“On the other hand,” papa Pastor reasons—and yes, maybe this speech becomes long and certainly personal, it is often the case when Father gets going, but the devoutness and his own evident emotion make it so that all thoughts one could possibly have about a tiresome choice of words fail to come. The wordiness that the Pastor could devote himself to during ordinary Sunday sermons too and for which he sometimes had to endure certain criticism for; mild criticism, in and of itself, because on the whole the Pastor was a respected vicar in all of the congregations where he has worked. But there had, in other words, been those who at some point in passing had said that when the Pastor was speaking in church it could, quite simply, sometimes become a bit too much of a good thing; maybe also a small reference to what was not said out loud, oh no, my goodness, but about the Pastor’s “country upbringing,” which perhaps made it so that he did not have the same well-developed mind for “the simplicity in the heaviness,” “the elegance of the unsaid,” and similar things that certain other people had gotten from their mother’s milk.
“I just get carried away so easily,” papa Pastor used to say in front of the family at the Sunday dinner table, apologetically as it were but with a rascally glint in his eyes because in reality he did not care what people said about him when he was preaching in church and the following Sunday he would, if he was in that kind of a mood, carry on the same way as always.
Rascallike. That was a reminiscence for Maj-Gun as well, here and now in the church, of something old, not forgotten, but something she had not thought about very much for a long time. Her beloved father, how he is, was, and could be.
“On the other hand,” papa Pastor continues as it were, pulling himself together. “The foundation that exists in everything,” Elizabeth “Liz” Maalamaa never lost it.
Faith like a mountain. A child’s belief in God, innocent and self-evident but as an unspoken demand. Belief as something to answer to.
Belief places certain demands on us when we have left childhood, become older. These demands can be formulated into words but should not be answered with words, but with actions. Belief is activity.
And many times, papa Pastor remembers again, and when he speaks, the tears glimmering in his eyes, and no, it does not need to be said, he is not embarrassed about them, not in the least. When he personally, the brother, failed in his belief. For example during the difficult years at the theology department when he was beset with heavy doubts, pondered and pondered, fallen and fallen. Of course some of this brooding was the normal brooding of youth of the kind brooded on during a certain period in life, a passing phase. You understand everything, understand nothing, know a lot, lack experience, the experience that comes from the heart, the blazing core of faith and life.
But there had also been a great, alarming question which, since he had left his comfortable and cozy childhood home, had been assaulting him: in the form of images, scenes of loneliness in a student room at a boarding school for “country boys,” made him defenseless. So, suddenly, he felt as though he had lost all contact with the living, with mankind. And with God: that if God—that question, so simple, but struggling with it was like walking on hot embers, about God—where was he then in this world?
I call to you from the abyss, Lord. But then, how his sister Elizabeth, “Liz,” student at the deaconess school, had come to see him at his student dormitory. Time after time, spoken to him, as in their childhood, in the woods—and gotten him to see. All the grace. The Light.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”
And finally, here in the church, now, papa Pastor says that the innocence of our childhood is the best thing we have.
Maj-Gun, the warmth swells within her. And: how proud she is. Her father, there, in front of her, everyone. His words, his endless love.
And how he personally, just in the moment when he has spoken about the grace the light, looks up, over all of the people in the church and at Maj-Gun, meets her gaze there where she is sitting in one of the back rows.
The lost daughter who has returned. “On the other hand”: it was never like that. “On the other hand,” in some way, in that moment, as if father and daughter both, like in a mutual silent agreement, in some way want it to be like that. Inside both the father and the daughter there is a certain rather well-developed feeling for the dramatic, to take the opportunity and reinforce the drama, but not just because. But because of something obvious, and maybe that is the essence in the story about the lost child’s return. Something that has been murky and therefore impossible to say out loud.
In the daylight. That it is over now, Maj-Gun. Beloved. Regardless of who you are, and that, whatever you have done, I love you and forever.
The hymn in the church later. “Glorious here on earth.”
Maj-Gun in the next-to-last row, the very end. She had to sneak in and take the first best possible seat because the memorial service had already started when she arrived and that is why she is not sitting at the front with the rest of the family. She was running late, nothing particularly special about it. Just taken the wrong bus, gone the wrong way.
But then gotten on the right bus after all. “As it often is in life.” Maj-Gun smiles at the memory, in the middle of the memorial service.
Something her father also said once, at that dinner table at the rectory, during her childhood. With a certain humorous emphasis too, but with the same good mood as always. Speaking of some of the new pastors who wanted to make use of modern analogies and the language of our time when they were preaching. Simple everyday similes and words besides, as easy to understand as possible. The way it is in life. Getting on the wrong bus, the right bus, remembering to stop at a red light, go when it is green, and brake for all of the pedestrians in the crosswalk. Sometimes you made a mistake, did something wrong, everyone does, but Jesus, who was forgiveness, forgave you.
And the whole family had laughed at the dinner table, not harshly, because there, at the dinner table, there was no meanness. Just as the Manager once pointed out when Maj-Gun had let things get out of hand when she was talking about the future, “the pastor’s calling” that she still, just like her brother Tom, had never actually had, then her father papa Pastor that open-mindedness, he was not fundamentally minded, not the least bit. But just did not want to have “the language of our time,” everyone’s everyday in the church. Not because it was wrong but these trifling rules, concerns which were just concerns that had nothing to do with the great, life, death, both extremes. Which all of us in some way are affected by and which can be felt in church in particular.
Everyone’s life that is, as it were, larger than that, and it needs to be taken seriously, not be diminished, just because it may not immediately be comprehensible.
So not that, in the church. Wanted, in church, to have God’s holiness because it was what it was, almost in Esperanto. Have that space, that glory. And the words, the melodies, the words and the melodies that brushed against the unspeakable, the tremendous. We go to paradise with song.
These words, not because they were supposed to be “solemn,” as it were, but because it was exactly these words which were felt in your body or which, in some way, already existed there. Set down inside you and when you heard them, came close to them here, how they were brought to life: something great, a glimpse of what is time but not directly history, rather time as an archaeology inside oneself, and inside other people, inside people in general. To feel that for a moment as well, such a participation. That all of us are also in some way the same: we carry ourselves in the same landscape—and time. That there was, is, another time, we carry ourselves in time that is not seconds minutes days years decades, my life, the story of my family… but time in the sense of “generations follow in the footsteps of generations.” A greater time, a landscape, everyone’s time.