Rolph Eriksen, the quiet one across the long table who had said grace; the one who “with no conception of social behavior” had read most of Dr. Pearson’s popular articles; the one who from his position of “strong mental and spiritual health” had apologized for his fellow students; the one whom Dr. Pearson had said he would be honored to have in class; this Rolph Eriksen was now in his class and in one of his laboratories, rubbing shoulders with him on an almost daily basis.
Who was Rolph Eriksen? In the days just before Dr. Pearson’s death, I got to know him quite well. And this is what I learned in those long moments of quiet time which we shared during the vigil we spent together in the Pearson home.
At the age of twelve, Rolph had discovered the Minneapolis Public Library with its awesome treasures of the wisdom of the ages. At the age of twelve, he had also had his first mature spiritual awakening, precipitated by a chance encounter with an atheist at the library that drove him into Sacred Scripture and into Blaise Pascal. In his young mind, this unlocked for him what he came to understand as the “Higher Realm” in which all those who are serious in their quest for truth and beauty are to be found. This included for him the likes of John Milton and Isaac Newton, Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach, St. Teresa of Avila and Florence Nightingale, Louis Pasteur and Stephan Pearson, among others. All of these had in common an understanding of life as an upward quest, inspired by God, however diverse may have been their particular means of expressing it.
In the process of absorbing these treasures in his most impressionable years, a unique universe of relationships took shape in his mind. Its characteristics were garbed for him in terms that might have struck others as abstract but which for him possessed a concrete and almost personal quality: quest, higher realm, truth, beauty, revelation, holiness, and above all perception. Perception was for him the key to our ability to relate to the whole order of things, an order independent of man and contingent only on the Divine Will. Perception was an inner sensitivity to expressions of the higher realm not immediately apparent to everyone. One man, for example, might perceive a sunset, bask in it, be drawn into its mysterious and fleeting glory, while another man might just notice it and move on.
One day when Rolph was in the tenth grade, he decided it was time to try to put words to this. The result was a highly metaphorical and turgid opus in which none of the few people to whom he showed it, with the exception of his parents, saw more than a jumbled version of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, which is jumbled enough to begin with. Yet in Rolph’s mind it was all crystal clear, the perfect blending of the natural world, the world of the human mind, and the world of Holy Scripture. His chief sorrow in these formative years of his life was the enslavement he observed in most of his fellow students to the cheap and fleeting pleasures of the lower realm when God had equipped them so well for rising to the higher realm and savoring its exquisite joys. All they had to do to attain the higher realm was to allow Him to be their Guide.
The quest for truth and beauty was the “Blue Flower” of Rolph Eriksen’s adolescence, the vision that harmonized and sanctified everything for him. It led him early in life to attainments which for him were just the beginning, but for others already seemed like solid achievements. He soaked up everything he could lay his hands on in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, but he also devoured the complete works of Shakespeare, most of Calderon, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Pensees of Pascal, significant sections of Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Ibsen, Goethe, and many others. In the privacy of his own room he lost himself in the Mozart and Beethoven symphonies and concertos, the great Bach choral works, much of Sibelius, Bruckner and Dvorak, and a smattering of many other composers, thanks to the long-play records he borrowed from the library. In all of these he discerned the outpouring of the souls of men who had been drawn by grace into the higher realm and were inspiring us and the whole human race to follow them there. All of this was for him an expression of the Gospel and he was not ashamed to say so.
In high school he fell in love with a girl from his church who respected him almost reverentially but found him a total enigma. His fascination with her began one night in a dream, his first of a tenderly romantic nature, and was fueled by his identification of her with the leading character in a historical novel he was reading at the time. At any rate, with the poetry he wrote to her, the short essays he submitted for her scrutiny, his social maladresse, his intellectual preoccupations, and his utter disinterest in the usual teenage activities, this two-year-long relationship was probably doomed from the start. Toward the end of their senior year in high school, she successfully killed it by telling him she was in love with someone else.
