tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24490788648877947092024-02-20T19:16:54.486-08:00The Inn of the Seventh MansionThe autobiographical musings of a mystic and his prayer life.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-8183054046101129862016-02-10T14:55:00.001-08:002016-02-28T09:37:30.043-08:00Introduction These 26 chapters were written between the years 1995 and 2003, simply titled by the author as "<i>Autobiography</i>". I have taken the phrase <i>The Inn of the Seventh Mansion</i>, found in book four of his novel <i>Contemplatives </i>and made it the title for this book.<br />
He later returned to writing autobiography but in fictional form and titled it: <i>Not Without the Angels</i>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-65313784296705669502016-02-10T14:50:00.000-08:002016-02-10T14:50:03.987-08:00Chapter One I was almost eighteen when the Lord gave me to understand that one day I would have to write down the story of my life with Him. Now I am almost sixty, so it is probably time to get on with fulfilling His will for this assignment. I have been able to do the Lord's will in part, by draughting sketches, or supposed beginnings, for over twenty years, but it is not until now, if all goes well, that I have been give the inspiration and grace, the company of the Divine Muse unreservedly, for the final version. To have the Holy Spirit perfectly is not easy to come by, and is a great privilege. I hope that I do not betray such a favour, neither by haste or impatience, nor by human pride or ambition.<br />
The life in question is a spiritual one, the history of a contemplative, of a soul drawn by the power of the Almighty, in spite of that soul's sins and imperfections, into an understanding and experience of the Catholic mystical life in all it's fullness. It is the story of a life in the light, by the grace of God, virtually since infancy. Thus it is not a story that will please those who prefer to walk in darkness, at least in its entirety. Nor is it a story which will be completely understood fully, according to its own substance, by very many, although even to understand it in part is to share no little way in an immense and profitable aggregation of graces and glories. Therefore it can be said to be a story which can be good to read, but only if the reader enters into studying the chronicle with more humility than ambition to reach a perfect understanding. A perfect understanding is by no means impossible, but much more by the favour of God than by human will. It can come only through years of submission to God's will; only after years of the daily endurance of the most paradoxical combination of indescribable consolations and inspirations interspersed with an equal degree of quite terrible aridities, desolations, all manner of trials, even seeming annihilation in every feeling, sense, and imaginative and intellectual ability./ Mere human plans and dreams have to give way before the juggernaut of God's destruction of everything other than His plans and dreams, His intentions; even ambitions and proposals that seem to be Divine become excruciatingly subject to further and further refinement.<br />
In my own case, for example, I was utterly confident, at twenty-one, that I would be "rich and famous" well before I was thirty. I had known that I was to be a novelist since I was sixteen, had applied myself to my apprenticeship with constant attention, so I thought, and my two favourite examples of that year or so, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, had both done very well in their twenties, I had already proved that I could write voluminously, and as I knew that I was basically a happy and successful young man, my sense of achievement could not help but spill over into my stories and make them attractive to the <i>average</i> reader the common man or woman. Yet even by the time I was thirty, I had published no novels, and in fact I was not able to even find my <i>final text</i> of my first novel until I was forty-four, coincidentally the same age at which Saint Thomas Aquinas began his <i>Summa</i> <i>Theologica</i>. That book was not completed until I was fifty-two, and even now is being presented to a very small public, albeit in a manner most satisfying to the author, some seven years after the last page was typed.<br />
This is not from want of <i>looking</i> for a publisher, and with the assistance of agents. But finding a publisher for such a spiritual intensity of material is much harder than looking: what publisher has enough perfection in his own soul to let him believe in a general appetite for perfection?<br />
At this particular moment - even an autobiography cannot escape the process of time in this life - the discovery of such a man seems possible - if it is possible at all - only in the wonderfully unique civilization that is Ireland. Yet even in that historic land of <i>saints and scholars</i>, despite the enormous wealth of the Irish tradition, each generation must acquire and be granted the light of perfection through its own merits, must encounter God's challenges in whatever form they arrive and in whatever form. Yet one feels a great hope in the Irish: no other Catholic culture possesses a greater hold on the Mother of God; no nation or literature has a more automatic or co-natural sense of the need of her presence in any writing worthy of a spiritual man's attention. But Ireland too is struggling with the ancient tenets of an unchangeable Faith. I speak of substance, of the essentials. So the sense of need for perfection, the appetite for the greater realms of the spiritual life, the glorious haunts of passive prayer, can get lost, all lost, in the agitations that flow out from fruitless searches. Every age has its wasteful follies: ours has the foolishness of inclusive language, none of which will be found in this book, just as it cannot be found in the novel. yet inclusive language can be found frequently enough in certain Irish publications. Its chilling presence might do to my work what envy and sloth did to a truly sublime book, Louis de Montfort's <i>True Devotion to Mary.</i> This work of a <i>real</i> spiritual genius was buried in a trunk for one-hundred and fifty years. In the natural order it is only reasonable for an author to hope to be published in his own lifetime, but in the spiritual universe the spiritual man, especially when he and his associates really do know what they are talking about, must expect to be misunderstood, ignored, or outright rejected to the point of oblivion in their own era. The active Church trundles along much more hand-in-glove with the world than it thinks it does. This is outrageously true in my own country, and anyone who can read sees some of the same signs in Ireland although happily, at this point, the hierarchy there sees through the pitfalls of mere humans thinking they can change the language of the Son of Man and the Trinitarian Divinity that inspired the mysterious integrity of the Scriptures.<br />
In spite of the obstacles, real or imagined, the spiritual man must keep writing - if he is genuinely called to write - about spiritual things. Someone, somewhere, sooner or later, will want a contemporary interpretation of the great doctors of the prayer life, especially from someone who, in spite of his innumerable sins and failings, has been yarded about as much of the spiritual universe as on can get in this mortal life. Most of those who follow the interior life do <i>not </i>have to write books about it, and God is no less pleased with them. After all, they have more time for prayer and contemplation pure and simple. They are allowed to labour just with their souls faults; they do not have to bother with the faults of their writing as well. No doubt they write letters, and one of these letters could be more valuable than this entire book, but they do not have the compelling labour and anxieties of a large and supposedly comprehensive text. I am not complaining, because for the most part I have always loved the labours of the writer, no matter what the field of endeavor of the moment, but I do feel the need to insist that contemplation's efficacy depends not at all on the ability to write about the factors of the interior life.<br />
Yet, of course, someone must offer the fruit of his or her experience in these matters. While the principal teacher and mover in the spiritual life has to be God, and often God alone - whoever heard of a lonely mystic? - yet the texts and their explanations, their confirmations or cautions, are also most necessary. I cannot bear to think of life without John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, and these after and with the writings of so many great theologians. What else can be the contemplative's <i>daily bread?</i> Who else can defend the spiritual man against the devil, who hates contemplation as he hates nothing else on earth, unless it be the mass and the sacraments? So the written tradition must continue, and certainly God has put much time and effort in trying to continue that tradition through me, even though, unlike all the greatest writers of the mystical tradition that I know, I am only a layman, not a priest or religious.<br />
And, even more paradoxical, this lay state of mine does not prevent God from demanding all the prayer and meditation out of me that He can possibly get, so far as I know. A mind, a body, a temperament in the years of youth almost addicted to activity and production - though I always love to read - has been mightily slowed down for the sake of endless hours, year in and year out, of contemplation. I have been let out, as it were, from time to time, usually as one or more of the arts - including writing - seemed to require me - but the priority has almost always lain in prayer, or the quiet study, direction, discussion that must accompany it.<br />
For those who know metaphysics well - that is, in the Aristotelian, or perfect sense - the reasons for this priority are clear: God Himself does not run about here, there, and everywhere. In the corrupted human estimation, in fact, He seems quite inert, although the spiritual man finds God's quiet, God's stillness, the most alive and vigorous entity that ever could exist. So the matured contemplative must imitate the calmness of the unmoved Mover, must in fact, by various ligatures and suspensions, be <i>made</i> to imitate that apparent lack of motion, even mentally as well as in the body. And this in spite of any amount of talent, passion, or ability that God may have granted to the soul in His original creation, or even in subsequent not-so-ordinary bestowals of grace. We must be conformed to the Immaterial One, sooner or later, and the initially punishing predicaments of passive prayer, of mysticism, are the most efficient methods this life, in God's grace, has to offer.<br />
And when I say <i>initially punishing</i> I mean in the sense that there is a profound <i>initial</i> shock that God can and will do such a terrible thing to one's soul. (There is also, either subsequently or in company, a great joy and sense of security in God, unequaled by any other kind of grace, but these factors, marvellously happy as they are, do not diminish the agony and the horror of, or, on a lesser scale, the puzzling annoyance of the various degrees of purgative aridity.) The purgations of the life of passive prayer remain punitive. As soon as one's own sins and faults are overcome by the kind but corrective hand of God then what comes to be borne but the follies of others; and as the mature contemplative knows, to his glory and his shame in the Church, these can come from very high and surprising places indeed. In the field of personal attachments alone - to talent, persons, native culture - what soul, even the soul of an archbishop, a cardinal, an abbot, a pope, has become totally free of unsteady allegiances before entry into Saint Teresa's Seventh Mansion?<br />
So the spiritual soul that has been brought to these ultimate freedoms and powers, to this virtually infinite scope of mediation, as thunderous in their vehemence as they are brilliant in their infused clarity, must continue to experience the interior trials that <i>initially</i> saved and then perfected him. Nor is he or she <i>absolutely</i> free from a personal need of refinement, as John of the Cross points out in the beginning of "<i>The Living Flame</i>." A little earlier I said that in my youth I seemed almost addicted to activity. As our basic nature and temperament does not change, for it is in them that we were created, so I would continue to roar off in all directions simultaneously if I were not constantly held in check by a stronger will than mine. One loves many persons, many places, many things; yet only God knows which of these should be focused upon at any given time in His all-seeing providence. His love, after all, is the greater, and therefore we must be guided by it. Our own affections must take the lower place. This is the rule for avoiding imperfection just as it is for avoiding mortal sin.<br />
These are hard lessons to learn, and the vast majority of souls, even devout souls, learn much of them the hard way. Yet, finally, by a little of our own effort, and much of His, we come to the happy state in which we admit the wisdom of giving Him the first place in our affections. We stop choosing the things and actions with things that make us grave sinners; we learn to avoid what can lose or weaken our grasp on perfection. Finally, we learn to grow up, to live, learn, and think according to the Original Design. God is neither fool nor cruel tyrant, we realize, and knew all along what He was doing. That was in His first creation. And in his second creation, the Church, he was even more brilliant. With the doctrines of Catholicism, with the sacraments and the teaching and example of the saints, we can - almost - do no wrong! Paradise Regained indeed. Adam again walks in the garden, and this time Eve, knowing why, does what she's told. The speculative and practical reasons finally walk hand in hand. Our souls are filled with light, most of the time. And, albeit with opposition here and there, we assist in the recreation of that light where ever we go. The soul in the state of grace is more valuable than any other created thing, rational or non-rational not in the state of grace; the fully perfect soul has a value and purpose not too unlike, in a specifically limited context, the value and purpose of Christ Himself. This via a divinely given participation of course, but a participation nonetheless. The world might not see this; the world might not want to hear this; but the world is affected, nonetheless and in spite of itself.<br />
In the present day as well, there is no small part of the membership of the Church Militant - or at least a nominal part of it - that does not want to hear this either, because the manifestation of wisdom and its blessed light interferes mightily with an heretical agenda. In one form or another, the snake is always with us, and the recovery of paradise takes unrelenting vigilance. To turn around a very precious Biblical phrase: the people who walk in the light regularly behold a great darkness, and this is their co-religionists, and not merely certain of the laity. Just last night, for example, I opened the pages of a well known Catholic periodical to behold, rooted in the darkness so firmly that he was a perfect model of the devil, a much too highly placed professor of canon law, calling for a definite weakening of the Papal authority. He was appealing for a return to the old high medieval errors regarding the supposed collegial powers of the bishops. In order to become competent in canon law, must a priest forego the study of history?<br />
Obviously this poor cleric had forgotten the priorities of his calling. The priest is not ordained to promote sin and error, but rather to preach and act against them. Mortal sin and the conditions and attitudes that create it are supposed to be his enemies, not his allies. But the investigation of mortal sin and preaching and writing against it seem to be the lost art of our times, especially in the culture I have had most often to do with. This priest and his like, apparently invited and supported by bishops, merely swim in the current spiral of darkness, the huge, revolving, vortex of inane rejections of all that is not only the shining best of the Tradition of the Church, but also the necessary. Fundamental ruptures in the fortress of truth are neither progressive advances, nor even merely venial sins. They are mortal wounds, from which the life blood flows in a grave volume. The soul is poured out like water. The fortress is left an empty shell, an abandoned city, a house in ruins that should have been full of lighted rooms.<br />
We are, or we should be, a might castle, says the incomparable Teresa of Avila, full of a great variety of the most useful rooms. I use the royal <i>we</i>, even if my predicate is singular, because we also are, or should be, kings and queens. Yet only if we have striven, like the prince and the princess in the fairy tale; only if we have been brave, nimble to read the magic signs, enduring in the face of the most unusual trials.<br />
Christ is the light. He shines all around us. We were born to bring that light into ourselves, to make it glow so clearly and warmly that the cold and sinful world will at last be overcome.<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-74839445640988791922016-02-10T13:22:00.003-08:002016-02-10T13:22:48.771-08:00Chapter Two My life has been salted with the light of Christ, thanks to my grandparents, from the very beginning. My mother's labour pains started up during a New Year's Day supper, in 1936, in the house where my father grew up, just down the street from the mighty coniferous forest of Central Park, in Burnaby, British Columbia. My grandparents on both sides were very devout Baptists, members of the Collingwood East Baptist Church, next door to Boundary Road on the Vancouver side. This means that my grandfather would have begun praying for my little soul the moment my mother announced that she would have to leave the table and go to the hospital. I was not aware of my Granddad then, of course, from inside the womb, but I most certainly took notice of him as soon as I was old enough. My very first memory of him contains, as I said, the light of Christ. This time we were at Christmas dinner, almost three years later, in my parent's own small rooms attached to a dairy my father was driving for. I think that my very thoughtful grandfather must have been asked to say the grace. He was sitting right across the table from me, in the little kitchen, and I remember clearly a sense of being mystified by the quality of the light around him. That it seemed to be delightful for its own sake is the way I would describe the light now, and at any rate, along with the immense kindness, patience, and prayerfulness in old Walter's voice, it certainly made me notice him.<br />
As with other unusual spiritual events of my childhood, I rendered no outward articulation to anyone about this incident, and immediately forgot about it, at least as an event. Yet the effect must have registered in my soul, because I was henceforth to notice quite as a matter of course that there was a light that came and went from situations. I think I was conscious of it more at some times than at others, even though I think I was vaguely aware that <i>my light</i> had some connection with the <i>light of Christ</i>, but I also think I assumed that everybody had it and therefore it was no more remarkable than the air I breathed or the ordinary light of the sun that shone on us all. In retrospect, it is clear that this special light was more evident around people and institutions with avowed Christian connections, but it also showed up elsewhere on occasion, as God, of course, was everywhere. Nor was it always or automatically present in the more specifically religious context; in fact in some specifically religious situations it was, on later reflection, noticeably absent. This absence was not always a critical comment on God's part, for He was capable of developing many other ways to catch my youthful attention, but the light coming and going did improve my natural sensibilities: the spiritualizing thereof had begun, and it began with my dear old Grandfather.<br />
He was in fact a builder by profession, a house carpenter. He had been first a farmer, in southern Ontario, descended, it was said, from United Empire Loyalist stock, and it was also said that discovery of natural gas on the farm had made him rich for a time. The money was apparently not invested well, and he went off to the Yukon, to carpenter there, to work sometimes as the gold digging, and to hunt most successfully. Eventually he married my grandmother, whom he had known for some time, and they tried farming foxes in the Yukon. The family has some wonderful photographs of this part of their life. But the war measures legislation subsequent to the invasion of Belgium took away access to the little fur bearer's ready and plentiful food supply, the great lake trout that lived so handily by. Apparently the Canadian government had a scheme, either for feeding the troops with Yukon togue, or else keeping bellies full in Canada should it have to send all the pigs and cows to France. Either way, my grandparents had to give up the fox farm, although no patriotic lines or nets ever graced their lake. They resettled for a time in south-eastern British Columbia, fifty miles from where I live now, then moved again to the West Coast, taking over the house, chicken barn, and huge garden I was to know and love so well as a boy. By the time I was conscious of him, my grandfather's response to the vicissitudes of life had mellowed and deepened into one of the most profound and peaceful acceptances of the necessary superiority of the afterlife that I have ever known. I say this in the context of my eventual conversion to Catholicism, which necessarily gave me the company of many priests and religious and therefore a considerable standard by which to measure old Walter's prayer life. And in fact the first <i>man of the cloth</i> I talked to, once I had decided to take my first steps toward entering the Church, was a Redemptorist brother, quite an elderly gentleman whose very meekness reminded me instantly of my grandfather. We said little to each other, as his immediate response - I found him praying in the church - was to take me to find a priest, but one look at him, one minute of listening to his voice, made it clear to me that Catholics also had their men of prayer, men like my Granddad Walter.<br />
I do not wish to canonize my grandfather. He had his faults, not the least of which was his adherence to a faith which, though very useful to my smallest years, could not answer the questions and expectations of an older boyhood. And there is no doubt that the Lord himself overrode the limitations of Protestantism and the narrowness of the family wisdom to make sure, with a view to my eventual conversion and artistic and theological employment, that I was to experience questions and events sufficient to turn me towards Rome. Moreover, of all the five grandchildren, I was the only one in whom any appreciable amount of his faith took root. And perhaps most significant of all, there is some question of the degree to which he was really the head of his own house.<br />
By the time I came along, my grandmother seemed to me to be a kindly Christian woman, not a little devoted to her first grandchild, and ready to shower upon him all the love and confidence-building that goes with grandparenting, although without indulgence. She was a firm lady, my father's mother, and I was to hear stories as I grew older about how her firmness with me was nothing compared with the way in which she had raised my father. In fact, it is sad to say, she seems to have had quite the mean streak in her younger and middle years, and my father and his sister suffered from it in no small degree. To some degree, I think, my grandmother did learn from her mistakes with her own children, and subsequently saw in me, the oldest grandchild, a second chance at the power of love, encouragement, and tenderness. With me too, she managed to find ways to show me, albeit somewhat stiffly, that she appreciated my considerable affection toward her. It seems, from my father's accounts that this exchange was not possible in his childhood. He was to speak of the happiest summer of his boyhood being the one he spent away from his mother, although he was nonetheless, at a mining claim in the Cariboo, in the company of his father.<br />
Part of the problem between my father and my grandmother, most certainly, came from the fact that my father and my aunt were actually adopted, a bit of history I never learned until I was fifteen or so, and my aunt had just returned from an extensive visit with relatives in California and other places south of the line. Perhaps this sense of the children not being from her own womb was something my grandmother could not overcome. But she was also from Ulster stock, as I learned when I was nine, and bore many of the flaws of Calvinism, as well as failures that are common to souls of any religion that do not truly understand the beatitudes. Yet, in her faith, she kept trying, and I was to benefit much, much more than if her failures as a human person had not been couples with a certain faith in a Divine person, and also had not been coupled with a strong personal will, at least for my good.<br />
Being materialists, the Marxian and Freudian philosopher-psychologists fail far worse than my grandmother in their view of human nature: lacking her <i>faith,</i> they give directions in mockery of her faults, but also in contempt of her saving graces. They do not see that as she gave, for my sake, a place where the Spirit of Christ could operate with relative freedom, I was much better off with her limitations, plus her faith in Jesus Christ, than I would have been with someone less rigid but also lacking that more important channel on my behalf. Where our beliefs have a foundation in sound proportions, though we may be less than that which we believe in, we are still quite well off, operating within some degree of normalcy. Where the belief is less than we are, because of the potential with which the Creator and Saviour endowed us, we are not at all normal, but in fact perverse, and stupid and insensible enough not to know it. Unlike the communists, my grandmother did not have to refuel herself with gallons of vodka to spark herself past her frustrations and failures; unlike the Freudians, she did not require the so called "healthy outlet" of unrestricted genital manipulation. Her faith was imperfect, perhaps markedly imperfect, but it was nonetheless an absolute guarantee of a relationship with God that saw her through a fair percentage of life's difficulties. It was a definite part of the household atmosphere, the <i>aura</i>, as it is spoken of in our times by many souls interested in the spiritual aspects of life. She did not have my grandfather's meekness, in the sense of the beatitude, but she was in fact an integral part of the house wherein, when I came through the door, Jesus always said, "Hello."<br />
This is in a manner of speaking, of course. In the first thirty years of my life, locutions proper were few and far between. What I mean by the greeting, the regular and constant greeting, from Divinity, was that my grandparents' house, to me, was never without the presence of the Lord; and I cannot remember that I ever felt there the lack of that presence, nor found its comfort missing. With my parents not being church goers, and my schooling being secular, it was my grandparents' house that functioned most like a parish church or a monastery in the development of my childhood religious sensibilities. The atmosphere simply inclined me to think about God on a regular basis, and for the most part made it difficult for me to regard Him as an enemy, or unaware and uncaring.<br />
There is a saying attributed to the Jesuits: Give us a child until he is seven, and he'll be a Christian forever. It is a fact that I trotted about in my Granddad Walter's shadow precisely until I was seven, for it was in the spring of my second year that my mother and I followed by soldier father to the other side of the country, and I was not to see my Grandfather for a full two years. Of course he was not the only influence - in those days Canada was in many ways a profoundly Christian country - but he was the most powerful influence, the inescapable evidence, not a little absolute, for me at least, that constantly going about - or sitting still - with and for the God-Man was the only normal thing to do. Nor could any other attitude create a better atmosphere, nor do so little harm, to one's fellow human beings.<br />
And yet, as I was to grow older, I could not simply follow in his footsteps, any more than Christ could settle down as a simple village carpenter. My grandfather was not an intellectual, not an artist. Nor was he, God bless him, a Catholic. And his wife, to some degree, hated Catholicism. Hers was the bitter, blind, legacy of the wisdom of the Book corrupted and leached by Calvin, Knox, and the Tudor and Cromwellian rape of Ireland. My grandfather's Christ was always kindly and patient, if a touch narrow; my grandmother's Son of God was a part time half-wit, quite out of touch with His own creation, with His own scheme of perfection. Yet these mistakes were only occasional, thank Heaven, for a young chap, and their house was, as I said, the station on the way where He could always be found.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-60307615565001866712016-02-09T15:55:00.001-08:002016-02-09T15:55:17.279-08:00Chapter Three The other grandparental house was also, in its own way, an oasis of Christianity, and because of the Second World War, and my father's moving about to deal with it, I actually lived in this house for a comfortable and formative period. There, my mother's mother, a widow and my Nana, as I called her, was the chatelaine; and her second son, my Uncle Alfred, was a younger version of my grandfather Walter. Both my Nana and my uncle were church goers, at the same Baptist Church. My Nana taught me my bedtime prayers, and my uncle, until I could handle reading for myself, was the man who read me the funny papers and stories from books. He also was a very tender soul, a sheet metal mechanic by trade, and spiritually enough inclined that some years later, when I was a teen-ager, he considered for some time becoming a Baptist minister. His question might have been temporary, like the vocations of some seminarians, but it deepened my own thinking and, in the face of my father's rampant materialism, gentled my own attitudes.<br />
My mother was the oldest of my Nana's four children, and the first married. My Uncle Alf was to be the last to enter the state of matrimony, not until the war was over and I had returned to Vancouver - for the summer holiday - so in those formative years I knew him as a bachelor, and was without rival for his attention. He was a sunny soul as well as a devout one, and very competent at his trade. And, like my grandfather, he was a teetotaller. His own father, the grandfather I never knew, was a drunk, so I was later told, and this may have had as much to do with his choice as did his Baptist beliefs. This grandfather had also been gassed at Ypres, my Nana said, but she was not inclined to blame his early death on the war.<br />
Her house too insisted on abstinence from alcohol as the domestic rule. My father, therefore, had to conduct his moderate affection for the grape and grain that cheers man's heart under other roofs, until he had a home of his own, and it has been said that his moderation - as it existed from my earliest memories - was a gift from my mother's inherited determination not to be widowed young by alcohol. To a degree, I was made to imitate my Dad: my wife-to-be and I had known a bare three days of our first conversations when she stiffed it to me over her Catholic Church's views on the legitimate methods of spacing the conception of children. Let me say in defense of my own intentions at the time, already much hosed down by daily experiences of the contemplative life - and not a few of these purgative - that I had not even begun to argue the point the other way, but she was ever a prudent woman, and determined to have that problem out of the way before she spent anymore time wondering if I were a suitable husband. You cannot say she was precipitous: I had already told her, on the second day of our acquaintance, that she was to marry me one day. And this in front of witnesses.<br />
But I am ahead of myself. As my prayerful grandfather was the principal breadwinner in his house by way of the eminently useful trade of house building, so my maternal grandmother has supported her family by cooking. She was in fact a dietitian by training, a graduate so she later told me, of the London Polytechnic, for she was a Cockney born and bred, raised within the sound of the Bow Bells, with a father, so she claimed, who had sung on the stage of the London Paladium. Whether this professional career was a fact or not - my Nana was not a strict historian, as I was to learn - there was without a doubt a great deal of singing ability in that side of the family. Grandmother Jessie Robinson was trilling as clearly as a songbird into her 'Eighties, in a church choir, and my mother, had she been born in kinder circumstances might very well have trained as an opera singer. I might have done the same, had I not been born to theology and fiction, and her eldest grandson has just made his opera debut in a small role in La Boheme. She always sang around the house, and sang truly. She was my first and probably my most important voice teacher, although I did not really think of myself as a singer until the summer before I went into the fourth grade.<br />
It was my Nana who taught me my prayers. These were quite simple, carrying little of the information available in the catechisms of the day drawn up for Catholic children, but through her faith, they made Jesus quite real to me, at least while I was saying them at bedtime. Anytime that I was living at her house, which was a good part of my childhood until I was seven years old, these bedtime prayers, along with grace at her meals, were pretty much a habit, and thus I was given a good little beginning to God's intended norm.<br />
In my parent's care, once the regular company of my grandmother was no longer such a part of my life, the formal prayers fell away. In their young adulthood, both my father and mother left churchgoing and its related customs, so it has seemed, forever, and pretty much expected that I would follow suit, except when I was around the religious sensibilities of their parents. As far as I know, my grandparents were never forbidden to raise religious questions to me, nor to take me to church and Sunday school, and, happily, they took every opportunity Providence arranged. I got to know quite well, sometimes Sunday after Sunday, the Collingwood East Baptist Church. And there too, most emphatically, I encountered the Light that is willed to shine on us all. In his desire to consolidate the good efforts of my grandparents, Our Lord Jesus Christ simply appeared to me himself. He also spoke to me some very specific words, which, although I was not to consciously remember them for years, left a permanent effect. This was my first experience of what scholastic theologians call the <i>grace of words</i>, and of course I was awfully fortunate to be granted such a favour, especially so young.<br />
I might have been four years old, but more likely I was five, and living at my Nana's house because my father was either in army camp in Canada or had already been sent to England, sometime in the wake of the main thrust of the air battle for Britain. Nana had started taking me to Sunday school, and I don't think had been at it too long before the Lord made his presence felt so uniquely. As I remember it, all the younger children were assembled in a large basement room, dutifully singing "<i>Jesus Loves me, This I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong; They are weak, but He is strong."</i> There was a pianist, and I think a second lady conducting us.<br />
And then for a surprising moment there was a third adult, a man. He had a very nice face and kind eyes, long dark hair, and a full length white robe. It was plainly the Jesus of our illustrated Bible stories. He seemed to be there just for me, and he only stayed long enough to utter one sentence: "<i>I am both stronger and more tender than your father, and I will look after you."</i><br />
The song continued but the image vanished, and so did the memory, for the time being. I said nothing to anyone, neither to my Nana when she came to collect me after church, not to my mother when I got home. In fact, with no ordinary memory of the event, I did not say anything to myself about it. But it does perhaps explain a subsequent habit I had seemed to acquire without any conscious effort, that of most cheerily forgiving my enemies. As a youngster, once old enough to ponder my personal ethics, I would frequently wonder why I had found turning the other cheek so easy, but I never recalled the vision or the words. It was not until I was in my mid-thirties, being brought to the God-given conclusion of my long apprenticeship to the interior life, that a clear memory of this incident was granted to me, more or less provoked by a question from a friend. She wanted to know, following a little very necessary counselling, what I had that others did not. I said nothing at the moment of the question, but I was inspired to search for the answer that would mean the most to her - she did not want to hear about the Catholic sacraments that meant everything to me - and browsing August Poulain's accounts of the childhood experience of various saints, I suddenly had the most wonderfully clear recall of that cloudy, gray, Sunday morning in the basement of the church of my first childhood years. The image and the words were both as plain as if I had recollected them all my life, but obviously they had been waiting for the friend's question, coupled of course with my spiritual progress and the approaching moment when I would be allowed and inspired to start writing about my life of prayer.<br />
The rationalist and the skeptic - and these include all manner of Catholics, and not just lay Catholics - might be tempted to think that I simply invented this vision, inspired to falsehood, or too much trust in my own imagination, inspired by what I was reading, but that was not the case. Such a creation was actually meaningless and unnecessary, as I had already know for a quarter-of-a-century spiritual experiences which each in their own way were as initially significant, and in the long run, more confirming by way of making the interior life habitual. as well as maturing it toward the seventh mansion. Imaginative visions, as important as they may be, are not the greatest or most necessary experiences on the spiritual ladder. Long before this sudden revival of a memory I had been given <i>intellectual</i> visions, and locutions having to do with not God's care of me, but my care of others. And, at least as efficient, I had known the dark night of the soul, in the spirit as well as in the senses. Invention, therefore, offers no foothold to the observer. <br />
For the truly rational man, the soul with enough wisdom to realize that the Almighty is in fact Omnipotent, even unto unrestricted power over a mind, there is only one answer to all the questions surrounding this suppression of memory: God does God's business in God's time. Anyone who would be habituated - oh happy prison - to the life of passive prayer must accept its mysterious conditions. In no other profession is one's life so little one's own. All for God, it is nothing for itself, even as regards the employment of its own habits of memory. One thinks, or does not think; one acts or does not act; one goes out or comes in, or does not go anywhere at all; only as the Holy Ghost decrees. To some, this might seem too rigid, too predictable. But actually the opposite is more the truth. The contemplative is forever in a mystery story, not knowing for sure from day to day how each day will unfold. God is most faithfully full of forecasts, of intimations of one kind of employment or another, but where and when, with or for whom, how and for what reasons - the particular situations in which the foreshadowings will be realized - these all await the careful. efficient, reckoning of grace' and the soul can only guess how that will go.<br />
I am not suggesting that the imagination, even of a mystic habituated to the seventh mansion, is always in the complete control of God. Much of the time, yes, but not always, as uninterrupted subjection of this sort would take away the useful exercise of free will, would eliminate a very valuable source of merit, especially for others, for those who have yet to acquire the skills needed to fight with an unruly and often victorious imagination. That is, victorious by way of the lack of wisdom or virtue's control. An imagination victorious through true discipline - whether in the arts, in morals, or in the spiritual life - is a glorious achievement, something altogether different. Where the intellect has made a thorough, meditative, study of the theological and spiritual tradition of the Church, in fact, thus moving the intellect to be assimilated to the Father, the imagination becomes a kind of the Image that is the Word, the Son.<br />
But of course it helps when the Lord has taken such an initial step himself, of imposing a vision, and some rather meaningful words, on a small boy, even if the boy does not remember the incident for thirty years/<br />
This interesting piece of forgetfulness - I repeat, quite Divinely arranged - has also a particular symbolic relevance, for it signifies, at the highest possible level, the many different ways and occasions, the coming and going of skills and interests, with which God has exercised his right to keep me focused on my prior obligations to the life of contemplation. Of all the arts and sciences, prayer is the most universal and the most necessary, and therefore, as odd as this may seem to the inexperienced, it is the most satisfying, the most fulfilling, the most adventurous. Ordinarily, therefore, a vision would be something to be retained, even amplified. But such was not the case. Why? One reason could be the Lord's sense of justice. If he could remover himself from the recollected items of my faculty of memory, then he was being only fair when he interfered with any skill or natural desire of mine. And the interference has certainly been real, present, and effective. How else to explain that in the course of writing my first novel I spent seven years with the first third, then one year with only the last two-thirds of the text? And why, after forty years of occasional provocations, which swiftly came to nothing, am I suddenly thrust into an entire week of brooding, not a little creatively, over the composition of an opera? In fact, perhaps, three operas. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-85199638330642541252016-02-09T14:42:00.002-08:002016-02-09T14:42:36.656-08:00Chapter Four It has been six months since I wrote the previous chapter. No, five. It was six months ago that I was still experiencing, on a daily basis, the satisfaction of finally getting to a final text with this autobiographical assignment, and, at the same time, realizing more with each chapter that I read, that Margaret Mitchell's <i>Gone With the Wind</i> was a very well written, well thought out, thousand pages of reconstruction of daily life in Georgia during the American Civil War. I had seen the film version when I was twenty or so but in my formative years as a student novelist I had not been inspired to think of the book as a model that I needed to analyze for my own purposes. The movie had given me the impression that Miss Mitchell had set out to write a historical romance, a genre I had virtually ceased to read, and I was not aware that the American academic world treated <i>Gone With the Wind</i> as serious literature. This third reason, by the way, in spite of the presence on my own University of British Columbia campus of a small and lively platoon of young literature professors of American birth and education.<br />
I was also under the amazingly ignorant impression that Margaret Mitchell Marsh had lived out her adult years as a spinster teacher of high school English, that she was a real life version of a Tennessee Williams female drone who had eked out a personal life in the desiccated South by living vicariously out of the invention of a bodice-ripper. This was not the first time I had made such a mistake about an artist, and it is probably not my last, given the power of false judgement in fallen man, wherever lack of instruction rules the day, but unlike my entirely self-inflicted youthful stupidities over the personality of John Keats, I think this impression had been helped by a number of my literary peers, at least the males. My omnivorously reading wife had always maintained that <i>Gone With the Wind</i> was a good book. And, having dubbed me, during our first weeks of knowing each other, as "The Last Victorian Novelist", she was confident that I would eventually discover the book for myself. My Beloved also knew that Mitchell's book was not a prime source, once my style had been more or less determined, for a novelist whose substance would one day be, by God's permission, the full spectrum of Catholic mysticism.<br />
This difference between Margaret Mitchell's characters and mine was the most important reason why it took me so long to be moved to take up <i>Gone With the Wind</i> for a serious read. Scarlett O'Hara, to the extreme of grave sin, exercised her will with utter freedom, always choosing to take and do whatever she wanted. She seems hardly to have a conscience, let alone suffer the invasion of her faculties by a Divinely jealous Teacher and potential Bridegroom, and only through her devout and relentlessly kind and dutiful Catholic mother does she seem to have any sense of religion. As a girl too quickly brought up to womanhood she is obsessed by her own pleasures and her power over men; as a young woman too quickly cast on her own resources by a profoundly unglamorous misfortune of war, and thus left a widow with a son to raise she adds to these desires a passion for material security. No character could be less of a contemplative, no matter how interesting she might be in other situations; no heroine could be less attractive to an author who must find ways of making fictional sense out of people who live - because they must live - by passages of sacred text like these:<br />
"<i>The darkness which the soul here describes relates, as we have said, to the desires and faculties, sensual, interior and spiritual, for all these are darkened in this night as to their natural light, so that, being purged in this respect, the may be illumined with respect to the supernatural."</i> <br />
Thus spoke Saint John of the Cross, virtually saying the same thing over and over again, in every way he can think of, aided by the scriptures and the greatest theologians and masters of the prayer life, throughout his four great books, although of course in the pages of <i>The Ascent of Mount Carmel</i> he speaks little of <i>being purged</i> - the result of God's unique action on the lucky soul - and almost entirely of the soul's spiritual action on its own behalf.<br />
Scarlett O'Hara - and every other character in Miss Mitchell's very well put together text - never had to deal with passive purgation, as the mystics call it, nor did it ever seem to occur even to the unquestionably virtuous Ellen Robillard O'Hara that the joy of all joys was to be found only in the utterly quiet and still habits of regular contemplation, not in the grimness of an unrelaxed self-rule. (If any of the blame for Scarlett's self-centredness can be shifted from her own shoulders it might be in the direction of her mother's, and probably Margaret Mitchell was making just that point.)<br />
Nonetheless, once my own first novel was a good year underway I one day fell into <i>Gone With the Wind</i> and realized that the writing was indeed solid. And if the characters were hardly candidates for canonization, they were genuinely of literary significance, clear symbols of a civilization that was courting its own demise. Also, from my earliest days of reading I had loved descriptions of a pastoral landscape and I had many times been enchanted by such landscapes set in the American South. The strong images of childhood are an impression made for all eternity and especially applicable to the questions that turn up, sooner or later, in the long unravelling of life. And this is even more so if those initial impressions are from time to time reinforced and deepened by mysterious experiences of the same penetrating variety, sometimes inspired by the most minimal occasions of inspiration.<br />
Inspirations do not always have to be small, of course. The most important visions or Divine utterance of the spoken variety in our Scriptural heritage have been huge, and this option for magnitude has been repeated in the lives of the saints. Moses on Sinai. Christ walking on the waters of Galilee, Our Lady presenting Dominic with the Rosary, Thomas Aquinas being told by Jesus. "<i></i> <i>Thou hast written well of me Thomas</i>." But this same Thomas also tells us, in the very first pages of his masterpiece, the <i>Summa Theologica, </i>that God has a habit of hiding the greatest and most wonderful mysteries, in the finest fruits of truly diligent search for wisdom, in some of the apparently most insignificant places, persons, and things He can think of.<br />
I say this having in mind an incident that must have been one of the links in the chain of events that led, finally, to the full idea of the opera. It would have been in the spring of 1965, I think, that I ran across a little publication of "Old Favourites", songs primarily of the Nineteenth Century, no doubt pretty well centred around the works of Stephen Foster. It was a slim volume, and none too pretentiously printed, but the cover carried what was for me a most arresting image, that of a couple of fellows in a boat, on a lake in the moonlight, singing to the strumming of the ole banjo. There were only two colours, or at the most three, in the presentation of the image, and perhaps the most striking feature of all was the effect of the ripple on the lake, in the moonlight, thus created by the artist. Simple, even plebeian, and profoundly inexpensive - no doubt there was not a copyright left to honour - and yet the picture immediately and profoundly haunted my soul with the magic of the music of the South.<br />
