Chapter 14

    Everybody falls in love, usually more than once, and it seems that far too great a proportion of lovers do little or no thinking about the ratios between the affection of one soul for another and the affection of either or both of those souls for God. Too late, if ever, do we come to the mystic's realization that the most profound of human joys in the love of another human, especially of the opposite gender, is no more than the middle act of the Divine Comedy. God is the cause of love - He it was, after all, who made the hearts in question - and He is also the ultimate goal and union of all our best longings. In our mature wisdom in fact, if we are so fortunate as to acquire it, we come to understand that our human romances are no more than occasions for our romance with the Virgin and the Trinity, the angels and saints, and it is only through understanding this sublime pattern and procedure that we can make the best of our human adventures of the heart. That is, human as they might seem merely to be at first, in our inexperience, and then, as we grow wiser, perhaps more Divine than human, keeping in mind that once we have been purged of sensuality and egoistic pride, we are good instruments for participating in the operations of care for each and all of mankind that come from the heart of a God who, is after all, in His own essential nature nothing but love. The opportunity to learn this fundamental law of life here, as well as in the hereafter, begins with the earliest experiences of childhood - "Suffer the little children to come unto Me." - but inadequate formation can obscure this reality. God is ever and everywhere teaching, but we are slow and unwilling to learn. Or, as I said, not correctly instructed.
    Thus the ravages of purgatory, for the saved but imperfect, because we must know how to love, and be loved by, perfectly, every soul in Heaven. There is no passing through the pearly gates for those who fail at love, that is, are still lacking the fullness of charity and wisdom in every corner of every faculty.
    Man, in his foolishness, in the habitual condition of what, in his fallen nature, he calls his instincts, rebels radically at such a contractual stipulation. The terms are too high, nobody can be both perfectly perfect and perfectly natural; a God who loves cannot possibly expect us to be so hard on ourselves; people who do wish themselves to know perfection - and actually act on such desires - are only indulging a prideful ambition. And so on and so forth. The world yaps, the flesh complains, the devil alternately whines and bullies. And life is lived at so much lower a level than it was intended to be.
    No quantity of merely human romance, of course, can teach us the essentials of perfection. Perfection belongs to God alone, and so jealously does He husband its particulars that claims of perfection that are only human are of all false claims the most severely punished. Yet in any romance reasonably well conducted, especially in a romance where innocence remains a predominant factor, there is much that is analogous to the relationship between a human heart and the Divine one, and many lessons, which if well studies in the beginning that is man and woman, go far to illuminate the end that is man or woman and the Infinite.
    Then, when this perfect union is accomplished, between the individual soul and God, there comes a final, totally fulfilled, understanding of what it is to perfectly obey the two great commandments of Christ - the love of God and the love of neighbour - according to their divinely intended destinies. The heavenly perfection of this state is comprehensible only to those who have been given it, in spite of their unworthiness, in this life, and it cannot be explained univocally, as the philosophers say, in words. The science of the mature mystics is not subject to ordinary observation by anyone, just as the experience of the beginners is hardly intelligible even to themselves.The demands of faith are never stronger. Yet the results are readily discernible, even where mere common sense, short of a genuine Christian faith, are the best the observer can call upon. Those who have been to Heaven, as it were, and returned, exhibit an astounding simplicity, and clarity of purpose, as well as an unshakable humility based on the scientific certainty of their experiential knowledge of the ultimate ways of the Way, the Truth, and the Light.
    Yet, of course, their journey toward such a lovely state was incapable of avoiding the most indescribable discomforts, trials, mortifications, predicaments of absolute detachments, losses, rejections, abuses, contempts, frustrations, contradictions. Some of these - the lesser part - were provided by man, and the others by God, or by God letting the devil have his hours. The ineffable treasure of the Seventh Mansion is not for the unsteady of will, the sluggish mind, the complacent and unpurged soul. For such a prize, there must be an awful lot of testing, not only at the initial levels of the spiritual life, but also much farther along than even ordinarily learned men might think. Saint Teresa utters the most dire warnings in such a lofty state as the Fifth Mansions, and John of the Cross discusses the refinement of faults even in the final dispositions of the Seventh.
    And, as odd as it may seem to those who assume that real religion is all severity - the curse of Calvin and Knox, and any other so-called thinkers illiterate and unimaginative enough to follow them - the experience of those who have come to know the fully matured love of God in this life have the habit of recalling that a good proportion of the rules of Divine love were there to be studied and applied in the first experience of human love. Our Lord, after all, the acknowledged master of lovers, wastes no time with His pupils and proteges, and where He allows and even promotes the heart to open to the light in another soul, has certain elements of Himself to insert into the process. He tries to teach that all genuine love comes from Him, and indeed, must return to Him, and from time to time He fully succeeds, in an earthly life. In the final analysis, in the resolutions of purgatory and hell, He succeeds absolutely, of course; yet we like to think that some men and women can be genuinely sensitive enough, spiritually wise enough, to allow Him to succeed within them in life before ordinary death.
    So what is the formula for giving Jesus that freedom? Humility, in the first place. Then gratitude for an adventure that unfolds one day at a time, as Providence may dispose. Without question, a mighty dollop of fear of the Lord, and an equal commodity of the preferential option for innocence and purity.
