A knock on the door.

  A knock on the door. 

I looked out the window. It was Axel. I thought, “Thank God, not Nils,” then felt bad for thinking that. But I was glad it was Axel, the older brother, that I saw at  the front door,
holding his hat like at the back door on one of those public television Brit soap operas that call themselves series.
     “Do you want to get a beer?” Axel asked.
     “It’s the middle of the afternoon. Not that! I just finished lunch.”
     “Pretend you're in Germany.”
     “I’d rather have a Guinness.”
     “Pretend you’re in Ireland.”
     “Let me check on Uncle Albert.”
     “He could come with,” Axel said. “Could he?”
     “Yes. We would have to drive. But let me check. I don’t think he’ll want to.”

He didn’t, he was on his phone. I signaled I was going out, did he want to come? He shook his head. I held up my phone, meaning call me if you need anything. He nodded.

The Gaza (from the archives). You can drink outside now.
The city changed the rules during the pandemic.

We drove anyway, to the Gaza. And dove in out of the dusty daylight. The light inside makes you feel as if you are underwater, and the air-conditioning makes you feel like it’s cold water you’re under. There are chairs out front, but they were right on the street.
     Axel wanted to tell me about a parishioner that had stopped by his office that morning.
     “I thought you took Mondays off,” I said.
     “No, Fridays.”
     “Oh.”

This parishioner had asked Axel, “Can you recover your faith after you’ve lost it?” And he  had answered, “Can you lose your faith after it has found you?”
     “I know, you were thinking about the perseverance of the saints,” I said. And Axel said, “Yes. But he wasn’t.” And he went on:

   ‘So,’ I said, ‘When did this start?’
   ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was the day before yesterday, but maybe when I was nine. Until then, I had no sense of myself, only that I was small and powerless, but that was okay. Dependent. Also okay. I didn’t wish, like Eve, to be more. Let God be God, and I could be me. It was good. Not that I would have used those words, those categories. But that was how I felt, I think. I did know about Eve.’ He paused.
     ‘So, say it started when I was nine; and pieces kept falling away, a small piece in high school, another piece in college, in graduate school another. And so on. Until now . . . .’ he paused again. ‘I’m 56 if you were going to ask. 9 + 47.’
   ‘And now it is gone?’
   ‘Yes, I think it is. It is,’ he said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Axel said. Because he didn’t know what to say. And the 56-year-old man went on.

   ‘When I ask if it is possible, I mean without becoming tendentious.’
   ‘And that means what?’
   ‘Well,’ he said, ‘in my catechism, the question What is faith like? is answered in a paraphrase of First Corinthians whatever-it-is: Faith is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude; it is not irritable or resentful; it is forgiving. Of the faithful and the unfaithful alike. it doesn’t boast. It doesn’t wave its hand in the air, bursting with the answer. It waits until it is called on then says, quietly, what it knows and what it doesn’t know. For it doesn’t know all things, whatever some of the faithful claim for it.’ He paused. ‘The forgiven faithful, let it be said.’

 “He had been looking right at me,” Axel said. “Then, he looked away, at the books behind my head.”

   ‘Thirteen,’ I said. ‘First Corinthians 13.’
   ‘I don’t think Paul wrote it.’
   ‘No. I don’t think so either.’
   ‘Any more than he wrote Romans whatever-it-is, Nothing can separate us from the love of God, not this or that or sixteen other things. That sounds a little more like him, Paul, but I don’t think it is either.’
   ‘Maybe not.’

“Wait,” I said. “Two things. You were sitting behind your desk?”
     “Yes, why?”
     “And you said about Romans 8 ‘maybe not’?”
     “I did. But then he said   ‘Nothing, it says. Nothing in creation. Not even the loss of faith, maybe?’ And he started to laugh. But it wasn’t loss of faith, he said, that he had come to talk about. Recovery of faith. The faith of his catechism, he said,

   ‘That I might be able to recovery if God didn’t get too pushy about it. Or God’s minions. God wouldn’t get too pushy. Or God’s minions in me,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’
   ‘I’m not one of God’s minions?’ I said.
   ‘Maybe. But not one of the pushy ones, I don’t think.’ But then he stood up. ‘So, good,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
   ‘Por nada,’ I said.

And he left. He looked like he was going to sit down again after I had said por nada instead of you’re welcome. It did slow him down, and I waited for him to sit. But he didn’t. He left.
     “And that’s the way it ended? I said.
     “Yes. I guess it is.”
                                                                       06.06.22
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 * The brothers Sundstrøm. See here and here. About my reaction: Nils always has to be in the center of things. Axel is standing along the wall. With me.
     For another post about loss of faith (and Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter). see here.