God is no half-hearted artist. When He strikes a blow with the sculptor's chisel, the chips fly, the stone feels the imprint right down to the marrow. The bone shivers, the heartwood perhaps even assumes a new grain. In the human soul, the antenna rears up and searches a new direction: what in the hell was that? Where did it come from, and where is it going, and do I follow? Will my heart break forever if I do not go? Words fail, even words the most violent, words the most lyrical, when the Spirit shivers the human timbers.<br />
So, I was shivered. I was rocketed, through the South and its heritage of music. Or was it its possible heritage? Its potential? I myself was at that point a musician - of sorts - in a setting much more rural than metropolitan, for all that the town I lived in could claim a small university to its credit, and I was perhaps especially sensitive to the image of another rural musician, also North American, but in a culture more agrarian and at least a century older than my own. That culture, moreover, had already produced a universally significant literature, from my childhood authors alone: Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Harris, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings John Fox Jr. That simple woodcut figure was merely throwing a little fuel on embers banked two decades previous, and never in danger of going out. The South had always been part of the history of my imagination, and from imagination's history comes inspiration, the daily bread of the artist, and the context of his ongoing relationship with the Muse.<br />
Is this not one of the great magic wonders of literature, that it can make us feel at home in a landscape we have never in reality seen; can give us the right to be albeit in a hidden fashion, a participating citizenship in a country we may never actually visit? Nor is this ability - of a book and of our own imagination - merely a skill for the present life only, for it has the most wonderfully august purpose of training us to look to life in yet another foreign landscape, the Paradise of heaven. Whatever strikes us as beautiful, compelling, or haunting in any earthly location is a sign of the transcendental joys to come in the location of the hereafter, and never more so than when it appears to be something like a perfect environment, where life seems to be all that we could ever want it to be, or even more than we would have thought we could wish for prior to the next level of aesthetic, metaphysical, or religious experience.<br />
Sometimes these events of imagination and intellect happen in our own real setting, from strength or brilliance of soul in our own family or community, and sometimes they come from something imported, from a culture distant and old enough to seem even more valid by way of objectivity. In the latter case they are more likely to arrive by way of art than by person, and the art easiest to import is something in a book or one kind or another. I'd had the first kind of experience before I learned to read, and once I'd learned how to handle a book or any other kind of reading material I was guaranteed - and experienced - the second, up to and including the image of the man with the moon over his shoulder and a banjo in his lap.<br />
The printed page will always retain this maximum universality because of all the mediums through which Man expresses himself little black letter symbols on a piece of white paper remain the most efficient, the shortest and broadest route for the best teachers to get the most important information to the most, best, students. Other devices have their own excellence, and of course do many things no book can do, yet their more material form of existence, their reliance on much more protracted use of the outer senses and predetermined and fixed sounds and images does not provide the immense, virtually infinite, <i>freedom</i> of the printed word and the lively mind that has learned how to deal with it.<br />
All knowledge worth having can be conceptualized, no matter how quantitative, intense, and repetitious must be the exercise of the outer senses in acquiring or imparting such knowledge, nor the expertise and experience needed to understand the symbols - words, diagrams or numbers - used to express the knowledge once it is conceptualized. Man has been created as a fundamentally intellectual being, so in fact not only is it <i>possible</i> for sense acquired information and habit to be conceptualized, it is also<i> necessary</i> for it to reach this peaceful and normalizing conclusion. To the degree that the lower forms of knowledge have not been conceptualized, i.e., totally understood, the student, the learner, even the partially realized teacher, lack mastery over the subject. From lack of instruction in methods of learning, not enough questions have been asked, so therefore - it almost goes without saying - not enough answers will have been discovered. There remains a kind of quantitative failure, from these insufficient questions; and then a qualitative failure, a lack of ease and joy, from insufficient answers. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that quantity and quality apply to both sides of the mountain of discovery.<br />
The largest successes or failures occur in the pursuit of wisdom and sanctity, but lesser ventures also experience varieties of quantity and quality. The topic at hand - as we began this chapter with mention of the possibilities of an opera - is a case in point, that of the greater or lesser degree of accomplishment in music, and not only in the areas of performance and composition, but also in pedagogy, including the possibility of improvements in music instruction made available through advances in technology. In its first years, the computer was to me little more than a glorified typewriter, and of no real advantage to my kind of writing, therefore nothing for me to become excited about personally. My wife lauded its growing use around her museum and my younger son took a degree in computer science. My two oldest daughters used computers in the jobs and professional training and my older son spoke with great enthusiasm of their use in composing music. I remained uninterested until I heard a voice emerge from a computer designed to include the technology made available by the concepts generally known as <i>Windows </i>'95. This happened to be an instrument just purchased for two young ladies to whom I was teaching piano, guinea pigs, as they called themselves, for my own experiments in pedagogy, and in their company, on the heels of just having completed my first run with the inspiration arising out of the idea of an opera based on <i>Gone With the Wind </i>- twenty or so sketches for songs - my imagination was off and running wild again. <i>Sound</i> had suddenly made a most radical difference. No doubt there was a little - or not so little - Divine humour at work: faith, it has been said, comes by hearing. Suddenly I had faith in the computer as something I could be directly involved with.<br />
I had, I must admit, been involved <i>in</i>directly, quite at the onset of the new technology. In the autumn of 1962, I was teaching Grade Eight in the Catholic school in Terrace, B.C., and doing my best to explain to my students the aspects, at their level, of the "new math" that the powers that be had bestowed upon them. Contained in their brand new textbooks was an explanation of counting and calculation systems using other than the method of <i>tens</i> my and previous generations had all grown up on. Included in the various bases was the system of Base Two, the foundation, said the text book, of computer calculations. A long row of lights, simple off or on, could handle huge numbers at the speed of light. Dutifully I imparted the information, but by then, in my third year of teaching, I was much more concerned about the arts, the humanities - especially philosophy - and much more interested in giving students a sense of their own dignity as artists and thinkers than as mathematicians, even though math had always been one of my strongest subjects.<br />
It was a full five years before I had in any way to think of computers again, when I was no longer teaching in a classroom but was working as a clerk in the Land Registry Office in Nelson, B.C. My boss, the registrar mentioned to me early on that the government was then considering utilization of computer technology in land registry work. Some months later, when I had the chance to ask about such a possibility with a computer technician then in Nelson installing new equipment for the Canadian Pacific Railway, as soon as he understood the nature of my office's records and methods he said that registry work had far too many variables to be handles adequately by computers. Now, thirty years later, my old office - which I left early in 1972, for the sake of writing a novel - has just been closed down and its operations, computerized here already for some years, have been centralized in Kamloops. Obviously, the variables are no longer a problem. Perhaps it can even be said that the problems with the computer run in a direction quite the opposite from its earlier limitations: it is now being thought of as the device which can and should do everything, even without, on occasion, due reflection on the fact that the computer can never actually do anything more than man tells it to do. One man "pushes the buttons" that plant the programme; a different soul taps the keys that harvest. Without the human participation, the instrument is useless. By itself, it has less real life than a blade of grass or a ladybug. When, some years ago, this person and that tried to tell me that a computer could be of vast help to my writing labours I protested that I could think of no way any computer, a machine, could assist the infinitely intuitive process of poetry and in fact what I really appreciated as helpful to my labours was the gift from my young grandson of his pet rock. This was a flat oval, about five inches long and three-quarters of an inch thick, which served as an excellent paperweight when I needed to keep a book open so I could copy from it. Always necessary with a paperback, on occasion even required with a hardcover.<br />
None of this is to say that I was opposed to the computer on principle. As far as I know, I am in no way a dualist, that is, someone opposed to the material aspects of our existence because he believes God made only the spiritual realm and left the corporeal creation up to the mind of evil. Computers obviously had a practical use at the onset, both as high-speed calculators and glorified typewriters, that helped people do more work more quickly with greater ease, and in the long run, more cheaply. These are some of the goals of technology, thereby raising living standards, and, hopefully, providing more time for leisure, especially leisure which calls for the increased and more wholesome use of intelligence than mere work usually demands. For these benefits, possibly the computer will prove to be as profitable as the iron plowshare, comparatively speaking.<br />
There was one aspect of the computer that offered a degree of advantage to my writing, the capacity to electronically contain several different pieces of writing in the same memory files. Possession of a computer with this ability would enable me to flit from novel to play to poem to letter or didactic work at the fingering of a key or two. But was there a real advantage, or only an apparent one? One's personal memory is the greatest of all computers, and there may be real disadvantages in any process which actually undermines its need of regular exercise. Also, my naturally energetic temperament is much inclined on the side of trying to accomplish too much at once. With a handful of projects on all of them at the same time, thinking that if I were slow with inspiration for one I'd be quick to find it with another. But writing, like courting a wife, takes more than flitting from partner to partner every time the dance music changes. Nor is one's own imagination the prime source of inspiration, assuming that we are discussing the ingredients essential to a work that will survive the test of time, that is a classic. One's own soul is the unique<i> channel</i> through which the imagination is inspired and understood, but as it did not make itself, neither does it own all the beginnings or conclusions of its processes. An entirely objective - i.e. <i>classical</i>-functioning of the creative imagination insists on the regular dialogue not between the artist and his own various components and effects, but between the artist and his models, both real and intentional.<br />
These intentional beings, creatures of the self's own mind, are not the same as what <i>becomes of them </i>in the external works of art and science that the artist or thinker makes. They do not have the same limitations of the finite product, and that is why, as a rule - aside from the question of rewriting, editing, and redesigning - they offer a more fruitful and refreshing field of continuing inquiry, along with <i>real</i> beings, than do the various charts of the <i>works in progress.</i><br />
This is not to say that the artist does not have to spend a great deal of time, on occasion, staring at the work he has undertaken. <i>Through</i> it, of course, he also sees the real models - the world outside his window and town - and the shadowy figures of his intentions - as philosophers call the forms of his mind - but he is acutely aware, in failure or success, of where his text or easel or staves are going only by studying whichever is relevant acutely, and he knows he has to put in this time, until the time is sufficient unto the inspiration, at the expense of anything else he might feel like doing. And this rule proves my point: he has to stick by that piece of labour until, according to his daily allotment, he is done with it. As a rule, too, there is usually more pain and tension in this sticking by than one wants to think about, and yet it must be endured, wrestled with, waited out, if the artist or thinker wants to accomplish anything lasting. The flitting about simply will not do. We must deal with our moods, - and art is nothing if it does not have a mood - thoroughly, and one at a time.<br />
Neither am I trying to suggest that the artist must, within the working day, deal with only one assignment, only one fruit of his inspirations. Over the course of a day or two, and more days on than off, I keep two typewriters employed, one on this book, on the second floor with its view of the lake and part of the town, and one in the basement study, with its maps and books and pictures, where I write fiction and the occasional letter of a business or theological nature. Between these house levels, on the main floor, stands a mighty old Gerhard Heintzman upright piano, where I occasionally skirmish with ideas for the opera and pedagogical principles for the proposed computerized keyboard. This threefold arrangement - added unto by other musical instruments and journals, notebooks for music and poetry - provides ample opportunity for <i>flitting</i> from project to project, as it requires enough physical labour to make me think twice about trying to slide from one frustration to another assumed inspired success.<br />
Such is the profound burden of genuine intellectual work, such is the patience required of those who would endeavor to go with the Muse, Who cannot allow Himself to be an ordinary victim of the work ethic. In fact the Muse is not to be <i>worked</i> at all, in the sense that the world often uses the term; the Muse, like any other object of true love, has to be <i>courted,</i> and it is this romantic aspect that gives intellectual endeavour its most profound and most rewarding elements, the spiritual affections the soul experiences in its pursuit and discovery of the whole truth. In Paradise, our work, as we call it, was to have been love, and what we not know as labour was to have been but a game, and God in his justice must be at pains to remind us what we lost. Yet, if we follow Saint Thomas, and his teaching on our <i>obediential potential</i>, we can recover no small degree of that preternatural facility, if only we learn how seriously God means us to put love into all things.<br />
Yet love must be patient, or it is not love, but only the exercise - not necessarily helpful - of some of the senses; and love must wait not only for signs, but for the discernment by which to interpret the signs, and for the Providence that may or may not turn the signs into one or more concrete external productions. Even the most ordinary elements in life rely on signs and symbols, although these are hardly mysterious, and from our training in the use of these lower purposes we should be able to make the analogous search for wisdom and direction in the greater predicaments of virtue and perfection, yet only as the Holy Spirit draws us, according to His specific plans for our particular development. We cannot be greater than He intends. And yet we should not willingly, knowingly, be less.<br />
So, in order to reach our potential, we obey the Holy Spirit, in general, through following <i>all</i> the teachings of the Church, and in particular through responding as positively and intelligently as we can to all of his promptings, even if they seem puzzling or contradictory, yet, by virtue of well-established habits, patently his promptings, his inspirations. Writing this chapter, for example, has wandered through some eighteen months of puzzles and contradictions, leading me at times into the land of symbols much more than that of reality, and then this morning, acting on the usual intuitions, I found myself at a coffee counter with three members of a Hollywood film crew. Although they had little time left before they drove off to the day's work many miles to the south, I was able to raise the subject of the opera, and my long considered question of taking it straight to film.<br />
Thus, to a degree, to a point with an as yet undisclosed future, Providence concluded a natural search, albeit guided in no small supernatural fashion. Yet the encounter, whether they realized it or not, was unquestionably spiritual for all three of the crew, and possibly somewhat supernatural for the one still intoxicated from the previous evening's socializing. For myself, and possibly even more so my spiritual advisers - at this point wary of operas and industry - the graces bestowed on the visitors were much more important than any gains toward the actual fulfillment of the production ideas. The ideas may only be disguises, the men were real and in need.<br />
But they too were symbolic to myself. Twenty-one years to the season after my first letter to Hollywood, I speak for the first time with an American film crew - I had nattered on previous occasions with Canadians - just two hours before I step into my own little sound studio to record the twenty-ninth cassette of the two-voice production of my first novel. There gentlemen seemed to think of themselves as none too important to the process, and they were best known to the hotel staff as generous with tips to the waitresses and alcohol to themselves, but I found them, for my intentions, ambassadors from the industry. At the very least, they could not have been sitting at the coffee counter without their guardian angels, and angels have never failed to inspire me.<br />
But for what purposes? A recollected history - of a single soul - must admit many surprises, and even if wisdom had elevated the darker surprises above the status of acute disappointment, seeing them in memory and hindsight as necessary challenges and educating experiences, still one recognizes that so many times the angels' spoke of possibilities better grasped by God and distant saints than the men and women in present company.<br />
So, in spite of so much inspiration, and all of it useful for spiritual purposes, will there be an opera, will there be something musical to manufacture? Even a mystic, even the seventh mansion, can only do so much, and all the most important of that in the regions of thinking and praying. And not that these are irrelevant. My household has just seen, most appreciatively the 1996 Renaissance Film production of William Shakespeare's <i>Twelfth Night</i>. There are few plays I am more concerned to see done right. This version we found magnificent. And as I was browsing my journals during our second viewing, I found this note, from February 29, 1992: "I keep seeing myself on a slope of grass, looking down on the sea, with a big film crew." The Renaissance Film <i>Twelfth Night</i> was shot entirely in Cornwall, and made much use of the coast thereby.<br />
As long as the angels are with us, and we with them, even the mere images of our imagination have an effect somewhere. <br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-51921009286352791332016-02-08T14:32:00.001-08:002016-02-08T14:32:44.397-08:00Chapter Five For better or for worse, our lives revolve around our mental images as much or more than they turn around anything. We live with things-become-symbols or we don't live at all. Some of these are universal - and hopefully objective, although this is not always so - like the Cross, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and the specific signs of the Roman Papacy; and other images are personal, specific to ourselves alone, although they recur to our thinking, in darkness or in the light, again and again. These have to do with persons, places, and things, and both life and art often give even new significance. God would give me an image of looking down on the sea not only by way of praying for a wonderful cast and crew with a noble and genuinely passionate objective, but as a sign of remembering my own youthful follies and the woman - my wife-to-be-who helped me out of them. We had our first fight, you see, as we stood on a somewhat grassy promontory, the outermost headland of the university endowment lands, in Canada's most Pacific province, gazing down on the sea, that is, the inland sea, of the Strait of Georgia and the entrance to English Bay, the first body of water to the port of Vancouver.<br />
What were we arguing about? Not sex, not money, not even - yet - religion. (She was Catholic, I was an odd sort of Protestant.) We were arguing about symbols, and whether or not they had any place in literature, or, more specifically, in my writing, whether I wanted it to be literature or not. I was, at that point, <i>against</i> symbols, at least as a subject of serious discussion among those who wrote, or studied writing. I was barely twenty-two, half-way through a "novel" of my own manufacture -although it had only just begun perking, after months of silence - and I was for the moment firm in the belief that preoccupation with symbols in literature interfered with all that was "natural", and therefore to me, then, with all that was most necessary not only to literature but to life.<br />
I cannot remember any of our exact words, even though I have always clearly recalled the critics and scholars we were discussing, but I have never forgotten how angry I suddenly grew, nor the strength of will with which I was rebutted. I was used to my own temper, but that it should emerge on such short notice, in such an idyllic setting, and upon such a subject was in itself - discerning scholars please chuckle loudly - as complex and indicative a symbol as the arts of man could ever hope to fashion. Unravelling my explosion and all that had provoked it - and all that would correct it - was to become a very long story in its own right, not always free from a certain atmosphere of judicious penance, especially around my wife, habitually now, as then, such an amazing spirit of learning and intuition. Just three days ago, for example, she picked up from the book shelves in the local recycling depot a little gem first published five years before I was born. Wigfall Green's <i>The Inns of Court and Early English Drama.</i> I had actually spotted the book first, as a matter of fact, yet my mind was still so full of the just seen <i>Twelfth Night</i> that I could not think of also dealing, in the same mood, with something that promised - I thought - some academic justification of what must surely be amateurish? Again, and after William Shakespeare, the Inns and their young manhood provided much of the best of English drama. So this book is also a symbol, bringing together, within its own mere two hundred pages so much of the thinking that roiled through my mind in my own university, law school, and - introduction-to-theatre years. Nor, to those who understand the writing process, should it be difficult to signify - without a lot of explanation - that the timing of such a happy discovery is also of major significance.<br />
Wisdom is indeed a reason for acknowledging that we must, like the earth around the sun, let our destinies unfold in circular fashion.<br />
In the year before my wife-to-be and I actually encountered each other in any useful dialogue I was both co-operating and fighting with this need to deal with the wheel of fortune. On the one hand, due to much of my reading and some of my writing, I was starting to take a sound professional look at my childhood and student life - not only as a writer but as a teacher-to-be - and on the other cuff often determinedly making notes about going to Toronto to work as a journalist, thus avoiding, as it turned out, the need to return for fifth year to my own campus and all the written and human encounters it still held in store for me.<br />
Also, as soon as I got back to the university to begin year five, my Heavenly Father was going to sharply upgrade and intensify the spiritual and supernatural encounters that had been a more or less regular part of my existence for some years, in spite of my utter lack of scholarship in the language of such experiences, and hindsight makes it very plain indeed that UBC and the Lower Mainland was to be the setting for this adventure, not only for a fifth year, but also a sixth. The Lord wanted me to make the best of the old home town and my alma mater before he took me away, it seems, forever. Or was it to be for only as long as it would take to help turn my wife's old home into an internationally known arts centre? (This sentence perhaps inspired and clarified through a conversation this morning with yet another pair of grips at the hotel coffee counter. And both of the mornings when I have been moved to go in, I have previously been awfully shy of inspiration.)<br />
My beloved had grown up in the heart of the Kootenays, in the cathedral town of Nelson, and though she had profited much from the degree of culture already present, and its earliest days as a mining centre, we were both to see the need of a larger and more professional concentration in the arts of all kinds. For various reasons, the arts and crafts grew, and by 1984, twenty years after we arrived, the town had lost its Catholic university; - actually public since 1973 - its sawmill and plywood plant; and the CPR diesel refit shop and telecommunications center were about to disappear, while the marshalling years dropped to a fraction of its own-time business. For the first half of the 'Eighties the town reeled from one blow after another, economically speaking. The first sign of hope arrived in 1986, when Columbia Pictures shot two full-scale movies, <i>Roxanne</i> and <i>Housekeeping</i>, in Nelson and area. Other enterprises followed.<br />
None of these things were to be the most important part of our lives here, but they and related undertakings grew out of skills and interests I was still acquiring in my extended university years, the time I did not give over to Toronto, and they most certainly grew out of all that was signified by the night I had my second encounter with this immensely rich - and growing richer - symbol that is Shakespeare's <i>Twelfth Night.</i> (How useful it is to have lost that first battle!) My first meeting was in the usual place for students in those days, in the 'Fifties, long before you could take a video for almost everything off of a shelf in a store just around the corner - in Nelson, at any rate - that is, in the classroom. In the eleventh grade we read, in parts, three of the Bard's comedies. The other two I recall only mistily, but <i>Twelfth Night </i>sticks out most vividly because I as selected by my teacher to render the part of Malvolio. At sixteen I knew nothing of any of the rudiments of acting, nor did my teacher seem to have any ability or interest in helping us along that rather technical path, and such an unpleasant old goat as the steward to the Countess Olivia is not the most attractive character for a young male ego.<br />
Nonetheless, I never forgot the humiliation of yellow stockings and cross-garters, and five years later, on a night when the wet Vancouver winter was changing into the wet Vancouver spring, my recollections, and my since acquired ability to laugh at myself in them, did me good with the members of a very successful UBC Player's Club production of precisely my best remembered Shakespearean comedy. So busy was I with other things, mostly off-campus, and anyway still not so sure that live theatre, especially university live theatre, was a necessary element to civilization, I had not even seen the play, but somehow my roommates had organized a party which turned out to be at least half-staffed by the Twelfth Night cast. Thanks to my old English teacher's casting of the play of my first theatre experience, I had something to talk about and the party went swimmingly. A lot of excellent food - the affair was pot luck - and a liberal wine supply also contributed. I might even have bought wine myself for the occasion, knowing it was to be a theatre party. My usual choice was utterly young Canadian at that time, beer or rye whiskey, yet somewhere during the wonderfully educational months previous I had begun appreciating the vintning abilities of the Eschnauer people, and a theatre party would have been just the atmosphere for trying yet another style.<br />
It was a fine, friendly, chatty, gathering - and there was even a <i>Twelfth Night</i> predicament in that one poor young lady present took a shine to me which I could not in my heart reflect back upon her - but my stil-to-be-discovered intended was not there, because, for reasons she cannot remember, she had not been in the play, although she was a fiercely committed member of the Player's Club and a green room habitue. Moreover, she was on the best of terms with a small circle, my newest friends in matters literary, who were in part also much involved with the campus players, and even that connection had not brought her to the gathering.<br />
Yet, like Cesario to Olivia, the gathering proxied well on her behalf, for the lively and learned spirit of the group spoke well to me of so many of the things she held, and had held so long, so close to her heart, and therefore of things I would need to study much further than I had so far. Furthermore, the timing was excellent. The party was on a Friday evening, and if it was not precisely my last day at my office job of the moment, it was close to it; I was about to take up the first period of my young life in which I would discover what it is like to give the first hours of the day to original writing, and all the rest of my waking hours to whatever study, recreation, and dialogue would make that writing work out best. All that freedom and opportunity is a heady prospect for a young fellow, and though I certainly had my doubts and fears, I was fundamentally as buoyant as a cork in a mill race, and moving just as quickly. In fact, too quickly. My last blocks before our basement apartment, on my way home from my last or close-to-last day at the office involved a sharp right-hand turn on the road just below the old Fourth Avenue diversion, near Jericho Beach. The road was slick from the rain, and my little Vauxhall slewed for a bit before I got it back on track. I was in no danger of leaving the road, but it was one of those times when a driver is very grateful for the absence of oncoming traffic. The dangers of driving too fast in unsafe conditions aside, the incident in the rain was a sign, always keenly remembered, of how much I was looking forward to the party and even what I knew then of its significance to my new life as a full-time artist. And full-time student again, inasmuch as I did not have to read or work at anything that was not connected with my writing directly and by my immediate choice.<br />
Furthermore, any time it rains, in the later afternoon, especially at that time of year . . . .<br />
Intellect, memory, and will: the three immaterial, post-birth eternal, faculties of the human soul utilized by the rational psychology of Saints Augustine and John of the Cross, and likewise also by Thomas Aquinas except in the practise by which he reduces the memory to the intellect, quite logically, but at no discredit to his fellow geniuses; and what a thing it is for a man to be able to know all his memories in the glow of God's preservation and illumination of them, not only in the next life, but in this one as well. Such are the perks of the veteran, fully matured, spiritual life; such God is able to work in spite of the sin and ignorance in an individual soul.<br />
I should make a distinction: Thomas calls the memory the <i>passive </i>intellect, the storehouse for that which has already been understood - or at least apprehended - as contrary to the <i>active </i>intellect, that which does the work of abstracting from present essences and recollected essences and then reasoning out the understanding that will then retire into the passive intellect, or <i>intellectual memory</i> until that which has become understood will be needed again. All three saints are agreed on how the soul operates, but they use a different nomenclature.<br />
And I should also distinguish further over my own recollections. I was not to merely write and study, but also to have myself free to be a full-time contemplative, that is, someone whose best energies, so far as could be understood at the time, went to thinking one's way toward the whole truth, and acting on its promptings. While the other two categories were useful and necessary, this third was the most useful and necessary of all, and within it, for many months to come, would happen all that was most significant. Almost everything I chose to write, as a rule with deliberation, was a profound distance from what I actually thought about, and regularly felt; most of what I read, although I read much better than I wrote, was also considerably less than I thought, because I consciously stayed away from reading - generally speaking, with occasional exceptions - literature that was specifically theological, or, as I would then have called it, religious.<br />
But the exception proves much, and was also a profoundly relevant sign of all that was happening to me during those interesting times. On a winter trip to Seattle I had bought a new book then being much talked about, <i>The Outsider,</i> by the English writer, Colin Wilson. This was actually the first book I had ever read which dealt deliberately and at any length with the question of mysticism - chiefly in George Fox, the founder of the Quakers - and it had read awfully interestingly to me. There was a certain sharpness, and personal relevance that had been missing, as a rule, in my literature and history classes, and also in my social science reading of recent months, as interesting, as illuminating, as liberating as that might have been. Nor did it hurt Mr. Wilson's cause with me that he was writing about very definite characters - T.E. Lawrence, Nijinsky, Fox, and so on - and his reader, in myself. was a storyteller's apprentice. For the last months my master had pretty much been Ernest Hemingway, and I was about to be introduced - very gratefully - to F.Scott Fitzgerald, but neither of them dealt with intellectual experiences and comprehensions beyond the poetic, generically speaking, although I periodically wonder if Hemingway, had he become a better student of philosophy, might have been one of the great metaphysicians of the century. He certainly had taught me the virtually infinite value of any <i>thing</i> in itself; it is more than a coincidence that much of his writing was set in France and Europe of Henri Bergson and Jacques Maritain; it was in large part Hemingway's exercise of the metaphysician's first principle of identity that was at the bottom of my argument with the brilliant nineteen-year old who was to become my wife shortly after she turned twenty-one. Well, that is, the argument over symbols. We were to have other arguments, quite separate from metaphysics or the use of symbols in literature, but we would agree on the merits of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.<br />
The mention of those authors, of course, raises questions as to the <i>indirect</i> participation of <i>theology </i>in the short stories and novels of theirs I had been reading, or was to read, because both men were Catholic, Fitzgerald, by being born Irish-American, and Hemingway by conversion through marriage. I had read of priests in Hemingway's short stories, and then of his relatively prayerful visit to a Spanish church in <i>The Sun Also Rises.</i> Well, it was Jake Barnes visiting the church, but I could not but think that it was Hemingway discussing his own prayer-life to some degree. I had taken up this novel just before Christmas, and although I found it sparse from time to time, I felt very good about myself because I was reading it, and very good afterward, in no small measure, actually, a fairly respectable repeat of the same experience Saint Ignatius of Loyola had from his first studies - as opposed to the knightly romances of his day - of the Lives of the Saints. This is not to compare Hemingway's characters themselves with the saints Ignatius was reading about - that, of course, would be silly - but to suggest a measure of the disciplining effect of his style upon myself. And it must be remembered, an author with real poetic sensibilities will often render a most effective picture of creation and the inexorable hand of Providence while at the same time not necessarily serving up fictional characters filled with virtue, heroic or ordinary. I always had been "wounded by nature", as John of the Cross speaks of in the early chapters of the <i>Spiritual Canticle,</i> and would continue to be even more so affected, and Hemingway was no small channel for God's grace in this regard.<br />
Some readers might be surprised that I give him so much credit - although there are others probably who think he deserves more - and they are of course entitled to their view, but it must be remembered that not only did the Muse tell me I was a novelist through the writings of Hemingway - and this is an inescapable fact - but so did the patron saints of philosophy use him to give me my first lessons in metaphysics, to any extent that they can be provided through a novelist. If my first tutorials in logic came in law school - I have always felt this to be one of law school's providential purposes - then certainly my first studies of pure metaphysics came in not a few passages hammered out by the <i>being-penetrating</i> mind of Papa Ernest. He was, of course, not totally self-taught. No one is. The student is the <i>agent</i> of his own learning, but he does have teachers, and Hemingway had Gertude Stein. "A rose is a rose is a rose." Or, as the scholastics say, a thing is what it is. The first principle of identity, and the battle cry of all those who love the truth, and have come to realize how easily men fall away from it. There is a time to avoid the elaborate conceit; a time, even, to drop the barest of analogies, to neglect, moreover, adjectives and adverbs; an occasion to let the thing, like a good piece of music, or a picture of substance, speak for itself.<br />
Like most artists, Hemingway could not always make his system work perfectly for him. But when it did work, it worked very well indeed, and, as I said, it taught me some basic metaphysics and a much improved respect, in many areas, for thought processes I had either taken for granted or not yet learned how to articulate. And, to my young manhood, his writing indicated fields and rivers, forests and towns, pits and ladders I still had to encounter and negotiate. To this day, I'm sure, I could never start writing a novel without having a good browse in a least two of Hemingway's novels, <i>The Sun Also Rises, </i>and <i>For Whom the Bell Tolls</i>. I may in fact find that I have to do precisely this bit of research for clarity and inspiration before I begin the third book of my current project, the sequel to <i>Contemplatives</i>.<br />
Did I discuss Hemingway the night I partied with the cast of <i>Twelfth Night?</i> In those days I kept no journal - I would have considered such an act too self-conscious, too artificial - so I cannot say for sure. Possibly none of them were interested in Hemingway: after all, he wrote, the scholars say, no plays of consequence; and Shakespeare is already a lot to take on intelligently. But the young lady who was not at the party turned out to be rather fond of much of his work, and all things have their time and place.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-45105641215266756802016-02-07T16:09:00.001-08:002016-02-07T16:09:59.178-08:00Chapter Six "No man is an island," Donne hath said, and no town is only itself. Nelson has been many places to me, you might just say just about any place that I needed it to be at the time. I have rarely had to leave it' for the most part I think of travel for myself, unless it be simply within the immediate outlying regions, as a waste of time. Through the well-developed interior life, one can be in contact with the guardian angels of Rome, London, New York, Dublin, Toronto, Vancouver, Los Angeles, etcetera, any time those spirits desire it. Just before the film crew came, I had distinct experiences of the streets of Los Angeles, and now that they are pretty much gone, I've had some again, the latest in the moment I sat down to this machine and stared out my window, downhill between my neighbours' trees, across a couple of blocks of the business section, the boathouses, the lake, to the shore and the long, declining nose of the mountain rising immediately from the waterline. Was it some retired British army major from the Indian service, a child out walking, or a journalist, in the early days of the town, who noticed that the general outline of the great pile of rock and trees does indeed look like a sleeping pachyderm? It is all quite nicely proportioned: the lounging body, with his rump and upper leg sprawling to the east; then the back, the head, the trunk aiming west, with a good sized promontory - known as Pulpit Rock - just where the left tusk might have been broken off. By the government charts, the mountain is named after the town. But no one I've ever met calls it by its official name, and perhaps the government would be wiser to rename it.<br />
And then again, perhaps it would be just as well for the government to leave the names as they are, for local traditions can and should arise, particularly when it comes to naming things. The judicious use of language includes the right to imagination, to flexibility, to alternatives. We must always be on our guard, as so much of society and the Church is <i>not</i>, these days, against the false accuracy of mono-nomenclature. So-called <i>inclusive</i> language has become profoundly<i> exclusive</i>, especially of intelligence, obedience and common sense.<br />
I was not always reluctant to travel, and perhaps for an important enough cause I could be inspired again. But for the meantime the angels seem to bring me all the views I need; the most useful journey anyone can make is deep into the depths of his own spirit; and God seems to effect even more than I would dare think of doing, on my own and without Him who is already present and governing everywhere. Poland has its worst floods in five hundred years. I have often wondered if the present Pope remained too attached to his native country, as noble a land of Our Lady it might be, and not enough attached to keeping a firm hand on the plague of useless and harmful novelties that beset the Church of our time. For ten years God engaged me as John Paul's spiritual director, for the sake of deepening his spiritual life, but I finally had to resign over his refusal to forbid the use of altar girls. No one with real discernment - the mother of all true virtues, someone has said - can worship in peace with females hovering around the altar. I am referring to the altar at the time of the sacrifice of the mass, of course; that nuns and other devout women have rendered invaluable service to the sacred liturgy in other forms of care - making of hosts, vestments, altar cloths, etcetera - is inarguable, and , as well, a necessary symbol of the mystery of the division of labour that God has decreed in nature and in grace, in certain fundamental areas. Men have not been intended to bear children, and women have not been intended to offer the mass.<br />
I did not always have this disinclination for travelling long distances. (Short distances are lovely: this morning I put in some twenty kilometers on a newly acquired ten-speed bicycle, the first bike I've owned for over two decades.) Thanks to the war I got to journey some very long distances indeed as a child, and saw myself to be full of adventure and experience because of my travels; then my travelling was to continue, as was the opportunity to live in many different places. until I was nearly thirty. I kept on being utterly thrilled by all the various means of transport, and relished the changes from town to town and all the different people and circumstances they brought, including some quite notable gestures on the part of the Almighty, who seemed to wish to mark each dwelling place with its own particular examples of the various steps and significant, identifying, events of the spiritual life.<br />
And then we came to Nelson: a man, his wife, two children, with a third very well on the way. Finally I had arrived, as I thought, in the land of my visions and my dreams. The town was surrounded by mountains, in fact built right on their lower slopes; it lay along the shores of a huge lake, a veritable inland sea; and culturally, it could boast of a great potential, for all the arts flourished to some degree and it possessed a Catholic school system complete from kindergarten to the baccalaureate. In 1964, moreover, that bachelor's degree required at least two years of scholastic philosophy: logic, epistemology, rational psychology, and metaphysics; the four fundamental tools of the Thomistic intellect - leaving the question of faith and theology aside for the moment - delivered each in a semester, and all students seeking a degree in the little university required to take them. Even the non-Catholics were required to show respect for Aristotle as well as their own minds; if they did not want a good dose of scholasticism along with the rest of their humanities or science, they had to look to another college.<br />
There were, of course, a plethora of campi eager to take them in. My own alma mater was such. It did not require one philosophy course of any student other than a philosophy major, and even there the student could pretty much avoid the happy responsibilities of moderate realism and surround himself with every doctrine opposed to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and be rewarded for doing so. (I had the impression at the time that the reigning premises of the day were based on something called <i>logical</i> <i>positivism</i>, but I made no attempt to understand what that was.) This is not to say that students were necessarily penalized for reading and thinking classically, as far as I know - although a fundamentally foolish professor is a penalty unto himself - as my wife-to-be, in her fourth year was given a very fine mark for a very fine essay on the Nichomacean Ethics. This was for a philosophy course senior students wanting only one crack at the subject in their four years were allowed to take. It was Shawn Harold's only philosophy course in her four years, but her essay did profit from the mandatory apologetics course she had taken in her first and only year at Notre Dame College in Nelson, then only half-way through its first decade of operation and at that time able to offer only the first two years toward a degree.<br />
Why had I chosen not to enroll in any philosophy courses?<br />
Did ever such a simple question have so many complicated answers? So many, in fact that I had to spend a day in the woods, picking huckleberries with our remarkable housekeeper - twenty-one pounds between us - in order to avoid getting the answers out of order, or missing the most important ones. And then, this morning, just to keep me on the right track, along comes another of those visits, specifically from God the Father, that have become quite regular over the past couple of weeks. Scary stuff, to tell the truth, the whole truth, not unlike dying, and one sees clearly why the Bible tells us that we cannot <i>see the face of God and live</i>. Was this experience only for myself, and the work at hand, or did it signify some special act of the Lord's in another location as well? It is now fourteen years - a profound scriptural sign in the contemplative life - since my community squared off on all fronts with the Vatican, and at that time - the summer of 1983 - it had been a full decade since Heaven and facts of the Seventh Mansion had squared off at my community.<br />
Heaven had been tumbling me up and down for rather a long time, of course; even souls much less sinful than mine do not come to the full maturity of the mystical life overnight. After years of thinking about it - and, naturally, pondering the relevant texts - I have to admit that I was actually given the night of the spirit when I was twenty-one, in 11957. This happened in the merry month of May, when students of that age are usually being handed their degrees, and I have always thought that God's timing was deliberately along the same lines of graduation, but I must insist that to whatever degree such an honour was a reward in God's mind, it was most definitely perceived as a punishment and correction in the mind of the recipient, given the circumstances of its arrival. Yet even at that it was to be some months before I was able to think and do in full conformity with God's intended will, and then it seemed more because of an express manifestation of Christ's Virgin Mother than by any remarkable growth in my own personal virtue. The <i>old man</i> dies hard, and, as Saint Paul said to the Galatians, sin is master everywhere.<br />
