His peaceable religion. Without it neither his wife nor his new vocation could have brought Dr. Stephan Pearson so far from the brink of despair and held him aloof from it for a decade. For neither his wife nor his vocation would have been capable alone of stilling the clamor of extreme guilt in his soul. Only his peaceable religion could do that, most of the time. But even it was unable to ward off every shaft of accusation aimed at him by the events of those years. Had he been living in isolation from contemporary history, it might have been a different matter. But he was living in the world of the late 1940s and ‘50s, even though far removed from its crossroads.
He could not, for example, escape noticing that his most dreaded fears after America had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were now being realized. The secret of atomic fission could not be safeguarded by the United States but was being diffused over the whole earth. Very soon Great Britain possessed it, as Steve knew she would, based on England’s involvement in its development. But Russia’s announcement on the floor of the United Nations that she too had successfully exploded the bomb really staggered him. No one wanted to believe their claim. But in 1952 one was detonated which was verifiable to the whole world. The treasure had fallen into the hands of unscrupulous men, the very men who had sat behind those whose bloody duplicity had driven Chiang Kai-shek from the Chinese mainland and instituted a reign of terror over more than four times as many people as lived in the United States.
But no less troubling to Dr. Pearson’s peace of mind were America’s own advances in the destructive power of the bomb, to which he himself had contributed at the institute in Pittsburg. One heard every day of the billions of dollars allocated to the military objective of staying ahead of the Russians, but no mention was ever made of developing the great potential of atomic fission and synthesis for man’s welfare. He had been assured in the most solemn fashion that as soon as the war was won, his strenuous efforts during the war would be channeled into peaceful benefits for all mankind. He had been duped!
No sooner had he and Kay arrived at Christiania than he witnessed the total collapse of another of his cherished hopes. The horrendous price exacted of mankind by World War II had not purchased the treasure of world peace nor had it elevated freedom and democratic civilization above the forces of barbarian invasion. He had pleaded with his overlords not to withdraw troops from Europe until it was clear that the Soviets were withdrawing theirs. But domestic political considerations predominated, and our troops came home while Russian troops remained in Central Europe and tightened their stranglehold on the nations they had “liberated.” And the whole world, wearied by the war, acquiesced. Dr. Pearson could only contemplate with appalled disbelief that four short years after the war to rid the world of the demonic barbarism of the Nazis, more people were subjected to a new and aggravated form of it than ever before.
So what had the war accomplished? Had it left the world at the mercy of two snarling monsters armed with inconceivably destructive weapons who were now holding the whole world hostage? Were all the Ciel des Montagnes of the world now in graver peril than ever? Was the threat of global annihilation preferable to the threat of subjugation to our enemies?
The state of Dr. Pearson’s peace of mind was understandably dependent on the many joys and satisfactions he was experiencing at close range and on their ability to block out the accusing finger of deteriorating world events for which he knew he was in no small way co-responsible. In the face of this challenge, some answer had to be found for his most troubling question: Where was Cecilia’s Jesus in all of this? How could he, Stephan Pearson, have fallen into the ground and died, as she had challenged him to do, and still have produced all the wrong fruit?
For this he had to be satisfied not with a direct answer but with a brilliant inversion of his question: If we know that God is good, why do we let the small pieces of the total picture which are visible to us destroy our faith and our hope? Why do we allow them to override our trust in God who has control of the total picture? Our trust is in Him who is, and who was, and who is to be. So let us persevere in seeking to do what is right and leave the sorting out of the big questions to Him.
For Stephan, this was a breakthrough which sustained him and animated him for a full decade.