All of these are infinitely precious, to society as well as to an individual, yet no civilization or culture in the history of mankind has possessed any great abundance of such qualities within that civilization or culture taken in its entirety. They do not come naturally to associations of fallen man, but rather spring up in individuals who then set an example - and a preaching, if they are so ordained - that attracts those who feel any inclination to be lifted out of the mire of self-interest. The apostles and martyrs of the first centuries of Christianity were such individuals, but they were no more than a light in the midst of the general darkness of pagan Rome and a Judaism now failing for lack of prophets, the last of these having been John the Baptist. Their successors, especially in Egypt, were the desert fathers - and mothers and sisters as well, in time - who became the light in the midst of a legalized Christianity and the moronic dominance of the Arian heresy. Then came Benedict and the monks and mendicants of the West, and a leaven and a light that almost succeeded in making these lovely qualities an everlastingly accepted norm, for, in a sense, they almost governed the civilization they had created and inspired for a thousand years; yet the saints of those centuries could never relax against the Devil's puppets, and in the end, in Luther, Henry VIII and so forth, humility, obedience, chastity, were swept under the rug, to the degree that they functioned as a ruling standard, and once again society's only chance of sanity came from the radical holiness and organizational abilities of certain inspired individuals: Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, Pius V. To such a large extent, northern Europe turned into a vast home for the mentally unfit, and its strange form of culture proved its own unique identity by creating the various styles of psychotherapists professions. Northern Europe began its modern history by rejecting the Christian papacy and wound up, in a sense, being ruled by two sons of Abraham, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Both these men were brilliant in their own way, and have had a vast influence on recent social philosophy, but only intellects without a well-rooted obedience could think for a moment that they had any kind of complete description of the nature of man, either singly or together. To abandon Rome is to abandon common sense, scholasticism, and very likely all or most of the most fundamental dispositions of the whole mind.
    This may seem like a very long and unnecessary digression, having nothing at all to do with the romantic life of a nineteen-year-old, and for a moment I myself wondered if I were not wandering, but the Muse reminds me, from His lofty perch, that my circular track has certain utility. Philosophers, even very young ones, fall in love within a certain disposition, and novelists as well - they have to watch that they do not try it out just for the sake of the experiences from which stories come - so Providence must do its best to ensure as real an experience as possible, even in these affairs of the heart that are not destined for the binding journey to the altar.
    I don't think I'm exaggerating anything in this narrative, although I must admit that it's taken me many years to see to the bottom of it, and that accomplishment might never have come along had I not again turned to a thorough read of a book I first became aware of in the early '70's, Gabrielle Bossis' lovely dialogue with Christ, He and I. It was in that book, not so many days ago, that I saw Him say to the little French actress and contemplative, "There is a little of my Mother in every woman." 
    It is actually Mothers' Day, 1999, as I write this, and the mood of the celebration reminds me to recollect that all men who have had the great fortune to be brought to a perfect relationship with the Virgin Mary - it is She who bids me say such a thing - can easily recall certain aspects of the Divine maternity in their own mothers, and other female relatives, even when those women, by the particular slant of their ethics, were not aware of the omnipresence of the perfect Woman expressed in the wonderful formula, on of the most wonderful in all Catholic theology, "What God is by nature, Mary is by grace." For those who Mary favours with an invitation to come to the fullness of friendship with her that Catholicism makes possible, she will be at work as early as possible in their lives, using any goodness in any female as a sign and promise of the infinite goodness God has created in her. Later, when the child has grown to the man, and has lived up to the promise the Divine Mother held out for him, he will even create that reflection in other women, sometimes in the most wretched of other women, simply because this is one of the spiritual powers that may come with a divinely instilled perfection.
    It goes without saying that this same reflective grace, to be genuine, and beyond suspicion of wrongful intentions, should ordinarily shine equally on men and children.
    At the same time, it can also be pointed out that there are always a great many women it cannot seem to affect, simply because they are not spiritually disposed for it. This favour is something bestowed primarily from the power of God, and the human bestower is only a vessel of that power. In its most profound manifestations, moreover, it as a rule cannot happen unless the recipient has the remarkable virtue necessary for its reception, and it will not happen unless there is some good reason according to God's intentions.
    And the fact that it happens once does not mean necessarily that it will happen again. Many are called, but few are chosen, very much applies. Or, it may not happen again for a considerable time. Of all vocations, the spiritual life requires the most patience, because of all vocations, it contains the hardest sayings. It has all the vicissitudes of romance, but every one of them much more intensely.
    And thus I am returned to the place where I started - with, then, no anticipation of such a digression - in the beginnings of what seemed at the time like a normal affair of the heart. Grace must build on nature, and the skills of grace must build on the skills of nature. Nor was the digression all that digressive. I suspect that most of the elements of the previous paragraphs had a bearing on the human adventure. Even before I went on to university, in the months before I was done with high school, I had been moved to think of giving a sympathetic and appreciative look at socialists and socialism, of which Marx, of course, was no small factor; and in the university academic year that concluded with my romantic adventure, I had been a quite faithful member of Dr. Margaret Ormsby's Medieval History class, History 304, wherein I had heard a great deal about monks and other clerical contributions to the culture of Europe.
    Moreover, in that class, I had my first experience of beholding a Roman Catholic priest from up close. He was simply introduced to us as a new member of the History department and the man who would be marking our essays, and he did not stay for more than a few minutes, and said only a few words, but I was left with an indelible impression, both as a curious student and an even more curious novelist-in-the-making. And as he impressed me, so I was later, for at least a short time, radically to have an effect on someone. And this also, I think, was a kind of "first time" experience, for that person. I do not wish to draw too close a parallel between the two events, but there is a similarity, that occurs to me in my efforts to recollect these key details with a full accuracy; I cannot help but wonder if the God who knows every hair of our heads also found - or promoted - an interesting likeness.
