It does not help him to cite the Oxford Movement’s four absolutes: absolute purity, absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, absolute love … (“Absolute idiocy!” Mona calls from behind the door) … because those are abstract concepts, even if they are a distillation of the most beautiful thoughts in the Sermon on the Mount. But we live as best we can here on earth, where our actions have consequences on a social plane. Think, dear Petter. Think. And if you won’t think about those consequences, then think instead about the four absolutes. Which of them did Our Saviour place first? Yes, love. And if you want to be absolutely honest with yourself, who is it that you love most? Yes, Mona and your little girl. Your mother. You have no absolute right to cause them such distress.
All that is bad enough. Even worse is that in the overheated atmosphere of those evening meetings, when Mona must of course stay home with Sanna, there are romantic young women who confess their wicked thoughts and, weeping, throw themselves on the priest’s breast. And the priest, who stands for absolute love, what is he supposed to do? Unable as he is to see through their cunning, he tells himself that it’s all pure spiritual anguish when in actual fact it’s an irresponsible effort to captivate a married man and father. Moreover a priest and a model for the parish. Where is he supposed to put his hands? What is he supposed to do when they cry, “God! I cannot go on like this!”
They. Well, one. Who is so terribly in love that she can’t stand it but comes rushing to his home in her despair. Right past Mona as if she were a simple servant girl, no one who mattered. Straight to the priest. “Oh God! Help me! Pray for me!”
His face a picture of masculine helplessness. She is about to push him into his study. She doesn’t see Mona, doesn’t reckon with her, she is meaningless, a person lacking spiritual life and love in Christ, a person who in a deeper sense has no right to him. She, Mona, with a teaching degree, steps forward and takes the overwrought young woman by the arm, hard. “Calm yourself!” she commands. Miss N stops in her tracks. Her tears freeze on her cheeks. Her hand halfway to his breast. Her thought cut off in midstream.
“Forgive me,” she says. “I didn’t mean … I don’t know why I’m here.”
“So it seems,” says the pastor’s wife. “I suggest that we drink a cup of coffee in the kitchen and then maybe you’ll feel better.”
She bustles about in the kitchen. Angry as a bee, Petter sees, but frighteningly polite to the fervid young woman, who sits at the table and shrivels, without a sob or a sigh. “Here you go,” Mona says, and Miss N dares do nothing but drink her coffee. Looks at no one, least of all at the priest, who stares into his cup. He can think of nothing to say, although he’s the one licensed to preach, and his wife is forced to continue.
“To my way of thinking, MRA has gone way too far. Its demands are terribly exaggerated and people get all worked up and overwrought and lose their heads. I can’t give you any advice, but I can’t help thinking you’d be better off staying away from those meetings. And I’ll give the same advice to my husband, who has many duties here in this parish without MRA trying to draw the last drop of his blood.”
Now Miss N looks at Mona, eyes wide, and draws a breath almost like a mortal sigh. “Yes,” she breathes. “Thank you. I hardly recognize myself. It’s like a dream.”
“Yes,” Mona says. “Reality is different. Work, for example.” She looks at her husband, the priest, a penetrating gaze. So blue, so powerfully blue. So indescribably, incomprehensibly, powerfully blue. The fifth absolute—blueness. “Yes,” she concludes. “And now I have to get on with mine. Perhaps you’d like more coffee?”
“No thank you,” she breathes. “I have to go. What you said about the meetings is right.” She says goodbye to them both, and no one who sees her go can help feeling sorry for her, the way we feel sorry for any young person who has lost her faith and hope. What passes later between the priest and his wife occurs in private, but we can presume that it is not the priest who emerges triumphant.
“How could you be so blind?” she cries, for example, after he’s assured her, scandalized, that there was of course no physical attraction on either side. “Everyone must have seen it but you! Don’t you understand anything? What would you have done if I hadn’t managed to stop her?”
He looks like a schoolboy, not like the beloved man she married. “I suppose I would have prayed with her. You know in the Movement we talk a lot about prayer. About its power to change our lives.”
“Ha! She threw herself at you! She was this far from a declaration of carnal lust.”
“Then naturally I would have calmly talked sense to her. Explained that we’re brother and sister in Jesus Christ. Nothing more.”
“I wonder if you really don’t realize how overheated the atmosphere gets at those meetings of yours. Your demand for honesty has pretty much the same effect that pornography has on a dirty old man. There are thoughts and inclinations that people are better off keeping to themselves. A little common decency never hurt anyone. You encourage simple, unbalanced souls to vent the feelings that they’d keep under wraps in a more sceptical atmosphere. Has it occurred to you that you’re acting like a sect, though you belong to the church?”
He can hear how weak he sounds as he admits that there is much in what she says. That it takes someone with her analytical ability to put a finger right on the sensitive point. Yes, people’s feelings ran away with them. Yes, the atmosphere was thoroughly overheated. As a priest, he should have realized that they expected leadership from him, not simply a confirmation of their surging emotions. What she says about sectarianism is perfectly true. Distressed as he is, it’s still interesting to see how it starts. You think it’s just an internal revival, and then it turns out that you stand at the forefront of a little group that is distancing itself from the rest of the congregation. It’s not healthy, she’s absolutely right about that.
By and by he also agrees to decline to attend any further evening meetings. Doesn’t intend to make excuses but means to be absolutely honest when he informs Westerberg that he is taking this step because he has grown increasingly dubious about the overheated atmosphere within the movement. It is becoming too naked and intrusive. It’s becoming sectarian, he will say, and then add that he would also like to spend more time at home with his wife and newborn child.
They talk and talk, though neither one of them has the time, and of course the result is that, both of them in tears, they reaffirm their love and agree that he naturally never and that she naturally never thought.
The priest stops going to the meetings, which gradually die a natural death when one after another of the little group stops coming. Some internalize the absolutes and continue to have them as lodestars in their personal lives. Others remember the whole episode with shame. In any case, the movement does not recover. Across Finland, a few faithful enthusiasts support it for a time, but it wavers and fades and eventually gives up the ghost.
She who murdered it feels a certain triumph at first. Then doubt and unease as well. That he could actually be so naive. That she has to act the policeman. Save him from things he should have the sense not to stick his nose into. That she has to get so angry in order to make him see what’s going on.