To complete the picture of the Pearsons’ domestic life in St. Mark, it remains only to add that Kay began teaching grade school during their second year in town. Mary Thorsheim’s intuition is to be thanked for this healthy turn of events. She sensed that once Steve was back on his feet and Kay’s constant care of him was no longer needed, Kay would require some other outlet to express her caring nature. Her need to give would not decrease in proportion to his need to receive, a situation which the arrival of children would normally have rectified. As Kay’s closest friend, Mary had more than hunches to go on that things could easily turn sour for them bit by bit. But she saw in Kay’s qualifications as an elementary school teacher the perfect way to avert the danger of marital stagnation. As a teacher, Kay’s capacity to love would never pile up behind jammed floodgates, but would keep right on flowing full, sweet, and fresh.
Inquiry was made, and on Mary’s recommendation the principal invited Kay to start teaching the second grade class in the fall. Once Mary had assured Steve that his wife’s classroom would be next to hers, he no longer hedged at the thought of her going into a coma undetected. He too saw the wisdom of the plan and could think of many factors in its favor. He even called it “perfect timing.”
From then on, Steve and Kay settled into a very satisfying routine for some years that allowed them plenty of time to be together and gave them much to talk about and share with each other. Mary had detected and disposed of the worm of restlessness while it was still in the embryo stage. It is easy, then, to understand why Steve woke up each morning happy, why he labored each day contentedly, and why he returned home each evening with eager step. His precious little wife and the delights and challenges of his work were more than enough to hold at bay anything from the outside world that might have threatened his peace.
II
During the school year, from 7:30 in the morning until 5:00 in the evening, Monday through Friday, and all morning long on Saturday, Dr. Stephan Pearson could be found in one of five places—in his office in a turret atop the massive gothic-style science building, in his lecture hall, in the physics laboratory, in the chemistry laboratory, or in the chapel.
Although the science building was a massive structure, the faculty offices within it most certainly were not. Tucked under staircases, blocked off in dead-end corridors, and squeezed into turrets, they impressed one for their coziness if not for their convenience. Dr. Pearson had been ceded the use of the southwest turret, one of two medieval projections on either end of the south wall of the fortresslike structure. To reach it one ascended a circular staircase from the fifth floor where the impressive and up-to-date science library was housed. One then ducked under a beam and emerged onto a narrow covered corridor on a flat flanking section along the edge of the roof. This led to Dr. Pearson’s turret firmly planted on the southwest corner of the building. It was about twelve feet in diameter on the inside and lined with an octagonal arrangement of bookshelves reaching two-thirds of the way to the ten-foot base of the conical ceiling. In the south-facing segment of the octagon was a tall window, the lowest section of which could be opened for fresh air.
Such an affair may seem cold and forbidding, especially during those long Minnesota winters, but in reality it suited the retiring disposition of the professor very well. Kay saw to it that the college provided him with a thick warm carpet on the floor and an electric fan-heater for use in cold weather. Twice a month she scaled the tower when Steve was in class to keep his workspace as clean and tidy as possible.
This last task might have overwhelmed a lesser woman. Every time she waded into the mess Steve could create in a couple of week’s time, she had the impression that a cyclone had struck. Books, papers, pencils, refuse of every description were lying in the same comfortable positions they had landed after being tossed or lost. Soon, however, Kay learned on which shelves the most used and consequently the most abused books belonged. She developed a system of separating the scattered papers into three categories—definite scraps, probable scraps, and probable essentials. The definite scraps (relatively few in number) she herself threw away. The probable scraps (a veritable mountain) she placed in a neat stack on the left side of the great oak desk right above the waste basket. And the probable essentials she placed on the right side of the desk up against the wall. Because of her dedicated efforts, both professor and students recovered papers that may otherwise have remained lost forever.
