Hanna Pylvainen's We Sinners

Aiming to convince her to leave her church, Tiina Rovaniemi's boyfriend Matthew tells her "You know, the best thing about the church is your family, and the worst thing about our family is the church"(102). While Tiina easily recognizes the truth of Matthew's words, she also realizes it will never be simple for her to separate the two.

The confluence of faith and family is at heart of Hanna Pylvainen's, We Sinners. The eleven short stories in the collection tell of Tiina's family, the Finnish-American Rovaniemi clan, made up of her, her mom and dad and eight siblings. Eleven stories, eleven members, although not every member narrates a story.

The Rovaniemi's are Laestadians, members of the Laestadian church. As rebellious daughter Uppu explains to a boyfriend, "It's a kind of Lutheranism where everyone is much more hung up on being Lutheran than all the other normal Lutherans"(154). It is a strict church in some regards; drinking, dancing, movies, popular movies, TV are all heavilly frowned upon. As is any type of birth-control; the Rovaniemi's are a large family and the married children who remain in the church also launch large families. Yet, according to the head of the clan, Warren Rovaniemi, who ministers at the church on weekends while pulling down a check as an accountant to earn a living, "Once you had the heart of a believer...the restrictions weren't restrictions at all- it was simply what your conscience told you to do and not to do"(158). Beyond this, Laestadianism is a church built upon forgiveness. It recognizes man is a sinner and the core of it's service is to foster forgiveness.

The Rovaniemi's simple faith offers peace and forgiveness, and builds remarkable characters. It cements them as a family. Yet, for all it's strengths and simple beauties, it is a severe faith. It is a faith, and, by it's nature, everyone struggle with it.

It seems especially a challenge for the children growing up in a late 20th century suburb of Detroit. For one, the rules of the church make them lead quite different lives from those of their peers. Nobody they know has such a large family. Nobody they know is forbidden from going to the movies. They all feel an urge to escape both at times. And, doubt creeps into the faith of all.

However, escape is not an easy passage, and although yearned for at times, when it comes to the point, it is hard to make the leap away from faith. When his wife asks what he does all day at work as an accountant, Warren Rovaniemi glibly tells her "I figure out the difference between what things seem to cost and what things really cost"(30). The Rovaniemi children all fear what leaving the church will really cost.

How does one price the gift of forgiveness and love. The family practices an imperfect but sincere and beautiful love founded on a daily, constant, seeking and granting of forgiveness. The mother, Pirjo Rovaniemi, tells one of her seven daughters' suitors, Jonas Chan, that her children "are the best of me...They are the best thing I ever did with my life"(171). And, the children feel the love and practice between themselves seeking and granting forgiveness. The family knits its members into something both maddening and large, alive and vibrant. When the Rovaniemi's leave Jonas Chan's high school graduation party, "they left behind a backyard of quiet that no one could fill again. He felt it again, the largeness of them, at Uppu's graduation, though then the entire churh showed, every room filled, even the stairs, even the porch, forty or fifty little kids running about, a few babies lying on blankets atop the living room rug, waiving their limbs like beetles on their backs"(167).

The situation is not easy. All the members of the family have doubts. When Warren suspects he is going to be chosen to minister to the congregation, he quickly dismisses his suspicions; surely, God knowing him as the particularly wrathful and  sinful creature he knows himself, He will never allow such a thing to happen. It does, although Pylvainen never makes us privy to the internal doubts such a series of events must have occasioned. Several of the siblings leave the church, unable to sustain the faith and not willing to fake it, despite the fact that it creates a barrier between themselves and their believing kin. Their honesty speaks to their respect for the faith of their family. Even the most devout member of the siblings, Brita is subject to a particulary dark night in her soul when she nearly dies after delivering her last child. Nobody simply leaves.

Never simply preaching one way or another, Pylvainen has done a superb and nuanced job of capturing the strengths and weaknesses of living a strict, non-mainstream faith. This is far from a screed opposed. If anything, it leaves me, a struggling believer who grew up in a rather normal, small nuclear household, envious of the Rovaniemi children. Their family and faith has offered them a certainty and happiness that is lacking for many. When son Nels experiments with alcohol in college, he eventually has a moment when he pulls back and realizes he is about to lose something if he continues to indulge in such sinful behavior. Nels "sat in the back of the lecture hall and wondered about all the people sitting there, bored, trying to figure out who they had a chance with. He felt bad for them, for the limits of their experiences, for the fragility and infrequency of their happiness. They did not even known, he thought, the kind of happiness they wanted"(74).