"The Gospel According To St. Urho"

pdf format: click here

The Rev. Suzelle Lynch
March 13, 2005

Worship for All Ages: THE LEGEND OF ST. URHO

How many of you know what holiday is coming up this week? The one that has to do with shamrocks and pots of gold?

How many of you know about the holiday that comes the day before that one? Anybody?

It’s St. Urho’s Day? What? You’ve never heard of St. Urho? Well, let me tell you his legend. It is one of the lesser known, but most extraordinary legends of ages past.

Before the last glacial period wild grapes grew with abundance in the area now known as Finland. Archeologists have uncovered evidence of this scratched on the thigh bones of the giant bears that once roamed northern Europe.

St. Urho, who lived not quite that long ago, but closer to the early Christian days, the time of St. Patrick, was born to a peasant family who lived on the Finnish-Swedish border. After showing promise in schools, he was given a scholarship to a Stockholm seminary and studied in Paris under the humanist Catholic theologians. When Urho returned to Finland, he went to serve as priest to a church in a rural area... And one year, a terrible plague of grasshoppers happened. Hundreds of millions of grasshoppers were everywhere, and they were eating up all the new young grapes.

The people appealed to all the gods they knew of, even the god of Christianity, but their prayers produced no results. The grasshoppers just continued to eat up every grape in sight!

In desperation the people asked their new priest, the good, kind Father Urho, to help them.

St. Urho picked up his pitchfork, and went outside. He stood on a hilltop, and chanted these Finnish words. "HEINASIRKKA, HEINASIRKKA, MENE TAALTA HIITEEN."

(teach them the chant….)

He chanted those words, over and over, and you know what? All at once, the grasshoppers began to swarm. They started hopping and flying and pretty soon they had all hopped and flown away. The grapes were saved!

Would you like to know what those magic Finnish words mean?: "GRASSHOPPER, GRASSHOPPER, GET OUT OF HERE!"

In memory of this impressive demonstration of the Finnish language, Finnish people celebrate on March 16, the day before St. Patrick's Day. Finnish women and children dressed in royal purple and Nile green gather around the shores of the many lakes in Finland and chant what St. Urho chanted many years ago.

Adult men dressed in green costumes gather on the hills overlooking the lakes, listen to the chant and then kicking out like grasshoppers, they slowly disappear to change their costumes from green to purple. The celebration ends with singing and dancing polkas and schottisches and drinking grape juice.

THREE READINGS

I. From the Mission Statement of UU Church West:

Unitarian Universalist Church West strives to: be a creative, nurturing, and challenging, diverse Unitarian Universalist community.

II. From W.E.B. DuBois

W.E.B. Dubois was an important early civil rights leader and co-founder of the NAACP. He was born just before the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1870. In 1803, in his important work called "The Souls of Black Folk," he wrote: "It is a pecuiliar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others…. One ever feels his twoness: An American a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body…"

III. You might be a Finn if…

1. Your coffee consumption exceeds 6 cups a day, and the coffee is too weak unless made with 10 or more scoops per eight-cup pot.
2. You are never late, not even "fashionably late.” You are always on time.
3. When a stranger in the street smiles at you, you assume:
1. he is drunk
2. he is insane
3. he's a Swede
4. Silence is fun.
5. You say "sow-na" instead of "saw-nah."
6. You know that 167 degrees is too cold inside the sow-na while 77 degrees is blazing hot outside.
7. You get all the Swedish jokes.
8. Your bad mood is your good mood.
9. Your idea of unforgivable behavior includes walking across the street when the light is red and there is no WALK symbol, even though there are no cars in sight.
10. "No comment" is a conversation strategy.
11. You see no problem wearing white socks with loafers.
12. You know how to fix herring in 101 different ways.
13. You eat herring in 101 different ways.
14. You associate pea soup with Thursday.
15. You rummage through your plastic bag collection to see which ones you should keep to take to the store and which can be sacrificed to garbage.
16. You understand why the Finnish language has no future tense.

SERMON

A week ago Friday I lost my identity.

At least, that’s when I think I lost it. I noticed it was missing on Saturday night, and the last time I remember seeing it was Friday morning. In between those times, I’d been all over – walking my daughter to school, meeting with various people, shopping, and more. I called every place I’d been in the hopes that someone might have found my identity, but it was useless.

