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ENDURANCE RUNNING AS INITIATION INTO THE MYSTERIES
on endurance running and spiritual life.’ By positioning Ehrnrooth’s 2007
novel Lähemmäksi kuin lähelle 2007 (Closer than Close), which focuses on
the tragic love story of two endurance runners, on the left side and the two
essay books from 2012b and 2014 on issues of faith, religion, and mysticism
on the right side of a scale, Ehrnrooth puts Kaksi syntymää... and Juoksu
somewhere between these two poles. However, the postmodern essayistic
Juoksu exemplifies most clearly how the boundaries between these poles and
genres dissolve.
Given the recurring topics in all of the above-mentioned works by Ernrooth,
it is worth mentioning three common ones:
(1) “all out” performance in sport (both in exercising and in racing),
(2) the experience of becoming empty (exhausted) and meeting the “nada”
(cf. Miguel de Unamuno) as a liminal state of body and mind for the mystic
who is yearning for holiness, and
(3) the poetic expression of such mystic experiences as treasures lying at
the bottom of “nada” or which come to fill the “nada” state.
While topic (1) dominates the 2002 and 2007 novels, topic (2) is discussed
in more detail in the 2012 books, and topic (3) in the 2014 book. All three
topics appear to some degree in all of the books. Moreover, it is worth
mentioning that parallel to Juoksu, in 2012 the author published another
essay collection entitled Tietämättä uskon, which describes inter alia several
of his other mystic experiences. The book’s polysemic title demonstrates how
strongly our thoughts and experiences are formed by the language we use to
express them. The phrase could be translated as ‘to believe is not to know’,
‘faith without knowledge’, ‘I do believe I do not know’, or ‘I do believe yet
I do not know’. In this book, Ehrnrooth describes his concept of uskontunto,
yet another expression strongly rooted in the Finnish language. The word for
“conscience” (omatunto) is built on the same final root as uskontunto, while
tunto by itself also means “touch,” “feeling,” or “sensation,” and oma means
“own,” usko means “faith,” and uskonto means “religion.” Thus, uskontunto,
referring to the same kind of deep human sensation as “being conscious,” is
imbued with a more complex meaning in Ehrnrooth’s usage, simultaneously
signalling what one really believes in (his or her inner sense of what is true),
as well as a sense of the uncanny, unattainable holiness that a believer holds
inside of his or her religious mind.
” Jari Ehrnrooth, Tietämättä uskon, Helsinki, Kirjapaja, 2012b. Jari Ehrnrooth, Toivon
tarkoitus, Helsinki, Kirjapaja, 2014.
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