But was sin involved in my decision not to take a philosophy course in my first year? One of my high school class mates did enroll, and was shortly afterward in ecstasy over logic. Yet I had experienced a very nice flash of an extra-ordinary light in my first visit to the offices of the student newspaper, the <i>Ubyssey</i>, so I think our souls might have been even in terms of simple impact from choices made following an inspiration.<i> He </i>was plainly excited by his philosophy class; I was equally delighted and satisfied by the working/learning and companionship opportunities of the student journal.<br />
I did browse the university calendar, and looked over the offerings of the department of philosophy, but the course, indeed the department, seemed much weighted in favour of the moderns. and in my youthful confidence, much buttressed by those frequent spiritual infusions for which I did not know the philosophical or theological terms, I felt myself to be the equal or superior of any of the modern philosophers, and indeed - I blush to recollect - I thought of my intellect as superior to Aristotle's, although at the same time I could acknowledge to myself in my heart of hearts that I would one day have to settle down to studying him. And I had a little knowledge of phrases of his, certain phrases I knew I could not do without, such as "<i>the whole is the sum of the parts</i>", and some hazy curiosity about the difference between form and matter, resulting from a very unsuccessful read in a high school literature text, which attempted to apply these terms to the analysis of poetry, where, frankly, I do not think that Aristotle meant them to apply. Nor was there anyone in my high school, I'm sure, who could have helped me through the questions the literature text presented. The public school system of my native province hates and fears scholastic philosophy, and does not encourage its grasp in its employees.<br />
But does not a bright student have an independence from the limitations of his teachers, especially where good libraries abound and access to any and all books is guaranteed by the rule of democracy? In this latitude, I sailed badly, and always later wished I had at least started to read on my own in philosophy, especially in Aristotle, and particularly in the <i>Ethics.</i> For what, in fact, can be more readable, what more simple and common sensical to anyone who wishes to be unconfused? And to come upon the great Peripatetic's discourse on the contemplative life, at the conclusion of the <i>Nichomachean Ethics</i>! Oh, my; and where outside the wisdom literature of the Scriptures can one find a better, clearer, warmer, defense of real friendship, tranquillity, and the essence of the most worthwhile conversation? And that includes silent conversations. For me, Plato talks too much. And one finds great conversations in Shakespeare, of course, but he came long after Aristotle, and always acknowledged his debt to the Greeks. Thus he remains one of the few Englishmen who co-naturally understands that the best meaning for <i>action</i> is that which goes on in the <i>mind</i>. Modern English-speaking culture - by modern I mean since the Renaissance - has paid a terrible price for the willful stupidities of Henry VIII, John Knox, and so on and as someone who could not help but grow up in the confusion of a British inheritance, I would take more time than a high school graduate's summer allowed to come to a free decision as to the absolute necessity of scholastic metaphysics. Nor would I do that without the help of not a few most excellent friends, considerable pursuit of the lesser humanities, and a great deal, in fact a regular, infusion of the night of the senses, especially in my first year in law school. And as well, we must remember that these sort of infusions, one way or another, had been pursuing me all of my conscious life, even without the existence in my soul of the sacrament of baptism, or the regular company of clergy and religious. Omnipotence has infinite ways of overcoming error and working without the normal channels. Neither too much Britannic thinking - or lack of it - nor the absence of the ordinary scope of preferable Catholic influence could completely prevent God from making me a theologian, even at a comparatively youthful age. So that once I got hold of such a term as <i>theologian</i>, and the profession it signified . . . .<br />
And yet later, in Nelson, in the very heart of the region to which the grace of Providence had always been calling me, I found myself face to face with an incumbent bishop who, especially in the latter days of our relationship, could only heap scorn on my claims to such a title. A sad situation, obviously, for an energetic and much studied young man, by then four years a happy and successful classroom teacher convinced that the Catholic education system was his life's work. What to do? Leave for a more amiable climate? Lead a revolt? Look for a new vocation in the same place? Go deeper within in order to discover what secrets lay behind this mysterious maneuver on God's part? Just watch, wait, and pray?<br />
The first two alternatives did present themselves continuously. There was little reason for them not to, as the frustrations, surprises, disappointments, and dark mysteries were virtually infinite. Could any corner of the universe have more things wrong with it? And yet I had been warned. My wife was not anxious at all to return to the town of her childhood, for all her affectionate memories so well transcribed in me; she knew the provincialism would be trying for a city boy primed to take on the world, and she was particularly prophetic in fearing that I would find the local Church in the van of mediocrity. And God had warned me as well as inspired me, although it took some months for me to understand just what He had been up to: I was to find myself in fact not that vehemently imported for the parish, the schools, the diocese the large measure of common association, but for the sake of a tiny few who were being called to the life of the spirit, the life of perfection. I cannot say that I was not to have some effect on the Church at large, but not nearly so much as I had expected; where I found my general common ground, and for the most part with great effort and great delight, was in the arts, especially in music and the theatre. These, in turn, led to small forays into recording and film, yet all of these endeavors were made to contribute toward the ever developing association with perfection and the spiritual life/Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-2758446386881176392016-02-06T17:07:00.002-08:002016-02-06T17:07:34.487-08:00Chapter Seven There are seven days in the week, seven sacraments, and seven deadly sins. Plainly, even though seven does not take us all the way to ten, God intended that seven be, also, a number that signified fullness. This is the first chapter in this book in which I have paid much attention to the numbering thereof, but it must be relevant - the numbering - because Providence has cunningly arranged that I should end the previous chapter and begin this one at such a time as to bracket precisely the weekend on which my dear little city held its centennial celebration. Nelson was officially a hundred years old - as an incorporated city - back in the spring - when I had to lead a court house full of souls in the singing of <i>God Save the Queen</i> - but the come-one-come-all grand celebration was delayed until the beginning of August. March is not much of a month for all the outdoor activities that were deemed to be fitting to such a significant occasion. Outdoor concerts, fireworks, and a two-hour long parade are not well-suited to March in our part of the world. On the official day, in fact, it was cold and raining, and all people involved were grateful for the roofs of the courthouse and the foyer of the refurbished building where Nelson holds most of its live theatre and musical performances. On that day was celebrated the legalities of a city's creation, with formalities, costumes, and cake. The summer affair, God bless it, was much more a party, although it was also a party much more enjoyable because of the solemnities that had preceded it.<br />
Life is like that: if we really wish to party, we must prepare in sobriety; true ecstasy is no enemy of true law, and good preparation can include even a bit of purgation, including the fact - or at least the possibility - that not everyone gets to go to the ball.<br />
And death, for the great majority of us, is the same thing - and I am talking about those who have eluded hell - there is this state, known to sensible men as purgatory, in which we must tarry in order to let God sort out the lesser follies and wasted opportunities of our earthly life, and also where the grave sins, even though confessed, abandoned, and to some extent overcome through penance, still might require a certain recompense.<br />
Oh, in this life, to be utterly at home in the great, tender, all-encompassing peacefulness of the Fatherhood of God. Yet how can there be peace, before God, without penance, without acknowledgement in full of the punishment deserved, without the full and complete utilization of <i>all </i>the means the Father in his love and mercy has designed for us through his Son and through his Church? But, when all those channels have been explored and capitalized upon - albeit <i>only</i> with the aid of God's finest graces - what could possibly be more satisfying, rewarding, and reassuring than to experience the great descent of this peace of the Father and his presence? One in fact "sees" the essence of God here, with the intellect, and understands that there is nothing more to be desired in this life. An utmost abundance of words, really, cannot describe such an encounter; only he who has experienced it knows what I refer to. And only he or she knows the long and patient effort and endurance God demands of those who will come to such a rest in the midst of the toil, trouble and tumult of this earthbound life. Yet, to make matters worse, in a sense, this effort and endurance must not be simply in the face of trials that come from without. Complete perfection requires that the soul must further deal with interior trials, with the contemplative purgation that comes from God alone - or the devils as well, with God's permission, and this severe a programme seems to be rare.<br />
The night of the spirit, as John of the Cross calls it, while it is among the greatest of gifts in quality, is the least quantitatively bestowed. Certain commentators have made grave errors in this regard, in our time, and the present papacy had neglected to correct them. It is one thing to appreciate another's suffering; it is something else entirely to grant that suffering a greater degree of effect than God providence can allow.<br />
The Church's doctrine, of course, is abundantly clear on these distinctions, fundamentally through Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila, who both cover all the categories and their proper divisions, and Thomas Aquinas does all thinkers and searchers genuinely interested in the whole truth the great favour of spelling out so thoroughly the differences between the two great hemispheres of the Christian life, the active and the contemplative. Nor are these saints alone in their understanding, but they might be said to be the most systematic of authorities, and thus preferable for establishing the rights of truth against the errors and neglect and inexperience of the times. And yet it must also be considered that where the contemplative life is in question, the <i>times</i> are forever out of joint, out of touch, out of sight. It is almost impossible for the actives to comprehend the inferiority of their own work, to honestly and humbly recognize and admit, withing their activity, the essential value even to their own work of the prayers of the hidden souls. To no small degree this blindness is as prevalent among Church leaders as it is among souls of much less ecclesiastical authority, and from time to time it becomes so serious a factor as to provoke God to punishment. In the Middle Ages Richard Rolle, the English mystic, sternly chastised the bishops of his country for their worldliness. He was taken little stock of, and England subsequently lost the Faith. In the early Eighteenth Century the bishops of France had a similar attitude toward Louis de Montfort, the great apostle of the Virgin Mary, and within a few decades their country was turned upside down by the Revolution. God intended contemplative souls not only to hear Him, but to be listened to by men and women.<br />
But men and women are much inclined, ever since Eve first gave him an ear, to listen to the Devil, the Father of Lies, as Christ called him. Thus our first mother, with Adam's complicity, gave Satan , the otherwise impotent, a kind of parenthood. Instead of an endless line of Gods sons, full of light and wisdom, due to the lack of sin and constant, cheerful, obedience, we became an all but endless string of bastards, stuffed with darkness and folly and a constant appetite for studying everything except the right directions.<br />
We come into this whirligig of bad will and confused intellect honestly enough, of course, because none of us since Adam and Eve have been born into Paradise, although Jesus in his manhood, being the son the the Virgin Mary - and the Son of God - reinstated that lovely situation on his own behalf and even shared it in no small degree with Saint Joseph, his foster father. Yet - and so - if we are to continue to honour the give and take of honesty between God and ourselves, we must consider also that through the Incarnation and His Church we have been offered the road back to Paradise. But ah, such a road! How to find it, and when it is discovered, how to travel its sometimes seemingly infinite distance? So skilfully do the world, the flesh, and the devil obscure the gate to this highroad, making such effective use - against the very spirit of God and its presence - of all the folly we were born into, that it must always be counted as an enormous event in grace when a soul actually takes its first realistic look at perfection and the spiritual life.<br />
Note that I say <i>realistic</i>, and I insist on the qualifying adjective because of the danger of extremely inadequate intentions toward all that is best in the life with Christ, the Trinity, the Virgin Mary and the saints. In our times the mystical life is in great danger of being held in an entirely false view, as a road to power, unlimited consolation, self-gratification, and a route to an erroneous exaltation of the female half of mankind. The mystical life is indeed <i>the</i> source of the most valuable powers, but only through the crucifixion of the Divine Incarnation and a rigid schedule of obedience to qualified spiritual direction that is infinitely more demanding than any other forms of discipline, as admirable and useful as they may be.<br />
Any of man's endeavors worthy of admiration demand skill, training, study, and continual discipline. The arts, sciences, politics, and athletics all know this so well that I would scarcely bother to mention such an obvious principle in so general a way were it not for the constant danger of inexperienced souls regarding the spiritual life, as it has to do with religion, as some kind of vague pastime for people who are no good at anything else. Interestingly enough, such an attitude is not held only by ordinary people, as it were, who may or may not have a working relationship with religion, but it is also far too common among professionals: bishops, priests, and religious. Are they malicious, or simply ignorant? Or, does the Catholic Church have within itself, in every generation, unpleasant little pockets of replicas, or perfect imitations, of the Sanhedrin? Anyone setting out seriously to follow the life of the spirit should be prepared to realize that I do not exaggerate. It can be all too easy for a soul that knows the spiritual life to be staring at a collar, a habit - or lack of habit as is so often the case now - and realize the teaching Jesus faced with a Caiaphas, a Pilate, at the very best a doubting Thomas. Let the spiritual man, the gazer, have even the inner sense of the Divine touch, and his companion has so often nothing but sensuality, as John of the Cross speaks of the inward follies of a self-indulgent imagination, and perhaps certain outward follies of sense as well.<br />
Of course such conflicts occur between the mystic and those fully in the world as well. It cannot be that professional clergy and religious are his only enemies of the hidden life. But of course it is always more painful to find the <i>hebetudo mentis</i>, as John of the Cross calls it, the dullness of mind, in those who are sworn to try their best to live by the quickness of the spirit. One expects it from the world, one does not expect if from the Church, even though history has sadly proved that so many have entered religion in order to do anything but the will of God. And Christ has warned of these hypocrisies, profusely, yet we are always disappointed when we encounter them, and the spiritual soul, like an ox leaning into the harness in front of a plow, heaves from an extra depth of his prayer life.<br />
Yet those "in the world" should not feel automatically let off the hook of responsibility toward their own spirit, for in the simple order of metaphysics, of the natural law, they are no less capable of exercising their intellects and wills in order to lift themselves clear of the swamps of materialism, sentimentality, disordered desires and unworthy ambitions. Virtues of the ordinary sort are available to all, and once we have worked at virtue for a time, we can safely look to that which lies beyond. And just as a stout glass of a vintage wine is the legitimate reward of a good day's ordinary labour, so is a passage like the following an example of that which comes to the soul who works well in the vineyard of the virtues, both moral and meditative: "<i>The soul, then, will frequently find itself in this loving or peaceful state of waiting upon God without in any way exercising its faculties - that is, with respect to particular acts - and without working actively at all, but only receiving. In order to reach this state, it will frequently need to make use of meditation, quietly and in moderation; but, when once the soul is brought into this other state, it acts not at all with its faculties, as we have already said. It would be truer to say that understanding and sweetness work in it and are wrought within it, than that the soul itself works at all, save only by waiting upon God and by loving Him without desiring to feel or to see anything. Then God communicates Himself to it passively, even as to one who has his eyes open, so that light is communicated to him passively, without his doing more than keep them open. And this reception of light which is infused supernaturally is passive understanding. We say that the soul works not at all, not because it understands not, but because it understands things without taxing its own industry and receives only that which is given to it, as comes to pass in the illuminations and enlightenments or inspirations of God.</i><br />
<i> "Although in this condition the will freely receives this general and confused knowledge of God, it is needful, in order that it receive this Divine light more simply and abundantly, only that is should not try to interpose other lights which are more palpable, whether forms or ideas or figures having to do with any kind of meditation; for none of these things is similar to that pure and serene light. So that if at this time the will desires to understand and consider particular things, however spiritual they be, this would obstruct the pure and simple general light of the spirit, by setting those clouds in the way; even as a man might set something before his eyes which impeded his vision and kept from him both the light and the sight of things in front of him.</i><br />
<i> "Hence it clearly follows that, when the soul completely purifies and voided itself of all forms and images that can be apprehended, it will remain in this pure and simple light, being transformed therein into a state of perfection. For, though this light never fails in the soul. it is not infused into it because of the creature forms and veils wherewith the soul is veiled and embarrassed; but, if these impediments and these veils were wholly removed (as will be said hereafter) the soul would then find itself in a condition of pure detachment and poverty of spirit, and , being simple and pure, would be transformed into simple and pure Wisdom, which is the Son of God. For the enamoured soul finds that that which is natural has failed it, and it is then imbued with that which is divine, both naturally and supernaturally, so that there may be no vacuum in its nature.</i><br />
<i> "When the spiritual person cannot meditate, let him learn to be still in God, fixing his loving attention upon Him, in the calm of his understanding, although he may think himself to be doing nothing. For thus, little by little and very quickly, Divine calm and peace will be infused into his soul, together with a wondrous and sublime knowledge of God, enfolded in Divine love. And let him not meddle with forms, meditations, and imaginings or with any other kind of reasoning, lest his soul be disturbed, and brought out of its contentment and peace, which can only result in its experiencing distaste and repugnance. And if, as we have said, such a person has scruples that he is doing nothing, let him note that he is doing no small thing by pacifying the soul and bringing it into calm and peace unaccompanied by any act or desire, for it is this that Our Lord asks of us, through David ...: Learn to be empty of all things (that is to say, inwardly and outwardly) and you will see that I am God." </i><br />
<i> </i>Learn to be empty of all things . . . ah, what a vast programme, and all the more difficult of attainment, in a sense, because so often it seems as if this emptying of all things is in direct opposition to call to a charitable action, or to a most necessary work or piece of study. I would be profoundly dishonest if I tried to pretend that such emptying is always easy, or immediately discernible as to need. The opportunities for <i>good works</i> are endless. Yet no need on earth is greater than the need of the souls in purgatory, and prayer more than action moves God to change the hearts of sinners. What I have quoted at such length from John of the Cross is not only a great gift of the spiritual life in itself, but is also most useful to the souls one prays for, and these are one of our best excuses for taking such comforts, or, more accurately, not interfering with their bestowal. What God hath joined, i.e., the soul and Himself, let no man, not even said soul, put asunder. Sometimes we try to scruple against the Spirit's generosity, as if we knew how to do good better than He does.<br />
<i> </i>But I add this commentary by way of footnote, as it were. My real reason for this lengthy excerpt from the fifteenth chapter of the second book of the Ascent of Mount Carmel is its rather tidy explanation of the rhythms of my life, as the psychologists and educators all tell us, I was supposed to be trying to figure out my professional future. John of the Cross is not only instructing and admonishing religious souls in this passage, he is also nicely detailing God's objections to a lifelong diet of a too particular form of thinking, and where these objections take concrete hold early enough, they will interfere not only with meditation but with actual studying. Most educators will not like to hear this, but the Lord made it plain just before I entered grade ten that He had lost all interest in my trying to carry on as a top student in the ordinary academic way. Against all school work but the essential I was prevented by grace from concerning myself and I was diverted from being a scholar into a general reader, and even at that I was a general reader with a considerably simplified mind, much delighted simple to be at peace with the universe, yet quite unaware, within the work ethic of my basically Protestant upbringing, that I was in fact participating in my special form of intellectual development. And any wisdom I might have thought of myself as acquiring I attributed as much to my favourite story tellers as I did to God.<br />
As I write this, the eldest daughter of one of those writers is forty-eight hours away from a professional visit to Nelson. There is to be a book-signing, some reading, and no doubt a fair amount of catching up. Forty-four years ago the daughter and I were both enrolled in our first year at the University of British Columbia and got to know each other as members of the campus newspaper club. In recent years she has been bringing out edited selections from her father's writing and now she has published her own original work, the story of her mother and father and their children growing up beneath a writer's roof. Over the years quite a few of my old Ubyssey cronies have written successful books, but this is the first time one has started off a book-launching tour in Nelson. That too is a sign of fullness, and complete fullness comes only from obedience to the kind of passive activity John of the Cross is speaking of. To understand what the saint is saying here, more important, to understand the work of God in such a predicament, is to understand how the mystic is, in his <i>non-work</i>, concerned with and in the work of others, especially others dear to him.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-76179518343684500332016-02-06T13:40:00.002-08:002016-02-06T13:40:42.250-08:00Chapter Eight "No Iliad ever began with the birth of Achilles."<br />
<br />
This is a bit of iambic pentameter I came up with one morning a few years ago when I was trying to write a long poem about the spiritual life. Homer's classic, as its readers know, gets off to a quick start, with two grown men in a battle over a young woman, in the midst of the siege of Troy. A battle within a war, like a play within a play, and even at this point we have had nine years of encamped Greeks and embattled Trojans with as yet no decisive conflicts. Inasmuch as the spiritual life is often likened to combat, especially with the forces of evil within oneself, anecdotes of war, real or fictional, have a certain relevant intensity.<br />
So, before we get too far along in this ramble, which has the fact dealt somewhat with my childhood, although not with actual birth, we must deal with some warfare, some gunshots, some wounds. and in fact the slow dying to the world, the flesh, and the devil without which the spirit cannot truly be set free.<br />
But what is the spirit? Even those who believe God gave them a soul and a mind, not just a sensual body filled with contradicting and unreliable emotions, so often seem unable to get beyond the few basic mental skills sufficient to stumble through the minimal obligations to family, workplace, school, and perhaps religion. Given the power and depth of life in a fully developed spirit, the limited existence in no small tragedy. Yet who can escape it without the grace of God, and who will go to the ultimate depths and heights of his or her soul without very special graces from God? And not only grace but the most definite participation in glory? And all of these lovely favours presume, of course, victory over grave sin. And then victory over lesser sins, and even imperfections and faults that interfere with advanced graces and the presence of glory. The growth pf the spiritual life is methodical, like every other undertaking of any consequence, and in our later years, with sufficient time on our hands and water enough flowed under our personal bridges, we delight in reminiscing and piecing together the chapter and verse, the times and places and person of these moments of instruction. This is not to say that the moments themselves were all pleasant. In order for the spiritual life to progress as it should, so much of the time spent is extremely unpleasant, in the way that mankind ordinarily measure pleasure. The spiritual life is indeed a rigorous affair, full of internal obedience as well as external, and therefore more demanding than even the military - which I was for years, on a casual basis, happily part of - and yet it also knows the most horrendous moments of battle agony. Many times over, the fully matured and experienced contemplative knows that death - would be much preferable to the spiritual trials in which it suddenly finds itself.<br />
The absolute sureness of this realization, for all that I had been given an habitual experience of the contemplative life, never fell upon me until I was twenty-one, and was, in reflection, a kind of graduation present or even the bestowing of a Divine equivalent of the bachelor of arts degree. After all, a large proportion of the students who had entered university with me were receiving their diplomas. so why, in a sense, not I?<br />
The place of this anointing was my beloved Sechelt Inlet, at Porpoise Bay, a sparse collection of homes scattered along the shore of the south end of that long, narrow, generally uninhabited Pacific fiord with a mouth so small that only sixty percent of the normal tide fluctuation is allowed to pass through it. By the summer of 1945 my mother's mother, remarried to a just-retired old gentleman of innumerable sea-going and outdoor adventures, was having a house built at Porpoise Bay - a small part of it by my ten-year-old-self - and she and Grandpa Alex were to live there for the next twenty years and some. I was awe struck by my new grandfather - the old one had died long before I came along - and fell in love with the Inlet as well. I had always loved the wild reaches of Nature, but never had any of them feel I could call my own. Now, through my Nana, I had a beachhead on my very own Eden, to which I regularly made my pilgrimages, and five years later, when my father and uncle bought adjoining houses three miles up the inlet coast, I had an even stronger grip on the meditative use of holidays and the sens of feeling doubly privileged.<br />
By the spring of 1957, I'd known the inlet and its profound silence for a dozen years. I'd fished regularly, hunted a little, but mostly I had simply loved being there. For those who have learned how to be still and look about them, who lack false ambitions and a guilty conscience both, the quiet, the solitude, of Nature is an overwhelming and most companionable presence, especially in a region blanketed by the very real faith of someone close to you. It was my Nana who had taught me my childhood prayers and it was my Nana who had been the occasion of my secure and comfortable access to the wilderness and its lonely reach of water.<br />
And as well as these key decisions regarding real estate and religion, it was also my Sechelt grandparents who subscribed to the <i>Saturday Evening Post,</i> the weekly magazine founded by Benjamin Franklin and in my youthful days, before television swept away most of the magazine storytellers, North America's favourite source of short stories and serials. My parents did not subscribe, but the <i>Post,</i> so often with its cover adorned with a Norman Rockwell illustration, was the journal no doctor or dentist's office could be without and I no doubt read it as well in homes where I visited or babysat. But in the months prior to the discovery I made in my grandparents' house I must have slipped up on my reading, because when I arrived at the inlet late in a certain summer - I think it was 1950 - I dipped into their great stack of <i>Post</i> issues and came upon a serial I had not been aware it had carried.<br />
The story was <i>Perilous Passage,</i> by Canadian author Arthur Mayse. I was swept into it instantly, landing by chance in an early episode, and after locating the first installment in the pile kept in Grandfather Alex' workshop at the back of the little house, I found to my great joy and relief that my Nana had preserved every relevant issue. The entire tale was there: I could relax and read it at my leisure.<br />
As far as I can remember, <i>Perilous Passage</i> was only the fourth novel I had ever read that was set in a landscape I could call my own, and the first of these was not of much use to a boy. It was located in my native province, and I suppose that may have been of some influence on my young mind that did not yet know it belonged to a writer, but I did not like it much and that may have suggested to me that people could not write well about British Columbia. That first book was written for adults, and ended unhappily.<br />
My next discover of a local author was Roderick Haig-Brown, with his two excellent books about a young lad's adventures along the east coast of Vancouver Island, first with a trap line, then with a salmon troller. Therein not only did I find my own territory very well written about, but I was also in no small way consoled over the uprooting from Nature that had come upon me when I was going on twelve and was hauled away from eighteen months in a coastal island paradise. It was probably best that this rupture occurred, for no paradise is complete without the prayers and education that come with a monastery, and my island had possessed no monks: I was to make great use of the opportunities the city could provide; yet I missed the island and was much pleased to have it restored by <i>Saltwater</i> <i>Summer</i> and <i>Starbuck Valley Winter</i>. Sometimes a good book can put us into a place, or back into a place, more suitably than can the place itself. A healthy mind makes more journeys than a body ever could hope to, and often better, and for all that I probably needed the city, and made good use of it, I also absolutely required regular journeys to the country, journeys real or imaginary yet always open to the spiritual law by which, where one considers the intellectual quality of the company, the imaginary journeys may be more <i>real</i> according to the actual relation to what <i>Being </i>truly is.<br />
Roderick Haig-Brown was awfully good company for a boy, especially a boy already well versed in the young reader's classics that have descended from Homer's detailed love for life on land or sea. <i>Starbuck Valley Winter</i> - it came first - was simply another of these, with the pleasant surprise of it being my own turf that acted as the setting. I had indeed read a few stories set in Canada - <i>Glengarry School Days</i> being one of the most notable, discovered when I was already familiar with the Ontario landscape - but in a country as big as this one, your own province merits its own treatment, and each generation of its writers need some rooting in those who went before.<br />
In a new province, in a settlement and colonization too young to have its own indigenous cultural history, those first writers will have had to be born somewhere else and have brought their culture with them. Haig-Brown had been born in England, and brought over many of the best things British, yet he became thoroughly at home in the Canadian West, making ti completely and comfortably his own back yard, therefore helping myself and any other apprentices to the work of words to truly make British Columbia our own back yard. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the eye, really the understanding and appreciation, must be trained, and trained again. Following young Don Morgan about was no bad training programme, and part of my being able to accept and be at peace with my return to the city, the settling in to urban ways.<br />
Initially, except for losing a new friend who had just come to my school on the island because his had closed, I did not mind leaving Lasqueti. My mother was already in town with my youngest brother and my father, of necessity, was winding down his logging operation. All my aunts and uncles and one set of grandparents lived in Vancouver or Burnaby. The urban area was full of libraries, athletic facilities, scout troops, cadet corps, movie theatres, and the high schools and the university a lad born to use his brains had to leave the coastal corners to go to anyway. It also contained the employment opportunities that would eventually be just right for my father, and a newly begun inexpensive veterans' rental housing development that would be just right for our family needs and economics. For the second half of grade seven and then for all of grade eight I landed myself two very fine male teachers - excellent role models for the trade I would one day take up - to my own astonishment and my luck continued on into high school. It seems pretty clear that I was meant to come back to the city of my birth. In fact anyone not so fond of the wilderness as myself might have thought that the year-and-a-half on the island was simply a necessary interlude, some time my family had to spend before work and accommodation came available for returned veterans.<br />
The city also possessed something else I had been able to avoid in good conscience on my little island: church and Sunday school, and therefore the opportunity to wrestle with the angels over the question of some sort of regularized allegiance with church buildings. congregations, Sunday school teachers and ministers before the Lasqueti interlude and then for eighteen months only the daily Bible readings in school had been there to remind me that Nature and books were not quite everything my spirit required. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these things had continued to be the means through which I was pursued by a light that I took for granted, by which I was given a nourishment in grace that I did not truly comprehend. But with parents who had left religion behind as they entered their adult and family lives, my conscious and articulate relationship with anything formal. and external. when it came to my Creator and Redeemer, was bound to be spasmodic, relying on the good will of relatives, good luck in schools - two months in a denominational college in Belleville, Ontario, for example - and whatever inner promptings and other special moments God might bestow upon me. Not the least of favours too, would be friends and associates, with their particular, better organized, relationships with specific religions.<br />
I am not by any means suggesting that there was no religion on Lasqueti Island. On the contrary, as I have always recalled very clearly and with much affection the spirit what was quite common to the island generally and exercised some definite benefits in my direction. The first house of influence had a mother who was Catholic by birth, the second was Jehovah Witness to a moderate degree, and in the third the mother came from a devout Mormon upbringing. But on an island barely twelve miles long and boasting no more than a hundred-and-fifty souls. there were no churches and no services of regular obligation. One could be both a Christian and a free spirit without a sense of guilt or estrangement that can come in the presence of specific buildings, specific congregations, and resident pastors. I had lived for the time in a kind of child's paradise, where there were all sorts of benefits but not so many obligations. And yet, because I was a child, not yet an adolescent, and because I was actually not all that many years away - a mere decade - from becoming a Roman Catholic and finding myself a theologian as well as a novelist, in so many ways, I think, the Holy Spirit made it to no small degree a Catholic paradise, if only because I had so much love for the Nature He had created and then renewed, and on the island so much time to exercise that affection and regard.<br />
And <i>regard </i>nature I most certainly did, continuously absorbing her unspoiled beauty and variety from the moment I awoke until the time I fell to sleep. Except for the hours I was in school. or at my chores at home, there was little else to be preoccupied with. I read habitually, of course, but even there in my reading the wild outdoors, with a farm or a ranch as home base was pretty much my favourite reading. We had battery radio on Lasqueti, and I listened fairly widely to any serials we could get, but I recall that the most important stories were those set in the Old West - again the outdoors - <i>The Lone</i> <i>Ranger</i> and <i>The Cisco Kid</i>. Being a story-teller in the making naturally I enjoyed any well-told tale, so I was also aware of <i>Superman</i>, <i>The Green Hornet</i>, and so forth, but I was basically convinced that the country mouse had the better side of life.<br />
I think that one of the reasons for this poet's preference was my instinct for mystery. The city was full of information, very necessary and useful information, but the fields and the woods, the coastlines and the mountain ridges, streams and pools and lakes: all these were an endless source of wonder and mystery. And this fascination over bottomless personality of nature was a very general passion. I had none of the ear-marks of the young botanist, geologist, forester, butterfly or birds' egg collector. From time to time I managed even to feel inadequate because of the lack of a special interest. I simply found the entirety of it all a satisfying companion, a necessary companion, and endless friend. Had I known anyone with the talent to teach me, I might have become a fairly competent landscape painter, but even this is only supposition; I might equally as well have realized that the particular concentration required of an artist injected far too much material interruption into the generally metaphysical tone of my happy brooding. And even a trained and accomplished painter is wary of asking his best friends to pose, for he knows it can be difficult to get into a painting all the right qualities of those he knows and loves the best.<br />
And the face of the created earth I certainly loved, and most of the time it seemed to be smiling fondly back at me. Fondly, and always full of mystery.<br />
If I seem to be insisting, in the early part of this recollective argument, that the towns and cities held no beauty, no mysteries for me whatsoever, let me say that such is not my intention, because in fact one of my earliest memories of being sublimely wounded by the glory of nature took place not in the forest or the middle of some vast and lonely meadow, but right in the front garden of a small nursery, close by the house and office building, just off a busy main thoroughfare. Nor did the inside of houses and other buildings lack many wonderful and arresting moments, especially where books or religion were natural elements, and gardens - I have just spent some time looking over mine, which lies south of the house, gleaming most provocatively in the November sunshine - November is the month of the dead - gardens could be inebriating too, especially when they were huge and full of everything from chickens to strawberries, corn and apple trees, like my paternal grandparents' garden. And later, perhaps even before I left childhood and entered the labyrinthine passages of adolescence, God exerted His rights over His own creation and began to teach me that not only is beauty in the eye of the beholder, but that from time to time the eye of the beholder is, divinely, radically, and not a little unpleasantly, interfered with. This happened even on my beloved Lasqueti Island, before I'd been there half-a-year. In these circumstances, even Nature loses all her charm, ceases to be a friend and ally, is for emotional and educational purposes nonexistent until God choses to restore the normal - or better than normal - relationship.<br />
This is nothing to complain about. If the created is so wonderful, then the Creator must be even more so, and the wisdom we are inspired to acquire by natural observation and experience must be rather less than the wisdom that comes to us through supernatural interference. And this supernatural <i>seizing</i> and <i>purging </i>of the faculties, one way or another even educates and stimulates our capacity for using and enjoying creation and the natural experience of it. Mountain climbing is a noble and exhilarating sport, stimulating to the mind as well as the body, but these passive steps by which we are enabled to ascend the inner mountain also present great challenges, with an even more lasting result.<br />
As God is everywhere, obviously this kind of experience can take place in a city as well as the heart of a lonely forest, and thus the opportunity for mystery is available to other than the country mouse. Moreover, as people. absolutely speaking, are greater sources of mystery than even the most awesome feature of non-rational creation, a truly civilized city is an immense source of the most wonderful, the most endless, occasions of mystery. It is for this reason that Saint Augustine employs his immortal image and title of <i>The City of God</i>, because we need this virtual infinity of human spirits, before our eyes in one way or another, as the proper material of the meditations that will one day take us to Heaven. In the afterlife we will have all the benefits of the solitude and quiet of the wilderness, of the lonely inlet or the desert island, yet we will have no shortage of company. If we need the outback to give us the space for looking into our souls, we need the roaring city to remind us of the inevitable quantity of our eternal brothers and sisters.<br />
Augustine's <i>City</i>, as its students know, is a town within a town, a numbering of the saved, and constantly rubbing elbows - in this earthly life - with those of an opposing spirit, even within the external signs of fellow membership in the Faith, every man jack of these will have to acquire that solitary wisdom of the wilderness before he enters the heavenly city. That is the great paradox of the spiritual life: the soul must learn to be totally alone with God, utterly detached from all created things, in order to learn how to be totally united in the spirit with those souls who have also learned to be completely alone with the Infinite and completely detached from anything created. Nor is this detachment applicable only to the material and the visible, as certain amateurs of the spiritual life like to pretend; to be truly effective it must also embrace the devotional life, the soul's own specific ideas, even genuinely spiritual events that have taken place at the very centre of the soul itself. This is a rule of thumb that beginners, by definition, find difficult to accept, but it is the law of the life of the spirit and completely unbreakable. No advancement in possible without adhering to it: God will toss the defaulting practitioner - no matter how highly placed in the spiritual or canonical journey - right off the path, sometimes without ceremony and quite brutal in His exposure of the soul to its spiritual acquaintances and even, on occasion, to wide open public scrutiny. The standards of the spiritual life, the integrity of the rules of perfection, are to be respected, for it is they, and they alone, through which is fulfilled God's desire that men and women be totally fulfilled in His <i>image and likeness</i>. No amount of masses and communions, no legions of good works, no quantities of devotions, as excellent and useful toward salvation as these may be, can do the work of the spiritual life. and this is a "work to rule" situation if ever there was one. And one works with a <i>ruler</i>, that is, a spiritual director. whose first obligations - after holiness and learning - are to exact obedience and to instill fear of the Lord.<br />
Do I seem to have strayed from my topic, my youthful anecdotes? No, because without having followed the rules of the spiritual life, most rigourously, and with frequent recourse to interpretation by, and deference to, another, I would not have been able to interpret these stories accurately, and in their right context. In fact I might not have been able even to recall them, or at least not all of them. And what writer wants to tell an incomplete story? No author can function without the Muse - study Homer, at the very beginning of the<i> Iliad</i> - and the Muse will co-operate only to the extent that the author lives up to his own standards as he has been granted the grace to acquire them.<br />
And, most certainly, the Muse requires deference to the principle of spiritual direction, even in its most obscure and tentative beginnings. That is part of the great paradox of the language of the spiritual life. More <i>romantic</i> images than the two great <i>Canticles</i>. the first of Solomon, the second of John of the Cross, cannot be found. Yet neither is there a stricter atmosphere of discipline than in both of those works, albeit spelled out more specifically, and at a completely exhausting length, in the Carmelite's masterpiece. The soul, the spirit, is called to love at the most profound level both God and man, yet to love with only the most refined, disciplined, purged of loves, a<i> true </i>charity, which sees all objects of affection as either Divine in themselves, or as a simply lent effects of the Divinity.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-39312271910138839612016-02-06T11:13:00.003-08:002016-02-06T13:40:53.909-08:00Chapter Nine <br />
Somewhat to my surprise, my upstairs typewriter - the one with the view - has been very quiet for a number of weeks. It is now almost the end of January - to be precise the 26th - and in two months I have managed only three or so pages up here. Whenever the Muse allows me to write steadily, I think of at least two pages as a normal day's work. Sometimes I have had to settle for half-a-page, as late in 1986 when I was moved to decide that I was due to put "finis" to the first volumes of <i>Contemplatives</i>; and then at other times, as in the summer months of 1987, when I was getting up to twenty pages on my highest day, and for an average day ten to fourteen, I have been able to produce in great quantity - indeed, unable not to do otherwise - but ordinarily I am content with a daily quota of half-a-thousand words; and so, I think, are many writers who take their craft seriously. The slower pace is pretty much preferred by authors who hope to leave something lasting. He who rushes to appear in print will rush to be forgotten, probably more quickly than he might have expected. The images and ideas of the mind can be voluminous, the stirrings of the heart and the feelings profound and numerous, and these can make for prodigious quantities of words, yet there might be such a loss of balance as to make the whole thing of a most ephemeral interest. Volume is usually necessary for a beginner, and even for the most proficient who relies on external draughting, for there must inevitably be a terrifying amount of words to throw away, but the finished result, if anything, will err on the side of economy.<br />