By Wednesday, I’d given up. My identity: my driver’s license, credit and debit cards, frequent flyer card, UU Ministers Association card, membership cards for three local museums, health and auto insurance cards, all packaged in the cute little red leather wallet given to me by my loving husband, was irretrievably gone.

But wait! Had I really lost my identity? Did my face go blank, did I turn into a shapeless lump without voice or feature when my wallet disappeared? Did I begin to change colors like a chameleon to blend in with my surroundings? Wasn’t I still myself, even without all those little paper and plastic cards inscribed with name, rank and serial number?

Of course I was still the same person I'd been before, though I had opened myself up to the very real risk of identity theft. But as I began figuring out all the places I needed to call to cancel those cards and get new ones, I also began to think more deeply about just who that woman was who had accumulated all those cards. What is my identity? And then, of course, I found my wallet under the passenger seat of my car, breathed a sigh of relief, and tried to forget about the whole thing.

But I found that I couldn’t, for identity is such a powerful concept. Psychologically speaking, it refers to the individual person, and explains his or her basic personality. Sociologically speaking, we learn that attributes shared by a number of individual persons define an identity group. All of us belong to more than one identity group – for example, we are grouped by age, generation, sexual orientation, gender, race, occupation, avocation, addiction or recovery, religion, marital or partnership status, parenting status, nation of origin, and so on and so forth. And the group identities we share definitely contribute to our personal, individual identity.

How many of us feel like we belong to the identity group, "American"? I know I'm definitely part of this group, even though I rarely have cause to identify myself as "an American." But I am an American, even though I'm not always proud of some of the things being American seems to stand for these days – things like preemptive war and disrespect for the United Nations and the Geneva Convention. But that's another sermon.
Recently I came across a definition of what it means to be American that I think might resonate with most of us. It's from philosopher Jacob Needleman, in his book, 'The American Soul.' Needleman wrote, “To be American is an idea, not an inescapable, organic given. America is a nation formed by philosophical ideas that have been thought through by human beings. It is the only nation in the world that is so constituted. America is not a tribal, ethnic or racial identity. It is a philosophical identity composed of ideas – of liberty, freedom, independent thought, independent conscience, self-reliance, hard work and justice.”

A philosophical identity, not a tribal, ethnic or racial identity. Needleman's concept works pretty well. At least it works well for most white people. But what if, because of your physical appearance, your "American identity" is often challenged?

I am thinking here of a recent email conversation I've been part of with a group of Unitarian Universalists who are Asian, or Asian American. The question being batted around was "how do you respond when someone asks, 'So where are you from?'" From experience, the people in this identity group know that this is a question about their race or the nation from which their family originated. It's a question they get whether their family immigrated last year or a hundred years ago.

Now, that's not a question that people usually ask me, though they will ask me where my husband, Young Kim, is from. And people don't usually tell me what country their family originally immigrated from, either, unless I ask. In her book, "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race," Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum writes that when asked to name elements of our identity, most of us who are white don't list being white as a part of our identity, while those of us who are people of color do list our race or ethnicity as important markers of identity. This is a pattern that plays out in other areas of identity as well, that those who are members of the dominant group do not name that group as part of their identity, they simply take it for granted, while those who are not part of a dominant group do name as important to their identity that part of who they are that makes them different (from the dominant group). For example, in the case of gender – women are much more likely to say that being a woman is part of their identity than men are to include being a man as part of their identity. And in the case of sexual orientation, heterosexuals tend to take their identity for granted, while those who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual are more likely to name their orientation as an important marker of identity. When our inner reality and experience is validated by the outer world, we are less likely to comment on it and identify with it.

But let me get back to St. Urho now, since, after all, this sermon is supposed to be about his gospel, his good news! Who is he? Where does he come from? Well, he's a somewhat controversial symbol for one of the identity groups I’m a part of. I am one-quarter Finnish, and St. Urho is a fictional saint created by Finnish-Americans as a way to celebrate their ethnic heritage.

St. Urho came into being nearly 50 years ago at Ketola's Department Store in Virginia, Minnesota thanks to a fun-loving Finnish-American named Richard L. Mattson. Mattson was a manager at Ketola's when Gene McCavic, a co-worker, chided him in 1953 that the Finns did not have saints like St. Patrick. Mattson told her the Irish aren't the only ones with great saints. She asked him to name one for the Finns, so he fabricated a story. When it came to deciding what the saint's name should be, he thought of St. Eero (Eric), or St. Jussi (John), but Urho, a common Finnish name, had a more commanding sound, and so St. Urho it was.