    Just as I had never thought of myself as being especially interested in priests - my fictional heroes of those days, that is, in my own fiction, were young men of action: athletes, loggers, fishermen - so the young lady that was about to tip me head over heels had, at that point in her life not, it seemed, thought about taking up with a young man who would live out his working days as an intellectual. In the months when I was first getting to know her, she was going out with her high school boyfriend, if I remember correctly, and he, like her, had gone straight to work as soon as he graduated. I think she had broken up with him at least once, then got back together with him, and was not finally calling it quits until the night of our interesting encounter. I had met the boy once or twice in the family home - she was still living with her parents, and would do so until she herself was married - and found him to be a handsome fellow, but because of her older brothers, also still living at home, her most immediate social life was filled with university students, one of whom she would finally decide to be the man for her.
    But this happy conclusion was not to be for a few years, and I, in the meantime, was summoned to the noble task of stand-in, or proxy, or understudy. It was to be considerable of a sacrificial role, as I was to learn, which is why the adventure was such a good introduction to, and image of, the spiritual life, and of course, as the Bard said, it is better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all. And a good scholastic philosopher might add that it is not only better, but required, to have lost and lost more than once before finally loving for good, as love is a school much in need of more than one course or one classroom.

Chapter 15

    Truth, goodness, beauty, and love; when they come with any degree of proximity toward a genuine norm they come as a surprise. That is, they come this way some of the time. We do have a certain proportion of control over their presence in our lives, or otherwise study, prayer, and right action in their pursuit would be valueless, and yet we also realize that too much calculated effort can take us away from the real thing. My discovery that I was, for a time, lovable by a young woman, was anything but a result of a deliberate search for such an experience.
    Well, there had been a certain element of deliberation. Sometime into the new year of 1955, after a lot of thinking, I had asked to a Ubyssey party a girl who had shown up in the north basement of the Brock earlier in the academic year. I had decided that it was time to date, and the girl was attractive and intelligent. (She was later to work in international advertising and was also for a time the road companion of the well-known black female singing and acting artist Diana Ross.) The girl said yes, she would go with me to the party. However, to cut to the chase and preserve all and sundry from unnecessary speculation, I will next say that half-way through the party I realized, with absolutely no chagrin on my part, that her real interest was not in me, but in my best friend, also a member of the university paper, like her, philosophically a socialist, and the young man I had been meditatively prepared to take on as a friend even before I got to the campus. My chum looked a little apprehensive of my opinion half-way through the triumvirate conversation we got into midway through the evening - the girl politely went home with me - but I found myself quite delighted by the turn of events - good grist for a story, it struck me - and an excellent opportunity for practising detachment. What the heck? The pair of them seemed very happy, and I had made the little bridge to their Paradise. Who could ask for a finer honour, at nineteen?
    But not too many weeks after this small exercise in self-denial, on a find sunny Friday morning, when for reasons I can't remember I was in possession of my father's car, making me a free agent of my own transportation schedule, my boy-friend invited me to a small gathering at his house, already to some degree my home-away-from-home in the university district, no small favour to someone who lived ten miles away in the East End of Vancouver. For some reason I was not, in the morning, keen to go. Having the car, perhaps, was a symbol of an opportunity to find a grander adventure, or perhaps the wonderfully clear skies of that early spring inspired me to think I was supposed to spend a Friday night conquering some segment of the universe. There might also have been an interesting movie at the Varsity that I'd had my eye on. At any rate, I was fairly sure that I was not joining the party.
    Nor did I change my mind throughout the sunny day. I went to a class or two, or perhaps did not go, and did a bit of studying or reading. Friday being that lovely day when no real work went on around the newspaper offices, and then I must have gone for supper either to the campus cafeteria or Dean's Cafe, as it was in those years across the street from where the Ubyssey was printed and I spent so many evenings as a proof-reader and headline author. Then, as I pondered the movie, I was struck with a thundering wave of loneliness, rarely a sentiment of someone like myself, so passionate and satisfied a general reader, and realized that I was predestined - there is no other word for it - to go to the party. To open any other door was to stare into a black and bottomless pit.
    Although it was still early in the evening, the little gathering was well underway when I arrived, and came upon my first surprise of the evening, a very pleasant drink made with something I'd never heard of, grenadine. There seemed to be an ample supply, and I happily settled into it. Having left my decision to come until so late, I'd not laid in any contributions of my own and I was grateful for my friend's largess. Probably his new girlfriend, my one shot at a date that year so far, had contributed. It was the spring of the year, or close to it, a low time in students' funds.
    I'm not sure if I'd been much of a visitor to that very hospitable home in my first campus year. I must have been a few times, because the second son of the house and I had become friends quite quickly. He it was who offered me a beer at my first newspaper party, a quite unforgettable evening at the old Kerrisdale lawn bowling clubhouse, wherein I had been transfixed by the impromptu performance of a live trio: piano, trumpet, and stand-up bass. The rapture was perhaps not solely from the music alone: the trumpet player came from the interior town where my wife-to-be was raised, and they had performed together in the high school orchestra, she as a singer. But I knew none of that then. I had no idea what to say to anyone so talented, and my new friend, as he was becoming, who had brought the case of beer we was so generously sharing, was like myself born to habitually talk of literature, and it would have been around that time that I would begin my first attempt at a novel.
    But certainly in my second year, and then on into the third, the strange and mysterious one full year of law school, I was a most regular visitor, first because the son of the house, then because of a family friend from the days when they had lived in Victoria - the head of the house was an engineer on the CPR steamships - a lad come across the Gulf to attend the university and board with the family. He would act as a broker of sorts in my short-lived romance, and that indicates that he also had become one of the reasons I was there so often to chat, watch television, and late in the evening dine on the sandwiches provided by the lady of the house. In my first university year there was not quite so much of this, because I was still spending quite a lot of my free evenings with my old chums from high school and my neighbourhood.