Thus when he enrolled in Christiania College, he had two compelling forces at work in him—his quest to live in and from the higher realm and his need to heal from the loss of the young woman he adored.
Now, Rolph was not a tinkerer who enjoyed fooling around with unknowns just to “see what would happen if….” In fact, his patience could wear thin in the laboratory. But he thrived on controversies surrounding such issues as the “what” and the “why” of the atom, the relationship of chemistry to biology, the whole field of quantum mechanics, and the like. He thrilled when he was in the presence of a mystery to be solved. Like the youthful Stephan Pearson, he was never sated with knowledge about anything because it was always leading him into more questions. He was in a virtually constant state of awe at the grandeur of God’s creation.
Dr. Pearson observed him with mixed feelings. How would the God who was so very alive in him now survive in the face of the cold realities of life? He saw a forty years’ younger version of himself in Rolph, and the sight quite frankly made him very uneasy.
Dr. Pearson’s encounter with Rolph certainly succeeded in drawing him back at least partway into the stream of life. Because he cared for the lad so much, he had a decision to make: Should he encourage him to follow his quest, or would it be more charitable to dissuade him from it? Should Rolph be warned that he was probably heading for bitter disillusionment? Would such a warning do any good? And what if, in spite of everything, the lad was not all wrong?
There were moments, plenty of them, when the professor could barely stomach the blind enthusiasm of his pupil. Through him he was reliving his own days of blind enthusiasm. And look where they had taken him! He knew only too well where that special spark in Rolph came from and how easy it was to identify it with God’s Will. Working shoulder to shoulder with the boy in the laboratory, he sensed in him the same awe which he too had once taken to be of divine origin. But he never had the courage to turn to him and say, “Be careful, Rolph.”
Instead he let Rolph’s budding genius grow and blossom out unchallenged. He let it open like a flower, delicate, exquisite, and quivering with life. He let it bathe in the sunlight and wave in the gentle breezes. He let its fragile petals unfold to the world, wondrous to behold. He could not bring himself to warn him that someday that flower would fall to the ground, those petals would scatter in the wind, and even that stem would be trampled into the dirt. He couldn’t bring himself to do it even though he greatly feared that Rolph was setting himself up to be crushed as he had been.
It would be wrong to say that Steve had totally abandoned his faith in the goodness and ultimate victory of God over evil, but it would be correct to say that this faith was badly shaken. The prospect for him that Rolph in all his youthful faith and enthusiasm might well be on a collision course with calamity haunted him and expressed itself in some strange behaviors. Sometimes, while working side by side with him in the lab, he would suddenly turn his back on him and attend to another student. Or he would avoid him altogether, whether in class or in lab or anywhere else. They did have some good moments together, but Dr. Pearson’s personal burden of sorrow and his anxiety for Rolph were never far from the surface.
Things went on like this until Christmas vacation arrived. He was at his wit’s end over Rolph. He couldn’t bring himself to come right out and disabuse the boy of his beautiful but hollow ideals, but he had to find some way to put him on guard. He decided that he would work this out in detail during the Christmas vacation, and then do what he needed to do for Rolph’s sake first thing in the New Year.
Christmas itself was sheer torture for Steve. Mary offered to go with him to the Midnight Candlelight Carol Service, but he declined.
“I can’t face it.”
She understood.
Instead he spent almost the whole night of Christmas Eve slouched down in the loveseat where Kay had given him her present just one year ago, facing the tree and its soft lights which Mary had set up and decorated for him when he was away at work.
Pressing himself down into that hallowed spot where Kay had trapped him in the overflow of her love one year ago, now on that very same Holy Night one year later, Steve’s grief overpowered him. The irony of Kay’s last smile—could it have been caused by something as simple as her not knowing about their son’s death, or was it caused by the wonder of what she was experiencing at that very moment?—this irony was altogether too much for him now, and in tandem with her final words, it broke him down into a night of anguish and nonstop tears.
“Oh my Kay, my angel, my love! Pray for me! Pray for me!” he sobbed all through that holy night.