Gifts of the Spirit

by Patricia Eilola

  He loved to be read to. When I read him his picture book about a farm, I asked him to point out horses, cows, pigs, chickens, the rooster, hens, geese, and ducks. He learned the whole by heart so if I skipped an animal or a line from a story, he immediately corrected me.

  The poems, too, he loved. I read him poems from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses, and he came to know, them, too by heart. If I intentionally skipped a line of a poem, he would say it in his baby-voice. Milma and Risto refused to talk baby talk to him, but I have to confess I sometimes did when we were alone. I tickled him and called him my “Teensie Weensie Baby Boy.” at which he giggled and laughed.

  Gradually the level of our bedtime reading became less picture and more word-oriented. He accepted that with the equanimity with which he greeted all new things. When I started him on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men, I was afraid at first he was too young, but he lay back on his pillow, listening, and I’m sure imagining what I was reading with his own eyes and mind.

  And then, as quickly as it had seemed to begin, summer was over, and it was time for us to pack up everything and move back into the parsonage that sat behind the First Unitarian Church of Virginia. It was a lot more crowded than Metsola had been. All three children were in one room, and my room was smaller. The kitchen held fewer time-saving appliances although we did have a gas stove and a gas refrigerator.

  Once I heard Milma humming and then singing, “Metsola-n River flows gently along, gently along, gently along; Metsola-n River flows gently along. All happy things there belong!”

  When I heard the words, I understood immediately what they meant.

  Living in town also made the reverends’ work harder. Not only were there weddings and baptisms, but church meetings during which the church board of directors made decisions about how the church should be run—not always to Risto’s satisfaction.

  One added responsibility of Milma’s I found to be of wonderful benefit to me, too. She began teaching a Sunday morning Confirmation class for older children—from twelve on up. I turned fourteen on November 6, but I didn’t tell anyone. I guess I was hesitant, afraid I would be considered too old to continue to help the family.

  Both Tellervo and Risto attended the Confirmation class. I asked permission to attend, too. Milma said, rather surprised, “Of course, you may join us!”

  How I came to love those Sunday mornings!

  Milma believed devoutly in God, of course, but the God she introduced us to was as unlike the God I’d heard of from the Finnish Lutheran minister as was every other part of our new church.

  And so we began a journey into the realm of the spiritual, a realm so familiar to Milma she rarely had to prepare for our classes. We began at eight o’clock exactly and continued until nine or nine-thirty, leaving time for Milma to prepare for the church service.

  Each time we had a lesson, she paused always to allow us to ask questions.

  Lesson One was on the Ten Commandments:

  One: Thou shalt have no other God before me. Milma explained, “God is our supreme ruler.” That made very little sense to me.

  “Who or what is ‘God’?” I asked.

  “We will discuss that thoroughly in a later lesson,” she answered. “For now, let’s just say that God is love.”

  “Any kind of love?” I asked, always curious.

  “Yes, any kind of love—the love of a child for his or her parents and they for him or her, the love of two people who wish to join their lives, and the love we feel toward every living thing.”

  “Even bears and wolves?” I couldn’t quite let the whole idea alone.

  “Every living thing,” she answered, clearly wanting to go on with the lesson.

  Later I thought about that and about Abou Ben Adhem’s answer to the angel’s question about whom God had blessed: “Write me than as one who loves his fellow man.” And the ending: “Next night he came again to show the list of those whom God had blessed, and lo Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest.” Love was obviously the key to living a good and happy life. I was grateful I had so many to love—Mother, Ronny, Aini, and Eino and the Lappalas—Grandmother, Milma, Risto, young Risto, Tellervo, and Daniel. I was blessed, too, I thought.

  Continuing her lesson, Milma had told us, “It would serve us well to remember that whenever we are in pain of any kind—physical or mental or emotional. God does not cause pain.”

  “Then why does he allow it to happen?” I asked, too familiar with pain and death after my experiences with the flu and with my father’s death.

  “He gives us free will to make our own choices. Sometimes the choices we make are bad, but God is always good. He always hopes that we will act in a way that is loving, not painful.”

  We all wrote down the Ten Commandments and what Milma had said about them even though several of them puzzled me.

  Then we had what she called a “music time.” We sang number 281 in the hymnal. She called on Tellervo, who had a lovely voice, to sing verses one, three, and five, and the rest of us to join together to sing verses two, four, and six.

  “Jumala ompi linnamme” #170 (“God is our fortress”) was our second hymn. Milma said we’d sing that when we entered the church to become official members. “Taivas on siininen ja valkoinen” (“The sky is blue and white”) was somewhat familiar. We finished with “Aamulla varhain” (“Early in the morning”).

  I thought we were getting good practice with learning to sing the hymns. Often very few members of the congregation joined in, most of them because the hymns were written in English. We would serve as a “choir” to keep the songs going. It was a very wise move of Milma’s, I thought.

  After the singing, we continued our lessons:

  She began, “There are many different kinds of religions. Many of these religions send missionaries to teach or rather to tell people what to believe. Unitarians don’t do that. We send teachers for the people to find the truth for themselves. We try to reason things out and are always learning. We should not make comic books and novels our only source of reading. We should read good literature because good literature is a good friend to have.”