    I don't mean to give the impression that I was a freeloader when it came to booze at parties. The two incidents I have mentioned were exceptions. After that first handout, I acquired the none too difficult skill of asking an upperclassmen to pick up a mickey of rye or a quantity of beer for me, and then at some point learned to brazen out my under twenty-one status at a liquor store or hotel off-sales. The second level probably came after my first year at summer camp in the officers' training programme. Being legal in an army mess goes a long way towards mitigating the fears of an arbitrary decision as to age at which a man can be allowed to buy his own alcohol. The officers' mess in Picton, Ontario also gave more than courage. There I was also given the nightly company of young French-Canadians, and the taste for an occasional Scotch whiskey.
    But back to romance, as some might call it. From the perspective of the subsequent years, I think of the adventure more as a lesson in friendship, in the realities of marriage as opposed to the fantasies, and perhaps most significant of all, a further and rather large step toward my growing apprehensions of the spiritual life. (I cannot say "comprehensions" because of course I knew hardly one word of the vocabulary particular to that science, let alone had studies the smallest and most amateur manual relevant to it. Nor does it quality that I was familiar with certain scriptural texts that applied to ethical action. I simply had no idea that prayer and meditation as a way of life were exactly that, a way of life, although I was in reality being introduced to such an ordinary fact, by experience.)
    The evening had worn on in complete and leisurely affability. Discussions here, discussions there, and it was quite likely that night that the son of the house had handed me an H.G.Wells novel, Tono Bungay. One of the bits of advice about campus life that God had pumped into me had been to let my student friends advise me on books worth reading, and at that point I had not actually cracked Pride and Prejudice, and perhaps the only satisfying part of my entire exposure to second-year English at that point had been some concentrated study, for the sake of the Christmas exam, on Hamlet. I'd found myself enjoying taking the trouble to memorize the action of every scene, chapter and verse, possibly just to prove to myself that I could master a subject if I really wanted to. The effort was rewarded. As I remember, it earned me my only first class in university English. I don't think I was ever stimulated to such a methodical analysis again, until I'd discovered scholastic theology and the history of the Church, the combination of which genuinely wonderful intellectual tools finally gave me the real machinery for taking the literature of Britain apart piece by not always entirely satisfactory piece.
    I suspect that it was that evening also that I brought out my ukulele and my modest collection of simple folk and then popular songs. I would have put the uke in the car on an instinct that something social would turn up. But this certainly would have been one of my first public performances, and I had probably decided that it would be a good idea to find out just how well I was progressing as an entertainer. I could hardly think of myself as the pick of the litter. My inspiration to learn the ukulele had come from a lad who, in partnership with another student, wrote magnificently funny, perceptive - and occasionally somatic - satires. Then, this other student acquired a five-string banjo, which, although reduced previously to a mere four strings, still made an irresistible sound. And, finally, to put me in my humble place, through my student mentor's socialist connections I was able to attend a local socialist's party, in respectable Point Grey, at which the star performer was a Vancouver boy, not a UBC student, who not only sang creditably, but who could play melody on a five-string banjo. I have always remembered that I felt as if I were hearing and seeing a young Pete Seeger, and as a beginning musician, I was not a little stunned. Two-and-a-half years later he has started up the publishing of a folk-song magazine, in Vancouver, and I had the happy satisfaction of spending a Sunday afternoon with him, spelling out the words, chords, and melody of a song I had written during my great job in the wilderness south and west of Tatlayoko Lake.
    So, as I said, I had good reasons to feel humble, to feel grateful for an audience that would listen to me, or, better, join in, and I think that night was successful, from the musical point of view, and therefore boosting to the ego and the confidence.
    If my memories are correct, our young lady, she whose person and spirit was to land on me with such unforgettable effect, came home somewhere toward the close of my musical hour in the sun. I think she caught the last two or three songs of my engagement and I was by then altogether warmed up and cooking, with all due respect to the limitations of the ukulele.
    Them came my hour as a raconteur. As befits a novelist, especially a novelist with a gift for dialogue, words have almost come easily, often too easily, for me, and that night by that time, I was as fluent as I could possibly be. That I remember distinctly. What I was talking about, what sagas or anecdotes I was summoning out of my young past, I have no idea whatsoever. But I seemed to be entertaining, everyone at the small gathering was listening, perhaps all else were much more aware that I was that the daughter of the house had just dropped one boy friend and might be interested in a replacement.
    She was certainly a pretty lass, and as she was by nature much more quiet than myself, there was most certainly the potential of opposites attracting. I had not thought too much about the fact that she was breaking up with the other fellow - someone in the house had told me this at some point - but the more she seemed to be paying attention to my story-telling, the more I became aware of her.
   And then something happened that I had never seen before.
    As the Lord said, the eyes are the window of the soul. Yet, although I'd had a few specifically spiritual experiences, I had no special habit of studying such windows, and certainly my final courses in such matters came two decades after the night I am describing now, when I was instructed again and again in the difference between eyes that were windows on a soul in heaven, as it were, and eyes on a soul in hell, strictly in accordance with the dispositions of the seventh mansion. But on this evening back in the 'Fifties, suddenly the lovely young woman was more than ordinarily attractive, and I saw in a sudden heightening of her colouring and an expansion of her eyes something I much later learned was called the dilation of the soul. There is a God, He is the manager of our destinies, and we do have guardian angels who can effect such changes upon us.
    I think this happened for a quite simple reason: she had realized, perhaps, that she needed a boyfriend, eventually a husband, who followed a profession of the mind, of the intellect. So she had made a choice, for her own self-preservation, and had been quite quickly rewarded, or confirmed, in the new direction.
