Church of Sweden

The Church of Sweden is a religious institution whose presence in the crisis is shown chiefly through people trying to interpret the dead’s return: Elvy Lundberg, who reads it through scripture and personal revelation, and a hospital chaplain who separates his private belief from what he considers appropriate public preaching. The contrast makes the Church significant less as a source of settled answers than as a setting in which faith is tested, restrained, and put into action.

Presence in Everyday Life

The Church first appears in the texture of Elvy’s ordinary relationships. Her granddaughter Flora is an atheist, while Elvy tries more than once to begin conversations about God. Their difference does not end their closeness: Flora visits Elvy more often, helps care for her grandfather, and can share some parts of her grandmother’s life even when religious belief is a limit between them. Their exchanges show faith as lived practice and family connection, not simply an institutional position. Elvy’s beliefs belong to her daily world, but they do not automatically become Flora’s.

When the dead begin to move, Elvy gives the event a religious explanation: she believes the spirits, the souls of the dead, have been released. That interpretation precedes her later prophetic certainty and gives her a framework for understanding an occurrence that otherwise defeats familiar categories. Yet the novel does not present this framework as an official statement by the Church of Sweden. In the episodes shown, religious meaning is voiced by individuals, and their degrees of confidence and willingness to speak differ.

The Chaplain and the Limits of Public Speech

During the night of the crisis, a visitor introduces himself to Elvy and Flora as a hospital chaplain who normally works at Huddinge, but is out in an ambulance. He asks how they are coping and listens as Elvy tries to explain the significance she sees in the events. When she confronts him as a minister of the Church of Sweden, she objects to treating the dead’s return as merely an unusual occurrence and invokes the biblical promise that the dead will rise from their graves.

The chaplain answers cautiously in public. He says it is too early to comment and suggests that the events may have greater significance, but he also explains that it would not be acceptable for him to go around preaching in this situation. Elvy presses him to say whether he believes the events mark the Second Coming. His restraint then gives way: he answers that he does believe, and his face opens into a joyful grin. Elvy smiles back, relieved that she is no longer alone in that conviction. The scene distinguishes institutional responsibility from personal faith without making either disappear: the chaplain has a role that limits what he will proclaim, but his private belief is powerful and sincere.

Revelation and a Mission

Elvy’s certainty later takes the form of a vision. Awakened by the television switching itself on, she sees a radiant woman whom she recognizes as the Virgin Mary. The image of Mary is defined by maternal grief, and Elvy reads that grief as a sign of the suffering awaiting humanity if people do not repent and seek redemption. When Elvy asks how she can make people listen, Mary offers a sign; something touches Elvy’s forehead, the television goes dark, and Elvy falls against the glass table, leaving blood on its edge and drops on the rug.

The scene binds spiritual revelation to a physical consequence, but it does not establish that the institution has verified or endorsed Elvy’s experience. Its authority, as depicted, comes from Elvy’s encounter and the mission she draws from it. Later, when a man asks why she has come, she answers that she and her companion have come to prepare people for the return of Jesus Christ. The Church’s language has become a public call to action, carried by a believer rather than issued as a formal directive.

Public Witness and Institutional Ambiguity

The distinction between an individual sermon and institutional authority becomes visible again when two elderly women take the stage at a gathering. One uses the public-address system to argue that the dead have awakened because their souls have returned, and warns that people are lost without spiritual preparation. Security cuts off the microphone and escorts her away before she can finish. The episode presents religious speech entering a managed public space, then being silenced; it does not identify the women as official representatives of the Church of Sweden.

Across these scenes, the Church of Sweden is associated with pastoral care, biblical interpretation, and the question of who may speak for faith during an emergency. Elvy’s outspoken conviction, the chaplain’s careful boundary between ministry and preaching, and the women’s interrupted address are not a single coordinated response. Together they show how religious understanding circulates through relationships and encounters while institutional authority remains indistinct. Against scientific uncertainty and administrative control, faith supplies some characters with a vocabulary for the crisis—but the narrative leaves the gap between personal revelation and recognized authority unresolved.