Prayer and the Body in Lay Religious Experience in Early Modern Finland

Abstract

Toivo’s chapter systematizes prayer as experience on three levels, as everyday encounters, as social processes and as structures. It shows the material and the corporeal nature of the early modern prayer to play an essential part in the ways the religious experience of a prayer was simultaneously constructed and personalized and shared. Praying was ‘doing’ in a much more holistic sense than merely saying words or even less thinking thoughts to God. The body and the material surroundings of the prayer form a space where the experience takes place, even ‘a tool’ to experience with.