Very early the next morning, Steve was awakened by a nurse who took his “vitals” and helped him to the bathroom. Once there, Steve was quite able to look after himself. When he emerged, he put on the hospital bathrobe and sat down in the armchair next to the bed. The nurse tucked a blanket around him and made him as comfortable as she could.
A short time later, Dr. Pederson, another physician, and the nurse entered his room.
“Good morning, Dr. Pearson. I hope you had a good night’s sleep.”
“I did, thank you. The staff here are very kind.”
“This is Dr. Wallace, our surgeon. He’s had a good look at your X-rays.”
“I am afraid the news is not good, Dr. Pearson,” began the surgeon. “The X-rays indicate that the cancer has spread out of control, eliminating surgery as an option. We will keep you here for the rest of the day and work out a plan for you to go home tomorrow for as long as possible.”
“We can take that approach,” added Dr. Pederson, “because Mary Thorsheim has already gone on leave of absence from her teaching, as of today. She insists on being with you for as long as you need her. We will give her some training today and I will be in touch with you in your home on a daily basis. If it gets to be too much for Mary, we will readmit you to the hospital. I am so sorry.”
“You are very kind, Doctor. Mary and my wife were like sisters. I welcome her help. That woman is the soul of kindness.”
“That she is. I will call in on you later. Remember that if the pain becomes more than you can handle, the nurses know what to do. Do not hesitate to alert them immediately. That’s part of what we will train Mary to do for you when you get home.”
“Thank you.”
“So I’ll drive you home in my car in the morning and make sure you have everything that you and Mary will need. She will be there, too.”
An hour or so later, Mary showed up in his room with a thermos jug.
“Good morning, Steve.”
“Good morning, Mary.”
“I brought you some warm seasoned bone broth. Very nutritious and digestible.”
“I’ll enjoy that, sip by sip. Dr. Pederson told me what you intend to do for me. Mary! That’s asking too much of you.”
“No, Steve. It is not. I will be there for you for as long as you need me, but not underfoot. I consider it an honor, a God-given privilege.”
“Dr. Pederson will be driving me home in the morning. He wants to make sure everything is set up properly. I am grateful you will be there with me, but after he leaves, I would appreciate a few hours home alone before you come. How about coming at 5:00 o’clock?”
“Of course. I understand.”
Mary poured some broth into a cup with a straw. Steve slowly sipped at it and it stayed down.
“It’s delicious.”
At eleven o’clock, the nurse appeared and asked Dr. Pearson if he was prepared to receive a visitor, an elderly gentleman who identified himself as Dr. Engstrom.
“By all means.”
With that, Mary gathered up her things and said as she was leaving, “I’ll be back later this afternoon. Enjoy your visit.”
A moment or two later, Dr. Engstrom appeared in the doorway, walking slowly with the aid of a cane. He stopped at the threshold, raised his head, and said, “Stephan Pearson. Is that really you?”
“Pastor Engstrom. Is that really you?”
A nurse was right behind him with another chair. She set it down facing Steve. He thanked her and motioned for the pastor to be seated. They took a few moments to absorb the marvel that they were actually in one another’s presence. Then the pastor expressed his gratitude to Steve for his willingness to see him in the circumstances.
“I don’t want to tire you out, so I will come right to the point.”
“I’m very glad to see you. There is no hurry.”
Dr. Engstrom stroked his chin.
“I remember so well that day when you came to my office on your crutches. I’ll never forget my shock when you informed me that Susan Dahl was your Cecilia and that she had written that exquisite anthem just for you. I’ve heard it several times since then. As I recall, you had a question about what she was trying to tell you in it, and I had a ready answer. I watched you connect with my answer almost instantly. And from that moment on, your life took a dramatic turn in a new direction. We all saw it and celebrated it. I want to talk about that, Steve. But first I really want to learn more about your life, personally and professionally. And then I’ll tell you some things about mine.”
Dr. Engstrom was still that gentle unintimidating pastor he had been so many years ago. Steve gladly acceded to his request. Over the next half an hour or so, he drew the pastor through forty years of his life, as succinctly and truthfully as he could, right up to the present moment, omitting nothing of significance. The pastor was visibly moved, even shaken, at several points in his story.
When Steve was finished, there was silence for a long moment.
Then Pastor Engstrom spoke.
“Steve, you touched on something at the end there, when you were describing your recent insight from the Lord’s Prayer, which directly relates to why I am here, to everything I feel compelled to share with you today. I know that it’s too little too late, but still I want to compensate in some small way for what I should have alerted you to forty years ago, but didn’t.”
“Really?”
“Really. But I need to start from the beginning.
“To be completely frank with you, we got carried away, almost all of us, after World War I over the prospects of turning the world into an earthly paradise in the wake of that horrible war. The rhetoric that sought to justify America’s involvement in an essentially European conflict was partly to blame, but we all bought into it. This, we were told by our leaders, was to be ‘the war to end all wars.’ It was ‘the war to make the world safe for democracy.’ Who could resist that kind of promise? And so we jumped into the conflict and tipped the balance of the war. When it was all over, as you well know, we were all looking forward to the paradise we thought the world was about to become, minus war and minus tyranny. This was to be the Christian Century, as it was already being heralded by leading Protestant theologians all across America. Both politically and theologically, we thought we were on the cusp of a Golden Age. And that, Steve, is the context within which I answered your question that day.
