‘What about Oslo?’

‘I didn’t live there, not as such. I spent the years commuting between faculty and bed-sit, from the church to Østbane station to catch the train to Åndalsnes. Veum, for me it’s as if my seven years in Oslo have been blacked out. They were learning years, years spent in a study, surrounded by theological writings, Bible texts in Greek and Hebrew, learned dissertations and philosophical interpretations. It was a monk’s existence, Veum. A … devotion to what was sacred.’

‘But in Bergen you met the temptations of a big town?’

He didn’t answer directly. ‘Imagine these outposts. The first period in wind-blown Finnmark’s flatlands, with the Arctic Sea in front of the sitting-room door, a tundra existence for most of the year, massive darkness all winter and floods of light in the summer … as though … as though God Himself had turned his back on us in the darkness, but was glaring at us during the summer nights. There were sects and free-thinkers, people with … heathen ancestors, and then the faithful religious community, life’s toilers, self-sacrificing and generous, but … in a way old even at a young age.’

‘So you didn’t find … a life companion there either?’ I asked delicately.

He shook his head.

‘What about in Vest-Agder?’

‘There?! There, they only marry their own. I’m glad I left after 295just two years. It was a closed life, Veum. I’ve never seen so many people keep such a beady eye on one another, every step they took, whether they were in the congregation or not. There were some fights about Christian mission statements in schools and kindergartens that made even a conservative theologian like me back away.’

‘So you belong to the young, conservative thinkers?’

‘Yes!’ he exclaimed with renewed passion. ‘Faith and religion are too serious to trifle with, to make compromises over or to set up on democratic guidelines. It’s better to separate from the state, which makes its own laws and regulations. I cannot make a secular state’s laws mine. I’ve always fought tooth and claw for the rights of the unborn child, against the abortion law and its advocates.’

‘But you could work as an army chaplain and give your blessing to the taking of adult lives?’

‘I had this debate out when I was in Oslo, Veum. You know the salon radicals there, with the morality of the thirties, against priests, for women priests, against war, for abortion – there’s no substance to what they think. It makes no sense.’

‘But if you think in a similar fashion, albeit with opposing views, isn’t all you’re doing exactly the same?’

‘No, because I have God’s scriptures to support me, years of theological studies behind me, studies of the Holy Writ no leader-writer on the Oslo newspapers would take the time to…’

‘Now it’s not just…’

‘We’ve lived through a time with far too many empty words and much too little passion, Veum. Among priests too. Liturgy has become empty phrases, and everything has been adapted to fit social democracy and pseudo-standpoints written in standard bokmål. Priests have become bureaucrats and civil servants and 296are no longer God’s impassioned wanderers on earth, preachers who praise the Lord. They stand in their pulpits like a sort of tax official, counting income and deducting tax allowances to tell you how much you owe or what refund you’re entitled to. They’re God’s accountants and not his missionaries.’ With a resigned sigh he added: ‘And they also generally preach to empty pews.’