Just a few hours ago, late Sunday evening, when working on two research papers due today, my sister FaceTimed me and shared her sorrow on our Mother’s death.

It was only a few hours after I had had my last video call with Mother that we used to call Imme, for Irmeli, after her first name, and for Isoäiti, after her role as Grandmother.

***

Gaining age, Imme got increasingly dependent on her closest ones. Which, now that I think of it, sounds reasonable for any aging person. But it was not always easy for us that seemed to have so many errands here and there to worry about. “Why do you leave me alone in my room?”  

Therefore, when I told her more than three years ago that I would relocate to Namibia, I was expecting more than plain reservations from her side.

But she never judged me for my moving to the other part of the world, far from her.

She missed me, though, she told me, so she decided to write a book on my life, to meet with me by her writing – the same way that I channel my missing of her right now. Writing helps to understand, to relate, to empathize.

I guess she was thinking that I needed to do what I needed to do, in the same way that she had lived her life. Somehow I feel that she was alive by me continuing her love for Africans that I learned from her and my Father since my childhood.

***

When my Mother called me, it was 1989, that my Father had left this world for the new one, she said: “You had a good father.” The call reached me in the midst of my working with my software development team at the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission.

Today’s news hit me also while working, now with my African team, joined by Mikko visiting from Finland; the colleague and friend with whom I started my academic work in Tanzania in 2000. Or an angel that God sent to console me at this particular time. The other three, African angels, Lannie, Bello and David, had moved in earlier, more than a year before.

“You had a good mother”, they told.

I said a remote farewell to my Mother by her bed online, together with my sister Liisa and her husband Juha, and my wife Päivi – they were all in Finland. I WhatsApped with my kids Laura, Tuuli, Martti and Anton, and also called Anton. Condolences started to come, online, from my uncle Seppo and his wife Irma, from their daughter Anna and son-in-law Matthijs from Amsterdam, and my colleague Ant from the UK.

So, we were all together, the death could not separate us, as the Easter’s message of resurrection confirms. FaceTiming by my Mother’s bed, on WhatsApp with my kids and many others, physically here at home in Namibia, and finally – as we say in the Creed – in the communion of saints with my Mother.

Very real.

***

The Sunday that Imme passed away had a watch word of Luke 10:20: “Rejoice because your names are written in heaven.”

My Mother was a writer, known for the way that she shared stories from the grass-roots, but now I believe that God wrote her name, in heaven.

Whether the heaven knows her as Imme, Irmeli or Isoäiti does not really matter. What matters is that she is finally home, free with her identity, the unique image of God.

The church was born a pioneer and – while it has come of age – so it even celebrates the New Year around a month before the rest of the world, at the First Sunday of Advent, today.

New year is a time for brave beginnings, fresh openings. It is a time to find doors and gates, seek for encounters between two spaces, places and realities, to open the door, leave what was behind, and get boldly in the novel and the unknown.

Today, in 1929, was a day of new opportunities also to my father who was then born; yes, almost a century ago. Getting out of the comfort of his mother’s womb, with his twin brother, marked the first day of his life in which he certainly not always was in his comfort zone.

The other day David, one of the students that I share my home with, arranged a farewell dinner for two of his classmates that he had known since Day 1 of his studies. The dinner marked, I guess, to all of the 15 students a door that opened the next steps of their lives.

At the time that the last guests of the group stood at the gate of our home, toxic masculinity needed to give way for sharing their emotions, tears and hugs at their entering the diverse paths that they were no more walking together.

***

Globally, or should we say NorthSouthGlobally, this First Sunday of Advent marks not only opening, or lifting up, the gates and the doors (see Psalm 24:7-9), but rather closing them down.

The success of South African scientists in identifying a new variant of the COVID virus, named omicron, resulted in a disaster not only in economy but human relations between those in the South and those in the North.

The whole region of Southern Africa was separated from much of the rest of the world, out of the fear of death.

That’s why I am prepared to not seeing my family over the coming Christmas (and who knows how many to come), but also opening my home to those that might get stuck by the newly erected corona curtain.

So, for me, today’s revolutionary Psalm 24 got a whole new relevance and meaning.