“Now, after you left my office that day, I immediately had qualms about what I had advised you, about its untempered optimism, about assuring you with some passion that this was beyond a doubt God’s will for you. You see, I had never entirely lost my traditional theological bearings despite the spirit of the times, and I guess that’s why I was feeling so uneasy about the adequacy of what I had just given you as a sufficient guideline for the conduct of the rest of your life. But I buried that feeling. I rationalized it away. I dismissed it.
“Then, in rapid succession, came Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, the Great Depression, World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Cold War. Some Golden Age!
“It was obvious that we had been wrong. But where had we gone off track so badly? It was only after World War II that I came face to face with what I now see was my major miscalculation, our major miscalculation, and in the strangest way. After my retirement from Christiania, my wife and I agreed that a term on the mission field would be a good way to put whatever was left in us to good use. So I offered my services to the Church and they assigned me to teach in a Lutheran seminary in Tanganyika for a term of five years.
“Here is what I want to share with you, Steve. During those five years in Africa, I learned more about God, about Satan, and about the actual plight of mankind than in all my years at Christiania. Our missionaries on the field, of course, were all trained in American, German, and Swedish seminaries, and most of them had imbibed the theology of Rudolf Bultmann. He is the one who attributed all supernatural phenomena recorded in Scripture, such as miracles and demonic activity, even the actual physical resurrection of Jesus, to an outdated worldview. His intention was to make Christianity palatable to modern man who, as he saw it, knew very well that miracles can’t actually happen. Thus, if modern man is not to dismiss the Gospel out of hand, it has first to be freed from the shackles of the unacceptable prescientific mind-set of the times in which it was written down. Every supernatural phenomenon in the Bible must therefore yield to a purely natural explanation, and only then will its true meaning be revealed, a meaning which is often very different from its apparent meaning in a straightforward reading of the text. From this perspective, even God and Satan are treated more as abstractions than as actual beings. They are seen as ways of visualizing various aspects of purely human conduct for better or for worse. And Jesus, of course, was as much a child of his times as anyone else, according to Bultmann.
“Arriving in Africa with that mind-set, these missionaries were ill prepared for what they encountered. One day I received three of them in my office. They had come to me for advice. To make a long story short, Steve, they had taught the story of Jesus in several remote villages where the people seemed restless but very receptive. But when Baptism was offered, all hell broke loose. These missionaries witnessed phenomena before their very eyes which Bultmann had dismissively explained away—exhibitions of superhuman strength, levitation (this really threw them for a loop), instant personality and vocal changes from gentle to ferocious and back, impossible contortions in facial bone structures, threats against them delivered in perfect English from tribespeople who didn’t know a word of English, and on and on. Everyone was affected, it seemed—men, women, and children—entire villages. It was pure bedlam. What should they do?
“Well, not sure myself how to proceed, I began by introducing them in some detail to the findings of Adolf von Harnack, the well-respected nineteenth-century German Lutheran historian, who had described just such phenomena in the life of the early church, especially in Asia Minor. This explained why candidates for Baptism in those days always underwent multiple exorcisms before they were baptized.
“I then asked the missionaries to return at the same time the next day.
“That very day, I paid a visit to the nearby Catholic seminary and located in their library a Church-approved manual describing the steps to follow in minor and major exorcisms. I also discovered that the Catholic priests at that seminary showed no surprise at all at what I shared with them. They had witnessed it often, they said.
“The next day, I gave the manual to the missionaries who lost no time in digesting it whole. They found it reassuring to know that other missionaries were experiencing the same thing. They returned to the villages affected and set about exorcising the entire populace one by one, which proved to be a dramatic reeducation for these missionaries. They were then able to baptize all of them in a most orderly and joyous way, stressing the importance of keeping Jesus at the center of their new lives to avoid falling back under the old tyranny of the devil. These villages were thereby transformed from places dominated by cruelty and fear into oases of peace, or, as von Harnack expressed it in relation to the communities in Asia Minor, from haunts of darkness to domains of light. One of the missionaries wrote a full account of these happenings which was published in our church’s award-winning missionary journal.
“Since then, Steve, I have become much more aware of the malice of the evil one, more aware, as you pointed out from the Lord’s Prayer, that our whole earthly existence is caught up between Satan’s hatred for God and us, and God’s love for us which frees us from bondage to the evil one. Where was this perspective in 1920? My experience in Africa catapulted it for me out of theory into fact, out of past history into present reality.
