Time’s Arrow

John and Florence Kronlokken, 1946

My father was born in February 1919, in the midst of the world-wide Spanish flu epidemic. When she was afraid he would die, and couldn’t bear to watch, my grandmother turned his little face to the wall. But my grandfather picked him up and held him against his own body all night, infusing the baby with his warmth. My father lived, though a somewhat sickly child. 

Growing up, Dad felt himself called to the Lutheran ministry. This required education, a lot of education! He worked on farms during the summer and helped his father on carpentry jobs. He also refused to smoke, knowing this saved money. He met my mother in college and, when he finished his seminary training, they were married. He was ordained as a pastor at the same time, in February 1945, only a month before his brother was killed in France at the very end of World War II.

In his parishes, Dad was known for his warmth and energy. In a small North Dakota town along the Red River, when the Swedish and Norwegian Lutheran churches finally agreed to join each other, Dad helped hoist one of the churches on rollers and move it two blocks down the street to attach it to the other! This made a much more spacious church with a large parish hall.

In this parish, the men’s fishing trips up to the Lake of the Woods were legendary. Dad was studying electronics at this time, a dedicated hamm radio operator. Us kids were arriving thick and fast. One summer he and Mother shipped us (six of us) down to our aunt, picked up the young people of the congregation and drove out to a Luther League convention in San Francisco.

Although we know that our perception of time is somewhat fluid, time moves for us in only one direction, away from what we call the past, and toward what we call the future. Stephen Hawking, in A Brief History of Time [published 1988], defines three arrows of time, thermodynamic, psychological and cosmological, which we experience as matching in an expanding universe. Only a universe which is in an expansive phase can support intelligent life, Hawking suggests.

It very much surprised me when I realized how young my Dad was, 43, when I left home and began traipsing the world, ending up quite far from my family. By this time, he and Mother were concentrating their energies on the kids still at home, and in a cabin on a northern Minnesota lake. While serving several parishes in northern Iowa, Dad built a canoe, practiced archery, facilitated bird-watching and nature study and got involved in photography. He also built out-buildings and added on to the cabin where he and Mother hoped to retire.

This was not to be, however. Dad developed cancer of the liver and died at 63. I regret not being there, but I had just been in Minnesota, and didn’t feel I could leave again. Surrounded by Mother and the rest of his kids, Dad was quite conscious, I was told, playing peek-a-boo with his first grandchild, Andrew. Toward the end, he kept reaching up his arms. “I have to go,” he said urgently. “I have to go.” Those around the bed sang. “I once was lost, but now I’m found. Was blind, but now I see.”

Mother said Dad’s favorite Bible passage was from Paul’s letter to the Galatians 2:20 [King James Version]: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”

My uncle, Gerhard Frost, who taught at Luther Seminary,  in the talk he gave at Dad’s funeral, said: “I remember how unpretentious he was. Nothing roused his indignation more than a nickel pretending to be a $20 bill … I well remember going to the big general store in that little Iowa community with him and how long it took him to go from one end of the store to the other — and by the time we had traveled the distance he had introduced me to everyone. And I think of the pastoral counseling, the pastoral ministry that has been done through the years by pastors who took a long time to get from one end of the local store to the other.”

Time’s arrow is relentless, but we are left with memory, memories which expand into whole realms of thought which we can nurture for ourselves. Floods of experiences come back to me when I open the gates to them, of childhood, of my parents and of our life together. And if you didn’t happen to know my Dad, you can probably see him in myself, my brother and sisters; and in our children, and in our children’s children.

On the other side of the present is expectation, our hope for the future. And to that end, our family gathered last summer at that very lake toward which my father had directed his hopes. The cabin has been replaced by a sturdy log home, but the dock platform is still located where Dad built it. And what he called “the cabana” at the edge of the lake is still there. We take the path down the hill that he built. His hands, his legacy, are everywhere.

Our hopes cannot be squelched, given an expanding universe. We make memories and share hopes. And I cannot fail to see a consequential line running from the actions of my grandfather so many years ago, to the tribe of families which met at the lake last summer. It would have made my parents so proud.