This is what I saw when I looked out of my bedroom at Hotel Vihiluoto in Kempele, between Oulu and Oulu airport, in Finland’s frozen north. The Gulf of Bothnia is just beyond the trees. The temperature never rose above -3ºC the whole time I was there (20 to 24 March) and fell as low as -25ºC at night.

View Larger Map

And this was the hotel.

But I didn’t go to Oulu for the hotel or the snow. I went because the Baha’is in Finland had invited me to be the main speaker at the annual Nordic Baha’i Youth Conference.

Photo ©Patrik Jansson

There were around 120 young people, mostly Baha’is, some not, from Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the UK, sleeping on air mattresses in a modern high school building on the edge of Oulu. Some had driven huge distances to get their. One car-load had driven almost 1,400 km from Oslo; the UK group had flown to Stockholm and then driven from Stockholm to Oulu, a distance of over 1,100 km around the northern end of the Gulf of Bothnia. Both groups drove for more than 12 hours to get there and were facing equally long drives to get back.

My presentations and workshops

My task was to speak about “Applying the Bahá’í Teachings in Your Life”. I gave three 90-minute presentations and ran four 2-hour workshops. The presentations covered virtues, prayer, fasting, other laws of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, and why we should obey the laws of Bahá’u'lláh. I wove some of the story of Bahá’u'lláh’s life into the second and third presentations.

Applying the Bahá’í Teachings in Your Life

The workshops covered: (1) inter-faith relations and religion in public life; (2) who am I and what makes me who I am? (for this I played the fascinating video from TED of Jill Bolte Taylor speaking about her experience of a brain haemorrhage and its impact on her consciousness, on her ability to handle language, and on her sense of who she was; and (3) how to approach the “difficult” questions that arise out of the Aqdas, such as the outlawing of homosexual relations, the prescription of the death penalty for murder and arson (with life sentences being an allowed alternative).

The first day’s presentation (on virtues, ethics and laws) and workshop (on religion in public life) didn’t really hit the spot with the audience, but the second day’s presentation went down a treat - you could have heard the proverbial pin drop at the point where I was telling the story of Bahá’u'lláh in the Síyáh-Chál. It certainly showed the power of story telling in getting to an audience. The second day’s workshop (with the Jill Bolte Taylor video) was hugely popular and prompted a great deal of discussion covering a wide range of issues (consciousness, near death experiences, personal identity, science and religion…). The third day’s presentation and workshop also seemed to hit the spot.

Bright young things

When I began to prepare for the conference I really had no idea how to approach the topic. It’s a long time since I’ve been to a Bahá’í youth conference and a very long time indeed since I’ve been a youth! How would I be able to win the interest of an international gathering of this kind? How stimulate their thinking? I had been asked to speak in English without translation (English is the common language for these young people, even if their English is not always as good as it might - although always better than my Finnish!), so I had to go reasonably slowly and not use too many of my favourite multisyllabic latinisms.

Some of the young people were frighteningly intelligent, asked some very sharp questions and made cogent observations. Others were quieter, but also made useful contributions to the discussions in a less intellectual but often just as perceptive key.

Other workshops

Others also ran workshops on topics such as the characteristics of Bahá’í administration, balancing your life, and learning how to be understood the way you want to be.

Interstitial conversations

I think I had just as much fun with the informal conversations at meal times or in between sessions. We got into some pretty deep stuff at times, such as the relationship between sexual orientation and personal identity; and conceptualization, ontology, onticity and reality.

Artistic talents

The young people included some talented musicians and artists. There were daily arts workshops on digital photography, origami, stand-up comedy, and sports. And, of course, there were evening performance - most of which I missed as I needed to return to my hotel in the evenings to rethink my next day’s presentation and workshop in light of the discussions that had happened during the day.

My great disappointment

My great disappointment was not to see anything at all of the city of Oulu itself. The school was located next door to an entirely modern shopping mall/area on the outskirts of Oulu. All I saw was the school, my hotel and the very uninteresting road in between.

Return to the UK

My return Finnair flights to London from Oulu involved a high-speed change of aircraft at Helsinki airport. The time between arrival from Oulu and departure for London was supposed to be 40 minutes - tight, by anyone’s estimate - but we left Oulu late and arrived late into Helsinki. This cut my transfer time to 30 minutes. Now Helsinki’s Vantaa airport is not Heathrow (thank goodness), but they do provide foot-propelled scooters for staff (I didn’t see any passengers using them) to get from one end of the airport to the other. When we landed at Vantaa the aircraft got parked on an outside stand, so we had to be bussed to the terminal; then I had to make haste to the international terminal (which seemed to be about half a mile away) to get my London flight. I’d checked in all the way through from Oulu to London, so I didn’t have to go through security again, but it was a damned close-run thing.

A nice feature on Finnair is that they show details of departure times and gates at Vantaa on the screens of flights coming into Vantaa, so even before you land you can see where you have to go for your transfer.

As you may imagine, I was somewhat stressed during the first part of the journey. I sat as near the front of the flight from Oulu to Helsinki as I could, knowing I’d need to make a dash, so I could see the cabin crew making a meal of counting passengers and agreeing the passenger manifest with the captain. The minutes ticked away and I wanted to leap up and say, “For God’s sake, get this bloody flight going!” And then the wait for the passengers to load onto the bus at Helsinki - aaaarghgghhh!

After all that we arrived at Heathrow right on time.

And my baggage arrived too!

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, youth, Nordic, Oulu, Finland, faith, virtues, ethics, laws, flying, airports