Jerry Gill's Enduring Questions

MY LIFE PARTNER MARI ULLA SORRI

Most of you know Mari in person, but few of you know much about her, so I thought I’d fill you in on some details. She was born and raised in Finland on a tiny farm a bit north of Helsinki in 1957. She has two older brothers. The oldest has been a very successful lawyer in Helsinki for many years, and the other has run the family farm after graduating from NYU. Mari’s mom, Ulla, ran the family sugar beet and wheat farm throughout her children’s school days and became a bio-dynamic farmer. Mari has many cousins and other relatives in and around Finland. 

After high school, Mari moved to America and worked at a large resort complex in the Adirondacks for several years before enrolling at Eastern College just outside of Philadelphia. She majored in Education, and in her final year she took her second required course in Religion, which happened to be my course in Christian Faith and Contemporary Religious Thought. Mari and I had seen each other on campus over the two years she was there, but had never really spoken. Even though her grandfather had been a Lutheran Church minister, Mari had never really thought much about what the main doctrines of the Christian Faith actually involved. She was a bit confused by the doctrinal differences between various Christian movements and denominations. She came to my office several times to discuss my comments on her papers. So gradually we got to know each other by discussing religious faith and other ideas. After a couple of months, we decided to go on a few dates with mutual student friends, and soon we became very close. Long story short, we were married the next Fall. In her last year of college, Mari added a philosophy major to her education degree.

I took a position at another college the next fall, and Mari earned a master’s degree in philosophy from the nearby University of Rhode Island. Next, I took a position at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, where Mari earned her MA in religion and another in ceramics at St. Rose in conjunction with Skidmore College. During our years in Albany, Mari taught several religion courses at St. Rose and worked as a ceramic artist in the Albany area. She also studied at Boston University, earning straight As in her courses, including As from several big-name professors, such as Peter Berger, and passed her PhD exams before deciding that the graduate school atmosphere was too toxic to continue toward the Ph.D. For many years thereafter, Mari taught and worked as a potter in the Tucson, AZ, area, where I had retired and continued to teach part-time at the local community college. Along the way, Mari qualified as a yoga teacher and worked for several years in the Tucson area. She also served as the cook and dietitian for the BorderLinks Border Education Program. 

            All of this while helping me with supportive consultations, co-authorships, and endless manuscript typing. There are no words, literally, to express my love and gratitude for the forces and circumstances that led me to join my life with Mari Sorri’s. Her constant encouragement, advice, and deep friendship have made my life a wonderful journey of joy and challenge for the past 50 years. We have danced, laughed, and traveled through a wonderful fairy-tale life together. What a gift!! Thank you, Mari, my best buddy!! Your Jerry!

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