So Mattson told McCavic the Finns had a St. Urho. And the story was that to save the grape crop, Urho chased all the poisonous frogs out of Finland. Never mind that grapes never actually grew in Finland.

A few years after Mattson spun his tale, a college professor named Sulo Havumaki changed the frogs to grasshoppers.

St. Urho's Day was originally to be a May celebration. But according to Mattson, everyone wanted to have the party in March as the Finnish answer to St. Patrick. And the response was phenomenal -- within a few years every state had issued a proclamation to recognize St. Urho's Day, and many communities, especially those in Michigan, Wisconsin, Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Alaska, and Montana with significant Finnish American populations held programs, parades, or parties – and some of them still do today. (Previous six paragraphs adapted from http://sainturho.com/mattson.htm)

I discovered St. Urho and his message of silliness and Finnish pride when I was trying to learn more about my ethnic heritage. Like many white Americans, my ancestors came to this country from various Northern European nations anywhere from two to ten generations ago.

My father’s father traced his ancestry to the American Revolution once, because he wanted to become a member of the Sons of the American Revolution. But he quit them soon after joining because he couldn’t stand their politics. My mother’s mother came to Michigan's Upper Peninsula from Finland near the turn of the last century, when she was a young child.

My drive to find out more about who I am by reclaiming my ethnic identity was fired by a growing commitment to anti-racism work, inspired when I began dating my husband. Early in our relationship, he helped me understand how his identity as an American of Korean descent has shaped his worldview and his life. Knowing that he, and all persons of color in the United States, essentially have to live bi-cultural lives – lives of "twoness" as W.E.B. DuBois put it -- was a big wake up call for me, and it challenged me to learn about who I was beyond “just white” or "just American," and to learn about white privilege as well.

This learning been a deeply spiritual process – reading books about Finnish culture, going to the FinnFest in 1999 when it was held at the University of Washington, talking with my father, and especially my mother, about their families, and doing research on the Internet has been good for me in more ways than I can name. It has given me roots.

One of the things I discovered and identify with strongly is a unique Finnish concept called Sisu. Sisu is a Finnish word that defies translation; it's a word that defines the Finnish people and their character. One definition I've read is that "It stands for the philosophy that what must be done will be done, regardless of what it takes. Sisu is a special strength and stubborn determination to continue and overcome in the moment of adversity. It is an almost magical quality… a combination of stamina, perseverance, courage, and determination held in reserve for hard times." [Adapted from www.csc.fi/tiko/finland.html] Another, more picturesque definition (as given by Trishka M. to Kara Cook Giles) is this: "Sisu is the ability to hold onto the end of the rope, while dangling over a precipice, for five seconds longer than you thought you could. Then going for five more hours."

In the past, the Finns struggled against nature and against intruders from Russia and Sweden, and they were dominated and oppressed by both nations at different times in their history. Despite all of this, the struggle gave a lot of strength. The people found inspiration in the landscape and in mythological heroes who taught them that it was possible to overcome obstacles. In more recent times these same sources have been inspiration for athletes, artists, composers, designers and architects who have made Finland known to the world. (adapted from http://www.sisugrp.com/sisuis.htm)
Now, I will admit that there is a great deal I have not learned about being Finnish. For example, I don't speak the Finnish language and I have not yet read the Kalevala, the Finnish national mytho-poetic epic a portion of which we heard sung earlier. Even so, the more I learn about Finnish culture and character, the more familiar it feels to me. My mother, without realizing it herself, I think, raised me in a Finnish way with Finnish attitudes and customs.
Knowing more about my ancestry and claiming it for my own has also made me more honest, more grounded, more connected to the deep center I long for. When we know who we are, both our own unique selves, and the various group identities that contribute to that self, we are more able to minister, to be present to the suffering of others, to listen without fear or judgment. When we know who we are, we can more honestly and completely honor and affirm someone else. And I believe that our souls are nourished when we learn more about who we are, and accept ourselves more deeply.
But let me insert an important cautionary note or two here. First of all, I recognize that not every white American feels any connection to his or her ethnic roots. As a matter of fact, some of you may not identify in any way shape or form with the ethnicities that make up your heritage.

