The Borlaug Polka

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter For the Years of Winter…


I woke up two hours past midnight and had to face that question that sooner or later all old people must answer: Did my life have meaning if there is no Finnish polka named for me?

The musical guests for The Second Sunday Folk Dance/Concert [1] last night was Kaivama, [2] composed of fiddler Sara Pajunen, from Hibbing, MN, [3] and guitarist and harmonium player Jonathan Rundman, from Ishpeming, MI. [4] They bill themselves as “Finnish-American Excavators,” meaning they dig up old Finnish and Finnish-American tunes to play, as well as create new ones. [5] One of their new ones is the Norman Borlaug Polka. [Polska in Finnish]

Borlaug was an Iowa farm boy who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize and is often called The Father of the Green Revolution. It is said that his third-world agricultural innovations have saved a billion lives.

Jonathan Rundman had never heard of Borlaug until he saw his obituary in 2009. “Why haven’t I heard of this man?” he thought. “Why hasn’t everybody? He deserves to be known.” He did the logical thing; he composed a polka in Borlaug’s honor. Now every Finnish polka aficionado will know about the unassuming but amazing Borlaug.

Most of us won’t have polkas composed in our honor, because we didn’t save the lives of a billion people. About the only thing I have done in the billions is eat cookies, a billion and five if you count last night at the concert. I’m not sure that’s even worth a shanty. Maybe a country song: “He ate a billion cookies and saved a billion Keebler elves…” Or maybe not.

Maybe none of us gets meaning for life finally from what we do here on earth. Maybe meaning is just in what we are, children of God. I believe that.

I’m a Methodist, though, a follower of John Wesley, the great advocate of free will. We believe that what you do matters, too. [6] What Norman Borlaug did was a matter of life and death to a billion people. That’s important. It’s also important that Jonathan and Sara and Dean and Bette made us laugh and dance and sing last night. It’s important that we broke cookies together. Not all of us can do what Norman Borlaug did. But we can add to the storehouse of the world’s love by sharing our music and our cookies.

That’s what Christmas is about, I think. Our lives have meaning because they are the gifts of God. God shares us with the world, gives us as gifts, just as God gives to the world the gift of Christ. So we don’t have to give meaning to our own lives. That’s already God’s gift. That frees me to share my meaning, my songs and my cookies, with the world, even if I don’t have a personal polka. [7]

Merry Christmas.

JRMcF

1] Second Sunday is hosted and fronted [opening set] by White Water (Dean and Bette Premo), with Susan, Emma, and Carrie Dlutkowski.

2] www.kaivama.com

3] There was a Zimmermann boy from Hibbing who used to play and sing a little. I wonder what became of him…

4] Second Sunday is held at Fortune Lake Lutheran Camp, where Jonathan learned to play guitar while a lifeguard at summer camp, so this was a homecoming for him. Summer camp lifeguarding in the UP means wading through the snow with a brandy flask around your neck to chop a hole in the ice…

5] Kaivama also means they both grew in open pit iron ore mining areas. Kaivama comes from the Finnish kaivaa, meaning to delve or dig.

6] I don’t mean that Methodists are the only folk who believe that what we do matters. I’m admitting to my Methodist leanings simply in the interest of full disclosure. And while on that subject, I admit that I made up that last bit about lifeguarding.

7] Hint to Jonathan: A Christ In Winter Polka would be nice, though.

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!

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{I also write the fictional “Periwinkle Chronicles” blog. One needs a rather strange sense of humor to enjoy it, but occasionally it is slightly funny. It is at http://periwinklechronicles.blogspot.com/}

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