  Tellervo and I exchanged glances. We were rather proud of the good literature we had been studying and the headway we had made into that realm.

  “The Bible is a collection of books written during thousands of years dealing with faith between God and man. It is a little ‘library’ composed of two main parts—the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Bible was written mostly by the Jews or Israelites.”

  I thought about that. Grandmother read the Bible every day. It was the first thing she did every morning and the last thing she did at night. And she often quoted passages for my “edification,” she said. Some of the passages were beautiful—like the Psalms; but some things I didn’t understand—especially the beginning. Genesis did not possibly seem to be the “Word of God” as she put it.

  I questioned her several times about how God could write the Bible from His Place Up in the Heavens. How could he get hold of pen and paper or pencil and paper and write everything down?

  Her answer was that, although people had written the actual words, they were the “Word of God.” He had told the people what to write.

  Milma’s lesson continued, completely contradicting her mother, “The Bible was not written by the ‘finger of God.’ It has been interpreted over and over again. The Old Testament, first written in Hebrew and Greek, has changed much. The Catholic Church uses it in Latin. It is a great source of information and knowledge but should be dealt with ‘open-mindedly.’”

  I couldn’t hold my questions back: “But Grandmother quotes passages to me and says they are the ‘Word of God.’ Is she wrong?”

  “Well,” and Milma paused as if trying very hard to find the right words, “many religions view the Bible differently. We Un
itarians don’t believe it was the Word of God, but many religions do. And we need to honor their beliefs. We just don’t need to share them.”

  “Does that mean I should listen to Grandmother’s ‘lessons’ from the Bible and take them to heart? Because a lot of that stuff… including how Adam and Eve came to be and the business about the serpent and the Garden of Eden… sounds suspicious to me.”

  “Well, take for example, the battle of Jerrico,” Milma said. “The Bible says Moses sent two spies—one named Joshua—into Jerrico. When the walls of Jerrico began to fall down, everyone thought it was a miracle, but now archeologists think—are almost sure—it was a sudden earthquake followed by a fire.”

  “And,” she continued, “the earth was made by evolution, not in six days. Eve was not made of ‘Adam’s rib.’”

  I added, “Why are the Unitarians so sure the earth was not made by God in six days, as the Bible says?”

  Her answer made a lot of sense: “Charles Darwin wrote a book called On the Origin of Species about a hundred years ago. He developed his theory by gathering as much information as he could about life. He collected it while voyaging on a ship called the Beagle, by sitting in front of a microscope back in England, and by writing to a global network of correspondents,” she explained. “Darwin proposed that natural selection could gradually transform a species. Scientists have observed thousands of cases of natural selection in action. He hypothesized that species share a common ancestry like branches on a tree and that humans evolved from apes in Africa. Fossils document the course of human evolution in Africa from apelike ancestors over the past seven million years. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I responded. “It seems a lot more likely than that we were created in six days!”

  To Grandmother’s bewilderment Tellervo and Risto were acting out the evolution from ape to man as we entered the house. When they explained what mother had told them, she was appalled. “Mankind was created by God in six days, according to the Bible,” she announced.

  Milma hurriedly stepped in. “We each have our own beliefs,” she said quietly. “I spent this morning telling the children what most Unitarians believe. You must know from Risto’s and my sermons that neither of us considers the Bible the word or the work of God.”

  “Are you very sure about that?” Grandmother countered. “How in heaven’s name could either of you not believe that?”

  “Both of us believe in the Unitarian philosophy,” she said gently.

  “Then I’m not a Unitarian,” she said, very firmly.

  “Unitarians are free to believe anything that makes sense to them and makes them feel is the truth.” Milma said trying to make peace.

  “Am I free to believe that God created the world in six days as the Bible says?” she asked.

  “Of course.” Milma said.

  “Then you must not tell the children that I’m wrong.”

  “I’ll tell the children to believe whatever seems right to them.”

  “Well, I guess that’s okay then.” Grandmother seemed satisfied.

  We could hardly wait for the following Sunday morning to find out more about the truths we were seeking, and we were sure they were not the truths Grandmother believed and honored.

  The next Sunday provided us grist for our mill. We were intent upon shaking Grandmother’s “false” beliefs and replacing them with the truth as Milma taught it.

  I re-read the Bible where the Ten Commandments are listed and studied them hard. Some of them made me feel guilty (like “thou shalt not covet”); one of them made me angry (like “honor thy Father and thy Mother”). Father did not deserve any “honor.” In fact, he had not deserved to be treated even as well as we had treated him or as Mother had treated him—with loving understanding always, it seemed—even when he was chasing us with knives. She had kept telling us that it was “the demon alcohol” that made him act that way.

  “But,” I had told her, “he’s the one who choses to drink. No one pours it down his throat. So why should we ‘understand’ when he is doing something to himself—and to us—that is needlessly cruel and mean?”