But this preferable measure should, ordinarily, occur within the working day, and no doubt as well the proper working week, where the prudent thinker in production mode still inclines to the wisdom of a day or two off every working five or so. Writing is a satisfying business in itself, but good writing, fully truthful stuff that is going to stick around for awhile, is often exhausting labour, and the writer needs his holidays, regularily small, yet occasionally large.<br />
Yet I was not really looking for any rests longer than a weekend, certainly not a couple of months, so from more than one past experience of Divinely created shutdowns, I knew I was waiting for something, either a research note - occasionally these take quite a while to come upon - or a major public event significant to what the Muse had in mind for me, eventually, to consider paying attention to. As it has turned out, there have been two events during the occasion of this delay - one of them seemingly connected with a question of research - and those two public events have occurred pretty well simultaneously. John Paul II has just concluded a visit to Fidel Castro's Cuba, and the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, is being made to face into the question of alleged sex scandals. Praying for leaders, of state as well as church, is a duty for the faithful, it goes almost without saying, but praying for those in the posts of decision and example is a full-time job for a contemplative, especially for a contemplative in the seventh mansiion.<br />
In fact it seems that the older I get, the less I write and the more I pray. As our professions shape us, of course the writer is always chattering away internally, for habits are habits, and that inward activity is satisfying, stabilizing, in itself. Yet this is still only the writer <i>thinking,</i> and valuable and necessary as thinking may be, it is not the same challenge and proof of ability as getting the words down on the page; the best words, in the best order. Nor, for the writer, is it quite enough of the work he has to do in order to employ the talents given him and thus save his soul.<br />
Yet, in 1987, as I was storming along at my most productive rate, the Holy Spirit did remind me, via a series of locutions, that praying remained my first duty, and that writing was to be considered number three. (Spiritual direction was <i>two</i>.) Then a couple of years after the book was done, He furthered his sense of my priorities by a most - to me - mysterious intimation: I was, at least from time to time, to regard myself as "never having written a novel at all". I still do not clearly understand all the reasons this was said to me. Ongoing lessons in detachment are never unwelcome to the prudent, but I suspect a reason more precisely practical, and having to do with other assignments, especially the assignment of praying for a bankrupt hierarchy; national conferences have in so many cases become the biggest enemies of Christ since - to my cultural background - the Anglican revolt of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries.<br />
In every country, including my own, there are some bishops and archbishops who do not go along with the whining of modern psychologisms, nor the strange ambitions of nationalists of this or that stripe; these are men who believe fully in the ancient, wise, and unchangeable essentials of Catholic Christianity, who can discern the perils of surrendering to whims, whether from so-called leaders and learned advisers, or from the rank and file. This distinction is valid, as the two do not always go mad in the same way, In our times, while the "professionals" babble on and on in "inclusive" language, the general run of parishioners wonder what all the fuss is about. A recent poll conducted in the American Church has proved this overwhelmingly, yet the addled Mandarins fail to make suitable adjustments. Likewise, the average worshiper of my experience is embarrassed by the habit of standing during the changing of the bread and the wine into the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, yet, like true sheep, they follow the herd, Rather comfortingly, I must say, one of the few genuinely devout priests of whose acquaintance I can boast in the modern Church said to me a few years ago: "Those who know they are sinners will kneel at the time of consecration; those who do not know they are sinners will stand."<br />
Yet - it must be asked - how can the laity recognize themselves as sinners when their professional leaders seem so generally incapable of such beginnings of wisdom? Just recently, in a brief conversation with a bishop, I used the phrase <i>mortal sin</i>. Had I slapped him, he would not have reacted with more vehemence and outright denial of the point I was trying to make.<br />
Moreover, even more recently I hear of a parish pastor being not a little off-hand in his advice to a young couple, for some time already living together, who are finally taking marriage instruction.<br />
And what of the young oaf, also in a collar, who a few years ago removed from a cathedral bulletin board an article, from <i>L'Osservatore Romano</i>, warning against inclusive language? He was already acquiring notice from parishioners as a preacher who went on twice as long as need be, so much so that eventually his bishop had to send him for what is euphemistically called a "year's study".<br />
With shepherds like these, the flock, to be destroyed, has no need of wolves. Only the mercy of God, His love for His Church, and the raising up through special infusions of grace in exceptional souls can counter these kinds of folly, can at least hold their influence on the faithful at bay, can eventually overcome them. And while certain souls among the laity, with a strong and genuine faith, may be able to set a minor example, may remain a truly graceful element within the body of the Church Militant, the vanquishing of all these harmful practises is possible only to the clergy: the bishops and priests, not excluding, of course, the vigilance and legislative authority, through canon law, of the Bishop of Rome.<br />
History tells us there was a time when Kings could deal with stupidity and sin among bishops and clergy, and not just for the ordinary criminal offenses, but it is unlikely that we shall ever see again the likes of Stephen of Hungary, or Henry of Bavaria - although recently I seem to have seen a line-up of medieval kings who <i>wished</i> they had been more like these men - and so we have to wait upon those whose task it normally is.<br />
This is not to say that the laity cannot have a strong spiritual effect on priests and bishops, and even cardinals and popes. Despite the clamours and follies of the world, and the worldly factions of the Church - and these are more manifold than Heaven has ever wished to see these days - constant prayer and example, in the souls of the genuinely virtuous, remain the Holy Spirit's weapons of choice, and such armament is readily available to the laity as well at to clergy and religious. In these times, however, it needs to be said that only those who firmly understand the Church's ancient and unchangeable teachings on real and wholesome chastity are truly virtuous, and thus capable of influencing the hierarchy for good. It is the spirit and example of those who have compromised on questions of purity and chastity that have brought the Church to its present sad condition in so very many areas of the world. Such a huge preponderance of souls, one way or another, are in the same predicament as Saint Augustine <i>before</i> he gave into the voice of Christ. They live in the flesh, for all that they might think of themselves as respectable - or even devout - and withing their minds they wander in a labyrinth of unanchored concepts and endless rationalization.<br />
<br />
* * * * *<br />
<br />
As with all of this book so far, the pages of this chapter have taken their time, once again waiting on events. Providence insists on having, for the time being, the lion's share in my processes of inspiration and permission to carry on with the text. Providence, of course, always knows what lies ahead, while we mortals must wait patiently on her signs. And the sign, once more, as with <i>Gone With The Wind,</i> is American. Two mornings ago, May 5, my agents mailed a letter of inquiry to one of the best known and respected - deservedly - of American Catholic theologians, Jesuit Father Avery Dulles.<br />
The idea of contacting Father Dulles was not new. Well over a decade ago, at a point by which Rome, through novel chapters and my letters to the Holy Father had heard much of our fictional bishop, the Most Reverend Meinred Schwartz, Ordinary of the fictional diocese of Sterling, Father Avery had come out swinging so hard against the bishops of his own nation that one could easily think that the mighty Babe Ruth had returned to the Bronx. (In that New York borough stands Yankee Stadium as well as Dulles' Fordham University.) And a certain novelist and his advisers could easily think that the learned Jesuit had been advised about Schwartz and was kindly tipping off episcopal palaces throughout his native land.<br />
Father Dulles was saying that throughout the United States, where could be found a bishop with a genuine understanding of liturgy, theology, or spiritual direction? Our spirits leapt, mightily, and we even wondered if we might be hearing from him in the not too distant future. There were matters we cared about intensely and prayed over constantly, and the fictional Meinred Schwartz had been summoned to a most intense case of spiritual direction even before he arrived in his new diocese! By grace as well as nature we have been optimists about eventually finding a home for the novel, in a publisher, and like-minded souls with learning and an influential circle are automatically a possible doorway.<br />
Yet at the time we were much of a mind to believe that only the Vatican had the spiritual intelligence to oversee such a project. Either on my own, or after 1982, with my agents, a fair assortment of publishing interests had been approached without success, as I had known that I would have to start testing the waters long before the boat was built and ready for sailing. Canadian, British American, Irish; old friends. total strangers; French, Italian, Pakistani, Spanish by proxy; academic, commercial, small and hardly known in the publishing world or as huge and profiled as could be imagined; publishing houses which dealt with fiction, or publishing houses specifically theological; radio, film, and television interests, magazines, daily newspapers; priests, bishops, cardinals, religious, even the Pope; actors, directors, producers, editors, and of course, fellow writers: all of these functioning as alternatives whenever it seemed that we would not be able to think of Rome as a publisher, or simply seemed to be following an alternative inspiration.<br />
Genuine mysticism, of course, especially at the fully mature levels, is a rare thing, and the average literary man, artist, or critic is not really prepared to deal with it, nor is the average theologian or philosopher, no matter how experienced, learned, or published himself. Nor could I feel ignored as a writer generally, and go off in a fit of sulking. My lesser excursions with the Muse had received a very fair degree of attention, on a least one occasion, more than my agents were comfortable with. Some poetry, a play adaptation, a few songs, one of which was the theme for a radio drama broadcast on the national network. Moreover, this piece of composition, more than any other lyric I had written, was the one which prompted me to be in wondering about the day when I turned to creating an opera.<br />
<br />
* * * * *<br />
<br />
And yesterday, as Providence and the Muse would have it, my beloved, who originally sang <i>The</i> <i>Bluebell</i> for the radio broadcast, performed the song at the annual gathering of an informal association of museum and gallery personnel. This year's meeting was held in Riondel, the little town beside the Bluebell mine, on the east shore of Kootenay Lake and the lyrics were rendered, a capella, after a tour of the mine area. I was not present, following the usual habits of a hermit, but my wife had to admit that there was not a dry eye in the house. Furthermore, she did not mention the Margaret Mitchell project, for fear that if the audience knew I was considering an opera they would insist on a local concept.<br />
And I must admit that twenty-five years ago I was quite willing to try an opera on the <i>Bluebell</i> theme - it was, after all, a tragedy, a murder provoked by greed, claim-jumping, and frustration. Interestingly enough, one of the protagonists, the convicted murderer was an American. My neighbours, for better or worse, seem always to be a part of my inspirations.<br />
For many reasons, this is only natural. On my father's side, my ancestors were American, until after the Revolution, when a Charles MacCarthy Lamb emigrated from Pennsylvania to Upper Canada. Nearly a century later the family tree returned to the States, with a young offspring in Montana, marrying a Maggie Cavanaugh in Great Falls in 1889. I think I have mentioned this earlier, in connection with <i>Gone With The Wind</i> and its attendant discoveries, but it comes around again as something to think about in connection with Father Dulles and my one trip to New York City, naturally a Mecca or Jerusalem or Rome for any young soul who finds himself with the vocation of a writer.<br />
But in my case, there was also a supernatural element, because it was while I was in New York that I had a rather profound religious experience, fundamentally the third experience of the weeks following my last day in classrooms ordinarily dedicated to the study of the liberal arts.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-86423797171867268442016-02-04T16:15:00.002-08:002016-02-04T16:15:34.852-08:00Chapter Ten Before we get to the weighty subject of spiritual experiences, however, I must report the new home for this typewriter, the machine that has the pages of my autobiography wrapped around its rubber roller. Is there an interesting symbol right here? A couple of years ago, studying the pamphlet accompanying a computer course on typing, I read a most interesting account of the history of the typewriter. It pointed out, it taught me something I had never known, even though I had been at work for over forty years on the result of Nineteenth Century technology, that the rubber roller that makes the typewriter such an obviously efficient device, was years, even decades, in the process of being realized. Prior to the roller, various inventors and designers were busy having the keys come thumping down on a piece of paper laid out on a flat surface. Truly, someone did make good at reinventing the wheel.<br />
The new home for this typewriter is also an old home. In the summer of 1986, after some barbarous rumbles at my Beloved's suggestion, I moved a different typewriter into a tiny cubicle - six feet by eight - on the porch on the west side of the house, and spent a useful June to August or so methodically puttering at the novel and firing off fairly regular epistles to Rome. In those months, as I recall, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was as likely a target as the Pope.<br />
The little office is now gone. A wall was removed, a seven foot window was placed over a screened opening, an assortment of chairs, tea-chest coffee tables, books, maps, prints, posters, exercise machines and a filing cabinet was moved in, and now I have, as far as I'm concerned, as fine a studio as any writer ever laid claim to. I should add that my dart board also was installed, rising from the basement. The Little Woman talks of the space becoming employable all year round, in the cold Kootenay winter as well as the warm Kootenay summer.<br />
An attractive idea. Years ago, a previous owner had her aged father living with the family. The porch, an L-shaped institution bordering the north and west sides of the house - with the longest reach on the west - was glassed in, with wonderfully big panes, so the old gentleman could spend as much time as he wanted in solitude, gazing down on the waters of the West Arm of the Kootenay River and as much town as he could see between the arms of the Norway maples. I never met this meditative old gentleman, but I know his daughter well because I taught the old fellow's grandson. The daughter, incidentally, has read <i>Gone With the Wind</i>, and reacted quite wonderfully when I told her I had begun work on an opera.<br />
And the thought of opera brings us back to New York, does it not? Edith Wharton's <i>Age of Innocence </i>- a book which has nothing whatsoever to do with the longest word in the title - opens most engagingly with a description of a scene in the old New York opera house, and reminds us that New York is as synonymous with opera as it is with the Statue of Liberty.<br />
<br />
* * * * *<br />
<br />
Well, how long has it been since I typed the last? The Muse appears to be making a deliberate point of requiring this chapter to wait on current events, a sort of symbolic index of how most of this book, so far, has gone as well, and He's had me shut down for weeks. All three books currently taking their turns have had no turns at all. Every writer has his dry times, just like Mother Nature, but a writer, having an intellect, always asks why, especially when the dry weeks begin to become dry months.<br />
Again, New York has been a factor. I cannot be surprised for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the Lord declaring to me, about the time the literary shutdown was beginning, that I was to put my meditative and intercessory mind on New York "for a year".<br />
Opera, the Statue of Liberty, and publishing. Since I began writing about two of the most inspiring authors of my youth, Roderick Haig Brown and Arthur Mayse, I have discovered that they both had the same New York publisher, William Morrow. I'd know about Morrow since I read Haig Brown's daughter's book about her parents, but I had not remembered - if in fact I ever noted - that they were also the people, along with Curtis, of the <i>Saturday Evening Post</i>, who brought out Mayse's <i>Perilous Passage</i>. Did Mayse, who knew Haig Brown, have the same Seattle agent as the latter, or did he make his own contacts with New York when he was fiction editor, in Toronto, of <i>Maclean's Magazine? </i>Perhaps I'll find out one of these days from Susan Mayse, the daughter and author in her own right, with whom I've already had an exchange of letters.<br />
Susan thanked me for agreeing with her that Perilous Passage is her father's best book, but she could not help me with my search for my own copy, in fact not even for one I could borrow, just to get the names right! Her own copy, she said, was in Norwegian.<br />
Enter the Internet, wherein our own municipal library came on line just as I was about to begin my search for Avery Dulles' books. Success with him, as I have mentioned - and now his excellent 1955 introduction to metaphysics is on its way here from a used book dealer - and again success with Mayse. The Vancouver Public Library had all his books, including the one I had been trying to run down for twenty years! (I had tried the Open Shelf provincial lending system in the late 'Seventies, when I'd committed to my novel draughts that Michael Thurman had made a film version.) I was incredibly delighted, at a depth not entirely disconnected from the centre of my spiritual life, and filled out the form for borrowers with a hand that wrote with an uncanny mixture of relief and anxiety.<br />
The anxiety was not unfounded. I had actually requested two books from my teenage years, the other being Stephen W. Meader's Red Horse Hill, and the latter came within the week, but Perilous Passage, said Vancouver, was not for loan. It was held as a reference work.<br />
Thump. Even as I had filled out the request form, I had wondered if everything seemed too good to be true. Regularly, a nagging voice has tried to tell me that a romantic adventure serialized in and old "slick" magazine could only be a sentimental distraction for a mature theologian, especially a theologian whose everyday concern was the dark night of the soul and the spiritual marriage of the mystics.<br />
I was disappointed, but not undaunted. And the spirit of determination seemed to continue to come from the same deepest wells of concern. To the local staff I insisted that I needed the book - for one thing, I had already begun to discuss it with the Archbishop of San Francisco, a man about to revive the diocesan newspaper, perhaps therefore a prospective publisher - could the Vancouver library photocopy the book for me? Or set up a line of communication so I could ask all sorts of questions? The fact that the book could not come by mail was only disappointing in part: the Vancouver library obviously valued it if it was being held as a reference and successors were justified! <i>Perilous Passage</i>, in the opinion of the professionals, did run a little deeper than your average serial in a shiny paper magazine.<br />
Not a little of my extreme delight in locating the mere presence of this voice from the past had rubbed off on the staff, but they stayed professionally calm, insisted that I not rush into unnecessary expense or effort, and further stressed that they were sure they could find the book elsewhere in the country, and , furthermore, available.<br />
They were right. A few weeks later, another phone call. <i>Perilous Passage</i> had arrived, all the way from Lakehead University, in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Coincidentally, this was the institution whereat my second daughter had taken her librarian's certificate. I was mightily delighted, had plenty of words with which to express my happiness with the library system that had worked, and yet my joy also went much further than words could express. The moment was indeed sublime: I was reliving the excitement of my adolescent discovery - it is always good to be returned to the days of our youth - and this was confirmed and augmented by the satisfactions that come with watching Providence work the signs of wisdom and reflection through one's older years. Moreover, where God has spoken once, He will speak again. From all the spirit that had surrounded and fuelled the undertaking of finding the book again, there had to be to this adventure than a single exercise in recollection. The Muse was up to something. There was a pattern taking shape, and having <i>Perilous Passage</i> in my hands again would provide not a few clues to making that pattern out.<br />
<br />
* * * * *<br />
<br />
Finally, today, my own copy. The two or three readings of the days since the book arrived have not filled the Muse's requirement's, that's for sure. The schedule of symbols in Mayse's crisp little work - 247 smallish pages - must have even more significance than I had hoped for, and if I ever had any doubts that it would be an excellent study piece for my literature students they have been swept away, and I am more than intrigued by trying to visualize the scenes through film-makers eyes of my fictional Michael Thurman. This too is more than a mere cinematic exercise for the sake of fiction.<br />
At my wife's museum, there is a photocopy machine. Previously it has served for copies of my first novel, either for chapters sent to the Vatican or for copies used as scripts for our two-voice recording. But now it has served for the 125 sheets that it took to provide the community with its very own copy of this long-last friend. Within a fortnight at least one teenager will be using this copy in an experimental course in English literature, and I have it as a very fundamental and prime source for recollective browsing.<br />
Interesting, how a book - or any other art object, of course - can be as strikingly informative as a human being, or a stunning adventure, when it comes to arriving at a clear grasp of the full significance of some past experience, especially in the often shrouded events of our youth. As I was walking home from the library with <i>Perilous Passage </i>I had a flash of understanding as clear as daylight: one of my earliest assaults on the work ethic had been so right!<br />
In the late spring of 1949, freed up from my winter job of baby-sitting my younger brothers and cooking supper while my mother held down a job at a Woolworth's store, I had donned my best clothes, shined my shoes, and applied at the old Beatty Street offices of the Vancouver Sun for a job as a newspaper delivery boy. I heard nothing out of that building for many weeks and then one day in early August the manager of the sub shack dropped by to tell me I had a job, if I wanted it. He seemed like a nice lad, therefore comforting to ponder as a prospective boss, and he further seemed genuinely disappointed when I said that I could not accept right away as I had planned a trip to my Nana and Grandpop's place at the food of Sechelt Inlet. My determination to have my inlet holiday meant at least a two-week delay in filling the post, and of course the sub-manager had to put a new boy in place as soon as possible. I was genuinely regretful, not only from losing the job, and the money that would have gone with it, but also because he was an older lad who seemed to like me for myself.<br />
My father was even upset that I had turned down the opportunity and I can't say that I blamed him. Although the family finances of the moment had improved enough that my mother no longer had to work so that we could have some basic furniture, they were still lean. And I had already had a wonderful holiday, paid for from the slim family budget, of ten glorious days at the Salvation Army camp on the west shore of Howe Sound, at Hopkins Landing. How well I remember my parent's exchanged looks of concern - over the squeaky finances, of course - when I raised the subject of camp at the supper table, following the announcement at a scout meeting. Ten dollars for ten days, including the Union Steamships fare from Vancouver to Hopkins, was the tariff. It sounds like so little now, but in 1949 it was almost a day's wages out of my father's winter salary as a depot master for the B.C. Electric. He was marking time, waiting for a job in personnel, simply happy, like so many veterans, to have a job and a roof over the head of his family. One of the biggest perks from my mother's quitting work was that I was able to join the school softball team, playing third base. There was no money for a proper glove, and I used an old left-hander's glove - the wrong side for me - that had been my Dad;s in his younger days when he played for a sawmill team. But that was before the War, perhaps before I was born.<br />
Was it the first time I stood up to my Father, on behalf of my own instincts? Thirteen is an adventurous age. Certainly I was not business oriented, as he was inclined to be, and in my own mind I wondered if I were being a bit of a snot, and revenging myself for the previous summer before, when I had, unquestionably, been a genuine little wretch over my mother and my two younger brothers going off to the inlet for a holiday while I had to stay home with my Dad. It was not a little complicated and yet, as I could not escape, there seemed to be a purpose in my intransigence. I <i>had </i>to make this journey, this pilgrimage, to my Nana's place.<br />
The first impressions of children are enormously important. They can never be exaggerated, never underrated. Our Lord Jesus Christ and his Church are most emphatic on this subject, and to disagree, one must indeed have a profound hatred of life. We were all children once, and "<i>unless we become as children</i>" again we shall never enter the kingdom of heaven. Grim words, in their connotations of absolute severity, and yet, if we turn them over in the slow, gentle, marination of genuine reflection, we come to <i>ground zero</i> with the wisdom of what has been said. Children are by no means completely, irretrievably, innocent. Their virtues have not been tested, their perhaps virtually infinite reception of individual gifts from the Holy Spirit have not been honoured by a proportional return. And yet the initial thrust and first fire is there. God cannot betray his own priorities and standards, and all youthful souls, as I remember, are flooded with grace whether they like it or not. Sooner or later, as the day of judgement approaches, they have no choice, short of hell, in acknowledging the instances of such favours. But these stern words are for the wavering, the ungrateful, the unrecollected. Those who have been given the grace for tracing their spiritual lineage - always more important than their natural ancestry - are only too happy to give the credit where it is really due. How could their thinking otherwise give them spiritual maturity?<br />
I had first gone to Porpoise Bay, at the lower, southern, end of Sechelt Inlet in August of 1945, when the collected family wisdom decreed that number one grandson should spend the summer on the Coast. The first half of the trip saw me in Burnaby, at the Central Park house where my father had grown up. and then my Nana came by and took me up to Sechelt and the beach property whereon my new grandfather was building her a cosy little cottage. Later I will list the details of yet another province in far flung empire of my childhood garden of Eden; for now, suffice to say that I loved my weeks there from start to finish - I even helped my new grandfather with some of the nailing - and had been eagerly awaiting a return. But the year-and-a-half on Lasqueti had intervened and the only family or any other jaunt to my mother's mother's new home had come in the summer of 1948, when my Mom and my two younger brothers had gone for a couple of weeks, <i>without me! </i>I'd been scheduled to stay behind, with my Dad.<br />
One could probably write a full novella, at least, about the riot of indignation, self-pity, outrage, sense of injustice, blah blah, and etcetera,. that flowed through my youthful veins and brains at the announcement of this arrangement, and I can vividly remember the mood of hoping and praying, right down to the moment of the <i>other trio</i> getting on the Union Steamship sailing for all those lovely little ports on the Sunshine Coast, including Sechelt, that there would be a change of heart and I would be told I could come aboard too. But, no dice, and I spent two weeks in the city, fishing and biking and roaming about with my buddies in the day, eating supper and chewing the fat with my Dad in the evening. In the golden tranquillity of old age, I perceive that my parents had decided that father and oldest son needed some time together, as it was the beginning of the vacation, and I had just spent the previous six months living with my Aunt Beulah, my father's sister, because our present living accommodations were so small. (In a tiny apartment in my mother's brother's basement.) I had got to go to a better school, thanks to my aunt, and come to the family on weekends, but not I was hone for the summer, and , as I said, spending quality time with my Dad. I have to admit that the pain of not getting back to Sechelt did ease, and I had the further satisfaction of hearing, on Mom and siblings' return, that the youngest brother had worked a certain amount of havoc on Grandpop's tools.<br />
And now, somehow, in the summer of 1949, there was nothing to stop me from making my return to Sechelt, my boyish pilgrimage to Paradise. For all that I was eager - with the aforementioned qualifications - to land a job as a paper boy, I did have some income. I had an allowance, possibly still money left from my salary as cook and babysitter during the winter months of my Mom's working, and more than likely money from babysitting at the next door neighbours'. They were a very nice family, and with a two-storey house they had a den on the main floor with an entire wall of books. My little income paid for my trip to and fro the grandparents' place, and not on the Union Steamship boat, but this time on a rebuilt navy corvette. Standing on the stern, you were closer to the green and white churn of the wake. It was a most satisfying journey, both ways, paid for out of my own independent pocket, and in the middle of it, first in my grandparents' living room, where I fell into the middle of the <i>Post </i>serial, and then in my grandfather's workshop and wood-room out back, where I found <i>every one</i> of the other episodes, emerged the raging, fiery, ultra-west-coast-marine beauty of Arthur Mayse's romantic adventure. My instincts for a solo journey, a pilgrimage, to my grandparents' had proved to be right, and not only right, but right beyond my deepest expectations.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-75089993166501153432016-02-03T15:54:00.000-08:002016-02-04T16:31:28.825-08:00Chapter 11 Since my last chapter, the fall term has well begun, and I have had a kind note from Father Dulles, thanking me for informing him about the use I hope to make of his metaphysics text. In fact the text is already in full employ, and within a week, the class has doubled, from one to two students. My first pupil is in grade ten, the second in grade eight. With the second one joining us, as a result of her mother's growing discontent with the literature programme offered by the provincial department of education, I was reminded keenly of my first and last full metaphysics class, of some thirty students, grade eight thirteen-year-olds, back in the late winter and early spring of 1964, in the Catholic school in Terrace, B.C., in the diocese of Prince George. Teaching later in Nelson, where the school stopped at grade seven, I had taught philosophy not actually as a separate subject, but only as an adjunct to grammar. The extra element added to the normal list of subjects here was in fact the theology of Catholic meditation. This was the result of a different kind of inspiration, and let to startingly more significant results, although the effects of the Terrace experiment were in themselves remarkable and were to send me to the Kootenays with an insight and determination to look for even greater results in the souls of the young.<br />
Indeed, God was no liar, and I found the results, and I would be the most ungrateful man who ever put words to paper if I did not acknowledge that the Church that I came to was, increasingly, step by step, year by year and decade by decade, exposed as a nightmare, and I cannot fulfill my obligations to the grace and will of God without some reference to this disturbing fact. Nor, indeed, is the nightmare done with. For a few years, before he was promoted to archbishop, we had a fairly decent bishop, a man and priest with some sensibility to Rome, and a modicum of respect for the norms of the Faith. But on either side of his reign, our chief shepherds have been far too busy fulfilling Saint Augustine's prophetic warnings - found yearly in the September breviary - against leaders who have no mind for the true wisdom of Christ and the genuine care of their flocks. As a fictionalist, I could happily ignore their follies, and invent a good bishop of my own, with the help of the writings of the saints and examples from other dioceses, but as an autobiographer - a vocation laid upon me by the Lord about the same time as I began the first draught of my first novel - I have to deal with the sad truth. Literature, as we call it, is one thing, with its own Muse, and its own light; history is another thing. To have the whole truth, men must read both. We have in our lives that which was glorious, that which could have been glorious, that which was horrific. Christ had both a John and a Judas, a Peter and a Pilate. In the diocese of Nelson I have found the best of souls - and therefore much bettered my own spirit - and some of the worst. From the time I have been able to create something of what I think is, by the grace of God, as exalting a fiction as can be come upon; from the second I have notes that must, for the record, be included in a grimmer chronicling. The evil that I have encountered could also be used in fiction of course, one way or another, but the Muse has not been content with this employment only, and has always urged me to make mental notes as well for a strict history.<br />
Does it signify anything that I have now changed writing rooms? The long warm summer is over - today is the feast of the Guardian Angels - and a damp, cool, weather system has moved in for at least a few days, although the Kootenays inevitably knows a lovely Indian summer. I no longer gaze at the arm of the lake and the town below, but the eastern half of our back yard. I see the roof of the kitchen, some lawn, two venerable deciduous trees, a lilac and a cherry, and the concrete wall of the garden shed, affectionately know to as as "the bunker". The yard has such a slope up to the lane that these walls used to double as the foundation of a garage floor. Years ago I took out that structure - the side walls of the garage had previously collapsed - and also an adjoining trailer pad, and reclaimed the ground for a garden. Vegetables were the result for almost two decades, but now the earth has been reassigned again and herbs rule the day. Beautiful things, herbs, and there seems to be a growing culture of people returning them to their rightful place in medicine.<br />
Ah. There is indeed a significance to this new view. In my fourth year of enrolling in university, in my second year of law school, I quickly unrolled and embarked upon my own study programme, leaving legal questions entirely for the social sciences, initially, searching for the causes of mental health, in society as well as individuals. I was living in a fraternity house, although not as a member, and the view from my desk in this old building was also from the second floor, as here, and of a garden, although on the west side of the house, rough and not much attended, but still a garden, a patch of green: some lawn and a few shrubs. I was most content: I had the green of Nature without, the vernal, poetic, spiritual spring of new, good, self-chosen somewhat classical texts within. That autumn, of 1956, is a long time ago now, but the circumstances of this room bring it back infallibly. Memory, if we look after her, refreshed herself again and again from analogous occasions, especially for those possessing, whether they are terminologically conscious of it or not, the metaphysical turn of mind.<br />
<br />
* * * * *<br />
<br />
My initial movement into this room was modest. I brought only my typewriter and the simplest of tables that has stood upon, over the summer, on the glassed-in porch. I had in fact wondered about leaving my dart board on the porch, perhaps finding some other useful occupation that would fill in the moments when I wait for the correcting fluid to dry on top of my typing mistakes. But I found that there were no substitutes for the little exercise of darts - they seem also to have a quite profound effect on writer's grist and contemplative recollection - and so in intervals of whiteout, or when I was waiting for a thought to clear, I reassembled my dart course right in this room. A search for a suitable piece of plywood to protect the back of the door from my wandering aim, the application of a few screws, and the poor man's archery yard is back in business.<br />
I've yet to rise to the little pointed rascals today, however, as the correcting fluid moments are taken over for the time being by a further use of the little white-covered brush. On Saturday, while the two ladies of the house worked mightily among rooms, closets, clothes, books, paintings, and other objects, I strove with equal concentration at the piano keyboard, looking for, and finding, some solid methods for fingering studies. It was a very long time ago that I stopped trying to use the Frederick Harris <i>Brown Scale Book</i> for myself or students, but only on Saturday did I take my bottle of whiteout to the fingering numbers for the treble scale, in <i>similar motion,</i> for the key of C major. The time for printing out my own scales, exercises, and studies had not yet arrived, but I think it is appropriate now, with my various guinea pigs, to attempt some employment of the printed scales currently available. I must admit to enjoying using the correction fluid: my history with the <i>Brown Scale Book</i> has been more frustration and confusing than otherwise, and I suspect there are many keyboard enthusiasts who share at least some of my discontent. By now, thanks to the typing slips, I have made alteration up to the scale of B major.<br />
When I take up the minors, if I do, I shall have even more work to do, for this publication, somewhat endorsed, it seems, by the Toronto Conservatory, doesn't seem to think that the natural minor scale is a useful study. Thus exits folk music, not a few hymns, and the more arithmetically sound introduction which is always essential to the peace of mind, self-possession, and autonomy of genuine beginners. I should add, to be fair and accurate, that other fingerings, particularly of the triads, solid and broken, are not at fault, and are indeed, the proof of the pudding that does not seem so well recepied on the other side.<br />
But now I <i>am</i> back to darts, in the failing moments, and having a devil of a time with double thirteen. This state of affairs has been with me since Friday night - it is now Monday afternoon, late, not too long before dinner and my usual writing time, and perhaps it is symbolic of the length of time I've put in with more important frustrations or obligations laid on by the Christian need to practise patience.<br />
I was mentioning the process of initiation into the horrors of the Nelson diocese, over thirty years ago. in part because of the timing of a recent gathering. It was forty years ago, at the same time as I was concentrating on the studies and prayers that would bring me into the Catholic Church, that Wilfrid Emmett Doyle, then an official in the archdiocese of Edmonton, Alberta, was made bishop of this diocese in the Kootenays, in the south-east corner of British Columbia. Doyle was made a bishop - by Pius XII, his last - while I was finally into the spiritual life by the gift of the flight of the spirit, with special notes from the Blessed Virgin Mary. Doyle had not spiritual life whatsoever, as I was six years later to so painfully find out, while I had more of it than any man would dare ask for, even though I was neither priest nor religious, and I would continue to have even more blessings dumped upon me, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the horrific conditions I was advised to endure while remaining in Nelson. The poor man did, however, have a kind of public life, and canonical responsibilities, and these were recently "celebrated" in a mass and banquet organized by the present bishop of Nelson, also from Albert, and in his own way similarly foolish, on the occasion of Doyle's fortieth anniversary of consecration.<br />
I think it fair to say that the only true honours that could be given out associated with Bishop Doyle's tenure were to good souls who chose to endure him, and went on serving the whole truth of Christ's Church as best they could within his canonical domain. The present bishop, had he any discernment, would have know this, and left well enough alone. But he has odd concepts of community, truth, and faith, and fancies himself as a leader of missions and retreats. The first and probably last time I was moved to engage him in a conversation he recoiled, as if slapped violently, at my use of the term <i>mortal sin.</i> When clergy, especially episcopal clergy, are not comfortable with this phrase, and do not use it warningly in their sermons, can there be any other reason other than they are in it?<br />
None of our community, of course, had anything to do with this hypocritical celebration, but as always, as we began noticing many years ago, whenever the parish or the diocese threw some questionably oriented clambake with which we could not honestly have anything to do, the Holy Spirit infallibly bestowed some real, special, concomitant grace upon ourselves. Thus it was no mere coincidence that a long week after the Doyle affair two of the foremost angels in my <i>flock</i>, the dear souls of genuine spiritual perfection, should be spending an entire day to establish this most comfortable and comforting room on<i> my</i> behalf. Poor Emmett has had his banquet, but now he is gone back to Edmonton, to where he was banished in 1990 by his successor, the fourth bishop of Nelson, Peter Mallon, and I remain, still secure in the <i>place of my purgation</i>, as Saint John of the Cross calls it, to whence I was called from the time Emmett was ordained. Mallon had been advised, by the most stable priest in the diocese, once a missionary in Africa, and a Dutchman, that he, Mallon, would not be the real bishop as long as Doyle was allowed to function here in any capacity.<br />
Poor Emmett? Perhaps Evil Emmett would be a more accurate title, but he is an old man now, and the last time I saw him a dark little gnome in a corner of a gathering of parishes come together for the sacrament of confirmation, the present bishop having brought him back to help with reducing the number of such get togethers. One of my little students was receiving the sacrament; to her horror she got Doyle rather than the present bishop, but the Holy Spirit came with His infallible light and protected her from the darkness of a pervert and protector of perverts. Such is the way of God's power in His Church, that through the sacraments the faithful are strengthened and nourished in spite of the weakness and even total sinfulness of the ministers of those sacraments.<br />
Nonetheless, one can still wonder at the wisdom of the committee that nominates candidates from among the nation's clergy. If Doyle was the best man for the job in 1958 the country's priests must have been, at that time, a sorry lot. Or is the committee stocked with perverts? Here and there, serious allegations against our seminaries have been made, and of late all the young priests I have come across would profit from a regular series of floggings or the spiritual equivalent. Knowledge of the classics of the spiritual life is non-existent, and mortal sin, as I have mentioned, is no longer mentioned, and I pity the imbecile who thinks these are exaggerations.<br />
There are, of course, some good priests, and even a few genuinely pious and learned bishops, and I think not only in my fiction. God and his power are realities, and the world and the Church cannot be left entirely without some of the real thing. But the folly is too abundant to be ignored, and nowhere can it be worse than in my own country.<br />
Yet, at the moment, any solution seems to be in the hands of others. The Vatican exists for the sake of discipline, for correction and purification. The layman, especially the contemplative layman, can do little more than stick to the helm of his version of Noah's ark. And this room seems so much like just that sort of sanctuary. Good memories, good books, the chance and the fortune and the grace to ruminate over both, spiced and salted and illuminated by the events of the day and the opportunity to teach the innocent and the spiritual what more could a man ask? Let the dead give false comfort to the dead. Those who know the peace, joy, and light and strength, of a true cell, a true monastery, a true spiritual community, will ultimately see their concerns addressed, no matter how dark, cold, and full of lies some of their attendant circumstances seem to be.<br />
By the way, I did get that double thirteen, as I was pondering my thoughts on priests who refuse to mention mortal sin. And thirteen years ago. this morning, brought up some interesting points in my journal, having to do with Jesuits and bullies, among other things.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-51043702498109807982016-02-02T15:22:00.001-08:002016-02-02T15:22:33.299-08:00Chapter 12 It is now some six weeks since this room gained a new practitioner, and some quite nice things have been accomplished within it. Two chapters of fiction in two different books, and some letters, a pair to the Vatican and a third of some length to a professor of English and philosophy at an American college, a woman, who has written - for me at least - a very useful study of Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh, her husband, and as the new book points out so thoroughly, her editor to a degree never quite so thoroughly documented before. As with myself, Marianne Walker never read <i>Gone With The Wind</i> until well on in her professional career and at that she only took it up at first - after being asked to give a talk on the book - because she learned that John Marsh came from Kentucky, the state which was now her home. From the youngest and last surviving of John's siblings she had access to a box of letters no one outside the family had ever seen, and the rest is the history of the solving of a mystery. Her book was published in 1993, some two years before I took up Margaret Mitchell's novel for my own final reading, and yet in the circumstances of all this there is that kind of coincidence dear to the heart of those who pretty much leave the active life for the contemplative. Mrs. Walker's year of adventurous discovery was 1985, the year in which, because of my mother-on-laws death, I fell into reading, finally, Tolstoi's <i>War and Peace</i>, by all critical parameters the inspirational book of choice for <i>Gone With The Wind.</i><br />
<i> </i>There has also occurred some good and useful reading in this room. A novelist always reads, and as I tap along I recall reading Evelyn Waugh's <i>Ninety Two Days</i> as a companion piece and inspiration to the last many chapters of my first book, but that was dungeon reading, the researches of the basement study which, although not inconsiderable, as a man must carry his essential cell within, was not quite the same as the constant opportunity to browse the shelves in this room, all one hundred and sixty four feet of them. I do use other libraries, as my references to the Open Shelf and the Internet have explained, and I use them most gratefully, but at the same time I have to confess to the indescribable value of the hundreds of books in this study, and I think I am still getting used to the leisure of browsing they not only provide, but even insist upon.<br />