    By the tender age of nineteen, I had, of course, been fond of a number of girls, and known some who had been fond of me, in a few cases quite substantially, sometimes expressed, sometimes not. But not since I was ten years old had I known a regular female companion, of my own age, except in the ordinary social context of school and youth organizations like scouts and army cadets. I had rarely even thought of dating, as for one reason, it cost money I didn't want to spend in such a way, and I'd had nothing whatsoever to do with high school dances. I did not even attend my graduation banquet and dance, for that particular Saturday in June had been booked for a yacht cruise, a cadet outing on the vessel owned by the honorary colonel of the reserve regiment to which our co-ed corps was attached. I was by that time regimental sergeant-major, and felt it my duty to attend that function. And I also should add that I could not think of myself as missing much: the only girl who had really bent me out of shape in my final year in high school was quite happily going with someone else. It did not seem fair to take one girl to an affair at which I would too likely have had my mind on another. And I should further admit that one of the girls in the cadet corps and myself were involved in some casual circling around each other, although as subsequent history was to prove, she was between bouts with an older, working, young man. My history as a stand-in had begun.
    So, while my heart had been severally stabbed - and keep in mind that mine was the heart of a poet - I had a limited record of the toil and trouble of romance, in the French sense that also means a novel, or plotted story, full of dialogue and outbursts of all the varieties of emotion. For almost a decade, all my closest friends had been boys, and, furthermore, I had no sisters, although all my women relatives had showered nothing but affection and good will on the first born of the third generation. I'd had an entirely satisfactory circle of male companions my own age: sufficiently athletic, responsible in their schoolwork, good-humoured, kindly in their relationships with each other, and undissipated. Some of them were also committed Christians, and this did me no harm. Twice, in fact, I was drawn in to a certain degree of participation with the organizations my friends belonged to.
    Yet those influences, I had some sense of right away, were to a degree, in my opinion, automatically somewhat right wind. (Or was it that the fathers of both influential lads followed the accounting profession?) I knew I needed to study the left-handed point of view, and this is was that had led me to my current predicament of the heart.

Chapter 16

    Let us start this chapter with a quote from John of the Cross. It is from the third stanza of the Living Flame, therefore from his most advanced observations, from a text which from beginning to end has us much more in the divine clouds than on the turf that is more fitting, so we tend to think, for the normal habitat of man. As the Muse often arranges these things, I found it, rediscovered it for the umpteenth time, early this morning as I was on my way to another part of this book that I have had to live by for some decades now, and also as I was in a somewhat perilous state because I knew I had to embark on certain observations of my own which could be in great danger of being misunderstood. Because the spiritual life works so much by analogy, and also because the fully matured spiritual life, that is, the seventh mansion, is so overflowed with the love of God and all that He made - keeping in mind that God did not make sin - the mystic can seem sentimental, reckless, exaggerated, especially to those who, in spite of a supposed religious understanding, actually see little beyond the prudence of the world, or who think that virtue comes from social groupings rather than from acts of an individual will. Such souls are also in danger of failing to understand, for one reason or another, their own childhoods, especially in their not realizing just how much the Holy Spirit entered into it, or how much they did not let Him do so.
    "For all the blessings, both the early and the late, the great and the small, that God grants the soul He grants to it always with the motive of bringing it to eternal life . . . ."
    As with most of the sentences and phrases of John of the Cross, this one is worthy of a lifetime of consideration, especially if we link it up with one of the many astounding passages from Saint John Eudes, the eloquent and poetic father of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The seventeenth century spiritual genius says this:
   The divine heart of our Saviour is filled with eternal love for us. To realize this truth one should understand two things about eternity: first that it has neither beginning nor end; secondly, that it comprises in itself all ages, past, present. and future, all the years, months, weeks, days, hours and moments of the past, present, and future, and that it comprises them in a fixed and permanent manner, holding all those things united and joined together in one indivisible point."
    It was only a few years ago that I first read this arresting passage, when a friend of mine had bought the book and then lent it to me, but my first response was to be reminded of many moments in my childhood, and to be very happy that I had authoritative and saintly words by which to be able to explain these moments to myself and perhaps others. I think it fair to say that from the first time I saw the light around my grandfather, when I was a little tot, I was henceforth to experience instant after instant of sensing that I was being confronted with the eternal. and in the most lovely and loving way, albeit for the most part of ordinary childhood situations.
   But did not the Good Lord say, "Suffer the little children to come unto Me?" And since He has come unto the earth, and died in order to save all souls upon it, His presence must be here to be discovered by anyone with the least inclination to make the effort, or even a disposition by which to be drawn toward His presence. His generosity in this regard is infinite, and His light abounds, or at least it must seem so in my case, because it so often came my way, the light and the sense of God's beauty in creation, without my consciously seeking it. No one could call me a saintly child, like Saint Thomas, or Catherine of Siena - I complained enormously, for one thing - and of course there were very little of the very tangible spiritual and sacramental side that are so available to the child raised in a Catholic atmosphere, nor was there even a regular attendance in any Protestant church, although every time I did go the Lord took advantage of the opportunity and one way or another, made His presence felt; yet I recollect receiving a constant infusion of kindness, of happiness and delight in almost everything and everyone around me. What else can this be called other than an overflowing of God's charity? Problems arose, of course: they always do in childhood, in everybody's childhood, but no apparent threat to my general sense of well-being ever held sway for very long. I think I must have been able to cooperate quite well with my guardian angel, for he was a reality with a responsibility, and I think that any knowledge that I had of him - theoretical knowledge - was due to my mother's mother, my Nana, for it was she who taught me my bedtime prayers, and though I don't recall a specific petition to "Angel of God, my guardian dear," I suspect that she slipped the relevant information in somewhere.
