FINNS: An Oral History- Keeping Services - Patricia (Kangas) Ktistes
New Ipswich Historical Society
FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region
Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.
Patricia (Kangas) Ktistes
When I was an adolescent, my mother taught Sunday School at a Missouri Synod Lutheran church. One day, she laughingly indicated how church publications made Christ quasi-Nordic. His hair was golden brown; never blond but with highlights. And his features weren’t ones you think of as belonging to Hebrew royalty. They’d been sanded down into this square, semi-Scandinavian look.
Before our family joined the Missouri Synod church, we attended Independent services and Sunday School at the Congregational Church Thus my sister and I, age five and six, knew stories about Noah’s ark; Christ driving money-lenders from the temple; the golden calf, etc. Thus we devised a ritual with toy farm animals and alphabet blocks. It took us hours to construct the set for these rites. We stacked blocks in rows like pews and the toy animals had to sit still during worship. The pig’s name was Muriel; I think in response to commercials for Muriel Cigars. I don’t remember the other animals’ names except for two plastic horses, Horsie and Religion. The horse named Religion got beaten regularly. The other animals pounded on him and let him have it at random.
One day Horsie was placed on the altar because we didn’t have a calf to serve as “Baal,” the golden calf. This story had confounded me: why would anyone worship a calf? But we figured our pantomime was harmless because toys had no souls. We made up a chant, borrowed from Catholic liturgy, which in our house was considered heresy, so that seemed perfect for the calf worshippers. I remember missionary nuns once coming to our door. I was terrified to see their habits floating across the lawn and I hid behind a hedge. My mother argued with the nuns, who carried rosaries and ‘tracts.’ The nuns pleaded, “But we’re all God’s children.” My mother sent them away.
Thus in our ritual, the farm animals droned, “Horsie is our savior, Hail Horsie, full of grace.” We slowed at the end to make it dramatic. One day our mother walked in while we were in mid-chant. She froze, started crying, and shrieked, “Horsie is not our savior! Jesus is our savior!” then ran out, wailing. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that she thought we were serious after all the careful training we’d had. My sister and I dismantled the set and our ‘services’ had to go underground..