<i> </i>In fact, as I started up my trio of letters, I heard the Muse say quite clearly that in this room I could virtually make no mistakes. This is a very nice sort of assurance when one is about to rebuke a Pope, especially a naturally formidable Pope, and yet it only seemed proportionate to the quality of the texts in the room, and the genius of their chief gatherer and librarian, my wife. Nor is it the only room of books, although it has the most books, for virtually every room in our house has shelves of books, and the bathroom always carries at least one significant volume for recollective browsing. At the moment, Archbishop Alban Goodier's <i>Life of Christ</i>. Not quite John of the Cross, but a reputable work nonetheless, and full of wonderful memories in my reading. The resurrected Christ on the beach, Jesus and Magdelene, Jesus and the Pharisees; incidents all told with enormous insight. The living room has many books - theology, literature, texts on herbs and natural healing; the housekeeper's room is full of books on all these subjects; the kitchen has all manner of cookbooks, the dining room is full of music, and the master bedroom contains shelves of theology and shelves of those altogether magical masterpieces, the classics of juvenile fiction. Juveniles they may be called, but pity the adult who never takes they up again, at least from time to time. "<i>Unless you become as a child</i> . . ." seems to me to be a pretty serious admonition.<br />
But I forget something on my list of the accomplishments of this lovely room. Sunday a week ago, quite unable to do otherwise, I rattled off forty lines of poetry. "And then there were so many, many books" Five lovely feet of poetry; iambic pentameter, the stuff of English rhythmic thinking made great and unforgettable by William Shakespeare, and ever after, I suppose, the challenge and standard of those who would essay to write poetry in a form both narrative and dramatic. It all came together most swishingly, hopefully a final form, a final beginning on something I have been on and off with for many years. On behalf of my Beloved I had written a lyric or two, especially in the Genesis of our affections, but the big poem had to be a sleeper, not totally unrelated to the travails of Milton in his speculations in and around <i>Paradise Lost</i>, and the day of its manifestation could only be akin to several other dates of no mean significance. And so it landed, on one November 8, in this room. November is late in the fall, early in the winter; it was probably in November that I was swept one Saturday morning into the womb of the Virgin, reborn as it were in an ecstasy, taken into the flight of the spirit, as Saint John of the Cross calls it, while I was actually meditating on the person of my wife-to-be. That was exactly forty years ago, 1958. Pius XII, that magnificent man, was dying. John XXIII had yet to be elected, but since the summer I had been praying, and "offering up" as I had learned from Catholic pamphlets, my trials for the change of the Mass from the Latin to the vernacular. In my very few months of exposure to the Catholic Mass, that mightiest of liturgies, I had come to realize that it was, simply. the most useful operation I had ever seen, I was furious at every agency I could think of that seemed to have screened this - now- incontrovertible fact from my young sensibilities, and as someone destined, I had every confidence, to soon pen the <i>Great Canadian Novel</i>, I wanted any of my passages referring to the Mass to be in English!<br />
To many, this will sound awfully brash, but that was exactly how I thought in those early days with the Church and sometimes, moreover, I wondered if it were simply not part of the deal that the Lord had made with me as I agreed to take on - or, more honestly, give in to my need for - the Faith.<br />
And then, in January of 1959, it was announced that Angelo Roncalli, one of the ultimate father figures of all time, had summoned the Church to the Second Vatican Council, and the revamping of the liturgy was on its way. God's refusal to allow my high school mind to excel in Latin finally had a redeeming meaning for me. (I had not yet heard of Jean Vianney's difficulties with the language a hundred years earlier.) English would triumph where, by the end of Shakespeare's life, England had become the mortal enemy.<br />
And speaking of the Bard, and his cementing of iambic pentameter on our cultural sensibilities, I should mention one other accomplishment worked in recent days my Muse of this room. I just might have begun the final version of the long narrative poem I began work on at this time of the year, the month of the dead, in 1972. Our house had become, irretrievably, a genuine domestic monastery. Marianne had moved in; all other boarders had left; I had given up trying to find a publisher for the fourth draught of <i>The Cruise of the Ballerina</i>; there was an awful lot of conversation and activity - and spiritual <i>passivity </i>- that had to do with prayer and progress into the <i>Seventh Mansion</i>; I did keep puttering at prose, as the family connected with the young hero of the yacht novel continued to grow, but I was most emphatically inspired to start up a poem that would also serve some biographical purpose, and I had an awfully good time doing it. And why not? I was focusing, from the starting gun, on one of the greatest souls of our time, my own wife, and trying to set down what she had meant to my adult existence, albeit with the hours of inexperienced youth, yet within the context of friends, a university campus, and the burgeoning cultural life of a rising city.<br />
I went on for some dozen of lines, which have since been buries in my files, and then I stopped that first version. From time to time since, I have taken it up again, the longest outburst occurring back in 1992, after I had reconnected with a childhood friend who was <i>the</i> integral element, after God Himself, in my first experience of the dark night, but I suspect that the unique matching of universal with particular, that is always the struggle for the artist, has only come to fruition in this room.<br />
I think that my wife has had a certain degree of conviction that something like this would be the case. She has not been especially aware of the poem, particularly as I've been without a creative thought for it for several months - there was one glimmer of a line in September - but she has been very much aware that it was time to move me out of the usual quarters, mostly for the past dozen years the basement, but if not there, then a corner in a room much in demand for other functions, and only partially mine.<br />
Yet this biography was begun - after the pen sketching aboard my living room corner throne - in this room, on this typewriter. But there was a table of many purposes, not this desk, and the room was subject to a variety of uses. It was not the thinker's sanctuary, the poet's lair, and I did not feel, as now, so habitually the lurking omnipresence of the shelves of my scribbling peers. A very fine room, yes, and I was content with how it was used, but it was plainly not then a room for poetry, and now it might be just <i>the</i> room. Certainly the poetry came along Sunday morning a week ago, some forty interesting lines of it, roaring up out of that chaos and sense of expanding futility that lets a writer know he must quickly get to work on something, and please God, what is it? And I found myself phrasing its speech in the direction of my Beloved. (This was a device that had worked very well for the last thirty years of journals.) I just happened to be sitting in the one chair of the room that is not my desk chair, and suddenly whatever book I was reading was not enough to keep me occupied. I found the long black notebook with the previous hopeful scrawls and was swiftly at it, and was not released from the tender claws of the great bird of the sky until I'd sketched, as I say, forty lines. For me, that's a lot of poetry at one sitting.<br />
It seemed to be the seal of something, and at the age of sixty-two, one is allowed to hope that the various somethings that come along have a certain final perfection to them. I've known the Muse for a long time, even in bits and pieces before the autumn of 1953, when I began the first draught of the yacht novel and ran into the writer's light and spirit and remarkably new - and eternal - sense of self-worth, but much of the time He's been a Muse of sketches and practise runs, pretty much the same fellow that spirits actors through the working days prior to public performance, or sparks up students in their first approaches to a musical instrument. It's the same Muse, the same source of inspiration without which - of Whom - there would be neither beginning nor middle of any genuinely artistic process, but His role at the end, the final stages is somewhat different. In the beginning, mistakes were not only as permissible as they were predictable, they were probably even necessary.<br />
This has something to do with the good old Aristotelian maxim about the whole being the sum of the parts. A beginning student, a beginning artist, is probably quite good with a part or two. Beginning little pianists, unless their abilities are interfered with by a faulty programme of studies, are usually good with rhythm. After all, they have been walking for five years or so, and at the same age, running for at least three. The beginning novelist in myself, having been able to articulate nimbly for at least a dozen years - my father and my uncles were sure I'd make a great lawyer - had no trouble whatsoever thinking of dialogue. It seemed to come as easily as talking, so much so that my internal sections of the Puritan and working class ethic made me wonder if indeed writing was actually honest labour! I was having such a good time, and never had I felt more proud of myself.<br />
The euphoria was balanced, of course, by the difficulty of good descriptive passages, whether of character, scene setting, or action; and even more humbling was the confrontation with my own dearth of language when it came to providing a philosophical or moral observation. A few months earlier, as I pondered my future after high school, and actually did come to a number of useful realizations - by the help of the Holy Spirit I hardly had a name for - I also made the eternally regrettable mistake of deciding that I was natively smarter than Aristotle, and while I would borrow some of his terms, I wouldn't actually get down to the honest labour of reading him, at least not for some time. An utterly moronic decision, of course, but nicely punished by Providence as soon as I tried to set mind and fingers to the keys of a typewriter aimed at producing a novel I had hopes of any moderately intelligent person wanting to read.<br />
Neither should I try to claim that the dialogue was good dialogue. (I have just been reading, by way of contrast, the opening chapters of Robertson Davies' <i>Mixture of Frailties</i>.) But it was dialogue that poured out of me, for better or for worse, and the vehemence of the operation, and the light of the Muse that came with it, told me that I was a writer in such a way that no one left to the history of the universe could argue me out of my basic confidence. And it is dialogue that makes the characters of a novel. just as much, although over a more leisurely context, as it makes the characters of a play. As the Lord said, a man is known by what comes out of him. And a psychotherapist would say that a man comes to know himself by what he comes to utter, finally, under the circumstances most favourable to him. My dear old back bedroom; an ancient but working typewriter on a desk; a door I could close against the world and the rest of the house; my confidence that I had my first year university courses under control, (insofar as I had any interest in mastering them), and my lively and educational participation in the campus journal, (three editions a week meant a lot of participation); and even a tiny bit of boredom - or was that a lot of boredom? - with the idea of spending all this time and money at a university and <i>not</i> using some of it to get cracking on a novel, got me rolling.<br />
And in the rolling, I realized another dimension of myself. In fact a most fundamental dimension: now I knew why I existed, why God had made me. I had understood this to no small degree eighteen months earlier, when the Muse came crashing through my puzzled reading of Hemingway and left me stretched out as near like a corpse as I had yet to be - with one exception, years earlier, back on Lasueti Island - but now, in the steady rain of a Vancouver autumn, on a Sunday afternoon when I had not, as usual, darkened the doors of a place of worship, the Muse was honouring His bets.<br />
I've no doubt covered this scene before, but, like the circumstances of natural birth, high school graduation, falling in love, a first job, and so forth, its key elements require - as well as they bear - analysis again and again. At any point where they have a status of wayside markers in the spiritual journey they are, where sacraments also exist, as significant as the sacraments themselves, for no sacrament ever created salvation or perfection without a disposition, without acts of will that rose to the opportunities to do good and avoid temptation. In a soul geared from infancy for the spiritual life these events are intensely lightsome, so much so that the soul cries out that it has done nothing for itself, as all has been accomplished by the manifest Light of the omnipotent God!<br />
Well, I wasn't omnipotent, but the onslaught of dialogue, mediocre though it might have seemed from the imagination of an all-but-eighteen-year-old, made me feel enormously powerful. The writer had been conceived, months earlier; now he was born. And I knew it. There was no shaking my confidence. The Muse was with me, and my life from henceforth would centre around keeping that companionship, simply because I could not recall any other experience that had made me feel better about myself.<br />
Forty-five years later, in another back bedroom that is no longer a bedroom - except when guests need a place to sleep - those two pages of poetry, which I probably should not call mediocre or apprentice-like, also made me feel very good about myself. And perhaps even better about the room. Is it possible to fall in love with a room? Perhaps not, speaking strictly. But certainly one can love the spirit of a room, especially the spirit of this room. The Holy Ghost is making a profound point, probably several profound points. Possibly I should break off now and go work on a different book so I leave myself plenty of time to think over all those points.<br />
But one last item. Yesterday I gave, for the first time to an adult, a lesson in my latest discoveries in keyboard pedagogy. He was the perfect student, catching on quickly. His wife runs a small Montessori pre-school and he has been an accomplished swimming instructor, a sometime philosophy student, and an amateur blues guitarist. We had a great time together, and he learned, irretrievably I think, that music, as Aristotle said so long ago, is a branch of mathematics.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-25934681951186133842016-02-01T17:38:00.002-08:002016-02-01T17:38:50.027-08:00Chapter 13 Although it was through Hemingway's <i>Farewell to Arms </i>that I realized I was to be a novelist, I did not actually study his style and his characters until I was twenty, and attending my first - and only - creative writing class, in summer school while I was working the late afternoon shift as a reporter for the <i>Vancouver Sun</i>. My first model among authors was Somerset Maugham, and I'm sure that I chose him, among other reasons, because I found him easier to understand that I found, at that point, Hemingway.<br />
Maugham seemed very sophisticated, well-read, and much travelled. I was a college freshman, and although I read all the time, I knew there were thousands of books I'd not even heard of, let alone studied, and my travelling had so far been restricted entirely to Canada. Opposites, they say, sometimes attract. But there were familiarities that made him accessible. His culture was British, which was pretty much the flavour of my education so far, and he further drew me along in the comfort of my formation by seeming to reflect an attitude reminiscent of my favourite English teacher. Also, he seemed unabashedly <i>modern,</i> and I was definitely bent on holding back the classics as long as I could.<br />
But I think the single most important reason - and I knew it at the time - was that he was represented in my first and second year English courses in a rather minor way, so that I did not really have to account for my thoughts on him to my professors. Maugham was mine, and mine alone, and I took great satisfaction, in fact a kind of sanctuary, in this independent position. I enjoyed Dickens' <i>Great Expectations</i>, I quite loved Bernard Shaw's <i>Saint Joan</i>, and , under pressure, dutifully wrote the requisite essays - with no distinction whatsoever - and met all exam requirements, as always throughout my previous school years, but Maugham I could treasure in the secret recesses of my bosom, where the established arbiters of learning would have no access until the day when the successful author would cough up his mentors and his opinions on them. I don't think I felt particularly rebellious, or that courses should be changed - though I was no fan at all of John Millington Synge - I was simply very happy with my own private island of exploration.<br />
Nor did I try to write like Maugham. For one thing, our childhoods - going by <i>Of Human Bondage</i> - were poles apart, and for another, I was always much affected by my native landscape, which he had not touched upon at all. Moreover, while Maugham might not be as classic as Shakespeare or Jane Austen, he was definitely more literary and less of a <i>formula</i> writer than I initially intended myself to be. That I would one day write seriously, in fact very seriously indeed, I never doubted, but first, I was convinced, I had to succeed as someone who could whip off a <i>mainstream </i>romantic adventure. Half-a-dozen short stories and serial or two in the <i>Saturday Evening Post</i>: that was my goal for my first two years, and I could see nothing wrong with it. (By the middle 'Fifties, moreover, I don't think my favourite magazine was publishing Maugham anymore, if in fact the <i>Post </i>had done so in earlier days.)<br />
I also hoped to make some money out of my attempts at commercial writing, but I was not really willing to put into that goal the effort that it actually took. Somehow, I managed to acquire just enough inspiration for a bit of a plot, and a character or two, but never enough for the real labour of crafting even a formula tale. Occasionally I was made aware, by trying a few times over, just how difficult it could be to get a genuinely solid first sentence. Sometimes I was bemused by this fact of the trade, at other times I think I knew the day would eventually come when I really would know how to do it. And I'm also pretty sure that no matter how self-satisfied and grateful for the identity my clattering keys made me feel, I knew that I would have had to live and read a great deal more in order to have the words roll off as adroit and significant as I hoped they would eventually be.<br />
So, as I say, the long shelf I would have to read along the lines of my own choosing started with Maugham. But even that is a<i> more or less </i>in the realm of self-recollection, qualified, now that I think of it, by recalling that I took up a volume of de Maupassant's short fiction not long after the realization, at sixteen, that I was to be a novelist - Time for some<i> serious </i>reading, I told myself, with my new knowledge warm in my breast - and also fell quite in love with John Buchan, some of whose books stood on the shelves of my high school library. Now de Maupassant, not being a penner of very happy tales, I put away. My brief encounter gave me a certain air, for sixteen, of sophistication, but I think that even at that youthful age I had more faith than he, poor lad, had ever come across by the time he wrote what I had read. Buchan, on the other hand, while he did not like Arthur Mayse and Zane Grey write about my favourite and very own landscapes, nonetheless got out of his own woods and fells and shorelines certain of the most delightful elements that I had known in mine. And Buchan, the son of a minister, had faith.<br />
I also tried James Joyce, as I may have mentioned, reading all of <i>Portrait of an Artist</i>, and he too I put away as someone who, leaving the faith of his childhood, was not to be trusted. And, without being judgmental, I simply did not like the episode with the prostitute. Compared to the sparkle of the chastity - and the drama of the treat to chastity - between the romantic principals of <i>Perilous Passage.</i> Stephen Daedelus' commercial affair was the ultimate in drab. I don't think I was influenced, either, by the concurrent reading of John Ciardi's translation of Dante's <i>Purgatorio.</i> I think, at that point, I realized that I preferred my epics in prose rather than poetry, and in terms of rolling around in another man's agonies in order to learn the wages of grave sin I had already been through Zane Grey's study of the guilt of Stephen Latch in <i>The Lost Wagon Train</i>, at age ten or so.<br />
But I got an immense pleasure out of buying these books, one misty autumn morning, in the old campus bookstore, along with two or three others, the titles of which I do not recall. Perhaps the short stories of Maugham were in the group, perhaps a copy of Huxley's <i>Brave New World</i> which I did not read until the following summer when I was in army camp. The actual titles and authors probably do not matter too much; the point is, I was investing money in a sample of the writers that a student writer had to take on to some degree, and I was enormously excited to be starting my own library.<br />
One title that I'm quite sure I did not purchase that adventurous morning was Maugham's <i>Razor's</i> <i>Edge</i>, because it was not until my second summer at the Picton, Ontariok anti-aircraft base that I was reading that book. Moreover, I should probably add a word of doubt as to my own memory specifics: it could be that the big buy-up came later than October, not as I was starting up my novel, but after I had somewhat exhausted my own store of ideas. A fog sweeping over the Point Grey campus has been known to occur at any time during the fall and winter months.<br />
Did I, indeed, actually buy <i>The Razor's Edge</i>? One of the things God had intimated to me in the mentally eventful months before I actually found myself at university was that the friends I would meet over the years there - and indeed elsewhere and forever - would recommend and lend books to me. In my high school days such was not the case; my omnivorous and constant appetite fed on the shelves of the school and public libraries, and also from the old favourites in the home stock.<br />
I that first year of college, I pretty well filled up on twentieth-century authors. Orwell's <i>Animal Farm</i> and <i>1984</i> both went down in the first summer at gunnery school. A friend there, I suspect, for one of my barrack-mates, the son of a Liberal M.P., bound for a legal career so he said then, was as regular a reader as myself and I know I borrowed freely from his trunk. He returned for a second year - not everyone did - and it is not impossible <i>The Razor's Edge</i> came from him. Given the effect it was to have on me, it was one of the most important of the titles-to-be-borrowed God might have had in mind.<br />
Good old second-year English, at least in those years at UBC, but probably still in most institutions, was, of course, that mighty trundle through the classics of the language, starting with something like <i>The Sea King's Burial </i>and carrying on through that other Geoffrey - Chaucer - and Shakespeare, right unto the very formidable feminine intellect of Jane Austen. When you think about it, you wonder how you got through it all and still had time to breathe, let alone eat, drink, converse with your friends and yet still have time for an original creative thought. There is an enormous amount of thought in all that writing, and underneath it, an even more enormous amount of history. For the true scholar, of course, a veritable swampful of material for research and consideration, and for the purposes of clearly digesting a particle or two, the essay form was quite in order. To a degree, the sheer volume is a kind of comfort: there is too much to be mastered in a short few years; English literature will be there for the rest of your life, especially when in your heart of hearts you do feel the call to become, eventually, a thoroughly serious author, the sort of thinking and writing man who will deal with all the big questions, and therefore you have every right, as someone trying to learn the business of creation, as distinct from simply learning, to avoid taking the actual prescribed work load too seriously.<br />
And yet, as I think I have already said, I had some very fine mental experiences when, for exam purposes, I was trying to grasp Wordsworth's <i>Preface to the Lyrical Ballads</i>, and, after reading H.G.Wells <i>Tono Bungay</i> on the insistence of - and loan from - my best friend of that year - also a considerable mentor - I was surprisingly delighted with the aforementioned <i>Pride and Prejudice.</i> And I should probably also confess, if I have not done so already, that in my studying for the Christmas exams I had really swatted up the plot in <i>Hamlet</i>, scene by scene, with a great sheaf of notes and thus, for me did rather well, pulling off a bare first class. To a degree, I enjoyed the process, proving to myself, I suppose, that I could be a genuine academic if I wanted to, but at the same time I sensed the atmosphere of the work ethic, the pursuit of marks for marks' sake, and I could not believe that these were the best reasons for my being at the university.<br />
I really don't know why I expected that Jane Austen's prose should be boring, or difficult, or irrelevant to modern sensibilities. Was it because I'd spent the year either writing for the <i>Ubyssey </i>sports page or, for the most part, struggling with what I thought of as standards for slick fiction? My reading was almost invariably more thoughtful than my writing, and could it be said that Austen was any less interesting than Maugham or Dickens or Nicholas Montserrat? I'd always love a good romance, moreover, and I'd thoroughly enjoyed the Greer Garson/Laurence Olivier movie version that the Varsity film club brought in every year. (Much better entertainment, I thought, took, than Olivier's Freudian <i>Hamlet</i>.)<br />
Perhaps - in fact, probably - the initial distaste for <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> was a little bit of the devil of contradiction that was to regularly begin to dog my journey toward a genuinely adult appreciation of culture and learning. I was simply faced with the temptation, which comes to every free intellect sooner or later, to avoid the very sublimity that is the most good for me. There is a possibility of a nobler cause, although I will not insist on it functioning as absolutely at that point in my life as it was to do later: I might have been, somewhat, carrying the problems of other students, especially those not confident in the knowledge that they were bound to the intellectual life or the craft of writing.<br />
And then there is one other possible significance: never again was I to be examined on a novel listed withing a university course as a university student. My days of an ordinary relationship with the liberal arts were over, even if I was as ignorant as I was as to what form of study lay ahead of me.<br />
When I realized what a delightful book had actually been assigned by the English department, I was sorry that I had left the study of it to a time so close to exams. I had to read in a hurry, at a forced pace, and could not give <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> the leisure it deserved, nor the leisure I, as a storyteller myself, needed to apply to the study of Miss Austen's genius.But I did realize that I could find a great pleasure in such a classic, such an <i>old</i> book, and if so there, then likewise elsewhere. Education had succeeded.<br />
On the other hand, I was grateful that I was long schooled in the habit of reading quickly. The more plots we have known in general, the greater mastery - for exam purposes - we can have over one plot in particular. Simply from an appetite for a good yarn I was eminently capable of digesting at the gallop, and part of me was quite content to do just the same as always with the inhabitants of Meryton and its assorted handsome domiciles, but another part of me saw, I think, instant reason for being utterly free from the shackles of reporting my thoughts on Elizabeth and Darcy to a mere academic or her lackey of a graduate student marker. Jane Austen was worthy of a fellow author's attention in the greatest possible arena of the reading public; and one of these fine days, so help me, she would get just that!<br />
It was interesting, I have realized on further reflection, that I should have felt that I had met my match in a woman. Had I felt superior to Maugham? He did trod a little in the gutter, and I had already had conversations with the Heavens that he, for all his stunning ability with words, never seemed to equal, at least not in anything I had read so far. (Yet I must insist forever on the great comfort it gave me to take him for my first conscious example.) For all her complacency in the lesser galaxy of Anglicanism - perhaps weakened from its original strength by Eighteenth Century rationalism - Miss Austen was a noble thinker, and I firmly suspect to me a harbinger of my later intimations of the unquestionable presence in my life of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And even if that is a concept difficult to grasp in the hearts of those poor souls who have yet to know the friendship of the Mother of God, then at least - what a poor phrase - she was a precursor of that incredibly bookwise young lady that Divine Providence, at the moment unknown to me, had picked out as my future spouse.<br />
And yet, as I hazard a quick glance at the text, in order to be accurate over those initial golden moments - chapter nine - I remember the mighty elevation of the mind, the threat to my ambitions for commercial fiction, my journalistic environment - the climate of the <i>Ubyssey</i> was not always according to the standards of the poet's Muse, with its ambitions toward downtown journalism - and my fear that I might have a very long row to hoe before I could sit down with Jane Austen and thrash the living tar out of ninety-nine percent of our fellow novelists. My heaven, but she was magnificent, and, although not with my wife-to-be, I was already, to a degree, falling in love.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-3043501694410277692016-01-31T16:05:00.003-08:002016-01-31T16:05:48.355-08:00Chapter 14 Everybody falls in love, usually more than once, and it seems that far too great a proportion of lovers do little or no thinking about the ratios between the affection of one soul for another and the affection of either or both of those souls for God. Too late, if ever, do we come to the mystic's realization that the most profound of human joys in the love of another human, especially of the opposite gender, is no more than the middle act of the Divine Comedy. God is the cause of love - He it was, after all, who made the hearts in question - and He is also the ultimate goal and union of all our best longings. In our mature wisdom in fact, if we are so fortunate as to acquire it, we come to understand that our human romances are no more than occasions for our romance with the Virgin and the Trinity, the angels and saints, and it is only through understanding this sublime pattern and procedure that we can make the best of our human adventures of the heart. That is, human as they might seem merely to be at first, in our inexperience, and then, as we grow wiser, perhaps more Divine than human, keeping in mind that once we have been purged of sensuality and egoistic pride, we are good instruments for participating in the operations of care for each and all of mankind that come from the heart of a God who, is after all, in His own essential nature nothing but love. The opportunity to learn this fundamental law of life here, as well as in the hereafter, begins with the earliest experiences of childhood - "<i></i><i>Suffer the little children to come unto M</i>e." - but inadequate formation can obscure this reality. God is ever and everywhere teaching, but we are slow and unwilling to learn. Or, as I said, not correctly instructed.<br />
Thus the ravages of purgatory, for the saved but imperfect, because we must know how to love, and be loved by, perfectly, every soul in Heaven. There is no passing through the pearly gates for those who fail at love, that is, are still lacking the fullness of charity and wisdom in every corner of every faculty.<br />
Man, in his foolishness, in the habitual condition of what, in his fallen nature, he calls his instincts, rebels radically at such a contractual stipulation. The terms are too high, nobody can be both perfectly perfect and perfectly natural; a God who loves cannot possibly expect us to be so hard on ourselves; people who do wish themselves to know perfection - and actually act on such desires - are only indulging a prideful ambition. And so on and so forth. The world yaps, the flesh complains, the devil alternately whines and bullies. And life is lived at so much lower a level than it was intended to be.<br />
No quantity of merely human romance, of course, can teach us the essentials of perfection. Perfection belongs to God alone, and so jealously does He husband its particulars that claims of perfection that are only human are of all false claims the most severely punished. Yet in any romance reasonably well conducted, especially in a romance where innocence remains a predominant factor, there is much that is analogous to the relationship between a human heart and the Divine one, and many lessons, which if well studies in the beginning that is man and woman, go far to illuminate the end that is man or woman and the Infinite.<br />
Then, when this perfect union is accomplished, between the individual soul and God, there comes a final, totally fulfilled, understanding of what it is to perfectly obey the two great commandments of Christ - the love of God and the love of neighbour - according to their divinely intended destinies. The heavenly perfection of this state is comprehensible only to those who have been given it, in spite of their unworthiness, in this life, and it cannot be explained univocally, as the philosophers say, in words. The science of the mature mystics is not subject to ordinary observation by anyone, just as the experience of the beginners is hardly intelligible even to themselves.The demands of faith are never stronger. Yet the results are readily discernible, even where mere common sense, short of a genuine Christian faith, are the best the observer can call upon. Those who have been to Heaven, as it were, and returned, exhibit an astounding simplicity, and clarity of purpose, as well as an unshakable humility based on the scientific certainty of their experiential knowledge of the ultimate ways of the Way, the Truth, and the Light.<br />
Yet, of course, their journey toward such a lovely state was incapable of avoiding the most indescribable discomforts, trials, mortifications, predicaments of absolute detachments, losses, rejections, abuses, contempts, frustrations, contradictions. Some of these - the lesser part - were provided by man, and the others by God, or by God letting the devil have his hours. The ineffable treasure of the Seventh Mansion is not for the unsteady of will, the sluggish mind, the complacent and unpurged soul. For such a prize, there must be an awful lot of testing, not only at the initial levels of the spiritual life, but also much farther along than even ordinarily learned men might think. Saint Teresa utters the most dire warnings in such a lofty state as the Fifth Mansions, and John of the Cross discusses the refinement of faults even in the final dispositions of the Seventh.<br />
And, as odd as it may seem to those who assume that real religion is all severity - the curse of Calvin and Knox, and any other so-called thinkers illiterate and unimaginative enough to follow them - the experience of those who have come to know the fully matured love of God in this life have the habit of recalling that a good proportion of the rules of Divine love were there to be studied and applied in the first experience of human love. Our Lord, after all, the acknowledged master of lovers, wastes no time with His pupils and proteges, and where He allows and even promotes the heart to open to the light in another soul, has certain elements of Himself to insert into the process. He tries to teach that all genuine love comes from Him, and indeed, must return to Him, and from time to time He fully succeeds, in an earthly life. In the final analysis, in the resolutions of purgatory and hell, He succeeds absolutely, of course; yet we like to think that some men and women can be genuinely sensitive enough, spiritually wise enough, to allow Him to succeed within them in life before ordinary death.<br />
So what is the formula for giving Jesus that freedom? Humility, in the first place. Then gratitude for an adventure that unfolds one day at a time, as Providence may dispose. Without question, a mighty dollop of fear of the Lord, and an equal commodity of the preferential option for innocence and purity.<br />
All of these are infinitely precious, to society as well as to an individual, yet no civilization or culture in the history of mankind has possessed any great abundance of such qualities within that civilization or culture taken in its entirety. They do not come naturally to associations of fallen man, but rather spring up in individuals who then set an example - and a preaching, if they are so ordained - that attracts those who feel any inclination to be lifted out of the mire of self-interest. The apostles and martyrs of the first centuries of Christianity were such individuals, but they were no more than a light in the midst of the general darkness of pagan Rome and a Judaism now failing for lack of prophets, the last of these having been John the Baptist. Their successors, especially in Egypt, were the desert fathers - and mothers and sisters as well, in time - who became the light in the midst of a legalized Christianity and the moronic dominance of the Arian heresy. Then came Benedict and the monks and mendicants of the West, and a leaven and a light that almost succeeded in making these lovely qualities an everlastingly accepted norm, for, in a sense, they almost governed the civilization they had created and inspired for a thousand years; yet the saints of those centuries could never relax against the Devil's puppets, and in the end, in Luther, Henry VIII and so forth, humility, obedience, chastity, were swept under the rug, to the degree that they functioned as a ruling standard, and once again society's only chance of sanity came from the radical holiness and organizational abilities of certain inspired individuals: Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, Pius V. To such a large extent, northern Europe turned into a vast home for the mentally unfit, and its strange form of culture proved its own unique identity by creating the various styles of psychotherapists professions. Northern Europe began its modern history by rejecting the Christian papacy and wound up, in a sense, being ruled by two sons of Abraham, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Both these men were brilliant in their own way, and have had a vast influence on recent social philosophy, but only intellects without a well-rooted obedience could think for a moment that they had any kind of complete description of the nature of man, either singly or together. To abandon Rome is to abandon common sense, scholasticism, and very likely all or most of the most fundamental dispositions of the whole mind.<br />
This may seem like a very long and unnecessary digression, having nothing at all to do with the romantic life of a nineteen-year-old, and for a moment I myself wondered if I were not wandering, but the Muse reminds me, from His lofty perch, that my circular track has certain utility. Philosophers, even very young ones, fall in love within a certain disposition, and novelists as well - they have to watch that they do not try it out just for the sake of the experiences from which stories come - so Providence must do its best to ensure as real an experience as possible, even in these affairs of the heart that are not destined for the binding journey to the altar.<br />
I don't think I'm exaggerating anything in this narrative, although I must admit that it's taken me many years to see to the bottom of it, and that accomplishment might never have come along had I not again turned to a thorough read of a book I first became aware of in the early '70's, Gabrielle Bossis' lovely dialogue with Christ, <i>He and I.</i> It was in that book, not so many days ago, that I saw Him say to the little French actress and contemplative, "<i>There is a little of my Mother in every woman." </i><br />
<i> </i>It is actually Mothers' Day, 1999, as I write this, and the mood of the celebration reminds me to recollect that all men who have had the great fortune to be brought to a perfect relationship with the Virgin Mary - it is She who bids me say such a thing - can easily recall certain aspects of the Divine maternity in their own mothers, and other female relatives, even when those women, by the particular slant of their ethics, were not aware of the omnipresence of the perfect Woman expressed in the wonderful formula, on of the most wonderful in all Catholic theology, "<i>What God is by nature, Mary is</i> <i>by grace.</i>"<i> </i>For those who Mary favours with an invitation to come to the fullness of friendship with her that Catholicism makes possible, she will be at work as early as possible in their lives, using any goodness in any female as a sign and promise of the infinite goodness God has created in her. Later, when the child has grown to the man, and has lived up to the promise the Divine Mother held out for him, he will even create that reflection in other women, sometimes in the most wretched of other women, simply because this is one of the spiritual powers that may come with a divinely instilled perfection.<br />
It goes without saying that this same reflective grace, to be genuine, and beyond suspicion of wrongful intentions, should ordinarily shine equally on men and children.<br />
At the same time, it can also be pointed out that there are always a great many women it cannot seem to affect, simply because they are not spiritually disposed for it. This favour is something bestowed primarily from the power of God, and the human bestower is only a vessel of that power. In its most profound manifestations, moreover, it as a rule cannot happen unless the recipient has the remarkable virtue necessary for its reception, and it will not happen unless there is some good reason according to God's intentions.<br />
And the fact that it happens once does not mean necessarily that it will happen again. Many are called, but few are chosen, very much applies. Or, it may not happen again for a considerable time. Of all vocations, the spiritual life requires the most patience, because of all vocations, it contains the hardest sayings. It has all the vicissitudes of romance, but every one of them much more intensely.<br />
And thus I am returned to the place where I started - with, then, no anticipation of such a digression - in the beginnings of what seemed at the time like a normal affair of the heart. Grace must build on nature, and the skills of grace must build on the skills of nature. Nor was the digression all that digressive. I suspect that most of the elements of the previous paragraphs had a bearing on the human adventure. Even before I went on to university, in the months before I was done with high school, I had been moved to think of giving a sympathetic and appreciative look at socialists and socialism, of which Marx, of course, was no small factor; and in the university academic year that concluded with my romantic adventure, I had been a quite faithful member of Dr. Margaret Ormsby's Medieval History class, History 304, wherein I had heard a great deal about monks and other clerical contributions to the culture of Europe.<br />
Moreover, in that class, I had my first experience of beholding a Roman Catholic priest from up close. He was simply introduced to us as a new member of the History department and the man who would be marking our essays, and he did not stay for more than a few minutes, and said only a few words, but I was left with an indelible impression, both as a curious student and an even more curious novelist-in-the-making. And as he impressed me, so I was later, for at least a short time, radically to have an effect on someone. And this also, I think, was a kind of "first time" experience, for that person. I do not wish to draw too close a parallel between the two events, but there is a similarity, that occurs to me in my efforts to recollect these key details with a full accuracy; I cannot help but wonder if the God who knows every hair of our heads also found - or promoted - an interesting likeness.<br />
Just as I had never thought of myself as being especially interested in priests - my fictional heroes of those days, that is, in my own fiction, were young men of action: athletes, loggers, fishermen - so the young lady that was about to tip me head over heels had, at that point in her life not, it seemed, thought about taking up with a young man who would live out his working days as an intellectual. In the months when I was first getting to know her, she was going out with her high school boyfriend, if I remember correctly, and he, like her, had gone straight to work as soon as he graduated. I think she had broken up with him at least once, then got back together with him, and was not finally calling it quits until the night of our interesting encounter. I had met the boy once or twice in the family home - she was still living with her parents, and would do so until she herself was married - and found him to be a handsome fellow, but because of her older brothers, also still living at home, her most immediate social life was filled with university students, one of whom she would finally decide to be the man for her.<br />
But this happy conclusion was not to be for a few years, and I, in the meantime, was summoned to the noble task of stand-in, or proxy, or understudy. It was to be considerable of a sacrificial role, as I was to learn, which is why the adventure was such a good introduction to, and image of, the spiritual life, and of course, as the Bard said, it is better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all. And a good scholastic philosopher might add that it is not only better, but required, to have lost and lost more than once before finally loving for good, as love is a school much in need of more than one course or one classroom. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-13529690078963407192016-01-30T15:01:00.002-08:002016-01-30T15:01:43.628-08:00Chapter 15 Truth, goodness, beauty, and love; when they come with any degree of proximity toward a genuine norm they come as a surprise. That is, they come this way some of the time. We do have a certain proportion of control over their presence in our lives, or otherwise study, prayer, and right action in their pursuit would be valueless, and yet we also realize that too much calculated effort can take us away from the real thing. My discovery that I was, for a time, lovable by a young woman, was anything but a result of a deliberate search for such an experience.<br />
Well, there <i>had </i>been a certain element of deliberation. Sometime into the new year of 1955, after a lot of thinking, I had asked to a Ubyssey party a girl who had shown up in the north basement of the Brock earlier in the academic year. I had decided that it was time to date, and the girl was attractive and intelligent. (She was later to work in international advertising and was also for a time the road companion of the well-known black female singing and acting artist Diana Ross.) The girl said yes, she would go with me to the party. However, to cut to the chase and preserve all and sundry from unnecessary speculation, I will next say that half-way through the party I realized, with absolutely no chagrin on my part, that her real interest was not in me, but in my best friend, also a member of the university paper, like her, philosophically a socialist, and the young man I had been meditatively prepared to take on as a friend even before I got to the campus. My chum looked a little apprehensive of my opinion half-way through the triumvirate conversation we got into midway through the evening - the girl politely went home with me - but I found myself quite delighted by the turn of events - good grist for a story, it struck me - and an excellent opportunity for practising detachment. What the heck? The pair of them seemed very happy, and I had made the little bridge to their Paradise. Who could ask for a finer honour, at nineteen?<br />
But not too many weeks after this small exercise in self-denial, on a find sunny Friday morning, when for reasons I can't remember I was in possession of my father's car, making me a free agent of my own transportation schedule, my boy-friend invited me to a small gathering at his house, already to some degree my home-away-from-home in the university district, no small favour to someone who lived ten miles away in the East End of Vancouver. For some reason I was not, in the morning, keen to go. Having the car, perhaps, was a symbol of an opportunity to find a grander adventure, or perhaps the wonderfully clear skies of that early spring inspired me to think I was supposed to spend a Friday night conquering some segment of the universe. There might also have been an interesting movie at the Varsity that I'd had my eye on. At any rate, I was fairly sure that I was not joining the party.<br />