    By the time I knew her, Nana was a Baptist, but I think that growing up in London she must have been raised Anglican, for in her old age she instructed me on the three-fold division of High, Low, and Broad - something I already knew about, but she was explaining herself to her contemplative grandson - and told me that she considered herself a member of the Broad section. And I think it must have been the Anglican church at Sechelt that she sang in for many years after she moved there, at the end of the war, and met and married my second grandfather. In figure, Jessie Robinson, nee Gasser, later Brown, was a roly poly little dietitian, but she could sing with a voice as high and clear as an angel's and did so in the church choir until she was nearly eighty. From her singing, took, I might have acquired some grasp of that invisible creature assigned to oversee my welfare.
    But with all due respect to art as a conveyancer of the glories of the unseen parts of God's creation, I think that the major influence on my young soul came fundamentally from the overall environment of my Nana's house. For a small boy, it was a most comforting and reassuring place, especially with my father, being a soldier, away from home. Not only was my Nana good company for my mother and me, but there was, still living at home, my young uncle Alfred, named after his late father. He too was a singer, with a fine tenor voice, and he also trundled off to the Collingwood East Baptist church every Sunday. If my grandfather was a fully matured example of the gentleness of a follower of the Christ, then my uncle was a comforting image of a younger version. He was also in the building trade, being a sheet metal worker. He was a teetotaller all his life, as far as I know, and by the time I was a teen-ager we all had a great chuckle because, in spite of his preference against alcohol, he was the main man for the contractor who installed, at that time, the longest hotel bar in the British Empire, This was in the hotel in Kitimat, B.C., where  the Aluminum Company of Canada was establishing its huge smelter.
    Aside from his Baptist beliefs - I am sipping on a mug of my own homemade stout as I write this - Uncle Alf had a very real and personal reason for his self-denial: his own father, so my Nana later told me, had died young, more from his alcoholism than for the effects of being gassed at Ypres. My father, on the other hand, although he liked his daily tot, I was never to see drunk, and he, dear man, has lived to a thoroughly ripe old age. So my Nana had been left a widow with four youngsters, had gone to work in her profession, and first my mother, interrupting her high school education for a year or two, and then my uncle, living at home while he worked, had all pitched in to provide the comfortable, shingled house and ample garden - with room enough for chickens - on South-east Vancouver's Lincoln Avenue, a block up the hill from Kingsway and two blocks from the wading pool and virgin evergreen forest of Central Park.
    How far into the essence, or nature, of a created thing does the intellect of a child penetrate? At the end of his life, should he be so fortunate as to die in the fullness of faith, he will see the essence of the divine nature, so it stands to reason that God, who will the latter, should start up some kind of lesser system of visions at the beginning of his life. Thus childhood should be full of dress rehearsals for the final vision, made up of much smaller, but certainly significant, soul-arresting glimpses into the being of various beings.
    When the Lord said, "Suffer the little children . . ." He was plainly dealing with a group of children, and a group of mothers, and of course a posse of confused apostles. (Albeit they were much less confused than the majority of present day bishops.) Yet the history of the saints shows that Jesus did not need a crowd of children, nor a classroom: He was infinitely capable of taking on an individual child, even if His less ordinary inspirations inclined toward metaphysics rather than items of the Faith. Thus, the six-year old Thomas Aquinas is said to have asked his kindly old Benedictine teacher not "who is God?" but "what is God?"
    It is doubtful if the old monk could give Thomas the same full set of answers that Thomas himself would lay down in his maturity, but the little man was obviously off to a good start, and his years in the Monte Cassino of the day seem to have all but guaranteed that he would keep up the good work, habitually aware of the source of is life, his redemption. and , to an extraordinary degree in a youngster, his sanctification. A little child had indeed been suffered "to come unto Me"
    What, indeed, is anything? To what degree is our difficulty in understanding and appreciating God, whom we do not see, a product of our difficulty in fully grasping the substance and accidents that are available to our senses and, to a degree, to our intellects? Or does the problem also work the other way round, so that we do not fully possess an intellectual vision of creation and the things of our daily life because we are blinder about God than we should be?
    Again, John of the Cross has some provocative words, encouraging to searchers in general, and clarifying to this writer in particular as he struggles with making plain the favours of his childhood. The Carmelite is describing a quite profound state of union of the soul with God, in stanzas XIV and XV of the Spiritual Canticle, and this happy condition must be well beyond the spiritual status of an unbaptized child, yet my recollections so often find even my youthful experiences better defined by this kind of literature, more so than by poetry or the various classic fictions of childhood, as illustrating and otherwise lovable as these might be.
    The saint says" "In these stanzas the Bride says that her Beloved is all these things, both in Himself and also for her; for in that which God is wont to communicate in such excesses the soul feels and knows the truth of that saying which Saint Francis uttered, namely: 'God mine, and all things.' Wherefore, since God is all things to the soul, and the good of them all, the communication of this excess is explained by the similitude of the goodness of the things in the said stanzas, which we shall expound line by line. Herein it must be understood that all this is expounded here is in God in an eminent and an infinite manner, or, to express it better, each of these grandeurs which are spoken of is God, and they are all of them God; for, inasmuch as in this case the soul is united with God, it feels that all things are God, even as Saint John felt when he said: . . .That which was made in Him was life. It is not to be understood that, in that which the soul is here said to feel, it is, as it were, seeing things in the light, or creatures in God, but that in that possession the soul feels that all things are God to it. Neither is it to be understood that, because the soul has such lofty feelings concerning God in that which we are saying, it sees God essentially and clearly, for this is no more than a powerful and abundant communication, and a glimpse of that which He is in Himself, wherein the soul feels this goodness concerning the things which we shall expound in these lines, as follows . . . ."
