In Arctic Norway, among the Indigenous Sámi people, there is a custom: When cutting down a tree, tap its trunk three times. On the one hand, it’s simply practical advice: Only old, dead trees will ring hollow. Test the trunk, and you’ll know which trees are young and healthy, and leave them more time to grow. But when Tore Johnsen, a Lutheran priest researching the spiritual customs of the Sámi, asked for an explanation, he heard the practice held another meaning: It was, also, a threefold blessing — a knock for the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Sámi are Europe’s only recognized Indigenous group, occupying a broad homeland that spans Arctic Europe from Norway to Russia. For millennia before the arrival of Christian missionaries, Johnsen found, the rites and rituals of Sámi communities helped sustain a distinctive worldview that emphasized respectful equilibrium with the natural world. “Sámi traditions and our practices all have to do with collaboration — with the place, with animals, with everything that grows,” said Lovisa Mienna Sjöberg, a Sámi theologian at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Norway. “You should not take more than is your part to take.” But more than 600 years after their first encounters with missionaries, Sámi communities are also some of northern Europe’s most devoutly Christian. Mixing Indigenous cosmology and ethics with Christian stories, imagery and theology, the Sámi have, over centuries, evolved a multilayered faith of their own, often in the face of bitter oppression and…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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