Nor did I change my mind throughout the sunny day. I went to a class or two, or perhaps did not go, and did a bit of studying or reading. Friday being that lovely day when no real work went on around the newspaper offices, and then I must have gone for supper either to the campus cafeteria or Dean's Cafe, as it was in those years across the street from where the <i>Ubyssey</i> was printed and I spent so many evenings as a proof-reader and headline author. Then, as I pondered the movie, I was struck with a thundering wave of loneliness, rarely a sentiment of someone like myself, so passionate and satisfied a general reader, and realized that I was predestined - there is no other word for it - to go to the party. To open any other door was to stare into a black and bottomless pit.<br />
Although it was still early in the evening, the little gathering was well underway when I arrived, and came upon my first surprise of the evening, a very pleasant drink made with something I'd never heard of, grenadine. There seemed to be an ample supply, and I happily settled into it. Having left my decision to come until so late, I'd not laid in any contributions of my own and I was grateful for my friend's largess. Probably his new girlfriend, my one shot at a date that year so far, had contributed. It was the spring of the year, or close to it, a low time in students' funds.<br />
I'm not sure if I'd been much of a visitor to that very hospitable home in my first campus year. I must have been a few times, because the second son of the house and I had become friends quite quickly. He it was who offered me a beer at my first newspaper party, a quite unforgettable evening at the old Kerrisdale lawn bowling clubhouse, wherein I had been transfixed by the impromptu performance of a live trio: piano, trumpet, and stand-up bass. The rapture was perhaps not solely from the music alone: the trumpet player came from the interior town where my wife-to-be was raised, and they had performed together in the high school orchestra, she as a singer. But I knew none of that then. I had no idea what to say to anyone so talented, and my new friend, as he was becoming, who had brought the case of beer we was so generously sharing, was like myself born to habitually talk of literature, and it would have been around that time that I would begin my first attempt at a novel.<br />
But certainly in my second year, and then on into the third, the strange and mysterious one full year of law school, I was a most regular visitor, first because the son of the house, then because of a family friend from the days when they had lived in Victoria - the head of the house was an engineer on the CPR steamships - a lad come across the Gulf to attend the university and board with the family. He would act as a broker of sorts in my short-lived romance, and that indicates that he also had become one of the reasons I was there so often to chat, watch television, and late in the evening dine on the sandwiches provided by the lady of the house. In my first university year there was not quite so much of this, because I was still spending quite a lot of my free evenings with my old chums from high school and my neighbourhood.<br />
I don't mean to give the impression that I was a freeloader when it came to booze at parties. The two incidents I have mentioned were exceptions. After that first handout, I acquired the none too difficult skill of asking an upperclassmen to pick up a mickey of rye or a quantity of beer for me, and then at some point learned to brazen out my under twenty-one status at a liquor store or hotel off-sales. The second level probably came after my first year at summer camp in the officers' training programme. Being legal in an army mess goes a long way towards mitigating the fears of an arbitrary decision as to age at which a man can be allowed to buy his own alcohol. The officers' mess in Picton, Ontario also gave more than courage. There I was also given the nightly company of young French-Canadians, and the taste for an occasional Scotch whiskey.<br />
But back to romance, as some might call it. From the perspective of the subsequent years, I think of the adventure more as a lesson in friendship, in the <i>realities</i> of marriage as opposed to the fantasies, and perhaps most significant of all, a further and rather large step toward my growing apprehensions of the spiritual life. (I cannot say "comprehensions" because of course I knew hardly one word of the vocabulary particular to that science, let alone had studies the smallest and most amateur manual relevant to it. Nor does it quality that I was familiar with certain scriptural texts that applied to ethical action. I simply had no idea that <i>prayer and meditation</i> as a way of life were exactly that, a way of life, although I was in reality being introduced to such an ordinary fact, by experience.)<br />
The evening had worn on in complete and leisurely affability. Discussions here, discussions there, and it was quite likely that night that the son of the house had handed me an H.G.Wells novel, <i>Tono</i> <i>Bungay</i>. One of the bits of advice about campus life that God had pumped into me had been to let my student friends advise me on books worth reading, and at that point I had not actually cracked <i>Pride and</i> <i>Prejudice</i>, and perhaps the only satisfying part of my entire exposure to second-year English at that point had been some concentrated study, for the sake of the Christmas exam, on <i>Hamlet</i>. I'd found myself enjoying taking the trouble to memorize the action of every scene, chapter and verse, possibly just to prove to myself that I could master a subject if I really wanted to. The effort was rewarded. As I remember, it earned me my only first class in university English. I don't think I was ever stimulated to such a methodical analysis again, until I'd discovered scholastic theology and the history of the Church, the combination of which genuinely wonderful intellectual tools finally gave me the real machinery for taking the literature of Britain apart piece by not always entirely satisfactory piece.<br />
I suspect that it was that evening also that I brought out my ukulele and my modest collection of simple folk and then popular songs. I would have put the uke in the car on an instinct that something social would turn up. But this certainly would have been one of my first public performances, and I had probably decided that it would be a good idea to find out just how well I was progressing as an entertainer. I could hardly think of myself as the pick of the litter. My inspiration to learn the ukulele had come from a lad who, in partnership with another student, wrote magnificently funny, perceptive - and occasionally somatic - satires. Then, this other student acquired a five-string banjo, which, although reduced previously to a mere four strings, still made an irresistible sound. And, finally, to put me in my humble place, through my student mentor's socialist connections I was able to attend a local socialist's party, in respectable Point Grey, at which the star performer was a Vancouver boy, not a UBC student, who not only sang creditably, but who could play <i>melody</i> on a five-string banjo. I have always remembered that I felt as if I were hearing and seeing a young Pete Seeger, and as a beginning musician, I was not a little stunned. Two-and-a-half years later he has started up the publishing of a folk-song magazine, in Vancouver, and I had the happy satisfaction of spending a Sunday afternoon with him, spelling out the words, chords, and melody of a song I had written during my great job in the wilderness south and west of Tatlayoko Lake.<br />
So, as I said, I had good reasons to feel humble, to feel grateful for an audience that would listen to me, or, better, join in, and I think that night was successful, from the musical point of view, and therefore boosting to the ego and the confidence.<br />
If my memories are correct, our young lady, she whose person and spirit was to land on me with such unforgettable effect, came home somewhere toward the close of my musical hour in the sun. I think she caught the last two or three songs of my engagement and I was by then altogether warmed up and cooking, with all due respect to the limitations of the ukulele.<br />
Them came my hour as a raconteur. As befits a novelist, especially a novelist with a gift for dialogue, words have almost come easily, often too easily, for me, and that night by that time, I was as fluent as I could possibly be. That I remember distinctly. What I was talking about, what sagas or anecdotes I was summoning out of my young past, I have no idea whatsoever. But I seemed to be entertaining, everyone at the small gathering was listening, perhaps all else were much more aware that I was that the daughter of the house had just dropped one boy friend and might be interested in a replacement.<br />
She was certainly a pretty lass, and as she was by nature much more quiet than myself, there was most certainly the potential of opposites attracting. I had not thought too much about the fact that she was breaking up with the other fellow - someone in the house had told me this at some point - but the more she seemed to be paying attention to my story-telling, the more I became aware of her.<br />
And then something happened that I had never seen before.<br />
As the Lord said, the eyes are the window of the soul. Yet, although I'd had a few specifically spiritual experiences, I had no special habit of studying such windows, and certainly my final courses in such matters came two decades after the night I am describing now, when I was instructed again and again in the difference between eyes that were windows on a soul in heaven, as it were, and eyes on a soul in hell, strictly in accordance with the dispositions of the seventh mansion. But on this evening back in the 'Fifties, suddenly the lovely young woman was more than ordinarily attractive, and I saw in a sudden heightening of her colouring and an expansion of her eyes something I much later learned was called the dilation of the soul. There is a God, He is the manager of our destinies, and we do have guardian angels who can effect such changes upon us.<br />
I think this happened for a quite simple reason: she had realized, perhaps, that she needed a boyfriend, eventually a husband, who followed a profession of the mind, of the intellect. So she had made a choice, for her own self-preservation, and had been quite quickly rewarded, or confirmed, in the new direction.<br />
By the tender age of nineteen, I had, of course, been fond of a number of girls, and known some who had been fond of me, in a few cases quite substantially, sometimes expressed, sometimes not. But not since I was ten years old had I known a regular female companion, of my own age, except in the ordinary social context of school and youth organizations like scouts and army cadets. I had rarely even thought of dating, as for one reason, it cost money I didn't want to spend in such a way, and I'd had nothing whatsoever to do with high school dances. I did not even attend my graduation banquet and dance, for that particular Saturday in June had been booked for a yacht cruise, a cadet outing on the vessel owned by the honorary colonel of the reserve regiment to which our co-ed corps was attached. I was by that time regimental sergeant-major, and felt it my duty to attend that function. And I also should add that I could not think of myself as missing much: the only girl who had really bent me out of shape in my final year in high school was quite happily going with someone else. It did not seem fair to take one girl to an affair at which I would too likely have had my mind on another. And I should further admit that one of the girls in the cadet corps and myself were involved in some casual circling around each other, although as subsequent history was to prove, she was between bouts with an older, working, young man. My history as a stand-in had begun.<br />
So, while my heart had been severally stabbed - and keep in mind that mine was the heart of a poet - I had a limited record of the toil and trouble of romance, in the French sense that also means a novel, or plotted story, full of dialogue and outbursts of all the varieties of emotion. For almost a decade, all my closest friends had been boys, and, furthermore, I had no sisters, although all my women relatives had showered nothing but affection and good will on the first born of the third generation. I'd had an entirely satisfactory circle of male companions my own age: sufficiently athletic, responsible in their schoolwork, good-humoured, kindly in their relationships with each other, and undissipated. Some of them were also committed Christians, and this did me no harm. Twice, in fact, I was drawn in to a certain degree of participation with the organizations my friends belonged to.<br />
Yet those influences, I had some sense of right away, were to a degree, in my opinion, automatically somewhat right wind. (Or was it that the fathers of both influential lads followed the accounting profession?) I knew I needed to study the left-handed point of view, and this is was that had led me to my current predicament of the heart.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-19789292171572158932016-01-29T14:58:00.001-08:002016-01-29T14:58:21.840-08:00Chapter 16 Let us start this chapter with a quote from John of the Cross. It is from the third stanza of the <i>Living Flame</i>, therefore from his most advanced observations, from a text which from beginning to end has us much more in the divine clouds than on the turf that is more fitting, so we tend to think, for the normal habitat of man. As the Muse often arranges these things, I found it, rediscovered it for the umpteenth time, early this morning as I was on my way to another part of this book that I have had to live by for some decades now, and also as I was in a somewhat perilous state because I knew I had to embark on certain observations of my own which could be in great danger of being misunderstood. Because the spiritual life works so much by analogy, and also because the fully matured spiritual life, that is, the seventh mansion, is so overflowed with the love of God and all that He made - keeping in mind that God did not make sin - the mystic can seem sentimental, reckless, exaggerated, especially to those who, in spite of a supposed religious understanding, actually see little beyond the prudence of the world, or who think that virtue comes from social groupings rather than from acts of an individual will. Such souls are also in danger of failing to understand, for one reason or another, their own childhoods, especially in their not realizing just how much the Holy Spirit entered into it, or how much they did not let Him do so.<br />
"<i>For all the blessings, both the early and the late, the great and the small, that God grants the soul He grants to it always with the motive of bringing it to eternal life . . . ."</i><br />
As with most of the sentences and phrases of John of the Cross, this one is worthy of a lifetime of consideration, especially if we link it up with one of the many astounding passages from Saint John Eudes, the eloquent and poetic father of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The seventeenth century spiritual genius says this:<br />
<i> The divine heart of our Saviour is filled with eternal love for us. To realize this truth one should understand two things about eternity: first that it has neither beginning nor end; secondly, that it comprises in itself all ages, past, present. and future, all the years, months, weeks, days, hours and moments of the past, present, and future, and that it comprises them in a fixed and permanent manner, holding all those things united and joined together in one indivisible point."</i><br />
<i> </i>It was only a few years ago that I first read this arresting passage, when a friend of mine had bought the book and then lent it to me, but my first response was to be reminded of many moments in my childhood, and to be very happy that I had authoritative and saintly words by which to be able to explain these moments to myself and perhaps others. I think it fair to say that from the first time I saw the light around my grandfather, when I was a little tot, I was henceforth to experience instant after instant of sensing that I was being confronted with the eternal. and in the most lovely and loving way, albeit for the most part of ordinary childhood situations.<br />
<i> </i>But did not the Good Lord say, "<i>Suffer the little children to come unto Me</i>?" And<i> </i>since He has come unto the earth, and died in order to save all souls upon it, His presence must be here to be discovered by anyone with the least inclination to make the effort, or even a disposition by which to be drawn toward His presence. His generosity in this regard is infinite, and His light abounds, or at least it must seem so in my case, because it so often came my way, the light and the sense of God's beauty in creation, without my consciously seeking it. No one could call me a saintly child, like Saint Thomas, or Catherine of Siena - I complained enormously, for one thing - and of course there were very little of the very tangible spiritual and sacramental side that are so available to the child raised in a Catholic atmosphere, nor was there even a regular attendance in any Protestant church, although every time I did go the Lord took advantage of the opportunity and one way or another, made His presence felt; yet I recollect receiving a constant infusion of kindness, of happiness and delight in almost everything and everyone around me. What else can this be called other than an overflowing of God's charity? Problems arose, of course: they always do in childhood, in everybody's childhood, but no apparent threat to my general sense of well-being ever held sway for very long. I think I must have been able to cooperate quite well with my guardian angel, for he was a reality with a responsibility, and I think that any knowledge that I had of him - theoretical knowledge - was due to my mother's mother, my Nana, for it was she who taught me my bedtime prayers, and though I don't recall a specific petition to "Angel of God, my guardian dear," I suspect that she slipped the relevant information in somewhere.<br />
By the time I knew her, Nana was a Baptist, but I think that growing up in London she must have been raised Anglican, for in her old age she instructed me on the three-fold division of High, Low, and Broad - something I already knew about, but she was explaining herself to her contemplative grandson - and told me that she considered herself a member of the Broad section. And I think it must have been the Anglican church at Sechelt that she sang in for many years after she moved there, at the end of the war, and met and married my second grandfather. In figure, Jessie Robinson, nee Gasser, later Brown, was a roly poly little dietitian, but she could sing with a voice as high and clear as an angel's and did so in the church choir until she was nearly eighty. From her singing, took, I might have acquired some grasp of that invisible creature assigned to oversee my welfare.<br />
But with all due respect to art as a conveyancer of the glories of the unseen parts of God's creation, I think that the major influence on my young soul came fundamentally from the overall environment of my Nana's house. For a small boy, it was a most comforting and reassuring place, especially with my father, being a soldier, away from home. Not only was my Nana good company for my mother and me, but there was, still living at home, my young uncle Alfred, named after his late father. He too was a singer, with a fine tenor voice, and he also trundled off to the Collingwood East Baptist church every Sunday. If my grandfather was a fully matured example of the gentleness of a follower of the Christ, then my uncle was a comforting image of a younger version. He was also in the building trade, being a sheet metal worker. He was a teetotaller all his life, as far as I know, and by the time I was a teen-ager we all had a great chuckle because, in spite of his preference against alcohol, he was the main man for the contractor who installed, at that time, the longest hotel bar in the British Empire, This was in the hotel in Kitimat, B.C., where the Aluminum Company of Canada was establishing its huge smelter.<br />
Aside from his Baptist beliefs - I am sipping on a mug of my own homemade stout as I write this - Uncle Alf had a very real and personal reason for his self-denial: his own father, so my Nana later told me, had died young, more from his alcoholism than for the effects of being gassed at Ypres. My father, on the other hand, although he liked his daily tot, I was never to see drunk, and he, dear man, has lived to a thoroughly ripe old age. So my Nana had been left a widow with four youngsters, had gone to work in her profession, and first my mother, interrupting her high school education for a year or two, and then my uncle, living at home while he worked, had all pitched in to provide the comfortable, shingled house and ample garden - with room enough for chickens - on South-east Vancouver's Lincoln Avenue, a block up the hill from Kingsway and two blocks from the wading pool and virgin evergreen forest of Central Park.<br />
How far into the essence, or nature, of a created thing does the intellect of a child penetrate? At the end of his life, should he be so fortunate as to die in the fullness of faith, he will see the essence of the divine nature, so it stands to reason that God, who will the latter, should start up some kind of lesser system of visions at the beginning of his life. Thus childhood should be full of dress rehearsals for the final vision, made up of much smaller, but certainly significant, soul-arresting glimpses into the being of various beings.<br />
When the Lord said, "<i>Suffer the little children </i>. . ." He was plainly dealing with a group of children, and a group of mothers, and of course a posse of confused apostles. (Albeit they were much less confused than the majority of present day bishops.) Yet the history of the saints shows that Jesus did not need a crowd of children, nor a classroom: He was infinitely capable of taking on an individual child, even if His less ordinary inspirations inclined toward metaphysics rather than items of the Faith. Thus, the six-year old Thomas Aquinas is said to have asked his kindly old Benedictine teacher not "who is God?" but "<i>what</i> is God?"<br />
It is doubtful if the old monk could give Thomas the same full set of answers that Thomas himself would lay down in his maturity, but the little man was obviously off to a good start, and his years in the Monte Cassino of the day seem to have all but guaranteed that he would keep up the good work, habitually aware of the source of is life, his redemption. and , to an extraordinary degree in a youngster, his sanctification. A little child had indeed been suffered "<i>to come unto Me</i>"<br />
What, indeed, is anything? To what degree is our difficulty in understanding and appreciating God, whom we do not see, a product of our difficulty in fully grasping the substance and accidents that are available to our senses and, to a degree, to our intellects? Or does the problem also work the other way round, so that we do not fully possess an intellectual vision of creation and the things of our daily life because we are blinder about God than we should be?<br />
Again, John of the Cross has some provocative words, encouraging to searchers in general, and clarifying to this writer in particular as he struggles with making plain the favours of his childhood. The Carmelite is describing a quite profound state of union of the soul with God, in stanzas XIV and XV of the <i>Spiritual Canticle,</i> and this happy condition must be well beyond the spiritual status of an unbaptized child, yet my recollections so often find even my youthful experiences better defined by this kind of literature, more so than by poetry or the various classic fictions of childhood, as illustrating and otherwise lovable as these might be.<br />
The saint says" "<i>In these stanzas the Bride says that her Beloved is all these things, both in Himself and also for her; for in that which God is wont to communicate in such excesses the soul feels and knows the truth of that saying which Saint Francis uttered, namely: 'God mine, and all things.' Wherefore, since God is all things to the soul, and the good of them all, the communication of this excess is explained by the similitude of the goodness of the things in the said stanzas, which we shall expound line by line. Herein it must be understood that all this is expounded here is in God in an eminent and an infinite manner, or, to express it better, each of these grandeurs which are spoken of is God, and they are all of them God; for, inasmuch as in this case the soul is united with God, it feels that all things are God, even as Saint John felt when he said: . . .That which was made in Him was life. It is not to be understood that, in that which the soul is here said to feel, it is, as it were, seeing things in the light, or creatures in God, but that in that possession the soul feels that all things are God to it. Neither is it to be understood that, because the soul has such lofty feelings concerning God in that which we are saying, it sees God essentially and clearly, for this is no more than a powerful and abundant communication, and a glimpse of that which He is in Himself, wherein the soul feels this goodness concerning the things which we shall expound in these lines, as follows . . . ."</i><br />
<i> </i>Now the saint goes on to re-quote the two stanzas of his ineffable poem, and comments on them, as he promised, line by line. By themselves, taken out of context, the images John of the Cross employs appear to be neither more or less than those choice elements of nature relied upon by the great Romantic Poets of the early Nineteenth century: mountains, solitary wooded valleys, strange islands, sonorous rivers, the whisper of the amorous breezes. So far, just Wordsworth, Shelley, or Keats; no bad company, of course, if we are interested in the quality of poetry, but none of them qualified to take us to the lofty atmosphere of the greatest graces of mysticism. But John of the Cross goes that extra step - even within the poetry, as distinguished from the sublimity of his commentary - where he prefaces all these magnetic features of nature with his reference to their creator, and begins the stanzas with: "<i>My Beloved."</i><br />
<i> </i>He was not, of course, talking to his girlfriend - although the Virgin Mary was never very far from his mind, and no one ever understood the process of the Incarnation from her immaculate flesh better than he did - he was involved in a straight ahead detailing of just Who it was through Whom all these lovely items of Nature were created by the tender and beneficent Father. This inclusion - not as easy to come by as the scarcity of the words might suggest - mightily upgrades the purpose of his text, and mightily challenges the reader, especially the reader who simply wanted the pleasantries of poetry.<br />
<i> </i>And the inclusion also defines, as best as could be done, the quality of the experiences of my childhood through which I was nursed along by the Holy Spirit until I discovered firmly and irretrievably, that I was a mystic.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-52537359531309629612016-01-28T15:15:00.002-08:002016-01-28T15:15:23.671-08:00Chapter 17 One of the fascinating aspects of education I can think of is the fact that we first learn the great epics of our culture at an age when - a few youthful martyrs excepted - we have absolutely no capacity for imitation, except within the power of imagination. By the time I was ten I knew about Hercules, Jason, Odysseus, King Arthur and his knights, explorers and the couer-de-bois, Ali Baba, the hard riding gunslingers of Zane Grey, and of course the cinema's imitations of all these and their literary descendants. As I have said before, and see no reason not to say again and again gratefully, I was a constant reader and the happy possessor of a belief in the power of the myths of literature. Every encounter with a new hero was the discovery of another continent. (I have left out of my list, shamefully, Robin Hood, introduced to me in grade two by the spirited reading of a male teacher some of us were occasionally sent off to from our regular classroom schedule. The reading was carried out in some pitiful cubby-hole of a room, but the story was none the worse received for that, at least not by myself; and I can remember thinking that the tale was more wonderful than I dared to believe, although I was at first somewhat puzzled by the fact that the hero was also a breaker of laws.)<br />
The child is realistic, of course. He knows he is not a real Hercules, nor a Robin Hood. Yet he can pretend, build the castles and battlefields and distressed maidens of fantasy, and wait until he grows up. And at the same time, he can also be immensely contented, in between volumes of adult daring-do, with stories about children, in which, if there are any heroics, they are rather more withing the realm of a child's possibilities, and this seems to bring a different kind of glow to the adventure of reading. In fact, for all that I could also be overwhelmingly happy to come across a tale about someone more or less my own size, ability, and passions, and from time to time I seemed to bathe in a minor ecstasy of gratitude that some writer would take the time to make such a story-telling effort on behalf of a small and possibly insignificant person like myself. To read of a child simply being a child - and the child did not have to be a boy - in a city, on a lake, beside a stream, in the woods, with other children, sometimes evoked in me a belief that the Earth really was a paradise, no matter how badly things might seem to be going in the world around me.<br />
This is not to say that, as a child, I suffered any undue amount of abuse or privation. Even with my father's absence during the war I was well looked after by others - my mother had a watchful eye - and other family members or good adults when my mother was away - but childhood, like any other stage of life, has its scrapes and confusions, and in the midst of these, story books were always the might pull - and we need to feel for the Heaven that exceeds our grasp - of the saga.<br />
By the time I was ten, I'd had, I think it fair to say, some pretty nice adventures, according to the normal scales of boyhood. For one thing, I'd been able to travel a lot, due to the war moving my father and mother about the country; by the time I was seven I'd swum in both the Atlantic and the Pacific; by the end of grade five I had been taught in eleven different schools; I'd lived in quite a variety of pleasant, interesting situations other than the usual company of just Mom and Dad in the family home. But I had never been personally involved, as far as I could see, in any kind of epic tale. The war was an epic, of course, but I was not fighting it, and I was certainly not suffering in the way that thousands upon thousands of other children were. I had never gone without a meal, a jacket, a roof, or a bed, and I remember only three occasions in which I even came close to fear for my own life from the war. Two blackouts - one in Vancouver, one in Halifax - and a news report of V-2 rocket attacks on London.<br />
But reading the stories that I did, I knew that the sagas had to be out there, and I knew that eventually I had to find one for myself. The movies were no doubt an influence toward this line of thinking also, but the principal influence, especially in the way of creating the optimum setting and mood, was the written word. As a matter of course, films simply do not - with a few exceptions - create a genuinely literary mood, which in my dictionary is a metaphysical mood, the mood of the intuition of being from often the humblest of causes, and I knew that authors were my guides, my teachers, my infinitely inimitable prophets.<br />
Especially authors who could write well about the woods, the fields, the lakes, the streams, the beaches, the mountains, and the animals - and humbly respectful people, boys, girls, and adults - who populated them. I was not against cities: in a relative's house in Springfield, Ontario - or rather, in a farmhouse somewhat less than a mile outside the town - I fell into and thoroughly enjoyed the tale of one <i>Little Maida,</i> who rode up and down a mighty elevator in, I think I remember, Chicago. And by that time I had my own adventures, worthy of recall, from Vancouver, Toronto, and Halifax. But the primary instinct was for the bush, as the place where genuine sagas were bound to unfold.<br />
Experiences accrue, and even more unquestionably, so does the capacity to appreciate and understand experiences. And all things are wonderful to a child, especially the first time round. What was a little boy to think, for example, at his first sight of the huge, original, conifers of Burnaby's Central Park? This might stand of timber lay directly between the homes of my grandparents, the houses most constant to my first awakening, and thus I was born in the land of the Paul Bunyans who had cut down the Douglas Firs which had not been preserved by legislation. And going about on steamers and trains also seem a pretty epic undertaking. Moreover, if you lived where I did, you were aware of a very special feature, in the order of the outsize, known as the Interurban, a giant form of streetcar, running on real railroad tracks, between Vancouver and New Westminster - for my purposes - and then beyond New Westminster well out into the Fraser Valley, for the use of other souls, especially farmers shipping into Vancouver, so I have been told. This creature was as tall as a railroad boxcar, and, running as a single or double unit, powered by an overhead wire connected to the engines by a trolley, it could accelerate to great speeds in the twinkling of a transfer. Our neighbourhood was plainly serviced by power beyond the ordinary.<br />
So, walking under the trees of Central Park was an adventure, and riding the mighty interurban was an adventure. But I had done nothing to create these interesting features of my childhood landscape. Someone else had made the story of which I was such a minor part. Yet, I registered impressions; I thought; I speculated; I read.<br />
Then, in the spring of 1942, after the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbour and the ensuing fears of a Japanese invasion of British Columbia, my mother, my baby brother, and I all moved to the interior of the province, to the North Okanagan. As far as I knew, we were the only family to make such a move voluntarily - thousands of Japanese-Canadians, of course, were forced to take up residence away from the Coast - because my father, far away in England manning the ack-ack guns, could not bear the thought of his wife and children being victimized by the same unpleasantries as the citizens of mainland China and Hong Kong. His father knew a farmer, and it was arranged that we could stay on the farm.<br />
Now things were taking on more of an epic quality. There was an entire train ride, of some few hundreds of miles, overnight in a berth, with a layover in the historic station at Sicamous, and my first view of the dry belt of the upper Fraser and Thompson Rivers. I had a great sense of adventure leaving Vancouver, and in the morning , my first sight of the hop fields and that loftiest of deciduous trees, the Lombardy poplar. I was entering upon a new kind of landscape, and no doubt felt something of a kinship with Genghis Khan out on a conquest of a new country. The delight in these different natural features continued as we approached our new home and I could be sure that I had arrived in a kind of genuine cowboy country. There were no big cattle ranches at hand, but there were cows and horses and sheep, and though the ground was well timbered where it had not been cleared, the woods more much more open than at the rain forest Coast. There were steep, rocky, hills to climb, the parkland timber to easily explore, and running through the centre of the narrow valley, something I had never had a chance to deal with before, a clear, meandering, stream. The day we arrived at the farm where we were to live for a month - I think the month of April - the oldest son brought in a string of trout. I was sure I had come to Paradise.<br />
According to the original schedule, we were simply going to stay at the farm until the threat of a Japanese invasion was over. But my mother, by no means a country girl, and never the sort of person to take comfort in solitude with a bagful of fat novels, found this first setting unsuitable, and we were to spend the months of May and June in Falkland, hardly a city, but a least enough of a village to give her a little of the kind of social exchange that she was used to. It was to be in Falkland, one sunny Saturday morning, that I encountered the epic experience I wanted to introduce here, and I jump around a bit - we'll go back to the farm shortly - because it seem pertinent to publicly regret - largely with tongue-in-cheek - that I wish I'd know at six that I was going to be a writer, so I could have kept a journal. I've always been somewhat nagged by not knowing the right sequence of events in my pretty wonderful North Okanagan sojourn: there was a motel episode in there somewhere; did it come before or after the month at the farm? The motel was right beside the creek, my first creek, and of course an item of water much less significant - except to Falklanders - than my own English Bay and the Gulf of Georgia - but I can remember hanging over the little bridge and being utterly fascinated and absorbed by the movement of the water.<br />
Did we stay at the motel, for some reason, before we went on to the farm? Or did we have cause to pause at the motel before we moved into the place in town? It really doesn't matter one way or the other, but I've always been slightly bothered at not having the events in clear order, which I suppose in itself indicates the power of their impression on my youthful spirit. In recollection, it seems that I spent a lot of time looking at that creek, enraptured by the movement and by the sound of the rushing water, and some of that time carried the additional charm, for me, of it happening as the evening came on. There was a great magic in being by the creek as the light faded.<br />
I remember also that the people who kept the motel also kept a peacock. That was a first for me too, but the long-tailed bird with the amazingly ugly screech was nowhere as fascinating as the lively little stream.<br />
If we were not staying at the motel while waiting a day or two to go to the farm, we were there on standby until we could move into our new quarters in the town of Falkland itself, a back room in a comfortable little house on the edge of the community. I remember a very genial older couple, the husband of which I think worked for the department of highways. It is important to say that the house was on the east side of town, because the epic event in which I would become, if only a spectator, at least a very proximate spectator, occurred while some people were trying to get to the west side, where lay the rodeo grounds.<br />
It was a Saturday morning, or perhaps - ah, the missing journal - it was the morning of the Twenty-fourth of May, the Queen's birthday holiday. At any rate, I was out of school and the sun was shining. I don't think I was aware that there was anything special happening, I just knew that it was a lovely morning in a lovely world and I should be out and about. I think I also remember a bit of a struggle with my cautious Mom, to be allowed to go rambling, and if so, I can only say that my guardian angel must have been on my side, for I did get to go.<br />
I think also that my guardian angel must have put me into a literary mood - whatever that meant in a lad of six-and-a-half - even before I saw the horses, for I remember that I was thoroughly enjoying everything around me: the dirt road, the trees and grass and spring flowers, the sheer balmy air with the sun filtering through it; and I was especially pleased to be full up with the leisure to take it all in. Just being out and free to ramble was adventure and intoxication enough. I doubt very much that I was even looking for any excitement beyond what was already present in my wonderfully pastoral little town.<br />
And I must have been rambling, because our new home was not far from the road which was both highway and main street, as I remember them, yet I was coming back up to the main road from some location to the south, perhaps the railroad tracks.<br />
I think I <i>felt</i> the horses before I heard or saw them. I was no more than half-a-block from the intersection in question, and the ground under my feet was rumbling. I looked up, hearing, of course, the sudden thunder of hooves, and beheld perhaps thirty or more saddle horses, neighing, rearing, kicking up a mighty cloud of dust, being herded one on top of the other by a band of native cowboys: yelling, waving sombreros, crowding horse flank to horse flank themselves as they guided the broncs around a tight corner. It was all very fast, very noisy, the grandest vision of organized confusion I had ever seen, right out of a movie, and yet unforgettably real.<br />
It was also different than a film in that the cowboys were not whites, but native Indians, probably Shushwaps, and that was the second part of the amazement. Aside from the absence of a six-gun, they were quite as gallant and expert as any white cowboy I'd seen in the movies.<br />
The remuda hurtled forward as directed, and much more quickly than my little legs would take me there, were safely herded safely into the pens at the rodeo grounds.<br />
I was allowed to go to the rodeo, later in the day, of course - who could have resisted the wide-eyed ecstasy that came flying in from the streets?- and viewed the whole thing with some of my knowledgeable schoolmates. I furthermore adopted a young native rider as my hero, and then had to suffer the sorrow of watching him break his arm when his bronc threw him, but the drama of individual riders and ropers going up against individual horses and steers and calves did not quite equal that first vision, of the thundering explosive, herd and its ki-ing, dark-skinned drovers.<br />
I'd had my first experience of the epic, that is, outside a book, a movie, or a comic strip, and I knew it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-34438753382839983432016-01-27T17:15:00.002-08:002016-01-27T17:15:27.937-08:00Chapter 18 There were to be more rodeo adventures, this time more akin to my own size and prowess - and also including a further exhibition of the superior skill of the local natives - but the reader knows by now that I was born to ramble through the events of a book, as a writer, because the immeasurable value of my principal theme, the spiritual life, just as I was made to wander through my native land, as a youngster, by the vicissitudes of the war.<br />
So I need to speak of another of the great events of Falkland, my first real<i> hearing</i> of a riff by a country and western guitar player. There were radio stations in Vancouver, of course, and from them I had already learned some of the classics of the day: <i>You Are My Sunshine,</i> and <i>Santa Claus Is Comin</i>' <i>To Town.</i> I was learning these at the same time as I was learning the children's hymns and the anthems, one had at the very least a teacher who knew the song and more often than not, an accompanist whacking out a sturdy, supportive, four-voice harmony on the piano. There were no problems in meeting the goals of the group sessions: a good ear and a good voice was the heritage from both sides of the family.<br />
But with the popular tunes off the radio, I was on my own. <i>There</i> was a challenge, and I can recall being awfully proud of myself, or perhaps simply full of gratitude, when I was able to remember and re-render the lyrics and melody. Furthermore, I learned to purse my lips and whistle, and that was another great breakthrough, fraught with an enormous pall of failure and frustration if I had failed to do so. I remember getting <i>You Are My Sunshine</i> right as I hoofed the long six or eight blocks to school in grade one, and the whistling came about as I strolled up the lane to call on a friend on a Saturday morning. So far, so good. I was shown a continent: I conquered it, I was shown a second continent, I conquered that. I could learn to sing a tune and I could learn to whistle a tune.<br />
But ah, to <i>play </i>a tune! To take up an instrument other than my own human voice and make that sing: now there was a wonderful deed. Yet until I was eighteen years old, in spite of my sporadic bits of instruction in theory in the many, many, schools I attended prior to my high school days, I never found myself and an instrument compatible.<br />
It was not from lack of desire, although such desire was never constant, because most of the time, as I had not understanding of how music worked, I had no confidence in myself as a player. In the subjects which required understanding: maths, science, grammar, I was habitually a top student; but in music as I had learned it, there did not seem to be anything to understand in the same way as these other subjects. I did manage to learn something about notation in grade eight, my last year in any kind of music class, but nothing at all of the pure numbers - as I know and play and teach them now - of scales and harmonies. In this absence of the common sense approach to music theory, in our schools, I suspect we are much less intelligent than the often abused classrooms of the middle ages, so passionate about eights and fifths and fourths. Our composers since then have learned to make more use of the other intervals - thirds and sixths and so forth - but in how many recollections of our school days do we hear of learning the straightforward syntax of harmony as we learned the multiplication tables and the parsing of a sentence?<br />
There has been lots of rousing singing, of course. I had a wonderful few months in grade five in a Burnaby school, ringing out the British Isles favourites in company with twenty or thirty other lads and our music teacher and his piano. But the singing of the numbered parts can be just as rousing, and because of the peculiar nature of the intellect and its appetite for design as some point actually more satisfying. <i>The Ash Grove</i> is a particular melody, but the skills behind learning the tune and the harmony for it, in all its possible arrangements, are universal. And universals, despite the current state of philosophical studies, are, as the normal goals of thought, the most liberating and delightful of possessions.<br />
In the 'Forties, every household that I knew had a radio, and the good folks we lived with in Falkland were no exception. It would have been one morning before school, just as I was out of bed and getting dressed, that I heard - naturally speaking - the most wonderful bit of instrumental that had ever blessed my ears. I don't recall what song it was, probably some country and western classic emanating out of Kamloops or Vernon. It may have simply been an instrumental, or some fine old chestnut like <i>The Wabash Cannonball,</i> with room for a guitar run between the verses. But I do remember the most nimble of passages on a steel-string flat-top, and from the top to the bottom of my little soul I knew that I had never heard anything like it before. I had no thoughts whatsoever for the composer, but I did think that the man who could play what I heard must possess the greatest gift known to man, and I also had the most firm conviction that I had not then, and possibly never would have, the means of doing the same thing myself.<br />
I should make it clear that I was not terribly wounded by this estimate of myself. I was probably more disturbed by knowing there was no means of making the radio station play the tune over again for me, and I do not recall that the house boasted a phonograph. I'm sure that had I been meant to be a professional musician I would have been moved to make a thorough racket about my interrupted delight, but my very favourite hobby for the entire next decade of my life was to be reading, not making music - aside from the singing, from which I was to get a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction - and when I wasn't reading I had such a passion for the usual outdoor activities of boyhood that I'm sure lessons and practise might not have been all that welcome, especially if I'd not been given the right sort of teaching. By this I mean that a thoroughly organic approach might have generated a constant motivation, but I suspect that such teachers were hard to find in those days and are not too much more available still.<br />
So what do I mean by <i>organic? </i><br />
<i> </i>Well, in the first place I suspect that I have been searching back to the middle ages, before the invention of printing, and especially before the employment of relatively cheap reproduction of music, especially music written out for students, because I have recognized that teaching music in those days would have been done with an absolute reliance on the instrument, and with very little reference to written scores, which were time consuming and expensive. And also much less relevant to a grounding in the basics, according to the medieval mindset, happily more realistic than the paper-rooted conceptualizations of our own times, especially when it comes to education.<br />
<i> </i>How hard it is to find a piano student, for example, who was not set right away to <i>reading</i> music. And, moreover, how impossible to find a piano student who, when directed to this reading, was advised to read by numbers rather than the letters C,F,G, and so forth.<br />
Yet music, like faith, comes by <i>hearing.</i><br />
<i> </i>I do not mean to criticize the skill of reading music, of course. No one can deny the cultural value of such an ability, and I have always been in awe of any and all of those lovely youngsters who can whip off, at the age of eight or nine, a bit of Bach or Haydn. Half-a-century older than they, I still balk at the imposed arrangement, and remain incapable of learning the left hand precisely as the composer or subsequent re-arranger has set it down. The organic musician, with great respect for the melody, has forever felt the need to be able to do<i> </i>his own thing with the rest of it.<br />