The turret office did indeed well suit Dr. Pearson’s disposition. He was the sort of scientist who, rather than involving himself deeply in particular laboratory investigations, had instead devoted himself to planning out his investigations’ next steps, pencil in hand. Technicians enough he had always had to carry out his instructions and report on results. He had been accustomed to spending many hours in the company of his well-trained fertile mind, visiting the laboratories that reported to him as often as necessary to check on progress or, occasionally, to conduct an investigation which for some reason he felt he should do himself.
His move to Christiania had, of course, curtailed this sort of activity, but it had replaced it with an activity that quickly engaged him to the full—teaching. His first challenge was to meet students where they were and not overwhelm them unintentionally. He must have succeeded in this. Every student of his that I had an opportunity to meet and interview after his death spoke glowingly of his classroom style during these years. They spoke of his encyclopedic grasp of every subject he taught and his infinite patience with students who were struggling. He never consulted notes. It was all in his head, neatly arranged, they told me. Furthermore, despite his towering intellect and reputation, he was always accessible to his students and the soul of kindness in every situation. But what they recalled most vividly was his ability to fire their imaginations. In the course of his lectures, he would regularly digress to paint a vision for his students of how humanity’s lot could be improved by the proper application the principles and the knowledge they were in the process of learning. He spoke of instant worldwide communication through a network of satellites (which he had designed on paper and illustrated for his students), of the elimination of famine and starvation through—among other things—the controlled culture of algae, of the potential of nuclear fission and atomic synthesis to produce limitless power for the benefit of all, and of a whole host of other possibilities he envisioned for a better future for the human race. He spoke with such radiance and confidence of this future, even in the face of the widespread panic induced by the threat posed by the Soviet Union, that the fear of nuclear war gave way in many of his students to enthusiasm for the many exciting prospects of nuclear peace. His first three years at Christiania saw the number of physics majors in the graduating class jump from five to twenty-seven and climb steadily from there.
He was not a dynamic lecturer, far from it. His voice did not even carry through the terraced lecture hall. It didn’t take long for the electronics man on his staff to rig up a portable microphone which he could unobtrusively hang around his neck. He didn’t try to be interesting. He just was, by virtue of what he said, not of how he said it. A principle could be ever so abstract, he almost always had a homely illustration of it at hand to make it easier to grasp and retain. Occasionally he would suddenly lower his voice and sever contact with the class, mumbling something to himself half aloud. This was an almost mystic moment for those in the class who were caught up in the spirit of the man. He never did lose his “romance” with theoretical physics and with mathematics especially, and their seductiveness could catch him at the most inopportune moments. The former students whom I was able to interview from this period in his life loved him for this and even held him in a kind of awe because of it.
Specifically, for what subjects was he responsible? A cursory reading of a number of the catalogues dating from these years reveals that he must have established a working partnership with the Departments of Chemistry and Mathematics, for he often moved over to teach one of their cours
es and was not shy about recruiting someone from their faculties on occasion to teach a course in his department. Each year he taught one class in general physics, a beginning course for science majors, but also available to fulfill the science requirement for nonscience majors. I am told that this class became very popular and was always oversubscribed. In addition, he regularly instructed a semester course in the three fields of thermodynamics, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. Then, crossing into the Chemistry Department, he taught a two-year course in theoretical chemistry involving thermodynamics and molecular structure. And every year he taught one class in upper-division mathematics which included over the course of time such subjects as differential equations, advanced calculus, and theory of complex variables.
With all of these quiet endeavors lumped together in a pleasing and orderly fashion, Dr. Pearson’s life settled down into a regularity that was far from boring or routine. His mere presence at Christiania attracted several outstanding new faculty members within a few years so that, in addition to the fine man in electronics whom he had inherited, there were now also first-rate teachers of inorganic and organic chemistry, a capable new electronic physicist, and a lightning-quick Hungarian mathematician, a refugee whom he had met in Germany many years before. The quality of work proceeding from little Christiania with its fifteen hundred students was commencing to attract some notice in the world.
