These 26 chapters were written between the years 1995 and 2003, simply titled by the author as "Autobiography". I have taken the phrase The Inn of the Seventh Mansion, found in book four of his novel Contemplatives and made it the title for this book.
He later returned to writing autobiography but in fictional form and titled it: Not Without the Angels.
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
Chapter 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.
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.
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 average 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 final text of my first novel until I was forty-four, coincidentally the same age at which Saint Thomas Aquinas began his Summa Theologica. 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.
This is not from want of looking 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?
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 saints and scholars, 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 True Devotion to Mary. This work of a real 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.
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 not 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.
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 daily bread? 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.
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.
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 made 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.
And when I say initially punishing I mean in the sense that there is a profound initial 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?
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 initially saved and then perfected him. Nor is he or she absolutely free from a personal need of refinement, as John of the Cross points out in the beginning of "The Living Flame." 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.
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.
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?
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.
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 we, 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.
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.
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.
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 average 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 final text of my first novel until I was forty-four, coincidentally the same age at which Saint Thomas Aquinas began his Summa Theologica. 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.
This is not from want of looking 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?
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 saints and scholars, 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 True Devotion to Mary. This work of a real 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.
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 not 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.
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 daily bread? 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.
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.
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 made 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.
And when I say initially punishing I mean in the sense that there is a profound initial 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?
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 initially saved and then perfected him. Nor is he or she absolutely free from a personal need of refinement, as John of the Cross points out in the beginning of "The Living Flame." 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.
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.
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?
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.
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 we, 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.
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.
Chapter 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.
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 my light had some connection with the light of Christ, 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.
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 man of the cloth 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.
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.
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.
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.
Being materialists, the Marxian and Freudian philosopher-psychologists fail far worse than my grandmother in their view of human nature: lacking her faith, 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 aura, 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."
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.
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.
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.
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 my light had some connection with the light of Christ, 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.
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 man of the cloth 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.
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.
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.
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.
Being materialists, the Marxian and Freudian philosopher-psychologists fail far worse than my grandmother in their view of human nature: lacking her faith, 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 aura, 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."
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Chapter 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 grace of words, and of course I was awfully fortunate to be granted such a favour, especially so young.
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 "Jesus Loves me, This I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong; They are weak, but He is strong." There was a pianist, and I think a second lady conducting us.
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 am both stronger and more tender than your father, and I will look after you."
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.
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 intellectual 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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 grace of words, and of course I was awfully fortunate to be granted such a favour, especially so young.
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 "Jesus Loves me, This I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong; They are weak, but He is strong." There was a pianist, and I think a second lady conducting us.
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 am both stronger and more tender than your father, and I will look after you."
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.
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 intellectual 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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
Chapter 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 Gone With the Wind 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 Gone With the Wind 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.
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 Gone With the Wind 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.
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 Gone With the Wind 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:
"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."
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 The Ascent of Mount Carmel he speaks little of being purged - the result of God's unique action on the lucky soul - and almost entirely of the soul's spiritual action on its own behalf.
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.)
Nonetheless, once my own first novel was a good year underway I one day fell into Gone With the Wind 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.
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. " Thou hast written well of me Thomas." But this same Thomas also tells us, in the very first pages of his masterpiece, the Summa Theologica, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, freedom of the printed word and the lively mind that has learned how to deal with it.
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 possible for sense acquired information and habit to be conceptualized, it is also necessary 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.
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 Windows '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 Gone With the Wind - twenty or so sketches for songs - my imagination was off and running wild again. Sound 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.
I had, I must admit, been involved indirectly, 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 tens 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.
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.
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.
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 channel 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. classical-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.
These intentional beings, creatures of the self's own mind, are not the same as what becomes of them 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 real beings, than do the various charts of the works in progress.
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. Through 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.
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 flitting 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.
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 worked at all, in the sense that the world often uses the term; the Muse, like any other object of true love, has to be courted, 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 obediential potential, 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.
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.
So, in order to reach our potential, we obey the Holy Spirit, in general, through following all 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Twelfth Night. 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 Twelfth Night was shot entirely in Cornwall, and made much use of the coast thereby.
As long as the angels are with us, and we with them, even the mere images of our imagination have an effect somewhere.
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 Gone With the Wind 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.
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 Gone With the Wind 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:
"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."
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 The Ascent of Mount Carmel he speaks little of being purged - the result of God's unique action on the lucky soul - and almost entirely of the soul's spiritual action on its own behalf.
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.)
Nonetheless, once my own first novel was a good year underway I one day fell into Gone With the Wind 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.
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. " Thou hast written well of me Thomas." But this same Thomas also tells us, in the very first pages of his masterpiece, the Summa Theologica, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, freedom of the printed word and the lively mind that has learned how to deal with it.
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 possible for sense acquired information and habit to be conceptualized, it is also necessary 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.
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 Windows '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 Gone With the Wind - twenty or so sketches for songs - my imagination was off and running wild again. Sound 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.