“Lift up your heads, O you gates! And be lifted up, you everlasting doors! And the King of glory shall come in.”

Prophet Isaiah did not express the message any more shy (62:10):

“Go through, Go through the gates! Prepare the way for the people; Build up, Build up the highway! — Surely your salvation is coming.”

I wonder how the Church will pioneer the message in this coming Christmas time.

***

A pioneer in many fields, my friend and student Martti Havukainen, a Pentecostal Christian, posted me today a picture from his cottage, looking into a lake wearing its wintery blanket of snow and ice.

A lake shore is another encounter, between land and water. Who would not want to cross it?

I woke up yesterday at 5am.

What do I want?

Today? asked Lannie.

Not only, but in life, for the years to come.

As a professor, one learns little by little what one teaches.

I had been emphasizing, when talking with Lannie and Romario, the importance of knowing what to want.

They told to me that it is a hard one. My domestic worked Liesa agreed, on our drive to a mall.

“It is what it is.” Whatever we want, does not finally matter.

Modern life requires, increasingly, decision making. And decision making is personal, subjective, not only a mathematical optimization problem, but an emotionally loaded question.

On our way to the mall, we stopped by Emmanuel who was selling watermelons, the season has just started. Which melon does each of us want? And how to choose a good one? The one I like, so that I won’t get disappointed.

But a question of wanting can be far trickier. Even as a question of identity. To make a choice, I need to know who I am. What are my tastes, my preferences, my talents, my passion? My will?

I was reading today Alison’s & Alison’s book Rapport (Vermilion, 2020). They describe experiments where subjects stayed in rooms with no sensory stimulation. After seven days (the experiment was supposed to take six weeks) no one could continue, after starting to fail in thinking and decision making.

My layman’s interpretation was that decision making, and hence wanting, requires a stimulating environment that gives us feedback. But we need also stimuli from within.

“It is what it is.” With few stimuli, we end up indifferent and lose our motivation. Loneliness – the Alisons write – means that others do not know or understand the inner us. Loneliness leads to our getting little if any relevant, or stimulant feedback.

Aesthetic feedback which would touch us with all our senses.

I am learning Namibia by her people. I am trying to figure out my young friends’ experiences of badly wanting something, struggling for the goal, having it done, getting exhausted. And becoming happy – a balance of meaningfulness and pleasure, as Professor Paul Dolan from the London School of Economics (yes, they do explore happiness at the business school) writes in his book Happiness by Design.

But those that I talked to have few, if any, of these experiences.

Another book that I browsed today is McIntyre’s Namibia (6^th edition, Bradt, 2019). The travel guide told how Western media makes Bushmen to walk in their traditional costumes across a hot salt-pan, for the film crew to get prizes by photogenic poses.

But the scene makes no sense. Why, would the Bushmen ask. Why should they want this, I would add.

How far is the artificial view from the uncontrived way of Bushmen’s lives.

The current academic milieux, whether in Namibia, Finland or wherever, are ranked by expectations that are as distant to the soul of the universal academy as the Western filmmakers are from the Bushmen.

Now wonder that many of us, whether students or teachers, don’t know what to want.

“It is what it is.”

But it does not need to be. It can change. But that requires us to want, and know what to want.

Me as well.

My wife is reading an introduction to diverse ways of how women can be angry.

There are two major ways for a wife, or a woman in general, to be aggressive: positively or negatively. That is what she is learning from the book.

I have to say that her readings had an emotional transfer on me: I also got angry, and I guess negatively.

It was an interesting observation. Reflections on a handbook of female aggressions make a male aggressive, even via a digital connection. Another indication of the reality of the digital world. And the North-South connectivity.

In general, I told to my still dear wife, I would not need a manual to learn about the anger of ladies. Or of the anger of gentle(?)men either. Nowadays, I just want to be, live and work with people that I like.

And I appreciate if my mates and partners, whether in work, at home or elsewhere, retain their aggressions behind.

My family members – not that many others – would know that I have not been very good at that art at all. I am trying to de-learn aggression in Africa, the location of my anger management program.

At least for me, fun, not aggression, is the key factor for creative energy, ideas and – how is it called? – flow.

Way back I read the famous story by Hans Christian Andersen What Father Does Is Always Right (or in some other translations, the Old Man – well, I am both).