    Now the saint goes on to re-quote the two stanzas of his ineffable poem, and comments on them, as he promised, line by line. By themselves, taken out of context, the images John of the Cross employs appear to be neither more or less than those choice elements of nature relied upon by the great Romantic Poets of the early Nineteenth century: mountains, solitary wooded valleys, strange islands, sonorous rivers, the whisper of the amorous breezes. So far, just Wordsworth, Shelley, or Keats; no bad company, of course, if we are interested in the quality of poetry, but none of them qualified to take us to the lofty atmosphere of the greatest graces of mysticism. But John of the Cross goes that extra step - even within the poetry, as distinguished from the sublimity of his commentary -  where he prefaces all these magnetic features of nature with his reference to their creator, and begins the stanzas with: "My Beloved."
    He was not, of course, talking to his girlfriend - although the Virgin Mary was never very far from his mind, and no one ever understood the process of the Incarnation from her immaculate flesh better than he did - he was involved in a straight ahead detailing of just Who it was through Whom all these lovely items of Nature were created by the tender and beneficent Father. This inclusion - not as easy to come by as the scarcity of the words might suggest - mightily upgrades the purpose of his text, and mightily challenges the reader, especially the reader who simply wanted the pleasantries of poetry.
    And the inclusion also defines, as best as could be done, the quality of the experiences of my childhood through which I was nursed along by the Holy Spirit until I discovered firmly and irretrievably, that I was a mystic.

Chapter 17

    One of the fascinating aspects of education I can think of is the fact that we first learn the great epics of our culture at an age when - a few youthful martyrs excepted - we have absolutely no capacity for imitation, except within the power of imagination. By the time I was ten I knew about Hercules, Jason, Odysseus, King Arthur and his knights, explorers and the couer-de-bois, Ali Baba, the hard riding gunslingers of Zane Grey, and of course the cinema's imitations of all these and their literary descendants. As I have said before, and see no reason not to say again and again gratefully, I was a constant reader and the happy possessor of a belief in the power of the myths of literature. Every encounter with a new hero was the discovery of another continent. (I have left out of my list, shamefully, Robin Hood, introduced to me in grade two by the spirited reading of a male teacher some of us were occasionally sent off to from our regular classroom schedule. The reading was carried out in some pitiful cubby-hole of a room, but the story was none the worse received for that, at least not by myself; and I can remember thinking that the tale was more wonderful than I dared to believe, although I was at first somewhat puzzled by the fact that the hero was also a breaker of laws.)
    The child is realistic, of course. He knows he is not a real Hercules, nor a Robin Hood. Yet he can pretend, build the castles and battlefields and distressed maidens of fantasy, and wait until he grows up. And at the same time, he can also be immensely contented, in between volumes of adult daring-do, with stories about children, in which, if there are any heroics, they are rather more withing the realm of a child's possibilities, and this seems to bring a different kind of glow to the adventure of reading. In fact, for all that I could also be overwhelmingly happy to come across a tale about someone more or less my own size, ability, and passions, and from time to time I seemed to bathe in a minor ecstasy of gratitude that some writer would take the time to make such a story-telling effort on behalf of a small and possibly insignificant person like myself. To read of a child simply being a child - and the child did not have to be a boy - in a city, on a lake, beside a stream, in the woods, with other children, sometimes evoked in me a belief that the Earth really was a paradise, no matter how badly things might seem to be going in the world around me.
    This is not to say that, as a child, I suffered any undue amount of abuse or privation. Even with my father's absence during the war I was well looked after by others - my mother had a watchful eye - and other family members or good adults when my mother was away - but childhood, like any other stage of life, has its scrapes and confusions, and in the midst of these, story books were always the might pull - and we need to feel for the Heaven that exceeds our grasp - of the saga.
    By the time I was ten, I'd had, I think it fair to say, some pretty nice adventures, according to the normal scales of boyhood. For one thing, I'd been able to travel a lot, due to the war moving my father and mother about the country; by the time I was seven I'd swum in both the Atlantic and the Pacific; by the end of grade five I had been taught in eleven different schools; I'd lived in quite a variety of pleasant, interesting situations other than the usual company of just Mom and Dad in the family home. But I had never been personally involved, as far as I could see, in any kind of epic tale. The war was an epic, of course, but I was not fighting it, and I was certainly not suffering in the way that thousands upon thousands of other children were. I had never gone without a meal, a jacket, a roof, or a bed, and I remember only three occasions in which I even came close to fear for my own life from the war. Two blackouts - one in Vancouver, one in Halifax - and a news report of V-2 rocket attacks on London.
    But reading the stories that I did, I knew that the sagas had to be out there, and I knew that eventually I had to find one for myself. The movies were no doubt an influence toward this line of thinking also, but the principal influence, especially in the way of creating the optimum setting and mood, was the written word. As a matter of course, films simply do not - with a few exceptions - create a genuinely literary mood, which in my dictionary is a metaphysical mood, the mood of the intuition of being from often the humblest of causes, and I knew that authors were my guides, my teachers, my infinitely inimitable prophets.
    Especially authors who could write well about the woods, the fields, the lakes, the streams, the beaches, the mountains, and the animals - and humbly respectful people, boys, girls, and adults - who populated them. I was not against cities: in a relative's house in Springfield, Ontario - or rather, in a farmhouse somewhat less than a mile outside the town - I fell into and thoroughly enjoyed the tale of one Little Maida, who rode up and down a mighty elevator in, I think I remember, Chicago. And by that time I had my own adventures, worthy of recall, from Vancouver, Toronto, and Halifax. But the primary instinct was for the bush, as the place where genuine sagas were bound to unfold.