And secondly, but even more importantly, being classified into a racial or ethnic group by folks in the dominant culture who hold power is a very different thing than claiming an ethnic or racial identity and finding it a source of personal power or spiritual deepening. I may feel good about identifying as a Finn, but it does nothing to dislodge the knapsack full of privileges and benefits I get automatically in our culture simply for being white.

What it might do, though, if I pay attention to the harsher side of what happened when the Finns immigrated to America, is to help me understand the ways in which people who are not of the dominant culture are stigmatized and used by those who are. It may help me understand why my ancestors, as soon as they could, traded in their rich ethnic cultures for the power of whiteness.

For example, between 1870 and 1920, 340,000 Finns came to America. Many of them were driven out of Finland because farming conditions there had become so poor they could not feed their families. Here in the U.S., they went to work in the iron and copper mines in places like Minnesota and in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The miners worked 10 hour shifts, six days a week, moving the heavy ore almost entirely by hand, in a darkness broken only by the flickering lights of the candles on their helmets. There were frequent accidents. Miners had to pay for their own equipment and supplies, and sometimes, after all their backbreaking labor, ended up owing the company money. (http://sfhs.eget.net/P_articles/Pelo8.htm ) Like the Irish, who were considered little better than slaves when they immigrated in huge numbers, the Finnish miners were treated as though they were completely disposable.

When I think about this, I recognize that there are important political reasons for people who are not part of the dominant culture to stick together and organize around a particular identity. There are important reasons – both political and personal – that all the black kids might want to sit together in the cafeteria. It is a matter both of solidarity and pride.

Ethnicity and race loom large in the arena of identity, but sexual orientation and gender rival their size in terms of impact on our sense of self.

Our congregation has done and continues to do some very important work on issues of homophobia and heterosexism through the Welcoming Congregation workshop series, as we pursue the process of becoming an official Welcoming Congregation – which is a congregation that affirms and celebrates the lives of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.

Just as an example, when I said, a few moments ago, that sexual orientation rivals race and ethnicity in terms of impact on our concept of personal identity, how many of us really “related” to that statement? I know I didn’t, not the first time I heard it, at least. As a part of the dominant culture, I usually take my heterosexuality very much for granted – forget that it makes me part of an identity group! But it does. (www.uua.org/obgltc/ ) Gender is another identity marker that many of us take for granted.

Who are you, really? Who are you becoming? What is different and special about you? There are things about all of us that are hidden from others, and there are other things about us that we may not even be consciously aware of, or able to accept, about ourselves. We may have a unique ability, or gift buried within us. We may have disabilities that are physical, mental or emotional in nature that we do not feel comfortable letting others know about, or even acknowledging to ourselves. All of us, if we are growing, will learn new things about ourselves from time to time. Throughout our lives, we go through the process that’s known in the gay community as coming out: coming out to ourselves as we accept who we are – and who we are becoming – and coming out to others as we trust them with the real stuff of ourselves and our lives.

Earlier, I said that learning about white privilege and my Finnish heritage has been a deeply spiritual process. Being real, having congruence between who we are on the inside and who we show ourselves to be to those around us, sustains our spirits. This is the gospel of St. Urho as I read it -- that in knowing ourselves, revealing what is hidden, even if it seems less-than-wonderful to us, we become more open to accepting one another, and especially those who are different from ourselves.

This is why congregations like ours are so important. If we can be open and affirming of persons of all gender identities and sexual orientations; if we can allow ourselves to be fundamentally changed by working against racism and for justice that the lives and perspectives of diverse people are truly welcome and celebrated here, then our congregation can be a place of spiritual and emotional safety where it is more likely that every one of us can grow. And when the members of our community grow, the whole community grows. And the community’s identity becomes one of openness and acceptance and affirmation of the many diverse ways of being human, as we reach out with that environment of spiritual and emotional safety, with that gospel of acceptance, blessedness and belovedness as far beyond these walls as we can.

This is not an easy journey -- it’s the work of a lifetime. But what could be more exciting than for our congregation be a community where each and every person understands themselves to be inherently worthy, inherently beloved, inherently a part of a greater Wholeness.

So let us be brothers and sisters on this journey. Let us be brothers and sisters in liberal faith, with the powerful mission of shaping a place where we can be free, where we can love whom we love, and where we can be who we are without fear.

Amen.