“And it’s not just found in the Lord’s Prayer. We have ignored, explained away, or trashed everything the New Testament teaches us so clearly about the enemy we are up against, the enemy Jesus faced from the moment of His birth until He harrowed hell between His death and His resurrection, about the one Jesus called a liar from the beginning, a murderer, the prince of this world, the great deceiver. We have had a far too superficial and tame notion of evil and as a result, we have laid ourselves wide open to it, and to the keen disappointment we experience when all our plans and ideals fall apart and we can’t figure out why.
“And, you know, Steve, I knew better when I sent you off with only a partial vision of the ‘ground’ you were being called to fall into. I knew my Bible, but I chose to ignore what I didn’t want to see. I was so carried away by the spirit of the times that I repressed the Holy Spirit. That’s the only way I can explain it.
“So I have come to ask for your forgiveness. I don’t know how much of the pain in your life can be laid at the door of the gravely defective advice I gave you, but I am sure that far too much of it can be. Please forgive me for all the disillusionment and grief I set you up for as the pastor you trusted.”
The pleading in his eyes was almost desperate.
“O my dear pastor. Of course I forgive you, if there’s anything to be forgiven. None of us paid much attention to the enemy back then. Who of us was really listening when Jesus told us, in reference to a world created good and then messed up, that ‘an enemy hath done this’? There are never enough Cecilias around, intensely in love with Jesus and for that very reason intensely aware of the presence and workings of the evil one. She was radiant with beauty because she knew her Jesus was the winner, but oh, so easily heartbroken by any sign of Satan’s cruelty to man or beast. She saw what I should have seen. It’s not your fault, Pastor. I am the one who knew her and loved her. Believe me, when I was working on the bomb, I could hardly bring myself to think of her. I knew she was agonizing over what I was doing. It became perfectly obvious to me that I hadn’t fallen into the right ground or died for the right cause, and that far from making her happy, I was torturing her. As we scientists maneuvered the elements of those bombs into place, and as the day of their deployment drew ever nearer, there were moments when I myself was perfectly aware that I was nothing but a pawn in the hands of the evil one. And I knew she was aware of it too! Nevertheless, I kept right at it.
“And when I think of how misguided I was a few years later in my unquestioned assumption that the peacetime uses of scientific developments would always benefit mankind, and that now at last I had fallen into the right ground, how that must have pained her, too! By making this assumption and embracing it so blindly, what was I really doing? I was justifying my own continuing love of science for its own sake, and I was paying no attention to what human nature and Satan’s malice might do with it.”
“Steve, both of us are on the threshold between this world and the next. I can assure you, being a theologian is not a safer path than being a scientist.
“But there is one more thing I want to share with you before leaving. Do you know anything about what happened at Fatima in 1917?”
“Not much. When I was in Boston attending the beautiful Catholic church just down the road from my house, somebody organized a pilgrimage to go there, I think. Something about Mary appearing to three children.”
“Right. Well, when we were in Africa one of the faculty members at the Catholic seminary thrust a new book entitled Our Lady of Fatima into my hands and urged me to read it. When I saw that it was written by William Thomas Walsh, my interest perked up. Everything of his that I had read up to that point had been of the highest quality. Well, getting into that book really shook me up, but it made all kinds of sense. Let me say to you that I have no question about the authenticity of what happened at Fatima. It’s hard to question it after God confirmed it through the dramatic miracle of the sun on the date foretold by Mary through the children months in advance and witnessed by some 70,000 people, believers and scoffers alike. Everything Mary said and did during those six apparitions is of the highest interest and importance, but the piece I especially want to share with you, Steve, is this: in 1920, you and I were dazzled by the dream of progress and wiping out evil. In 1917, Mary spelled out in unmistakable detail what the twentieth century would bring if mankind returned to God, and in equal detail what it would bring if mankind did not. And of course it did not, with exactly the results she had foreseen, including the rise of Russia by name and the horrors of World War II. But looking further down the road, she also announced that in the end what she called her ‘Immaculate Heart’ would triumph and there would be an ‘Era of Peace’ before the close of the age. To make way for this ‘Era of Peace,’ Satan’s direct influence on the human race would be eliminated for a time, she said, and the human race itself would undergo a purging through chastisements, more or less severe, depending on our collective obedience or disobedience. So you see, the era we thought we were building in God’s name will come about not on our terms at all, but on His terms, and not at all because of our initiative, but because of His.”
“That does make all kinds of sense, Pastor. I’ll have to let it soak in. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
With that, Dr. Engstrom shifted about in his chair, found his cane, and was about to stand up.
“I can’t thank you enough for coming, Pastor. Would you please bless me before you go?”
Dr. Engstrom struggled to his feet, placed both hands on Stephan Pearson’s head, and said very slowly:
“The Lord bless thee, and keep thee.
“The Lord make His face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee.
“The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.
“In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
“Amen.”
Both men were too moved to say anything more. Steve looked up and smiled into the old man’s squinting eyes.
Dr. Engstrom nodded, turned around, found his cane, and walked slowly to the door. There he stopped, twisted his head and shoulders around, and said, “Good-bye, Stephan Pearson.”
“Good-bye, Pastor Engstrom.”