  “Alcohol is a kind of disease,” she had said, with what turned out to be amazing perspicacity, “like cancer or pneumonia. Not everyone who drinks gets drunk and not everyone who gets drunk winds up hurting others—including those he loves. He can’t seem to stop even when he tries and believe you me, he has tried.”

  Angrily I asked, “When? It doesn’t seem as if he’s trying at all. He just goes on drinking and drinking and drinking until he drops or until something makes him mad and then he turns into… an ogre!”

  “Yes,” Mother had admitted, “I know. But even at his worst, he’s down deep a good man. I fell in love with a good man,” she repeated. “And he’ll return some day, I believe. I need to believe,” she told me fiercely.

  “I doubt it.” I was being absolutely truthful. And I had turned out to be right. He had drunk himself to death. So why should I honor his memory? The whole commandment seemed senseless to me.

  And I pondered the nature of God. Was there really someone living up in the sky who knew exactly what we were doing every minute of our lives but who gave us free will to make mistakes and to do awful things? It seemed a little far-fetched to me, but when, I thought, who am I to know? I’ll ask Milma.

  And with that decision made, I finally fell asleep.

  11: Beliefs

  We could hardly wait for the following Sunday morning, ready to hear more about “our Unitarian beliefs” and absolutely certain we would find gist for our arguments with Grandmother, which had been ongoing.

  “Hell,” was Milma’s opener. It certainly caught our attention. “We Unitarians do not believe there is such a place. God gave us the Ten Commandments to teach us and help us see the difference between right and wrong. If you don’t obey them, your conscience will trouble you and create the real hell within yourself. When you are in touch with your conscience, you are in ‘heaven,’ and you are with God, who is a spirit. He is everywhere. He exists within us as we live our daily lives—always trying to honor his Commandments and to show that we believe by loving one another.

  “As far as Unitarians are concerned,” she continued, “We believe in the fatherhood of God, the leadership of Jesus, the brotherhood of man, and the progress onward and upward forever. Love is the doctrine of this church. The quest for truth is its sacrament, and service is its prayer—to dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, to serve mankind in fellowship to the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the divine.”

  That last part was very important: Through loving one another and “serving mankind in fellowship” (caring for one another), we would find God. That sat well with me because it was similar to the message of “Abou Ben Adhem”: “I pray thee then write me as one who loves his fellow man. / The angel wrote and vanished. / Next night it came again with a great wakening light / to show the names whom love of God had blessed, and Lo, Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest.” I felt comfortable with this part of “Unitarianism,” and vowed to try to live according to their beliefs. In the back of my mind, I pushed the memory of Tommy Bessemer and vowed never to be put into that kind of situation again.

  Such was the conclusion of the early part of her lesson for the day. After the music hour, when we practiced the hymns she had set out for us to learn, we had hoped to hear more about God, and we did—in the crux of the lesson, which was “Ourselves.” She asked us to take careful notes on the six points she would give us and to memorize them and the answers.

  They were as follows:

  One: Who am I? “I am a person or spirit made in the likeness of God, individual, distinct from one another.”

  Two: Whence did I come? “I came from God, who is the source of all life.”

  She continued until we hit number six, whic
h was What is my destiny?

  The answer we were to learn was as follows: “As I came from God so shall I return to him to render my account.”

  That image of God was a new one—different from the one she’d offered us that morning. This one implied the “theistic” kind of God, who “created us in his likeness” and “from whom we came,” perhaps a God who sits on a throne and judges us as we “render” the account of our lives. I wanted to ask her about that, but I felt uncomfortable doing so and just let it go, thinking I would address it later. I never did, and I regretted that. It was the only aspect of Unitarianism that still didn’t quite sit right with me, although I revered Risto and Milma and knew they wouldn’t teach us anything they didn’t believe.

  When we got home, the four of us went about our work reciting the questions and the answers. Grandmother approved of what we were memorizing and said so loudly and often, especially about numbers one, two, and six.

  We anxiously awaited our next meeting, during which we were sure we would find out more about Jesus. Grandmother had already informed us that he was the son of God, that he was resurrected (bodily), that his conception was “immaculate,” meaning that Joseph was not his father.

  We were quite sure Milma would have quite another story to tell us, one Grandmother would not approve of at all. With an air of suppressed excitement following Sunday morning, we were up and dressed and ready to go before Milma, looking forward to what she would have to say, and we were not disappointed. As soon as we were settled around a table in the social room at the Virginia Unitarian Church, Milma began, “Today we are going to talk about Jesus.” We sat, pencils ready, waiting for her to begin: “When Jesus was young, he attended a school of doctors and so had medical experience. As a physician, Jesus spent time helping those who were sick, traveling and healing people. He was baptized by John—a messenger of God—in the River Jordan when he was about thirty years old. He faced temptation in the form of Satan, an evil spirit, and, victorious, he made the decision to tell people what he knew to be the truth. A great teacher, like Buddha and Mohammad, he taught lessons so clearly people began to follow his teachings. He prepared his twelve disciples to teach and to go on with his work once he was gone. That was the beginning of the Christian churches.”