Jumala: The “Sky God”

Jumala is the Finnish word for “god.”¹ The word’s origin comes from the Northern Baltic regions of Finland, Estonia and Western Russia. In particular, it came from the Finno-Ugric people, and their unique language.²

The Finnish deities, like the ancient gods of Italy and Greece, are generally represented in pairs, and all the gods are probably wedded. They have their individual abodes and are surrounded by their respective families. The Primary object of worship among the early Finns was most probably the visible sky with its sun, moon, and stars, its aurora, or northern lights, its thunders and its lightnings. The heavens themselves were thought divine. Then a personal deity of the heavens, coupled with the name of his abode, was the next conception; finally this sky-god was chosen to represent the supreme Ruler. To the sky, the sky-god, and the supreme God, the term Jumala (thunder-home) was given.³

Why Jumala?

I registered the jumala.in domain in January 2023 with the intent of creating a spiritually oriented blog or website. At that point, the last blog I had contributed to with any frequency — largely dedicated to commentary on news and public affairs — had gone dormant well over a decade earlier. The idea of launching a spiritually oriented website was not new to me; I had registered a number of spiritually themed domains (including god.io, christlike.us, christlife.info), but dropped them over the years. This time around, after searching for the word “god” in multiple languages, Jumala struck me as one of the more poetic-sounding results — at least to my English-speaking American ears. It was available to register under the country code top-level domain for India (.in), so I registered it.

Why “Spiritually Oriented”?

In his June 1965 commencement address to the graduating class at Oberlin College (Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution), the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed “Yes, we shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Before arriving at that inspiring and aspirational proclamation, however, King admonished his listeners that the arc of the moral universe doesn’t simply bend toward justice all by itself, but often only after a long and determined struggle, saying “Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals. Without this hard work, time becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.”

A Bit About Me

I am a former musician, having played drums in a variety of no-name rock, punk, funk and power pop bands, starting in the mid-’70s and ending in the mid-’90s. Had I been more sober, and less given towards disaffected nihilism, I might have gravitated towards jazz-rock fusion. In the early ’90s I launched a music and arts newspaper called Paperback Jukebox, which I edited and published for the next four years. I was born in Santa Cruz, California but have lived in Portland, Oregon since 1982. I currently work as a data analyst for a county government organization.

My Personal Spiritual Journey

My mother has described her conversion from unchurched to Christian as becoming “saved” after “accepting Jesus into her heart” at age sixteen. Later in life, she faithfully brought my siblings and me to church with her every Sunday morning, and often on Sunday evenings. Our family also frequently participated in church activities throughout the week. My mother’s preferred brand of Christianity was (and remains) Assemblies of God, the largest of the Pentecostal denominations. Near as I can recall, I began asking my mother tough questions about specific Christian doctrines — including the doctrine of eternal damnation, in particular — at around age 8 or 9. She would, in turn, do her best to explain things to me as best she understood them.

As I got a little older, I became increasingly troubled with the absolutist and authoritarian attitudes generally predominant within the church. Although the Jesus People Movement (aka “Jesus Freaks”) of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the movement’s focus on the example of Jesus’ ministry over church dogma, offered a brief respite from the stultifying atmosphere typically encountered within the more authoritarian and conservative regions of Christianity, the rise of the religious right in the United States during the middle and late 1970s seemed to effectively snuff out Christianity’s more freewheeling Jesus freaks. At some point when I was 19 or 20 years old, I left the church. The Pentecostal, fundamentalist and evangelical movements on the religious right had largely devolved into an agglomeration of reactionary, authoritarian and dogmatic religious cults.

In the mid-aughts, decades after making Portland, Oregon my home, I began attending a small, itinerant United Church of Christ affiliate called Christ the Healer, and would bring my grade school-age daughter with me to many of the Sunday services I took part in. As its name implies, CtH’s main focus is on physical, psychological and spiritual health through raw and lightly cooked, plant-based foods, and through natural and alternative healing methods. I was more interested in the political and theological discussions I would engage in with the church’s co-founder, Thomas Chavez, who has since passed away. The congregation met in a space borrowed from a larger UCC church; I stopped attending once that meeting space was no longer available to CtH’s congregation.

I began attending church again only recently, after my daughter suggested I find a community activity to involve myself in. A small, progressive and independent church (not affiliated with any denomination) called Pearl Church meets just a couple of blocks from where I live, so I began attending the earliest of their two Sunday services in mid-September 2024.

Photo & Image Credits

• Profile Photo Credit: Bre Rae Photography LLC. This photo was shot at my daughter and son-in-law’s wedding on Hawaii’s Big Island on Sunday, October 10, 2021.
• Hero Image Credit: god of thunder | zzjimzz