Yet, oddly enough, I seem to have discovered a method of counterpoint, that is, a musical schedule of one note in each hand, that I teach with absolute rigidity, allowing no compromise, for beginners, on the intervals, and insisting on a similar firmness with the fingering. None of this, initially, has any resource whatsoever to a written score, yet it sounds infallibly like the explorations of Johann Sebastian himself, as he might have puttered speculatively along a given key on his composer's working Wednesday morning. Also, I might say for those who have yet to learn the universality of sound methods in music, the same paired scales work wonderfully with guitar and pairs of voices, with major keys, and intelligently bending the applications of the numbers, with all three sorts of minors. (I am also absolutely rigid, as an old folk-musician, in teaching the natural minor first.)<br />
I'll leave the brackets as they fit the context of the previous paragraph, but then I'll also leap to the reference to folk music as if the brackets had been stripped away, because I need to emphasize that the counterpoint pairs work so well because they were determined after a full exploration of the relevant <i>chords</i>, played melodically, and of course it was the discovery of chords, as I have indicated earlier, that had let me loose as a performing musician. Without the discipline of <i>triads</i>, my counterpoint scale would never have come to be, at least not as long as I was insistent on functioning as my own teacher. And even if I had taken on a teacher other than myself, I doubt that I could ever have listened to the advice unless it contained the automatic shuffle between the two-note statement and the three.<br />
This personal rule of thumb has worked wonderfully for the keyboard, leading me to discover a set of intervals by which one full octave of notes in the left hand pair very nicely with two-and-a-half octaves in the right. The left hand doubles back on itself, of course, and this happily leaves some bass timbre in the arrangement of the eighteen melody notes. None of the bass notes are in unison, with the melody, or treble notes, so they add a counterpoint harmony to the exercise, thus adding greatly to the student's sense of musicianship, and profoundly reducing the boredom inherent to the practise of scales in unison.<br />
Only the invention of cheap printing - and the profits to be derived therefrom - could have canonized the pseudo-discipline of volumes of piano notes following each other at apparently tidy octave intervals, especially when the fingering patterns for the right hand have so little to do with actually playing music on the piano. Hopefully, my little scheme, once it is a matter of course in those cottages "which have done more than symphony orchestras to preserve the tradition of Beethoven", that is, the homes of music teachers, will make life more interesting for students of the keyboard.<br />
As there is a time and place for everything, an appropriate <i>season</i>, as the Scriptures would have it, there is a place for two-handed scales in unison. Perhaps there is no better place to begin, especially for some students. But as variety is the spice of life, so it is also the <i>sine non qua </i>of music, and any child with talent - or adult with spirit - wants to understand as quickly as possible the key to the complexity of what he is capable of hearing: there is not reason not to teach him immediately the other two sets of notes which are not in unison but in harmony.<br />
Children - and we all have to become as children whenever we are setting out on the adventure of learning a new art, science, craft, or skill - love to work out puzzles, they have an instinct for analyzing how things work, so long as the working seems logical. And music can never get beyond the question - where harmonizing is concerned - of being a puzzle. What note - or notes - goes with the first degree of the scale? What note with the second? the third? and so forth. Compound this search, this hunting, with an uninhibited exploitation of rhythms, always at the discretion of the student, and there can be no possibility of drudgery, of the boredom, that is so often a complaint of students who have been forced to study with a lesser system.<br />
This is not to say that boredom is never a factor. No one is always excited; no one is continually motivated by the sublimest inspiration. But we are entitled to refuse to do anything that does not seem to us at least <i>useful</i>, intellectually speaking, and it is according to this law of satisfactory and non-dualistic learning that natural musical inclinations of the student should be allowed to unfold, always with the understanding that a method is sound because it conforms to the natures of hands, keyboards, ears, and rational thinking as expressed, in music, by the use of numbers. Just how does one apply five fingers to eight or more notes? Is there a natural fingering, which applies to every scale, major or minor, or does the student have to memorize the notated fingering for every piece he wishes - or is told - to play?<br />
<i>Some </i>finger notation is useful, of course. I have found it necessary myself, at certain levels of studentship, and, as well as that, from the hands of a great composer, it has helped me to discover some of the laws inherent in a universal scheme for fingering. But as a standard and exclusive method, I think it is to be condemned, and putting it in the wastebasket, and replacing it with what I have quite exhaustively proved to be a better, because natural, ways of going about the scales, would bring a lot of much needed joy to thousands, if not millions, of initially eager little fingers, hearts, and faces.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-75256471290296341832016-01-26T15:04:00.000-08:002016-01-26T15:04:16.216-08:00Chapter 19 It was the Lord who said it: Into every life a little rain must fall; and I have reached the point where I must begin to talk about a great deal of rain; and I do not mean simply in the ordinary course of the soul that will pass through the dark nights of the senses and the spirit, insofar as these are the essential elements of development in the interior life - and here there must be a great deal of rain indeed - but in the history of the external causes of anguish that it seems must inevitably caused by the spiritual man's contact not simply with sinners in the ordinary sense, but with sinners of the pharisaic stripe, that is, within the leadership of the Church Militant.<br />
Since my last chapter much time has elapsed, occupied not only by perfecting - through simplification - my current keyboard discoveries, but also by the surprising satisfactions of membership in a weight training room. It would be more pleasant, all factors considered, to talk about these things, for they are utterly positive, and cast no dishonour on anyone. My piano tykes are happily prospering - in these weeks of November studying Christmas carols - and I have gained nine pounds of sheer muscle in less than four months, plus made some progress in the new found art - for me - of nasal breathing during strenuous exercise. For a hermit I have been unusually active in the concert hall, attending three performances on three consecutive Friday nights - all wonderfully world class, in Nelson's little jewel of a live theatre - and the further inspirations and practical matters connected with the opera appear to be once again moving along, somewhat as a result of these performances.<br />
Yet history, even dark history, must be dealt with. If Christ and the saints have had their human enemies as well as the diabolical, then so must those who aspire, all unworthily, to follow the same paths. The Catholic Faith holds that on the uncountable numbers of God's angels, and among all their nine divisions, one-third chose to follow the rebellion of the chief of them all. They were subsequently swept down into the everlasting punishment of Hell, yet left also with a certain amount of freedom to torment and seduce mankind, and in particular the freedom to torment and seduce those for whom God has seemingly showed any special favour. Even before the Garden of Eden, it was guaranteed that Man could not be born into the perfectly simple existence that we now think of existing only in Heaven. The earthly paradise was not to be free of the whirling and swirling schedule of constant temptations the devils would create, no matter how long it lasted.<br />
But, as we know, Adam and Eve as the perfect couple had a very short history, and thus original sin and its resulting weakening of the human faculties - by contrast with what had gone before a very big weakening indeed - became just as significant an element in the succeeding drama of salvation, perfection, the spiritual life, Christian formation, and sanctity, to mention only those areas which are at the forefront of theological considerations. Each and every soul, except that tiny handful selected to be born without original sin, was destined to have to overcome the sin within itself and its companions as well as to resist the deceits and threats and even accomplishments of the Enemy.<br />
In certain special souls this conquest of the three thieves - the world, the flesh, and the devil - takes place at an age early enough for them to be given the full-time working assignment of , simply. praying night and day for their fellow man. (Even the dreams of contemplatives seem to be intercessory and therefore useful, and the waking hours are usually two full shifts, although not entirely at the foot of the Cross.) This is both the glory and the horror of the most mature spirits, in or out of convents and monasteries, and they are not allowed to escape either extreme, in terms of spiritual, mediating experience; nor are they permitted to avoid the destruction of their peace of mind and working mental conditions that rubbing shoulders with the spiritually needy must unconditionally necessitate. Most working writers would be astounded to learn how little actual time in the past fifty years I have actually been able to devote to writing as a full day's work. Nature being what it is, I sometimes wrestle with the Lord over His sense of economy, but I rarely win. My last blazing streak was a dozen years ago, and I have no idea when such another will return. There would seem to be a much greater need of prayer than of spiritual literature.<br />
On the other hand, ideas, images, sounds, words, inspiration all must come before production, and I can have no complaint over what spins around in my brain day after day, underneath, above, beside, around, the contemplation. There, the quantity, as well as the quality, is quite wonderful. And from time to time the quality actually emerges on paper, and I am content, each little word becomes an indelible part of the permanent record. Moreover, considering the mental struggles writers can go through over their work - or non-work - it is no small grace to be content with even day after day of no visible production, or the smallest addition or correction.<br />
We are nicely into Advent - in fact it is the feast of Saint Nicholas of Myra as I write, again, amazingly, in the wonderful working light of mid morning, over a back yard covered in snow - and I am reminded of this time in 1964, when God told me that one day there would be in Nelson a celebration of a "real Advent". At the time I assumed that He was thinking of spiritual events which would be evident to the entire local Catholic community, and perhaps other Christians in the area as well, but now I suspect that He may have been seeing into the future, for the time being of only me and those closest to me, including certain souls in the Vatican.<br />
In those days, of course, I needed every encouragement, not the least of which were the occasional locution or spiritual apprehension, for the rain had begun falling, and fell not only heavily, but with unrelenting regularity. I had been in Nelson for four months, gradually understanding that I had moved with my growing family to a far from ideal Catholic community, that in fact I could be living in, had been unquestionably inspired for years to settle down among, some of the most defective clergy, bishop included, who had ever been called upon to make up a diocese. In the ordinary human sense, my dreams had been utterly shattered, and had it not been for the undeniable certainties of the interior events that had been summoning me here, and on other humanly surprising factor, we would have been gone by Christmas. The clerical company, always such a satisfying source of fellowship in my previous six years as a Catholic, was now all but intolerable, almost without exception, and I had the further grim suspicion that the little university, fourteen years in the running and five hundred students strong, was counting numbered days. Yet Notre Dame University of Nelson had been my first reason, so I thought, for locating - forever? - in the town where my wife grew up.<br />
By this time, you see, I had been a classroom teacher, enormously happy with my work, for four solid years, in the B.C. Catholic school system. The material pay was modest, but what was that to someone who had taken a private vow of poverty? The spiritual rewards were uncountable, and we had wanted not at all for the essentials, with a social life as lively as any young couple could ask for. We had lived in three different communities, each quite distinct from the other in many ways - a great gift to a writer - and made dozens of new friends and acquaintances. And through it all - with some resistance at first - I had first decided to jump into teaching, then became more and more enamoured of the process until, when we landed in Nelson, I was personally convinced I would be teaching desks full of the young for the rest of my life, and always centering that instruction on the theology of the Church. By 1964, Nelson was the best place in the province, I thought, in which to teach and to experiment toward a perfect system of education. The elementary school dated to the beginning of the century; the university had a faculty of education and the power to grand education degrees; for a year or two there had also been in place a high school, or at least the first two years of such, with promise of the others. Providence, so it seemed to me, had created the perfect arrangement. Not only would I be able to teach all manner of subjects in the way I thought they should be taught, but I could train teachers!<br />
On and off, I had, of course, puttered at writing. A few poems, a few short stories, a handful of novel starts. But throughout the history of these pages, not a word on that which was growing even more significantly than my understanding of the role of the teacher: my interior life. God let me exercise my talents all I seemed to want on ordinary matters: work, play, nature, friendship between individuals, romance. But not a hint of a mystical passage ever crossed my story line, even though I hardly knew a moment in which I did not feel sensibly attached - by the inner sense of touch - to the Holy Spirit. Even my intermittent journals of those days are all but dumb about the things of the soul that were my most important daily bread. Therefore, a veteran contemplative can easily understand, as I had not yet come to the real labour I was born for, I could very easily think that teaching could fill me up for the rest of my working life. I had once thought I could be a lawyer as well as a writer; now, with a much greater sense of personal worth in my contribution to ordinary society, I thought of myself as perfectly happy being a teacher as well as a man with a typewriter. Nor did my understanding of the contemplative life, up to that point, in any way interfere with this vision of the future: Saint Thomas made it plain that so long as adequate contemplation preceded, the active skills - writing and teaching - were not against the will of God. And certainly there would always be an audience worth labouring for: the children of parents faithful enough to send their offspring to a Catholic school or college, and readers devout enough to want to read stories with a spiritual emphasis, whenever I was to be given the permission and inspiration to write such tales.<br />
It all sounds like quite the attractive life, does it not? And many a soul has been called to similar paths and found great usefulness, life, joy, beauty, satisfaction, and a profound sense of personal worth and dignity therein, along with that which is most important of all, the unswerving service of the exact will of God. And with good reason: nobody works harder, nobody faces more challenges, than a good teacher or an honest writer; and if you can do both, so much the better for your self-respect. Besides, there is no greater joy than that which comes from knowledge: the successful Christian teacher or writer is simply being paid to study what he has already learned to love about any other form of endeavour! What life could be more ideal? How good of God to make such a life as possible as it was desirable! How odd that I should ever have thought that I could never be a teacher, or that I should ever have believed that simply being a novelist would be life enough!<br />
In fact, at twenty-eight, I was much more successful at teaching than at writing. I had plenty of students, all of them interesting for one reason or another, but I had few fictional characters, and no real plots, although, as I said, I always enjoyed the process of working things out with words, just a s a good musician will enjoy his practise exercises, even if he does not perform for the public. The artist needs a certain degree of this hidden work just to keep his balance with the other things he is called upon to be involved with at the time. Yet the writing was, at best, spasmodic. I had thrown myself wholeheartedly into teaching, and into all the study and reflection I had found went with it. There seemed to be so much to learn, and prove, before I could settle down to a fully measured stare at whatever it was I had been born to write about. Becoming a Catholic and a teacher had utterly obliterated all my youthful promises, to others as well as myself, of early triumphs in the world of book publishing.<br />
There was, moreover, two other elements that would interfere with youthful fame. For one thing, I took very seriously my favourite theological writer's observations on spiritual perfection; for another, whenever I found Teresa or John of the Cross complaining over the faults of bad spiritual directors, I automatically asked God to help me avoid their mistakes, if ever in fact such a marvellous honour and privilege fell my way. As I was merely a layman, this did not seem all that likely, but, I was after all unquestionably a mystic, and that was said to be the best qualification. However, as I was not in the Seventh Mansion, was it qualification enough?<br />
For some souls, probably for most souls, one has to insist that, to a degree, spiritual direction can be carried out, even with a fair degree of progress, without the possession of the final mansions. If this were not so, the Church would rarely know what spiritual direction was about, for, as with any other skill, the process has to start somewhere, and where mankind is involved, the beginning is never the end.<br />
But in my case, I think I knew quite quickly into my studies of the great pair of Carmelites, that I would not relax in my pursuit of the interior life until I had, in this life itself, come all the way home. I doubt very much that I should get any credit for such an ideal on my own behalf: in the mind of a rational young man it could have been put there only by God Himself, both as a thought which by Divine support could stand on its own, and also as a conclusion, reasoned a posteriori, in the wake of certain Providentially arranged climbs to the top of the heap I had experienced in my youth. And it must be kept in mind that not only had He coached me toward academic excellence, but that after my ninth school year He created the spiritual conditions which put an end to the ordinary scholastic competitiveness that preoccupies clever schoolboys, all in the name of better preparing me for the higher calling of the contemplative path. Moreover, according the plans Christ had for me, there was little point being brilliant and acknowledged for it in relatively lesser significance of secular education.<br />
On the other hand - and here the thoughts become quite terrible by contrast - it is much worse to be an apparently bright young Catholic chappie, even a religious priest in an honoured order, universally acknowledged as a rising star, and yet to have an inner disposition that seems beyond correction, eventually to break out in adult independence as publicly immoral, and therefore, when in positions of leadership and responsibility, to take institutions down with it.<br />
As much as I wish it were so, I am not speaking of a fictional character. I refer to what I found when I came to Nelson, not only within the little university, but also within the priesthood of the diocese, and there were more characters than I would, ordinarily, like to think about. The situation was in fact so bad, and would so profoundly continue to be so, that I probably had to be a mystic, already a veteran of spiritual horrors, in order to have the strength to remain here. I think that the imagination of an ordinary novelist would not have been enough, for a writer needs good models. The mystic, of course, already has, habitually, a pretty good view of the Supreme Model. And too, there had been that initial locution, I think the first of my catechumen days" "I want you to see what kind of priests the ordinary Catholic has to live with."<br />
So this <i>rain</i>, as it were, had conditional intelligibility. I was by this time quite familiar with Saint Teresa's discussions of the trials of the Sixth Mansion, part of which was virtually certain to be opposition and enmity from the very souls one would have the most necessary reasons to rely on for co-operation. I knew that the contradictions could be frustrating, even agonizing, in the short term, but must inevitably have an eternal positive gain. Yet because they would destroy what I had thought of as one of the most important reasons for coming to Nelson, I could not help but wonder again and again what it all meant, and what could be done to halt the process of decline. So much of the time I still thought as an active, and would continue to do so for years to come. I was very much preoccupied with the Church Militant.<br />
On the other hand, I had been drawn further and further into the depths of contemplation. If Teresa had warned me in the <i>Interior Castle</i> about darker trials and persecutions, John of the Cross in the <i>Living Flame</i>, or the Holy Ghost through him, had tipped me off as to my fundamental reason for settling in the Kootenays. Here I was to come to grips with the art and science of spiritual direction.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-51096719322085587082016-01-25T15:00:00.000-08:002016-01-25T15:00:08.419-08:00Chapter 20 It would have been just about this time of the year, in the month of February, 1964, that I was mysteriously advised by the Holy Spirit to start thinking about looking for, in a young soul. the appetite for theological perfection. These instructions did not specifically limit the search to only one, as even Divine intimations incline to go into a man according to his disposition, and I was disposed to remain a classroom teacher for the rest of my working days; so I interpreted the inspiration as a prod to continue my teaching and research within the normal classroom grouping. I was by then at the helm of a Grade Eight class, in my second year at it, and had done quite well with an introductory course in philosophy, concentrating on basic metaphysics, as well as with a bit of instruction on individual mental prayer, or meditation. There was also a lot of music, and art, and creative writing. I was feeling quite pleased with myself, but I had also been advised by the pastor that my growing family was becoming too expensive for the minimal salary structure of the Frontier Apostle programme of the diocese of Prince George and I would have to move on.<br />
Of course I was pondering my future, but that had to include meditative reflections on the past, which for a good six years had included periodic profound inspirations to wind up in Nelson. Moreover, Providence had come up with, that year, a new series of literature texts for Grade Eight, including a book devoted only to poetry which contained a lovely and prophetic line regarding an orchardist looking down to where "The Kootenay snaked black." The spiritual intimation worked most formidably on my understanding; the poetry drew with equal power on my imagination and my heart, and my fate was irrevocably sealed. Yet, as I say, I thought I was headed for, simply, further research an accomplishment within the ordinary classroom setting, albeit in a Catholic school.<br />
Furthermore, in the late winter, I had read in the B.C. Catholic of the establishment of a Catholic high school - or the first couple of years thereof - in the city of Nelson. This seemed like the perfect opportunity for me. I could enroll in the little, growing, Catholic university, to finish my degree, and at the same time carry on my teaching and research in a Catholic high school! The school in Terrace by that time proceeded only to grade nine, and the B.C. Catholic story spoke of hopes for grade twelve in Nelson. Of course there would be grade twelve, not long after I arrived, and of course the university would become the greatest Thomistic institute in western Canada! For what other purposes could all my energy and insight be devoted? I actually wrote to the bishop of Nelson, spelling out some of my intentions, and he courteously replied, and further asked me to call on him when I came to the seat of his diocese. I was not offered a post at the high school, as these positions were then all nicely filled by members of the religious brothers who had founded the school - in the buildings of what had been previously the hospital where my wife's younger brother and sister were born - and the school was not expanding at a great rate. But I did enroll in the university.<br />
Yet this decision was months away. In that late winter in Terrace I was experiencing a number of different ideas and thought processes and spirits, all of which were preparing me, as I later realized, for the years ahead, none of which would have anything to do with presenting Scholastic principles to classrooms full of grateful students. Nor was I always personally convinced all of the time, or even part of the time, that I would be moving to the Kootenays.<br />
Sometimes I felt very strongly like returning to the Lower Mainland, so that I could sniff again the smell of the ocean, so that my poet's fancies would be let loose to roam through my other life's work, the Great Canadian Novel. At other times I was sure I should go back to UBC and pick up a degree in literature, even though I had grown quite discontent with studying the same subject with the University of Ottawa, by correspondence. My beloved, who has always had a most wonderful love affair with Vancouver, could not object to either of these motives.<br />
And then there was the startling, very clear and powerful, intimation that I perhaps should get involved in the recording and broadcasting industries, as both a performer and producer. This last had hit with a sudden smack, late in January, while the four members of the <i>Exiles</i>, of which I was one - guitar, banjo, and vocals - sat over coffee in the restaurant of the Lakelse Hotel, taking a break from Sunday afternoon rehearsals. 1963-64 was the first winter that Terrace had television, most of it flown up from Vancouver in a can, with an hour or so every evening set aside for local events and even local performances. There was no taping. <i>The Exiles - </i>two lads from Ireland, one of whom knew the youngest of the Clancy Brothers, a girl from Ontario, and myself - were to do an hour show that night. We had a MC, a switcher, two cameramen, a monitor, and as comfortable a studio as I have ever been in since. I was enjoying the chance to perform, of course, but I was enjoying the process of the mechanics even more, for the moment, as much as I had enjoyed the mechanics of the classroom. Great God in Heaven, thought I, as the comprehension of the possibilities of spiritual satisfaction in this business hit me, are we all supposed to turn professional? That evening, actually, we did do rather well, prompting all sorts of phone calls to the station, and the four of us pondered what kind of debt, professionally speaking, that we might owe God for our talents. Yet I missed the performing company of my wife, who I considered the best of all of us, and left the group after two more appearances - one for television, one for the stage - and years later realized that the inspiration to a new career had really been for one of the Irish lads, who married the girl from Ontario and took her home to Ireland, where he wound up with his own radio programme.<br />
And then there was the darker side, in that year of interesting events, both interior and exterior.<br />
Once I had established contact with the bishop of Nelson, I experienced, for the first time in my life, a setting upon me ugly spirits, some kind of obsession, which could be driven away only with the use of the discipline. I had to take the belt out of my pants and use it vigorously on my legs for a dozen or so good wacks.<br />
This was not a form of mortification I had never expected to use, ever. Of course I had heard of flagellants, in medieval history studies, and I admired their courage and sense of penance on behalf of their own sins and those of their fellows, but I habitually shrunk, in my own disposition, from outward display. For one thing, I think I had always known how to suffer inwardly, even before I was understandingly aware of the hard side of the mystical life; and once I was done with my first two years of university, during which I had been properly spoiled by consolations, in spite of my grand neglect of organized religion - and God had begun revealing the rougher patches, I could only assume that the various suspensions of the faculties, the aridities, the scruples, and the steadily growing incursions into the horrors of the second night where more than a match - as indeed they were - for any legitimate series of swats on the shoulders or any other part of the physical anatomy.<br />
So what was this new, and somewhat negligible, self-inflicted onslaught all about? To tell the truth, as best as I can remember, I did it only once in Terrace, and not again, for more than a year, until one strange summer evening in Nelson. In neither case, at the time, could I connect a particular cause to the devils in question, but the whipping was cause enough of their departure, and I was led further into understanding the life of a good monk. And not for a quarter-of-a-century would the police and the courts establish the reasons for my surprising acquisition of that part of the monkish tradition.<br />
The other workload, much larger a consumer of time, and of what until that time in my life had been a great facility for getting a good night's sleep, was the thought, as I interpreted it, of going to teach on an Indian reserve. Once our pastor had told us our Terrace days would end with the school year, the reserve idea came again and again, waking me up in the middle of the night, and keeping me awake for rather a long time. Even though I had done a kind of practicum fortnight in the Indian day school, in Alert Bay, four years previous, and quite enjoyed that, this was a radically new notion, because my focus had fastened more and more on the idea of training teachers with an interest in philosophy and the arts. The force of the idea moved me to think that natives might be even more open to metaphysics and music than whites, but the thinking on the subject, even though it temporarily eclipsed the old inspiration to settle in Nelson, did not lead me to any concrete action, and when the thought of perfection came, the reserve plan passed away. Where perfection among the young was concerned, God already had a soul in mind, and she did not live on an Indian reserve. But there were victims of sexual abuse by clergy and religious living on reserves, and this was the Lord's way, I realized years later, of having me start to pray for that horrific situation.<br />
Those who live by passive prayer must be, unquestionably, by the graces of God, the wisest souls on earth; yet they also must be, in so many ways, the most uninformed. They are very much aware of God, in admirably special, mysterious, and to the unexperienced, inexplainable fashions, but of the specific reasons for the particular joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, of their prayer life, they can be the most ignorant of men or women. By the time I was seventeen I had made a few choices as to the long term intentions of my life from day to day, but I was to learn that there were and would be others I would not currently identify, some certainly not at the moment, and perhaps not for some time, while the rest would have to wait for Heaven. "Do not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing," He said, and that made one hand different from the other.<br />
The logic of the contemplative situation can be annoying, can seem even somewhat criminal to those who think only by the standards of the world, and even, on occasion, by contemplatives themselves, who have as much appetite as anyone for seeing the evil done in. But the contemplative is, by definition, not an active. His role is influence toward perfection and the interior life, and even formation of the same in any souls qualified. Unless he is an abbot or a bishop, punishment or dismissal is unlikely to come under his authority, except in cases of spiritual direction, which are not what is herein under consideration. The contemplative, in fact, is so bound to pray<i> for</i> those in grave sin, which is always so common to both Church and State, that he is ordinarily allowed to do very little<i> to</i> those in possession of it. This at least has most certainly been my experience of the great majority of situations particularly in the face of my actual natural temperament being passionately inclined toward action. God only knows how hard He has had to work to keep me tied to my chair of reflection.<br />
This is not to say that I have never been allowed into activity, and I have also to say that I have from time to time been quite definitely inspired to it, being given an idea, a direction, a targeted soul or two, and further given no rest nor peace of mind whatsoever until I have fired off a telegram, a phone call, a letter, or taken on the culprit face to face, even or perhaps especially when I had no idea just how much of a culprit I was sent to warn. My <i>modus vivendi </i>in this regard was established early on, even before I became a Catholic, just before, in fact, I undertook instruction in the Faith, and it came in no less authoritative a form than within only the second locution of my life so far, some fifteen years and more after the first one.<br />
"I want you to <i>see </i>what kind of priests ordinary Catholics have to put up with." This was Our Lord's answer to my question, in the early summer of 1958, as to whether I should take my catechism from the Basilians, stationed at the UBC campus, and specializers, of course, in the supposedly complicated and subtle minds of university students; or from the more middle class oriented Redemptorists of my neighbourhood parish, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I had left my basement apartment - I think on Thirteenth Avenue - on a lovely balmy Vancouver morning in the beginning of June, and was headed for Tenth Avenue, the only commercial street in that part of West Point Grey, and the principal access to the university. I was pondering within myself whether I should turn left at Tenth and head out to the campus and the Basilians, and through them submit my intellect and will to Rome, or if I should turn right and stroll down the hill to the church I had first noticed five years earlier, on my initial bus rides to the campus, from the east side of the city.<br />
To tell the truth, I had already had a couple of good experiences, in terms of evaluating the Faith, and the priests of the Faith, on the campus. The priest introduced to my medieval history class, when I was in second year, and then a most energetic moral theologian from Europe, who gave a few days of a Lenten mission, just weeks prior to my decision to inquire, were both profoundly provocative to my processes of selection. I was, after all, a novelist, a student and creator, hopefully, of strong and interesting characters. Both priests, in their own, probably unconscious, ways, had exhibited, to me, clarity, energy, and self-possession greater than anything I had ever seen in my other teachers or professors to that date. I knew I could go to either or both of them, and no doubt get involved in a fine series of intellectual and spiritual conversations.<br />
But was that that the bravest and most useful road for a writer who so very much, he thought, had the <i>common man</i> on his mind? Especially when he already had a Catholic girlfriend who read good books as habitually as most people breathe? Nor was I incapable myself, of looking up the relevant texts. What did the <i>ordinary</i> fellow do? Thus were my musings as I neared Tenth Avenue in the lovely sunshine, and thus spake the Lord to determine the direction my steps would take.<br />
I have written earlier that I ran into a dear old Redemptorist brother who immediately reminded me of my eminently prayerful Baptist grandfather, and I have probably also said that the priests that I met at Our Lady's were generally that kind and helpful that I for some years puzzled at the fair degree of negativity in Christ's instructions. But finally, in this diocese, I realized quite what He had in mind, and also took comfort in understanding, as He pinned me down, that I had no obligations to act as a good bishop should. I should simply <i>see, </i>as best I could, what was going on, and make my writer's notes. None of this standing on the sidelines, of course, would in any way prevent me from guiding others - none of them clergy - who had the faith and courage to do the same.<br />
Is there a country in the Christian world where the spiritual life is generally so badly understood as in Canada? And where this condition is general, who can be at fault other than priests and bishops? And how, in the general acceptance these days, of so called <i>inclusive language</i>, have these Canadian clergy and bishops so radically revealed their complete and utter failure to grasp the most fundamental and elementary principles of the life of the soul? The <i>truly</i> inclusive use of <i>either</i> masculine, or feminine, or neuter, by the mystics, is absolutely necessary to even beginning to comprehend the doctrines of the soul as bride, in relations to its divine Bridegroom; so necessary that all true sons of prayer have no recourse against the current practises than that of cheerful, but implacable, contempt, laced with the mercy of praying for God's lightening as much as possible the bishop's ordained punishment in purgatory.<br />
Have I wandered from my original intentions? Not at all. Some of the perfect souls it has been my honour to discover in the diocese to which I was sent for precisely that purpose were no doubt set out long ago in God's plan to pray for just that modern stupidity, and being female, their prayers against exaggerated feminism, have in a sense, a better chance with God than mine do.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-74876101446762478842016-01-24T16:03:00.001-08:002016-01-24T16:03:13.811-08:00Chapter 21 As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living, even if it means, as in his case, we wind up being put to death for our examinations. For what is death, for the fortunate wise, but the passage from the darkness of this world into the perfect clarity of the next? And the final death only comes easily and sweetly to those who have already, by examining their lives, put to death the desires of their flesh, the badness of their will, and the ignorance of their intellect. Examine, examine, examine.<br />
No matter how much we examine the past, either for the sake of our own conscience, or for some legitimate curiosity over the behaviour of others, we regularly come up with new information or a new understanding of old information. In my striving to make a fully fair and accurate recollection of the material of the current passage, I have run into quite the remarkable bit of irony, and it was at that point, more or less. that I thought of Socrates' declaration. I remembered something I don't think I had thought of for decades, not a very large memory at all, and of little more, given the context of the times, than a passing idea; yet something which eventually set against the ultimate reality of the sins of the Catholic university I came to, created a masterpiece of contradiction, or, as I said, irony.<br />
In the months of my last year in high school, even though I was much in receipt of a steady schedule of spiritual favours, such as my life-long goal of working inwardly for the collapse of atheistic communism in Russia, and the certain knowledge of just why and how I was going to university - to make friends and to learn to write - I did run into the fear of losing what faith, as I understood it, that I actually possessed. In my own unschooled way I did have an obscure sense of the Trinity - although Christ was much more the Great Teacher than the absolutely necessary Saviour - and what I had I did not want to lose, in my heart, no matter how much undergraduate skepticism I might allow myself to verbally, publicly, revel in. From a single copy of the Ubyssey I had discovered in the Britannia library I was as made wary by the apparent irreverence as I had been ignited by verbal brilliance. I was apprehensive enough to be moved to wonder if I should try to enroll in one of the Pacific Northwest's confessional colleges. Somehow I had learned that there were one or two of these in the state of Washington - I had a couple of friends who were regular church goers, of Protestant denominations - and I had also read in the newspaper, I think, that a small Catholic college had recently opened up in the Interior of my own province. This might seem like an odd possibility to some - the Catholic possibility - but I knew in my heart of hearts that I had met through my own cadet corps and my time in Vernon cadet camp a lot of young Catholics, both boys and girls, who certainly proved to anyone with the abilities of a novelist, that there had to be something to the oldest of the Christian faiths.<br />
But of course UBC was cheaper, as I could live at home while attending, and God seemed to be assuring me that I would be all right. I suspect that it was in those troubled hours that I gained some real understanding of the reality of the Holy Spirit, and of the necessity of His presence in a life that wishes to hold on to the clarity and strength that it has already acquired.<br />
So there I was, at seventeen, feeling confident that some far-off Catholic college could, if necessary, help me keep my youthful faith in Christ insofar as I thought I knew Him. Eleven autumns later I was to settle by that very institution only to realize that I had landed amongst a set of clerical derelicts second to none in the history of the Church, with a bishop determined to keep them all in place, and the faith of the students therefore compromised to a most unfortunate degree. I need to make it clear that in the days of my looking to the Kootenays for the preservation of my little faith, when I was a youngster, this horrendous condition was not in control. The founding bishop was an entirely different sort of man, and no one in the region had as yet heard of the fornicating monk who had become president of the university by the time I arrived.<br />
But God, of course, had heard of him as much as he needed to, and therefore, to make my own assignment somewhat intelligible, He took the trouble, in the spring of `1960, to ram a mighty log into the propeller of the <i>Canadian Prince</i>, the coastal steamer that was then serving the west coast from Vancouver to Prince Rupert, including Alert Bay, the fishing village - half of it most wonderfully Kwakiutl Indian - where Shawn and I were living while she taught before she became a mother and I studies - and worked - before I became a teacher in the Catholic school system.<br />
The log did its job handsomely, bending the propeller shaft enough that the ship required nine hours repair in Prince Rupert, its northern destination. I was working in the local post office, as a humble bag boy, but my brother, who stayed with us when he was not off cooking on the small ship operating out of Alert Bay, was between cruises, and thus available to fill in for me while I caught the delayed steamer on her way back to Vancouver. I called the head of the Nelson university to see if he would be available for an interview - I was thinking of teaching English - arranged with my brother and my boss for the substitution, and , with my wife, caught the Canadian Prince that evening.<br />
The fitful coastal weather had changed. In the morning, when I phoned the Kootenays, the sun was shining, but by evening the clouds had settled in and a light rain was falling on Johnstone Strait. We minded none of that, because no matter what happened as a result of the interview, we were getting ourselves a little holiday. Shawn would get to visit her family, and we would both have some time in our favourite city. There had been no question the summer previous but that we should leave Vancouver, perhaps forever, but we had also missed the old town mightily, from time to time, and did not mind at all the chance to see it again. In spite of the rain, as soon as we had located our cabin and stowed our suitcases, we betook ourselves to the stern, to watch Cormorant Island fall behind us. I had been off the island a number of times, in various boats; this was, as I remember, only Shawn's second trip. In the autumn we had crossed over to Sointula. the heart of the Finnish settlement on nearby Malcolm Island, to take in an anniversary celebration, including a play in Finnish, and my very literate, observant, and appreciative wife had subsequently written up a nice little essay on the settlement, to be aired on a CBC radio show out of Vancouver.<br />
This well put together little feature was, I might add, a much more cogent and useful piece of work than anything her supposed novelist husband had been able to come up with during our months on the island thus far. My studying was wonderfully successful, as both the <i>Summa</i> and John of the Cross' <i>Ascent of Mount Carmel</i> were going into my soul with a clarity and penetration I was to subsequently learn, to my sorrow, that few Catholics, including priests and bishops, never seem to experience; but none of this enviable success as both a student theologian and young mystic somewhere short of the seventh mansion could find its way into my sporadic attempts at storytelling. The best thing I could accomplish for Canadian literature at that point in my life was to recognize, finally, many months after it was written, some of the flaws in my second complete version of the "yacht novel", and burn it.<br />
So, plainly, I had yet to reap fame and fortune as a writer, and had to look for a job. As someone has already said, a wife and family are hostages to fortune. I had no resentment of these facts of life; after all, I had happily tried to become a lawyer because I knew it might take me years before I could earn a living solely as an author and, so I thought at the time, the law would give me all sorts of material to write about. But the law studies had come a cropper, to be replaced, in the order of temporary vocations for the aspiring writer, by thoughts, inspirations, and experiences of teaching.<br />
Shortly after I was baptized, and at about the same time as I was cranking up the opening pages of the afore-mentioned "yacht novel", I read in the <i>B.C. Catholic</i>, to which I had become a mightily satisfied subscriber, an article about a Catholic elementary school; and this article, or the Holy Ghost through it, had fed me an unforgettable sense of my needing, quite absolutely, to become a Catholic school teacher, but with the distinct view of making my young charges aware of the glories of Thomas Aquinas. There was also some intimation of instruction in the arts, I think, for I was not only a musician of sorts, but had just recently performed the leading role in my first play.<br />
I was quite swept away by the idea, and in the calm of perfect hindsight brought on by forty years of a well-examined life, I can say with complete confidence that this inspiration was as primal as it was clear and powerful, and it was, in time, to be utterly fulfilled, both as to philosophy and the arts, with the addition of a result which at the time I had no way of knowing could come to be. In the time of the inspiration I had not read the Carmelite mystics, nor hear of the term <i>spiritual director</i>.<br />
The article dealt with a Catholic school in a city, not, I think, Vancouver, and it seemed to be about a school where all the teachers were nuns. So, as with most inspirations, the world and the devil had their subsequent innings. I could never teach in a Catholic school because it would not be able to afford me. (I was only months away from being married.) But I did not get depressed about this problem, as I was happily at work on a novel, and, as always, was surrounded by friends who provided me with all the meaningful mental preoccupations that a teacher is provided with, and in fact I received no further bulletins from Heaven on the teaching question until the summer, after Shawn and I were married. We were subletting a small apartment, still in Vancouver until the middle of August, and one night watching a drama on television about a youngish father who becomes the headmaster in an upstate New York private school for boys.<br />