The story tells how the husband traded the property of a modest household finally for a basket of rotten apples.

But the wife had not read the anger guide.  So I guess it was the wife’s overwhelming confidence in her husband’s miserable mistakes of his businesses that transformed the threating poverty into richness and happiness.

Or maybe it was love? Blind love. Positive love? (At least it must not have been negative love, although maybe the book would have clarified my thoughts here.)

I wonder what the feedback of an either positively or negatively charged wife would have resulted in.

I guess I have received so much of the undeserved and unfounded love from my wife – with my mistakes and my anger and my aggression – that she needed to do the reading of the manual.

At the time of emerging aggressions, hate and conflicts, it might be more constructive to learn from Andersen than from the Finnish therapists.

When we talk, hours and hours, day and night, with my Namibian friends, but also digitally with others, the anger horizon of the whole world opens up.

People have so many reasons to recall all the unjust that they are all the time encountering in life.

Like my grandmother who kept writing letters to her ex-husband throughout the rest of her life. Decades. And as far as I have understood, they were not traditional love letters.

Many years back I was chairing a keynote by President Benjamin Mkapa. With no other questions after his great talk, I needed to give mine:

Why do so many people in Africa look happy, even within a range of difficulties that they are living in?

Of course, most people with more judgment than me would regard the question childish and not very well informed.

Maybe it is the sun, the President was joking. But more seriously, the relations are still there, within a family, he continued.

At the time that people are talking increasingly about healthy food, maybe we could get a step further up in Maslow’s hierarchy and talk about healthy relationships.

We don’t talk about aggressive food either, even with chili (but maybe it is an example of positively aggressive food).

A call for another book?

Yesterday and the day before, we enjoyed the Digital Theology in the Global South symposium and hackathon (https://ftlab.utu.fi/node/151).  

Thirty people from four continents were exploring the arising horizons of the encounter of interactive technology and faith expressed as theology in the context of the Global South, in particular Africa, the emerging epicenter of Christianity.

Among several highlights that you can read later in the coming proceedings, Solomon, in his presentation Smart Technologies in Digital Theology in the Global South, brought up the idea of flipped sermon that he later generalized into flipped church.

Flipped church comes from the concept of flipped classroom where the roles teachers and learners and processes of teaching and learning are transformed to their opposites.

Earlier, the teacher prepared the lessons, delivered them at the lesson or lecture, to be later studied by the students at home.

Flipping the scenario will have learners to get familiar with the material before meeting with teachers and peer students. In the flipped classroom, at what earlier was called a lesson, the prepared students will challenge the teacher to answer questions, lead the conversation and scaffold the joint venture for shared understanding. Afterwards, hopefully both learners and teachers will be inspired to synthesize what they learned together, for novel insights and ideas.

A flipped sermon translates to a process where the congregation will explore the readings of the next Sunday beforehand, individually or together making use of all available, occasionally seemingly irrelevant information, and thus preparing themselves for a novel experience of co-sermon.

Another presenter, Walter, in his talk Digital Theology and the expression, elaboration and communication of faith, exemplified a flipped sermon with a cartoon where the Pope (apparently Francis!) was sitting in the first row, alone, listening to a sermon given by a highly diverse group of people from around the world.

But Solomon continued. He called us to ponder the idea of flipped church. And imagine how smart technologies would facilitate it.

Flipping is a highly Christian concept. Christianity means rethinking, swapping, exchanging. Getting rid of the old, the sin that binds us, and continue our walks liberated. That is also the idea of learning.

Martin Luther used the term sweet exchange: a human gives their sins to Christ, Christ justifies them by his righteousness. Jesus beatitudes in his (co-?)sermon on the mount (Mt. 5) expresses similar exchanges, transformations, swaps.

A flipped church concretized. Leaders starting to serve, the first becoming the last, the clean the dirty. Children showing the example. Blind seeing, the captured released.

Technology, when designed for, with and at the church, should always serve flipping. This is what I heard also our Namibian participants, like Isak and Dan, sketching: flipped church, with apps made in Namibia.

Thanks all participants, and the organizers Ant and Anna, for starting a flipped journey for digital theology in the Global South, and beyond.