In his office by himself or with his students one on one, in his lecture hall, in his laboratories, or at daily chapel, reticent and diminutive Dr. Stephan Pearson seemed the very embodiment of self-possessing unaffecting genius, moving with his own brand of quiet eagerness in the well-ordered orb of his lofty calling, his grace-filled wife, and his peaceable religion.
III
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.
IV
No one was more responsible than Dr. Harold Thorsheim for bringing about this inversion in Steve’s view of reality. As the little physicist drew back from the epicenter of science’s involvement in producing weapons of ever greater destruction, he lost that daily contact with the demands of the politics of survival which had driven him to the brink of despair. His great need now was for a sustainable sense of the goodness of Almighty God next to which the evils unleashed by men would shrink in importance. And the longer he was exposed to Harold Thorsheim’s implicit confidence in just this, the closer he came to adopting that confidence for himself.
The Pearsons and the Thorsheims spent many evenings together until Harold’s death in 1953. Kay and Mary would always retire to the kitchen where over a cup of herbal tea they could pursue in conversation the things that interested them, while Steve and Harold normally took control of the front room or, in pleasant weather, the front porch. Most often the men discussed some aspect of their respective fields that was of common interest to them, and frequently this led them into the spiritual dimension. As they spoke, Harold often glowed with humble admiration for the grand historic continuity of the Christian community as it expressed itself in her rich cultural and liturgical heritage to which the leaders at Christiania at that time were fully and intelligently committed. Steve, for his part, often found himself, as Harold spoke on, reliving his experiences of worship in the beautiful Catholic parish near his house on the outskirts of Boston before the war.
Dr. Harold Thorsheim was a man caught up in the worship of God. This was evident from their very first conversation. Steve discovered that life was for him a ceaseless act of adoration of the Almighty, alive with countless signs and symbols each directing the inner man toward the eternal verities which the loving Power beyond our history has graciously woven into it for our benefit. His religious posture might best be described as an acute awareness of the fact that although God has entered time to con
vey eternal truths to His time-bound creatures, still those truths themselves stand with God outside of time. Wherefore, although Christ died once in time to defeat the evil one and to atone for our sin, nevertheless His sacrifice goes on forever in the presence of God who knows not the restrictions of time. For Harold Thorsheim, this overarching reality made the Sacrament of the Altar much more than a mere memorial. It is God’s means of uniting us with Mary and John and Mary Magdalene and, indeed, with all redeemed creatures of all times and places at the very foot of the Cross, since in the eyes of God, the eternal Father, the crucifixion of Jesus, His Son from all eternity, is never past history but always present reality. The consecrated elements of bread and wine which become Jesus’ Body and Blood are God’s way of uniting us to the death of Jesus in the closest possible manner. This awesome truth never failed to bring tears to Harold’s eyes whenever he tried to account for it in words.
“The great Apostle Paul in his first epistle to the Church at Corinth puts it this way: ‘The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?’
“Salvation, it seems to me, is an ever-descending stream of grace from on High whose sole purpose is to reunite us to God and evoke from us a response of gratitude and love forming an ever-ascending column of incense from below.”
“That’s quite a picture,” Steve replied with closed eyes to envision it in his mind. “But don’t you think that such pictures might run the risk of restricting our concept of the Eternal Being?”
“Perhaps. No picture tells the whole story,” replied the artist, leaning back in his easy chair. “As I see it, God’s purpose in entering time and space through the Virgin’s womb was to give us an authentic grasp of the intangible through the tangible, of the invisible through the visible. If we whose minds are capable only of making time-space associations are left to ourselves to fathom and then depict ultimate spiritual truths in our minds’ eye, it is amusing—if not a little pathetic—to note what mental images of God we might come up with. I knew a man one time whose abstract concept of God was ‘Sheer Power.’ When I asked him what mental image he associated with that concept, he replied, ‘Whirling electrons in infinite space, or a massive explosion.’ It was news to him that the Eternal Word became flesh to give us a more accurate picture of who God really is.”
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