Again I felt the call to the classroom, and given the ordinary superiority of emotional impact of drama over journalism, I felt it with an incredible, undescribable, keenness. As with an inspiration of three years previous, reading Hemingway, and feeling the call to one more job in the bush, I felt that I would simply die if I did not become a teacher, and a teacher of children. At the same time, I was by no means inspired to run about immediately in search of a classroom. It was Shawn who was to teach, we had decided - I was writing quite steadily for the moment, and waiting to hear from a publisher - and hopefully in some not-too-rustic, not-too-distant, somewhat rural community like Salt Spring Island. But that tidy little spot was too close to Victoria not to be able to demand a fully certified teacher, and we had to settle for the more remote Alert Bay, where, after the end of July, the school board was allowed to take on a teacher who had only a degree. (Neither one of us had ever had the slightest interest in taking teacher training.)<br />
Yet now I was looking for work, and teaching work at that, although not in an elementary or high school, even though I'd enjoyed myself and had a great deal of satisfaction substituting in both levels in the months previous. I was off to try for a post at a college, without a degree myself!<br />
Those who have struggled long and hard to get a solid arts degree, even at the bachelor's level. and never mind the post-graduate diploma that is usually required for college teaching, might think of my snap decision as ridiculous, and God's part of the inspiration as profoundly questionable, and they could be right, although neither would I listen to the arguments of any critic who had not tried to familiarize himself with Saint Thomas, which was the real fuel in my tank. But it is not the ordinary arguments of the world that are applicable here, nor the ordinary reasoning of the Church's ordinary officials. What I was about was spiritual business, something much beyond the programmed qualifications for educators, and I was by now too much of a mystic not to recognize the internal signs of an assignment. The external logic, useful for explaining an action to others, might or might not be useful to my best thought processes.<br />
In this particular case I had a fair degree of legitimate hope that my journey could be naturally fruitful, for there had once come a Divine inspiration about living in the Kootenays every bit as powerful as visions of the schoolroom. This I have previously mentioned, being the spirits that came while I was watching a television programme on the proposed dams on the Kootenay-Columbia river system, in the immediate previous winter.<br />
Nor was I being especially indulgent in regard to a special spiritual experience - always troublesome in the illuminative stage - because in thinking I was supposed to move to the Kootenays at the moment I was quite renouncing my own particular sense of responsibility toward Saint Michael's College, at the University of Toronto, and degrees in scholastic philosophy.<br />
What of the classroom visions as an antidote? Well, they were, psychologically at least, for the moment utterly inoperative. This for the usual reasons in an habitual victim of passive prayer: God had quite blotted them out of my working memory. It was everything I had ever thought about Nelson that was thundering through my brain and liver, ignited of course by the incident of the log, and while by no means certain of being hired, I was not at all afraid of rejection. Even if it was not time to move to the Interior, it was a good time and excuse to have a look at our future home.<br />
There was, moreover, another reason for God's nautical caber toss. As Providence would have it, my real future employer was also taking the Canadian Prince to Vancouver, and I was to get the chance to see him in action as the public man, not just the parish priest, in action on behalf of the Catholic school system.<br />
A few years ago, looking for a simple phrase which would define for my working associates a capsule introduction to the story of my latest trip into the wider community, I came up with "Go for A, get B." In other words, once again, I had sallied out with my thoughts clearly focusing on one very possible person or operation, only to find that I was away from my monastery for one or more very different reasons.<br />
Such a pattern has been pretty much my daily bread for many, many, years, long before the titling, but I think it really started as early as my enrollment in law school, in the autumn of 1955. Up to that point, I was used only to, as a general rule, equivalent results, pretty much aware ahead of time of benefits to be accrued from school, from scouts, from cadets, from my first two years of university and my association with the campus newspaper. Nor had there occurred any radical surprises in my summer jobs, although I do not want to pretend that there was any absence of valuable life lessons. But with law school there was a profound shock. I found, immediately, that I actually had no natural appetite whatsoever for legal texts. They were even duller than my Psychology 100 text - with a few memorable exceptions - and furthermore, no matter how hard I might try from time to scattered time, my absorption rate was the least I'd ever known. The prayer of quiet had struck, my faculties were chronically interfered with to a much greater degree than ever before, even if I had no educated understanding of what was going on, and I knew only that I was getting one of the great surprises of my young life. Furthermore, without even knowing what grace was, I knew that I was getting something that made me quite content with my lot. And I should have been so, for I had also been put into the situation of learning even more deeply how to live one day at a time, although the going-for-one-thing-getting-another pattern was by no means as regular as it was to become years later.<br />
When Shawn and I had done with our musing on the deck, we came back to the main salon to find a most arresting little group deep in conversation at one of the tables, in an otherwise pretty empty room. On one side sat the Reverend James Fagen, pastor of Saint Margaret's, Ocean Falls, whom we recognized from a trip he had made to Alert Bay in the autumn, in company with a mission preacher, and on the other were the then minister of education, Leslie Peterson and his wife. Considering all that has gone down in my province since that last year of the 'Fifties", in both Church and provincial government, I recall them as two of the noblest leaders of the half-century. Fagan, of course, was lobbying for a just share of the education taxes, for parochial schools such as his little one, and twenty some years later he was to see his urgings - and prayers - bear fruit. I distinctly remember admiring his open-handed forthrightness and I also remember feeling some regret that did not have the claims of position and experience that would have permitted me to join in the conversation.<br />
I knew about the Catholic school not from its pastor himself, as Fagan and I had not as yet had much conversation, but our own priest, new since after Christmas, had been at me in his own quiet, steady, concerned, way to head on up to Ocean Falls and Saint Margaret's, where he knew Fagan would need not only one but two teachers for the new year. His campaign had started soon after he arrived, following a spirited discussion - at least on my part - on the virtues of a Thomistic formation, and I felt encouraged and complimented by his enthusiastic trust in my abilities, but I was still thinking of Saint Michael's and writing, and was not at all sure that I had the patience for the youngest students of an elementary school. And by sailing time I had actually been brooding over Notre Dame for quite a while, and for reasons beyond my comprehension then the Holy Spirit had been making quite a spiritual to-do about that little campus, sometimes enough to make me think that it was the only place in the world I would find a job that I could be happy in. As I said, go for A, but only to later realize it really was B that was the designated harvest. B, I suppose, stood for bastards, for who could ever have suspected that a Catholic diocese would contain so many priests so little interested in being true sons of Christ?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-62704505108883762672016-01-23T15:00:00.001-08:002016-01-23T15:00:47.216-08:00Chapter 22 "Where sin abounds, grace more abounds."<br />
This is the ancient formula of the saints, wherever and whenever they realized that their particular swamps were full of moral crocodiles. Wherever He allows the crocodiles to gather in force, He also provides a steel-hulled boat and a mighty crossbow. The vicious amphibians keep coming, but the prayerful man gets to be a stout oarsman and a damned good shot. Then, eventually, God might even decide to drain the swamp, and all the crocodiles soon go belly-up and feed the vultures.<br />
This might not be perfect zoology, but it will do quite nicely for the history of the diocese of Nelson, or, more correctly, the diocese's history after 1958. The first bishop of Nelson, Martin Johnson, rector of the Toronto cathedral before his appointment in the mid-Thirties, was also one of the noblest men of British Columbia in the days of my young manhood, as well as the builder of some of the institutions I would later come to the diocese to try to preserve. But as I think I have mentioned earlier, he was kicked upstairs to be archbishop of Vancouver in 1954, followed in Nelson by another decent man, also a genuine educator, and then, late in 1958, Pope Pius XII signed the bull that made Wilfrid Emmett Doyle the third bishop of Nelson.<br />
Bad bishops, and even bad popes, from time to time, have ever been the bane of the Catholic Church. All men, even clergy, have free will, and thus can be sinners, even great sinners, and priests in high offices can be the greatest sinners of all because they have so much to betray. Aaron with the golden calf; the temple rulers who defied the prophets; the Pharisees who blasphemed against God Incarnate; Judas, forever; Peter, James and John, temporarily; and then two thousand years of heresy and schism amongst the episcopacy have all scarred the image of the Church Militant and guaranteed the continual bleeding of the wounds of Christ. By the time I got to Nelson, in the spring of 1960, I had converted my voracious appetite for novels, criticism, and general reading to a voracious appetite for theology, Church history, and biographies of the saints. Being a novelist-in-training I did not give up the other stuff - the lightest of reading can provide some remarkable symbols, one gets to learn - but greatest writings to do with the Catholic Church had become my wonderfully light-some passion and primal purpose, albeit with a soberly increasing understanding of the scope of failure that Christ's whole religion made possible. Moreover, in my daily digesting of the <i>Summa</i> that was the central work of the months in Alert Bay, I had run across reference to the duty, of an informed Catholic, to rebuke even a bishop, and, I think I can say after all these years of reflection, God's grace made me ponder Thomas' instruction with a certain gravity, even though the bishops I knew of - Duke, Johnson, O'Grady - were not men I could think of criticizing, let alone rebuking.<br />
In the trip to Nelson I never did meet Doyle, nor any other priest of the diocese except his appointment - in 1959 - to the presidency of the college. Years later I learned that the Reverend Aquinas Thomas - of the New York based Society of the Atonement - had actually been banished to south-eastern British Columbia because of his political ambitions. He had lobbied extensively to be elected head of his order, and thus been sent down for an attitude so flagrantly contradictory to the ideals of a monk. The Atonement Fathers were a modern species, founded by a converted Anglican, of Franciscans. Father Aquinas wore both sandals and hooded robe, but in fact no man more unlike the real monk ever strolled more incontinently through the halls of a Catholic institution, and never with more blessing and support of his bishop. Abelard is of little use as an example of moral failure, because at least Abelard was faithful to his Heloise. Our poor reprobate believed in a succession of victims.<br />
Now of course I knew none of this prior to arriving at the campus. I had read of villainous churchmen, but all the priests I had encountered up to that point, as far as I knew, were admirable in the celibacy, their basic energy for life and their concern for souls, and, without even questioning the issue - as we do do often now - their fundamental commitment to the teachings of the Church. What Newman found, I had found. Granted, there had been varying responses to my status as a mystic, but even among priests the lack of experience, as John of the Cross insists, must be allowed for. God had his way, even unto inspiring Archbishop Johnson, as he was by then in Vancouver, to say to my anxious mother-in-law to be: "Is it possible, Viole, that he is a visionary?" And by the time Shawn and I were sailing into Alert Bay the first time, I was in minor ecstasy reading Anthony Trollope's <i>Barchester Towers,</i> a novel in which all the principal male characters are clergymen! They were Anglican, of course, but I had every confidence that in time I could fill a legitimate plot with Catholic priests.<br />
So much for the crocodiles, for the moment. Now we must speak of the grace that abounds where sin abounds. But of course that too contains an element of the crocodile, where we have the abundance of graces that come with the matured spiritual life, or even with fairly early stages that are nonetheless precociously augmented by the will and skill of an omnipotent heavenly Father.<br />
In the autumn of 1958, I had my first and perhaps greatest, experience of the flight of the spirit, during which I was conscious of at least three major and unforgettable elements. I was in an indescribable state of happiness; I utterly lacked any sense of possessing a body; I was not only in Heaven but also in Mary's womb. It was this event that made me realize the I was in fact more than a novelist, I was a mystic. But it was also an event which followed a proportionate series of acutely uncomfortable experiences, going back to the same time of year, the autumn, of 1956, when I left law school for the first time to study under, as I thought at the time, my own guidance.<br />
Although most of the time I was the happiest student I had ever been, reading for the most part the most serious psychology texts I could find - Freud, MacDougal, Havelock Ellis - I had also to pay a certain price for my freedom. For the first time in my life, so far as I can remember, I was regularly threatened with failure; as punishment for my radical break from the normal order of education and social responsibility I would never again be able to find a job. It was usually as I was trying to go to sleep at night that the devil carried on this abuse. In the daytime, I was happily busy at some useful study or reflection on what I was reading. Earlier than this of course, throughout the entire first year of law school I'd known the habitual exercise of the ligature of the faculties that prevented real scholarship, but that had been more consoling than anything, and I had always enjoyed the setting and the company. This nagging threat was downright unpleasant, and occasionally seemed to take quite a lot of courage and determination to endure without a change of direction. We should not meander too far off our subject of the moment, however, and I will simple say that after six weeks of not-so-quiet ecstasy as an independent student I ran out of funds and immediately found a month of temporary work, ideal for a young fellow, and at an excellent rate of pay. The Father of Lies lost the first round, and I was well on my way to learning how to live, by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, one day at a time.<br />
But of course we do not know about any given day the same way God does, or even in the same way History will be able to judge a few decades later. Now it is easy to see Heaven's correcting principles at work. My experience of the flight of the spirit, following a sustained programme of the dark night and the lower mansions, came in the same weeks that W.E.Doyle was being made bishop of Nelson. He was consecrated in October, installed in Nelson early in December. I cannot give an exact date for my experience, but I do know that it was a few weeks before Christmas. God knew the diocese I would be settling in, eventually, and wanted me well set up spiritually, not only to survive such wickedness, but also to increase the numbers of those interested in perfection, even in such a contradictory environment.<br />
Not that I in any way thought of myself at that time as a spiritual director, either for the present or the future. My passions were for study, writing, and some form of classroom teaching. I read Teresa and John of the Cross so constantly, and with such respect and deference, that I could not think of a director as anyone with less than a mastery of the seventh mansion and the night of the spirit, and this I knew I did not have. At that point, my best working asset, in the mystical order, was the inner sense of touch. For much of every day, God had a manifestly tangible hold on my brain. For the most part, I was kept <i>out </i>of trouble and <i>in </i>the right direction.<br />
It should be emphasized as well - and as often as I am moved to say it - that I was most certainly kept away from the one kind of writing that ordinary thought would expect me to be trying the hardest with at this point: writing about the spiritual life, especially about my more phenomenal adventures with mysticism. Nothing is more natural to a writer than the desire to work up his strongest material. One could think that Hemingway got himself involved in a war simply to be able to write with authority over an area always popular with many readers. Prior to realizing that my central field was to be contemplation, I prided myself on, and took great comfort in what I though of as a considerable variety in experience. Going on twenty-three, I thought of myself as having had a varied education, a varied history of work, a wide circle of friends with different interests. I had rubbed shoulders with all the social classes and political and religious inclinations or convictions, and before becoming a Catholic, would have insisted that I possessed a universally open mind. This was all going to be most helpful, I assumed, to my literary career.<br />
And to the extent that I could think up a plot or a group of characters, I of course drew on this youthful history. But never was I allowed or inspired to draw on my history of the mystical, not in the slightest, so of course all my stories were out of whack. The best I could do was to insert some degree of religious flavour, but this was never close, spiritually speaking, to what I actually knew as an every day life. Occasionally I dipped into catechetics, but there was not even much grace for that, as my characters were so skimpily formed, in my complete inability to set down what I knew the best and thought about the most. But I did enjoy my writing, for I had ever loved nature, and had some pleasure in jotting of the wilderness, or things of town and humanity insofar as I was inspired and permitted to take them on.<br />
In the weeks after we were married, I had even essayed a priest, my first attempt. It was a bold venture, for I had my young lay hero as a friend of his, and certainly I had yet to claim a priest as a personal friend, although the dozen or so men of the Catholic cloth I had encountered up to that point had all for the most part been friendly enough, and certainly these engagements had all held a flavour quite unknown to me before. I suppose, for a novelist, their virtue and affability created a problem: none of them were evil, or even especially stupid, although God had seemed to advise me to beware trying to seek a spiritual director in Vancouver. But in firing me off to Nelson, He had begun to lift the screen from the chiaroscuro.<br />
So, now, back to the <i>Canadian Prince,</i> plowing south through the Inside Passage. In earlier years, incidentally, she - or he, as a prince - had been dubbed the <i>Princess Nora</i>, a CPR ship, and the husband and father of some very dear friends of mine in my student days had been one of her engineers. He was, like so many sailors, a Scot from Glasgow, God rest his kindly soul. Furthermore, as the <i>Prince, </i>this boat could claim, a few years before we first sailed on her, a third mate who had become a friend of ours, then godfather to our first-born. He had left the sea for studies, and stored extra books of ours when we left Vancouver, and later, when I was up to my ears in the troubles of Nelson, blessed the beginning of the third full version of the yacht novel. He was by then a university librarian. Sadly, however, he finally committed suicide, so God bless him too. How rarely we know as effervescent youngsters, what sorts of tragedies will come upon our friends.<br />
Shawn and I had managed to get a part of a night's sleep on the narrowest bunk ever designed. Perhaps there was also an upper bunk, but that would have been ridiculous for a couple still married less than a year. As it was, the relative discomfort of the bunk had us awake in time to see the south-west corner of Lasqueti Island, lying across the choppy gray seas to port as we sped toward Vancouver. My beloved had heard so much about the island from me and always insisted that I write about the days spent there. We had not seen it on the northward journey, as it was still part of the night when we had sailed by. Now we had a clear view of the rocky shore and its mantle of evergreens. Perhaps as well we picked up some of the angels who had been part of my experience there, experiences in innocence, an immensely useful introduction to the Virgin Mary, and a most profound - for a youngster - encounter with the dark night and a subsequent equally profound encounter with the Being of God.<br />
Getting this chance to see the island - I had not been back since I was fourteen - was not a mere happenstance. In the place where I was heading, I was about to encounter, as far as I have known, my first impure priest. Perhaps, for all his Catholic background, he had not known the same good fortune in his youth as I had.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-24014360096744441772016-01-22T16:17:00.001-08:002016-01-22T16:17:42.338-08:00Chapter 23 At that point in the family history, my wife's parents were still living on Sixteenth Avenue West, the house where Shawn had lived when we were courting. In her basement room, three weeks after we had experienced our first conclusive encounters, I had fallen in love with Nelson, from browsing through her scrapbook. That Friday evening there were no student parties, no interesting movies we had not already seen: there was nothing to do but look into this - as it turned out - fascinating record of not only her past, but the history of her time in the town she grew up in.<br />
By this time I was stunningly - and gratefully - aware that I had never in my life met a woman who had such a deep and profound - and of course, God given - appreciation of the best and the most colorful in her fellow human beings. Her cross-section of friends, her student clubs and associations, her appreciation of faculty and all the culture they stood for, was utterly remarkable. That was the lesson of my first three weeks or so of knowing her well. Then, on that Friday evening with the scrapbook I saw that power of empathy and gratitude at work again, this time for the community that had raised her.<br />
Now I was about to see that very town, and what had become for me its very heartbeat - or so I thought - the little Catholic university, just a decade in being; and it was just after mid-day that I caught the Greyhound bus for Nelson. In those days the run took longer, as in the daylight the bus travelled from Osoyoos to Rossland through northern Washington state, while at night, on the Canadian side, it twisted over a wonderfully scenic but necessarily slow, mountain dirt road. When I came back four years later, for good, the provincial department of highways had built the paved highway route from Christina Lake to Castlegar known as the Blueberry-Paulsen, and the bus run was something like four hours shorter.<br />
I must confess that throughout the trip I was utterly delighted to be travelling toward Nelson: my heart was as full of hope as Ulysses', when he knew he was finally on his way to Ithaca, and I rather doubt that I was in any way convinced that my hopes for a college post, teaching English, were about to be dashed against the rocks. I had spent a full year appreciating the wisdom of the <i>Summa Theologica</i>, almost that long reading the <i>Ascent of Mount Carmel</i> because God had made its study as necessary as it was totally satisfying and purposeful, and I had also assumed a quite respectable relationship with the English and American Catholic writers and thinkers of the past - at that time - hundred years. I also knew that I was a writer, perhaps not yet published beyond the columns of the student papers and the daily press of a major city, but still someone with a talent that would one day - as the Lord many years later would say to me - rest among the English greats. After all, someone would eventually have to deal with those four hundred years of Anglican eccentricity, and regardless of whether or not I had any original, creative, ability, I had by then enough analytical experience, from the genuine scholastic standpoint, to understand that the Tudor and Stuart follies had cut England off from the necessary genius of the Counter-Reformation, and especially from the necessary genius of the three incredible Spaniards: Ignatius, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross. I loved English literature, but I knew its defects, and I knew the deeper sources where the souls of the young could feed with deeper adventure and absolute security and purpose.<br />
There was a point on the bus trip, too, where my cause appeared to be proclaimed by the circumstances of Providence. It was close to midnight, perhaps after the witching hour, when we stopped in some small Interior town, where through the windows of the bus open to the night air I heard the voices of two Grade Twelve boys, both thoughtful lads, talking about the end of the school year and their hopes for further education. It seemed to be a good sign. I really did feel that I would like to be a teacher - I had not always - and I felt prepared. And the night certainly seemed full of poetry, full of the smells of late spring in the country, and the markedly individual sounds of the hour, as well as of the musings of two young men upon their future.<br />
I sleep well on buses, but there was a moon in the clear sky that night, shining on the still snow-capped peaks and our twisting mountain road, and once we were east of Osoyoos I was in a part of our province I had never seen before. Also, our nine months on an island less than three miles long had reminded acutely how fond I was of an expansive geography and the means of getting about in it. I felt myself to be entering a land I would be very happy to live in forever, and I wanted to be aware of all the moments of our first encounter. Landscape has always been a member of my immediate family, and that of the Kootenays was to be no exception.<br />
By the time we descended into Trail, it was full light. I bought a copy of the local paper, the Daily Times, and read it quickly so as not to miss more of the passing countryside that I could help. But the paper too was part of the local flavour: I had not picked it up because I was anxious about world events; perhaps I was nothing but confident in my upcoming pitch to the president of the college, and I thought I should settle into studying local issues and interests as soon as possible. I was not to see Trail for five years after that fateful journey, when Shawn and I would be part of a quite wonderful folk music concert in the smelter workers union hall.<br />
Certainly part of my severe feeling of disappointment in failing to land a post, as it was to turn out, was the landscape. The bus rolled along between mountains, beside the Columbia River, even, in the area of Birchbank golf course, past the spot where my grandfather, just after the First World War, had operated a small truck farm, from which he had sold butter and eggs to Selwyn Blaylock, the manager of the smelter. My father had told me a story of watching the family horse drop dead in the field, from eating the grass poisoned by fumes from the chemical rendering of the silver, lead, zinc, and gold, and of the general slaughter of the area's deciduous trees, but then had come the electrolysis attack on the problem, after the famous law suit by the Wenatchee farmers, downstream Americans, the conversion of trouble into fertilizer, and once again the hills of the valley were green.<br />
At Castlegar, we encountered the Kootenay River system - some of which I had seen from the air and the to[ of a dyke in 1956, when I was a Vancouver Sun reporter - turned right, and aimed straight for Nelson. In the Kootenay valley, the hills were even greener, and the succession of dams and pools and stretches of turbulent river was quite unlike anything I had seen before, and that here lay a history I had not much, heretofore, thought about. I gazed and gazed at the passing countryside of well-kept houses resting in the midst of fields and large garden plots, alternation with stretches of evergreen timber, and found myself wondering if there could be a more idyllic area to live in. All this rural, or semi-rural, ambiance, with the forest at the back door! What could be more wonderful? In the '58-69 winter I had had a vision of the Kootenay-Columbia river system while watching a television study on the question of the new dams on the Columbia, and now I was within that vision! Of such well-arranged coincidences, or providential occurrences, are myths and legends made! My heart, my soul, could do nothing other than expand.<br />
The scene was the same, wonderfully the same, all the thirty miles into Nelson, with the simple. and even more attractive, exception that close to that little city, the small farm clearings, shining green in the morning sun, held their spaces hundreds of feet above the river. The hanging gardens of Babylon could have been nothing like. In earlier days, I was later to learn, many of these emerald pastures had been dairy farms.<br />
As my chat with the President was scheduled, I think, for the late morning, I arrived in Nelson well in advance. The bus station in those days stood at the corner of Baker and Hall, the south-west corner. I ate a leisurely breakfast of bacon and eggs in the station restaurant, asked directions to the campus and then started off on a mile walk. Since those times Greyhound has twice relocated their bus depot, but the corner, except for a respectable period as a Salvation Army thrift store, has usually had to do with food and coffee. In its latest persona, it was taken over by a family of some of our closest friends. And for the past couple of years it has been one of the two or three watering holes where I infallibly get the grace to write a few lines of the<i> big poem</i> while I sip my morning beverage. Although the first sketches of the epic were wrought in the silence of this study, all subsequent production has so far only been possible in a cafe, first thing in a morning, while my fellow citizens are gearing up for their day's work. The Muse insists on this condition, perhaps because He thinks I will be best fed by participating in their hopeful expectations of the day ahead.<br />
There is an interesting coincidence. The man I was about to try to discuss my future with belonged to a religious order whose headquarters were in the New York area. As I write, it is a week since that city was so severely damaged by the passenger jet suicide flights into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre.<br />
In those days, in the 'Sixties, Islamic fundamentalists were not a threat to our part of the world. The enemy then was Communism, and it was not much of a threat either, in the Diocese of Nelson, but certain Catholic clergy were to use this supposed menace, and its sometime supposed ally, trade unionism, as the paper tiger against which they could exercise their own supposed virtue in order to cover their actual vices. I suspect that our region was not alone in this convenient exercise in smoke and mirrors. Patriotism is sometimes the <i>first</i> refuge of a scoundrel, and it was to be better than twenty years before the justice system charged and convicted at least the priests who preyed on children. Sadly, it has been able to do little to the clergy in authority, who, because they were intemperate themselves. colluded in keeping the pedophiles in their positions.<br />
In a story of the spiritual life, which is fundamentally about the encounters of a soul - and its associates - with God, how much space does one give to a villain? Certain critics have suggested that in writing <i>Paradise Lost</i> the poet John Milton gave too much attention to the Devil, and I suspect that I might agree with them, because I certainly never found in that lengthy epic the same clarity and usefulness, on the same subject, as I discovered in John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, as well as other doctors of the Church. So how much effort do we put out for such as the Reverend Aquinas Thomas, S.A.? Well, even naming such a fellow requires a certain setting aside of human preference. It would be more pleasant to ignore his appellation, and simply pass him off as "The President", or, even more consoling, to be able to ignore his destructive vices and comment only on some lasting contribution to education, especially theological education, in our part of the province.<br />
Yet an artist must be honest, and a theologian must recollect the villains of Holy Scripture. Was not Saul a fool to be envious of David, the saviour of his kingdom> And this wretched cleric, following in the tradition, would eventually run into the problem of the musician, the singer, who also had the Word of God on his mind.<br />
But this was in the future. In the present of 1960, there was simply the friar of some forty years, in his robe and his sandals and his office in an utterly autonomous Catholic college, on one side of desk and a twenty-four year old layman convert young husband on the other.<br />
Although I told Father Aquinas I was a mystic, I did not tell him about the spiritual apprehensions of having to someday come to Nelson. I think my entire focus during the interview had to do with my own capacities to teach English literature as an introduction to the Scriptures and Saint Thomas, and I was equally concerned to evaluate just how much of a Thomist this priest was.<br />
He did not challenge my claim to a special relationship with God, but he did startle me by asking me how well acquainted I was with John Dewey, the American philosopher - so called - of education. In retrospect, I have to say that it was, up to that point, the stupidest question I had ever had from a Catholic priest, a wonderfully irrelevant reference to the work at hand, for I had by that time read a fair bit of Gerald Vann, the Dominican educator, and I knew that Dewey was about as far from his wisdom as a thinker could get. Nonetheless, when I got back to Vancouver I did lay hands on a copy of Dewey, dutifully read it, and was at a total loss to know why Father Aquinas had asked if I knew his thinking.<br />
No, he would not hire me. The lack of a degree made a job at the college impossible. But my wife had a degree, did she? He might be interested in her, he said, but I was certain this was not our road. Shawn was not only about to be a mother, but our time in the schools of Alert Bay had proved that she was not fascinated by a lifetime of teaching, whereas I was obviously getting more and more anxious to whale the tar out of a blackboard, somewhere.<br />
Given the enormous appeal of the original visions of life in the Kootenays, I was understandably cast down by this decision, and puzzled as to why I had been so inspired to come in the first place. But I did not fuss: ever since the dark night of the intellect in my days in the UBC faculty of law I had become something of a veteran of contradiction. I knew that God must have had a reason for my journey. But I did feel the disappointment, especially when I took a walk along the forest road about the college, beside the creek and toward the Great Northern Railroad tracks that my father-in-law had once been responsible for. To someone like myself, with such a combined affection for theological study and the wilderness - I mean real wilderness as opposed to the tamer pleasantries of a city park - I could not think of a more ideal location for living and working and creating, and I must admit that I felt the meaning of sacrifice. I may even have shed a tear or two.<br />
I was taking the stroll to kill time as well as to sort out my feelings. Father Aquinas had kindly invited me to stay for lunch in the campus cafeteria and it was still half-an-hour before noon. When I came back from my walk, thoroughly satisfied with the geography, and reconciled to my not being able to move to it immediately, I rejoined my host, at the faculty table, and sat directly across from him.<br />
Half-way through the meal, fate - or Providence - struck with a vengeance. A very attractive young woman, eighteen or so, suddenly disengaged herself from one of the student tables and came over to speak to our monk. She stood close to him, so that she could speak quietly, and I did not hear what she had to say. I was neither introduced nor included in the conversation, which was rather brief anyway and apparently none of my business. I would have taken no further notice of the event except for one small contingency: Father Aquinas blushed. Not only that, but he realized that I say him blush.<br />
You cannot hang a man, of course, because he blushes. It is generally understood, as well, that a good soul can blush for the indiscretions of a bad one. But I was not a little stunned, and never forgot the incident, although it was to be almost forty years before I was given the evidence that explained it. Not having the evidence at the time, I was left puzzled, and, mindful of the words of the Lord: "Thou shalt not judge.", I was reluctant to jump to conclusions. I finished my lunch, said thank you and goodbye, walked back down the slope to the bus station and caught my ride back to the Coast. The eastern part of the route lay first to the south, to the American border, and then over Highway Twenty, in northern Washington, to the Okanagan River. I remember blazing blue skies and fields and fields of hay, and perhaps winter wheat. I had a seat to myself all the way for that part of the journey, and somewhere along it I really did break down and cry for a couple of minutes or so. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2449078864887794709.post-41527601698989628132016-01-20T14:13:00.001-08:002016-01-22T16:18:18.982-08:00Chapter 24 If I were, in these pages, writing a novel. I would not do what I am about to do now, that is, spell out something of the grand climax of the long and bitter history of scandal in the Church, both local and universal, that, as I was to come to know it, began with the little episode just sketched. In a novel, as in a play or a film, suspense must be part of the structure, in such a way that there must be a tangible thread of it from beginning to end, so the reader can share the characters' own sense of quest and uncertainty, and thus also share emotionally in the catharsis of the resolution. Perhaps I should not exclude all autobiographies, either, for some adventures can be told pretty much as cliff-hangers, even if they are true. But this is a spiritual work in which the climax was given away at the very beginning. Furthermore, the historical incidents which support the accounting of that climax, certainly a resolution beyond which nothing greater can be attained or received in an individual, took place for the first time almost thirty years ago. (The most recent, in the visual aspect, was two days ago, in the course of some spiritual direction.) Thus all other achievements must be kept in perspective, so as not to disturb the mood necessary for an adequate reading of a work such as this. Moreover, in chewing over the significance of these latest events, I was reminded of one of the fallible ideas of my youth, and it seemed a good time to record it, as the late facts are such a good example of how God eventually, and very fully, answers any question or objection we might be moved to think up.<br />
After the initial terror of discovering that I was to be a writer, I who had never reaped much satisfaction from school composition assignments, quite quickly began to acquire a distinct mental pleasure in what I understood was the intellectual and imaginative preparation for the day I settled down to a story or two, and never until the rainy autumn Sunday afternoon that I began the first draught of the Yacht Novel did I have any doubts or complaints about my appointed vocation. Nor did I have any dark moments, as far as I can recall, throughout the year or so it took me to finish it, actually in two spurts many months apart. I knew, mind you, that it was only a draught, and would require much rewriting, although I could never have believed that this retelling and retelling would take half-a-century.<br />
But in my second year at my apprenticeship, when I began writing short stories - ah, sophomores - I found myself fretting over what seemed to be a very negative predicament of the writer: other men <i>did </i>things, writers only <i>wrote</i> about what other men did. To no small degree was this kind of thinking the lamentable result of my then neglect of the study of real philosophy, but I did not know this then, and my complaint seemed to be genuine. I sometimes thought I had been tricked into a second level of occupation.<br />
In many ways, I think I was done with this complaint by the end of my second year - I'd had a whopping great spiritual experience in my Ontario army camp, as well as a writer's pilgrimage to New York - and if not, then certainly my third year, my first in law school, with its definite intrusions of the dark night that rendered my brain incapable of mastering the legal world as I knew a good student must, was teaching me, albeit obscurely, that I had a vocation within a vocation.<br />
But now, so many years later, comes the teaching among teachings: the Vatican has taken a resolute and major step against sexually abusive and undisciplined priests, going over the heads of the bishops - who have proven so negligent and incompetent - and placing such matters under the authority of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. The contemplative, who, among other things, prays for the needs of the Church, has seen this need about to be, by canon law, more satisfied than it has been. The lamentable habit of protecting, even fostering, the lack of chastity among priests and even bishops, in future should have a swifter means of correction. Had such a system been in place forty years ago, this diocese might have kept its university and one of its private high schools, to say nothing of its honour as well. How much damage ensues, when hard facts of wrongdoing are not communicated to the proper authorities; how much labour must be undertaken, primarily by contemplatives, to restore or create what should be the ordinary exercise of vigilance and responsibility.<br />
So it stands to reason and to faith, does it not, that God should have ordered a contemplative into the diocese of Nelson, certainly one of the worst in the country and continent and set the labours of his soul - and the souls of his contemplative associates - against this scourge? But being God, He did not have to explain Himself in full, only give the grace for surviving such a task from day to day. All would eventually be explained in Heaven, of course, and, as the unearthing of scoundrels is, in cases such as these, the job of bishops and police, the daily bread of the man of prayer was to be growth in the spiritual life and help to those who sought the same thing. Yet details from time to time came his way, sooner or later.<br />
The last of these was just over a year ago. Six months or so after I was told the story that explained the blush, I mentioned it to the Pope, in company with some other considerations: one, thoughts on the proposal to make Louis de Monfort a doctor of the Church - a most excellent idea, in the current collapse of Marian devotion - and the second, possibly a veiled reference - certainly hidden from me - to the events of the Black Tuesday of the upcoming September 11th. It was, again, a half-year or so before the Roman legislation was announced.<br />
The information that was passed on to me, some forty years after the event, and this because it was generally known that I had been involved as much as I could be, with police, the courts, and the journalists, in dealing with the clergy - quite numerous in the Nelson diocese - who had been charged, finally, with sexually abusing the young.<br />
From a certain point of view, this activity might be seen by some to be fairly extensive, and it is a fact that over the years, especially in the decade or so following the revelations first emerging, in Canada, in the archdiocese of Saint John's, Newfoundland, I was from time to time pretty busy about it; but the most important work was in the praying, for it was in this, by the laws of the spiritual life, that I was given the deepest misery. This was profoundly true even before the attaining of the seventh mansion, but it was much more so subsequently. Christ indeed came to earth to suffer. I had run into the devil before the Easter of 1973, and that was unpleasant enough, but these incidents were still only certain degrees toward the raw, naked, horrors that were the final bequest of the fully mature state. For the first time in my life I had to see, and to some extent, share, the spirits of perversion, although I was not given the satisfaction of being able to identify the actual human exercisers of these spirits and point them out to the police. God, it seems, had no special wish to see the diocese of Nelson cleaned up before the rest of the Church.<br />
Could this have happened? Probably I shall never completely forget how to turn the possible scenarios of correction over and over in my mind, not entirely uninfluenced by memories of earlier successes in helping the authorities catch a felon, albeit in much less serious issues than the molestation of children. The first was an assault, the second an attempted fraud, the third a robbery. In all three cases it was pretty much the result of being in the right place at the right time.<br />
But, as equally important in the matter of law and order, and the protection of victims, in those earlier instances - all on the lower mainland - the powers that be were doing their job. One very efficient pair of the juvenile detail of the Vancouver police, an alert Dun and Bradstreet credit investigator, and quick acting little squad of Burnaby RCMP. And in the last case - I think this is relevant - there might not have been an arrest had not the entire episode began with a kindly officer bending the rules in the first place to offer me a ride as I was walking the Lougheed Highway in the middle of a rainy night.<br />
But in Nelson, there was not this kind of efficiency, and my participation in it, until the morning of February 14, 1988 - a Sunday - when a Nelson police corporal called our home to ask my wife to ask our four daughters, all graduates of Saint Joseph School, if they had been victimized by the Reverend John Frederick Monaghan, former pastor and vicar general of the diocese. At that point I was able to go into gear, and stay there, on and off, for the next five years, by which time all the criminals except two had been rounded up, tried, and sent to prison. The victims had finally come up with the simplicity and courage to complain to the police, and the police and the press had finally realized that there was a problem.<br />
The two who had not been put behind bars were the pair I started with, the university president and the bishop, and they remained free and uncharged because they had not in fact been accused of sexual activity by any victims young enough to have them put away, or simple enough to carry a provision of information all the way through to the courtroom. They remain severely guilty in my mind, however, of conspiracy to maintain Father Monaghan in his predatory position. In the spring of 1967, as I was preparing to leave classroom teaching for more obscure forms of sharing my mystical life with mankind, both my principal and a member of the school board told me about the results of an inquiry arranged over allegations of that time brought against Father Monaghan.<br />
Monaghan was sent to Father Aquinas, the university president. Father Aquinas declared that Father Monaghan was a good and devout priest and the sister principal was an over-anxious nun, and the adjective is a euphemism for what he actually said. Father Aquinas was recommended, of course, by Bishop Doyle. Nor was he the only faculty member with an interest in attacking the reputation of a sound religious concerned with the morals of Nelson Catholic education personalities of that time.<br />
To this day the province's attorney general has declined to make a full inquiry into Bishop Doyle's dereliction of duty. This could be because a thorough examination of the history of the last forty years of the diocese would show that, in His own mysterious ways, God was warning all the authorities all the time, and all the authorities were too stupid or too involved in their own sinful behaviour to pay attention. This may seem hard and judgmental, and if it is, then I have to be sorry; but it may also be the most logical comment on the thought patterns of professionals in the Canadian province widely recognized to be the least religious in the nation, perhaps priding itself the fullest on the so-called separation between Church and State.<br />
At the very least, British Columbia has not been the easiest or most productive province for a mystic's practising his profession, as far as it affects the ordinary needs of provincial society. Future legislatures, police academies, law, medicine, and journalism schools might do well to take note of the realities of the mystical life, and thus learn to co-operate with the unusual graces of God rather than resist them.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0