For the past couple of years I have served on the advisory committee at Brigham Young University for the Danish Scholarship Society, an organization established by a private donor to create broader awareness between Utahns and the people of Denmark.
The society has sponsored several prominent Danish educators and government officials to lecture at the university and to become better acquainted with the people of Utah. Last week we had a special visit from Uffe Elleman-Jensen, who was for many years Denmark's deputy prime minister and minister for foreign affairs. He is currently the national chairman of Denmark's Liberal Party as well as vice president of the European Liberal Party in the new European Union.At a dinner party held in their honor, Veloy and I were seated across from him and his wife, Alice Vestergaard, who has been a prominent newscaster on Danish television and is currently the head of the news department on TV-2 Denmark.
At one point, I asked Mr. Elleman-Jensen what he would estimate as the single most significant event of his long government career.
He answered by explaining how the Baltic countries of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania had been swallowed up by the Soviet Union in the turmoil of World War II and how Denmark had never ceased, during the 50 years since then, to acknowledge them as independent states.
In 1989, all three Baltic countries declared their sovereignty from the Soviet Union, as the rest of the world waited tensely to see if the Russians would respond with renewed repression.
In those anxious days, Denmark, under Ulleman-Jensen's leadership, sent delegates to the Baltic countries to re-establish ambassadorial status. One of the countries even sent secret contingents to Denmark to establish a government in exile in the event the Soviet Union would not recognize their independence. Uffe Elleman-Jensen was at the heart of these dangerous negotiations.
"The most special day of my life," he said, "was when our Baltic neighbors were hosted by Queen Margaret at her castle in Fre-dens-borg. She instructed me to have our officials wear their most respectful regalia and to have the palace guards, with their high bearskin hats, attired in their most special uniforms as a message to the Russians of our recognition of the Baltic delegation and as a token of respect for their defiance of communist domination."
Needless to say, I was inwardly embarrassed not to have known all this before but glad, nevertheless, that I had asked the question.
During their weeklong stay, the Jensens were provided with a rental car and for the last three days of their visit they took a brief tour of southern Utah. They were scheduled to stay one night at Ruby's Inn near Bryce Canyon and then to drive on to Zion's Lodge.
When we found out about the landslide at Zion National Park, we were worried that they might have been among the hundreds who were stranded at the lodge. The slide occurred, however, just before they arrived at Zion, so they drove on to St. George, where they were able, amazingly, on the city's busiest weekend of the year, to acquire a room at the Hilton Inn.
All this was fortuitous in that, somehow, they decided to return north along U.S. 89, through Sanpete County, where so many Danish immigrants settled in the 1800s.
At the small towns of Elsinore and Spring City, they touched the heart of Utah's Scandinavian roots, where they were drawn, for some reason, to search out local cemeteries. Walking among the headstones, names like Jensen, Hansen, Petersen and Ostergaard perked their attention.
Through terse inscriptions on stone they were able to envision the struggles of early settlers living and dying in a land far removed from the homeland of distant memory.
The experience must have been transforming.
Ford Stevenson, who had hosted them during their visit, says that as he drove them to the airport for their departure, they were both visibly very different than when he had been with them earlier in the week.
As they explained it, they had come to realize that for many people here, Denmark is not just a distant place of minor significance, but a special part of their cultural heritage.
Visiting people who still know Danish phrases, for example, which their grandparents taught them, reading Danish names on headstones, together with the names of cities in Denmark where the people come from, created for them a bond with the people of Utah they had not expected to feel.
There is a lesson in this that seems extremely pertinent in our current, pervasive atmosphere of family, regional, national and international divisiveness.
We can recognize that what Uffe Elleman-Jensen and Alice Ves-ter-gaard experienced in Utah is a model for us all, that we are inseparably bonded by the very similarity of our feelings and desires, that boundaries of mistrust and competition are products of the mind, and that our greatest strengths are tapped when we learn to trust and access the vulnerabilities of the heart.