The Gospel of the Finnish Sauna
Photo: Gerald Farinas. Canva license.
“I’m going on 95 years in life and a lot of yuck has been happening. I’m having a harder time seeing, even though I go in for my eye shots every six weeks,” she shared, perched on her red rollator-walker, watching me reconfigure her computer so she can see her online bridge game better.
“We were taught in the Finnish church up in Michigan a long time ago, we are born with a part of God, a part of Jesus within us,” she continued. “I have never wavered, even with all the s*it that happens, to try to feel Him there, struggling through the heartaches and pains and anxieties with me.”
She smiled when she saw that she could see the bridge cards blown up on her older Toshiba laptop. It’s a bit of a dinosaur these days. But she’s 95 years old. What’s she going to do with the latest machine with hyper speeds?
“It’s like sitting in the sauna,” she said.
I like the way she pronounces sauna.
It’s in the old Finnish way.
She enunciates.
She heightens the ‘a’ with a mouth open wide to lengthen the sound of “ahh,” and abruptly collapses her lips together to deepen the ‘u’ with an “oooh.”
“You sit on the cedar bench absolutely soaked in the warm damp, bringing out the impurities from within, and you can wipe it away with the sweat.”
She tells me the best part—the running from the sauna into the cold air outdoors and jump into the icy waters of a pond, a river, a lake.
“It all washes away. What’s left?”
I nod my head and smile because I agree.
“All that’s left is this reinvigorating breath from within as you rise back up from a dunk. The water cascades and all that gunk comes off you. It’s like you’re new again. But the essence of what has always been in you is even stronger.”
She comes to her point as I get up from her desk chair and she takes my place, grabbing hold of the mouse.
“We are born with a part of God, a part of Jesus within us. It’s even more present, I can feel it better when I let all that stuff wash away. God is there. Jesus is there.”
With the swift move of her cursor, she moves an ace into place.