I had, I must admit, been involved indirectly, 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 tens 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.
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.
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.
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 channel 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. classical-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.
These intentional beings, creatures of the self's own mind, are not the same as what becomes of them 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 real beings, than do the various charts of the works in progress.
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. Through 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.
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 flitting 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.
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 worked at all, in the sense that the world often uses the term; the Muse, like any other object of true love, has to be courted, 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 obediential potential, 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.
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.
So, in order to reach our potential, we obey the Holy Spirit, in general, through following all 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Twelfth Night. 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 Twelfth Night was shot entirely in Cornwall, and made much use of the coast thereby.
As long as the angels are with us, and we with them, even the mere images of our imagination have an effect somewhere.
Monday, February 8, 2016
Chapter 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.
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, against 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.
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 The Inns of Court and Early English Drama. I had actually spotted the book first, as a matter of fact, yet my mind was still so full of the just seen Twelfth Night 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.
Wisdom is indeed a reason for acknowledging that we must, like the earth around the sun, let our destinies unfold in circular fashion.
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.
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.)
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, Roxanne and Housekeeping, in Nelson and area. Other enterprises followed.
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 Twelfth Night. (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 Twelfth Night 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.
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.
It was a fine, friendly, chatty, gathering - and there was even a Twelfth Night 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.
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.
Furthermore, any time it rains, in the later afternoon, especially at that time of year . . . .
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.
I should make a distinction: Thomas calls the memory the passive intellect, the storehouse for that which has already been understood - or at least apprehended - as contrary to the active 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 intellectual memory 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.
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.
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, The Outsider, 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 thing 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.
The mention of those authors, of course, raises questions as to the indirect participation of theology 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 The Sun Also Rises. 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 Spiritual Canticle, and would continue to be even more so affected, and Hemingway was no small channel for God's grace in this regard.
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 being-penetrating mind of Papa Ernest. He was, of course, not totally self-taught. No one is. The student is the agent 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.
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, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. 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 Contemplatives.
Did I discuss Hemingway the night I partied with the cast of Twelfth Night? 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.
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, against 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.
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 The Inns of Court and Early English Drama. I had actually spotted the book first, as a matter of fact, yet my mind was still so full of the just seen Twelfth Night 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.
Wisdom is indeed a reason for acknowledging that we must, like the earth around the sun, let our destinies unfold in circular fashion.
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.
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.)
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, Roxanne and Housekeeping, in Nelson and area. Other enterprises followed.
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 Twelfth Night. (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 Twelfth Night 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.
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.
It was a fine, friendly, chatty, gathering - and there was even a Twelfth Night 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.
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.
Furthermore, any time it rains, in the later afternoon, especially at that time of year . . . .
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.
I should make a distinction: Thomas calls the memory the passive intellect, the storehouse for that which has already been understood - or at least apprehended - as contrary to the active 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 intellectual memory 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.
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.
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, The Outsider, 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 thing 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.
The mention of those authors, of course, raises questions as to the indirect participation of theology 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 The Sun Also Rises. 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 Spiritual Canticle, and would continue to be even more so affected, and Hemingway was no small channel for God's grace in this regard.
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 being-penetrating mind of Papa Ernest. He was, of course, not totally self-taught. No one is. The student is the agent 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.
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, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. 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 Contemplatives.
Did I discuss Hemingway the night I partied with the cast of Twelfth Night? 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.
Sunday, February 7, 2016
Chapter 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.
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 not, these days, against the false accuracy of mono-nomenclature. So-called inclusive language has become profoundly exclusive, especially of intelligence, obedience and common sense.
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.
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.
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.
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 logical positivism, 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.
Why had I chosen not to enroll in any philosophy courses?
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 see the face of God and live. 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.
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 old man dies hard, and, as Saint Paul said to the Galatians, sin is master everywhere.
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 Ubyssey, so I think our souls might have been even in terms of simple impact from choices made following an inspiration. He was plainly excited by his philosophy class; I was equally delighted and satisfied by the working/learning and companionship opportunities of the student journal.
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 "the whole is the sum of the parts", 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.
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 Ethics. 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 Nichomachean Ethics! 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 action is that which goes on in the mind. 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 theologian, and the profession it signified . . . .
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?
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/
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 not, these days, against the false accuracy of mono-nomenclature. So-called inclusive language has become profoundly exclusive, especially of intelligence, obedience and common sense.
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.
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.
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.
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 logical positivism, 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.
Why had I chosen not to enroll in any philosophy courses?
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 see the face of God and live. 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.
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 old man dies hard, and, as Saint Paul said to the Galatians, sin is master everywhere.
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 Ubyssey, so I think our souls might have been even in terms of simple impact from choices made following an inspiration. He was plainly excited by his philosophy class; I was equally delighted and satisfied by the working/learning and companionship opportunities of the student journal.
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 "the whole is the sum of the parts", 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.
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 Ethics. 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 Nichomachean Ethics! 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 action is that which goes on in the mind. 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 theologian, and the profession it signified . . . .
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?
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/
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