Stephan Pearson lost no time in falling into his ground once he had identified it. Actually, he took Dr. Engstrom at his word and plunged into it, relieved to have found a way to redeem his guilt, at least in part. Mathematics and physics had always exerted a powerful attraction on him, and now that he was armed with a worthy and impelling motive for it, he allowed their powerful magnetic field to draw him deeply into them. His genius was unleashed.
Even before his transformation in Dr. Engstrom’s office that day, Professors Brockhaus and Larson had already been astounded at the facility with which his mind grasped the relationship and broad unity of concepts normally dealt with in isolation from each other. For all his outward nonchalance, his mind had never been an attic collection of miscellaneous data. For him, details fell into a picture already in place or else created a picture in which they made beautiful sense. They never stood alone. If pieces were missing in a picture, he postulated what they might be and then sought for them until he found them and inserted them where they belonged. His mind would often construct a pattern out of known data with a few blank spots in it which left him the fascinating challenge of locating the missing pieces. The professors’ back-row student had caught their attention almost from the first day without even trying and had held it just by being himself.
Now, however, he suddenly moved figuratively from the back row to the front row for the simple reason that all of this mattered to him now. It was no longer just a game. Their delight in him was exquisite as they watched him come alive to his vocation. With a compelling goal ahead of him, fascinating mental challenges all around him, impelling memories behind him, and a holy motive within him, he was at long last striking a unique interior balance that even I had to admit was nothing less than a miracle.
Although his legs and rib cage bothered him for the next two-and-a-half years of his undergraduate career at Christiania, he did not let this prevent him from taking those long leisurely walks in the country which had become second nature to him from his childhood. I was grateful that he maintained his contact with me on a regular basis, bursting into my room from time to time and sharing with me something he found too exciting to keep to himself even though I often had no idea what he was talking about. I am also aware that he returned to Meadowville the following Thanksgiving to be with Irv and Ellie and a few of Cecilia’s special friends, to inform them personally of everything that had happened to him after Cecilia’s death, that is, of how constantly present she was to him in his own falling and dying. He told Irv and Ellie how much their love meant to him and he begged them to pray that he might become a worthy fruit of their daughter’s death. After that, they never saw him again, as far as I know, but they never stopped loving him and praying for him.
Over time, I am aware that his vivid sense of Cecilia’s immediate presence receded somewhat, but never disappeared, as did also to some extent his strong motivation to fall and die for the good of others. This was because he became caught up in the fascination of his work itself from day to day to the point where he needed no further motivation to be doing it. But Cecilia and the vision ignited by Dr. Engstrom remained within him as silent justifiers of what he was doing with his life even though his joy in doing it was becoming its own reward.
In those days, wherever he went, whether at home or elsewhere, Steve was met with enthusiastic approbation to which he appeared to be quite oblivious. He needed no external approval for what he was doing. There was little danger in those days that anyone would question his goals or seek to undermine his dedication to them. The ideals to which he was dedicated were being extolled everywhere. Chapel speakers heralded the dawn of the new age of peace and progress and urged students to take their rightful place as Christians in that imminent age. There was much to be done yet before the Kingdom of God could come fully here on earth, and Christiania students were to be among the first to lay the fruits of their efforts in the cause of peace-making and poverty reduction at the feet of King Jesus.
Even more influential on Steve than this overt assurance of the rightness of his course from those whose business it was to know was the tacit approval of it that charged the very air of Christiania College. The spirit of the whole place, from the administration down through the ranks, was vibrant with its own form of missionary zeal:
“Hail to the brightness of Zion’s glad morning,
Joy to the lands that in darkness have lain!
Hushed be the accents of sorrow and mourning,
Zion in triumph begins her mild reign….”
The vocation of a Christian was, after all, no longer so abstruse as it had at one time been considered. Let a man line himself up with the tide of progress by associating himself with a useful occupation in harmony with the better aspirations of humanity. Let him find his own unique way of contributing to improving the conditions of life for his fellowman and he would not only find personal fulfillment but he would be discharging his duty to his Creator. Christ had been a man, after all, and as such had been vitally concerned about the total needs of mankind, both the spiritual and the physical. Why else would He have spent two-thirds of his active life in a ministry of healing? The trouble with past generations was that they had too often spiritualized the religion of Jesus, reversing the Incarnation so that they encouraged people to flee the world rather than face it. Improving living conditions in the world had been seen by them as a trivial concern compared to working to ensure the eternal life of the soul. But Jesus had taught us to pray, “Thy Kingdom come,” had He not? How could God’s Kingdom ever come into a world trapped in ignorance and poverty and suffering?
There were a few dissident voices that dared to question this updated version of the Gospel, but they were dismissed as reactionary and out-of-touch. The tide was definitely moving in one direction in the early 1920s, and if you didn’t want to be labeled old-fashioned, you got on board and let the tide sweep you along with everyone else towards the paradise just ahead.
Although Steve was not especially interested in anyone else’s dreams, the climate in the early 1920s insulated him from any serious misgivings about the rightness of the ground he had plunged himself into. The realm of theoretical physics, which at that time, as I understand it, was just beginning to split open a crack into the world of fundamental particles, held Stephan Pearson spellbound in its grip. Within his own short lifetime, the quantum theory of radiation had been propounded by Max Planck and clarified by Albert Einstein. Within the previous decade the nature of the atom had been determined and then defined by Bohr, and the character of X-rays had been established by Roentgen. In addition, Albert Einstein had reduced the relationship between matter and energy to the simple formula, e=mc2. All of these developments, of course, raised more questions than they answered. The work of Planck and Einstein, for example, had seemed to indicate that light waves were of a corpuscular nature, at least in some important respects. Steve became very curious to discover exactly what is the relation of matter to energy in this marginal area in which one phenomenon partakes of the characteristics of both. And all of this was fermenting in him while he was still at Christiania. He and I talked about such things often in those days.
In spite of the accident and his lackluster record in his freshman year, he graduated with his own class magna cum laude, majoring in physics and mathematics and minoring in chemistry. His parents were both extremely proud of him on graduation day. Old Lars managed to camouflage his disappointment that he would have no successor and heir to the estate. Julia, on the other hand, could not contain her joy. Steve had already shared with her what Cecilia’s death had done for him. To her it was a miracle. Her Stevie was going beyond her wildest dreams for him. He was on a course that was sure to make God very happy.