, it is no wonder that personal or singular interpretations and new modifications appear as problematic. Practical things and especially liturgical actions appear as simultaneously theological and practical, personal, and communal. Lived Orthodoxy appears as simultaneously perplexingly institutional and communal.
The interviewed priests found themselves in a difficult position. They were simultaneously safeguards of the authenticity of the tradition and pastoral experts dealing with a dangerous epidemic. In this position, they had to face people’s accusations and aversion for not following the tradition, especially regarding the veneration of icons by kissing, and the use of wooden spoons in administering the Sacrament, a practice that quickly became commonplace in Finland. The following narrative excerpt of an interview illustrates these questions and the transnational nature of Orthodoxy and Orthodox influences.
…Or when they call from Greece and say, “I have sinned.”
How come?
“I haven’t kissed an icon when I went to church because I was afraid.”
What sin is that?
“Well, when everybody watches and doubts and…”
Hear me, you did just what needs to be done. When you go to church and ask for blessing, you don’t kiss the hand [of the priest]. You don’t kiss the icons, and you use the mask…. (Int. 2)
Challenging questions emerged from “the greater Orthodox community”: How could the Holy Body and Blood (“For the health of the body and of the soul”) be associated with lethal sickness? What is the understanding of sickness as related to worship and sacramental theology? And how can medical science and theology be related to each other? Obviously, the holiness of the temple did not protect believers, but what about the Mystery of the Eucharist?
These questions were crucially important to the priests, yet the clergy posed no clear or self-evident answers. And as far as the refined theological reasoning of the relationship of the two (human and Divine) natures of Christ and their presence and function in the Eucharist was concerned, discussions of these theological concepts were not addressed in the interviews. This might be the result of a few factors. Perhaps such theological discussion was a novelty, or it could be because the parish priests were too modest to engage in a discussion usually guided primarily by the hierarchs of the Church.
Two different conclusions came to light in the data regarding parish members and their relationships to the modifications that were made in view of the worship tradition. Firstly, there was consent and acceptance in this time of need. “They have been able to understand this. No conflicts or schisms.” Yet, secondly, according to the priests, this was by no means the only perceptible attitude. “Some have gone to other communities where they celebrate the Liturgy [with open doors, without restrictions]” (Int. 8).
One interview was highly personal. The priest reflected on his own priestly self-image. “It is a question of identity; who am I as priest if I can’t go to church and celebrate with my people?” (Int. 8). The notion or perception that a person can be changed by a pandemic threatened identities in this time of liturgical emergency. This idea interestingly reveals how for the vocation of priesthood the institutional and personal are combined, as are the practical and social elements of the sacrament of priesthood. But all this insecurity gave impetus to theological reasoning and creativity. The Church was narrated as being on the road, as in the Easter Night procession, in insecurity. Thus, the Church, together with all of creation, as in the Arch of Noah, where “all are in trouble, and also the Church” reflected the cosmic view of the traditional Orthodox notion of the salvation as a cosmic reality.
The interviews also revealed evidence of a typical Catholic theological tradition: “…even a longing for the Eucharist is communion with Christ” (Int. 8). This perspective resembles Western theological reasoning regarding spiritual communion, and it is no wonder that similar questions and theological notions can be seen on different confessional grounds. According to contemporary Catholic understanding, “Spiritual communion means a conscious longing to receive Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar when there is no possibility to commune. In this manner, a Christian can uphold and strengthen his or her relationship to the redeemer in all conditions of life” Hengellinen kommuunio, Spiritual Communion, a Finnish Catholic web-text from the Covid era, translated by JB). Similar challenges have prompted analogous reflections across various religious contexts.
The question of conspiracy theories as a challenge to pastoral practice also emerged from the data: “I’m grew up in Sweden, I have faith in that state officials don’t want to harm me,” one Swedish informant pointed out in a somewhat frustrated tone (Int. 4). In Sweden, priests had to encounter not only the pandemic and its devastating impacts, but they also had to confront wild conspiracy theories about the coronavirus, leading to a manifestation of mistrust and doubt towards state and health officials. These theories have not been totally absent in the Finnish Orthodox realm even if they did not feature in the interviews.
In contrast to the pronounced mistrust of authorities articulated by specific parish members in Sweden, a Finnish interview highlighted a priest within his parish in the role of a public administrator. This role involved an obligation to address parish members’ legal inquiries regarding individual rights, particularly those associated with freedom of assembly and freedom of religion, and whether these rights were adequately safeguarded within the parish during pandemic restrictions. In Finland, parish members had the autonomy to challenge decisions made by state officials and some of them sought the intervention of their priest on their behalf. However, the small amount of data from this research allows only preliminary observations. More comprehensive research is needed regarding these aspects.
Conclusion
The main results showed the priests’ lives and practices radically changed. Concerns and worries emerged, and problems had to be solved. Care for health and people’s lives became prominent – there was a deep concern to protect people’s lives and health. Pastoral counselling, communication, and togetherness had to be reconfigured – and it was troublesome, especially because of the digital solutions. Sacramental life and communion with parish members became weaker. And, finally, the entire understanding of core of the Tradition of the Church seemed to be under reconsideration, as theological and practical problems especially concerning the meaning and worship and the celebration of the Mystery of the Eucharist had to be solved. Considerations concerning the continuity of the Tradition turned serious as informants pondered church life also after the crisis.
In their various roles, the priests had to function as sacramental and pastoral experts, administrative officials connected to the Patriarchate, the local bishop, and the bishops’ council, as well as interact with health officials and comply with legal and governmental actions and regulations. Moreover, lived religion meant lived institution. From a theological perspective, the informants perceived their lives and actions within an ecclesiastical and sacramental framework. They embodied priesthood, serving as leaders, experts, and empathetic, concerned individuals. Their lived Orthodoxy as institutional representatives was shaped by these multiple relationships.
“Locked doors slammed against the very essence of the Church” (Int. 1), but they could not prevent the interviewed priests from finding ways to reach out to their people.