    Experiences accrue, and even more unquestionably, so does the capacity to appreciate and understand experiences. And all things are wonderful to a child, especially the first time round. What was a little boy to think, for example, at his first sight of the huge, original, conifers of Burnaby's Central Park? This might stand of timber lay directly between the homes of my grandparents, the houses most constant to my first awakening, and thus I was born in the land of the Paul Bunyans who had cut down the Douglas Firs which had not been preserved by legislation. And going about on steamers and trains also seem a pretty epic undertaking. Moreover, if you lived where I did, you were aware of a very special feature, in the order of the outsize, known as the Interurban, a giant form of streetcar, running on real railroad tracks, between Vancouver and New Westminster - for my purposes - and then beyond New Westminster well out into the Fraser Valley, for the use of other souls, especially farmers shipping into Vancouver, so I have been told. This creature was as tall as a railroad boxcar, and, running as a single or double unit, powered by an overhead wire connected to the engines by a trolley, it could accelerate to great speeds in the twinkling of a transfer. Our neighbourhood was plainly serviced by power beyond the ordinary.
    So, walking under the trees of Central Park was an adventure, and riding the mighty interurban was an adventure. But I had done nothing to create these interesting features of my childhood landscape. Someone else had made the story of which I was such a minor part. Yet, I registered impressions; I thought; I speculated; I read.
    Then, in the spring of 1942, after the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbour and the ensuing fears of a Japanese invasion of British Columbia, my mother, my baby brother, and I all moved to the interior of the province, to the North Okanagan. As far as I knew, we were the only family to make such a move voluntarily - thousands of Japanese-Canadians, of course, were forced to take up residence away from the Coast - because my father, far away in England manning the ack-ack guns, could not bear the thought of his wife and children being victimized by the same unpleasantries as the citizens of mainland China and Hong Kong. His father knew a farmer, and it was arranged that we could stay on the farm.
    Now things were taking on more of an epic quality. There was an entire train ride, of some few hundreds of miles, overnight in a berth, with a layover in the historic station at Sicamous, and my first view of the dry belt of the upper Fraser and Thompson Rivers. I had a great sense of adventure leaving Vancouver, and in the morning , my first sight of the hop fields and that loftiest of deciduous trees, the Lombardy poplar. I was entering upon a new kind of landscape, and no doubt felt something of a kinship with Genghis Khan out on a conquest of a new country. The delight in these different natural features continued as we approached our new home and I could be sure that I had arrived in a kind of genuine cowboy country. There were no big cattle ranches at hand, but there were cows and horses and sheep, and though the ground was well timbered where it had not been cleared, the woods more much more open than at the rain forest Coast. There were steep, rocky, hills to climb, the parkland timber to easily explore, and running through the centre of the narrow valley, something I had never had a chance to deal with before, a clear, meandering, stream. The day we arrived at the farm where we were to live for a month - I think the month of April - the oldest son brought in a string of trout. I was sure I had come to Paradise.
    According to the original schedule, we were simply going to stay at the farm until the threat of a Japanese invasion was over. But my mother, by no means a country girl, and never the sort of person to take comfort in solitude with a bagful of fat novels, found this first setting unsuitable, and we were to spend the months of May and June in Falkland, hardly a city, but a least enough of a village to give her a little of the kind of social exchange that she was used to. It was to be in Falkland, one sunny Saturday morning, that I encountered the epic experience I wanted to introduce here, and I jump around a bit - we'll go back to the farm shortly - because it seem pertinent to publicly regret - largely with tongue-in-cheek - that I wish I'd know at six that I was going to be a writer, so I could have kept a journal. I've always been somewhat nagged by not knowing the right sequence of events in my pretty wonderful North Okanagan sojourn: there was a motel episode in there somewhere; did it come before or after the month at the farm? The motel was right beside the creek, my first creek, and of course an item of water much less significant - except to Falklanders - than my own English Bay and the Gulf of Georgia - but I can remember hanging over the little bridge and being utterly fascinated and absorbed by the movement of the water.
    Did we stay at the motel, for some reason, before we went on to the farm? Or did we have cause to pause at the motel before we moved into the place in town? It really doesn't matter one way or the other, but I've always been slightly bothered at not having the events in clear order, which I suppose in itself indicates the power of their impression on my youthful spirit. In recollection, it seems that I spent a lot of time looking at that creek, enraptured by the movement and by the sound of the rushing water, and some of that time carried the additional charm, for me, of it happening as the evening came on. There was a great magic in being by the creek as the light faded.
    I remember also that the people who kept the motel also kept a peacock. That was a first for me too, but the long-tailed bird with the amazingly ugly screech was nowhere as fascinating as the lively little stream.
    If we were not staying at the motel while waiting a day or two to go to the farm, we were there on standby until we could move into our new quarters in the town of Falkland itself, a back room in a comfortable little house on the edge of the community. I remember a very genial older couple, the husband of which I think worked for the department of highways. It is important to say that the house was on the east side of town, because the epic event in which I would become, if only a spectator, at least a very proximate spectator, occurred while some people were trying to get to the west side, where lay the rodeo grounds.
    It was a Saturday morning, or perhaps - ah, the missing journal - it was the morning of the Twenty-fourth of May, the Queen's birthday holiday. At any rate, I was out of school and the sun was shining. I don't think I was aware that there was anything special happening, I just knew that it was a lovely morning in a lovely world and I should be out and about. I think I also remember a bit of a struggle with my cautious Mom, to be allowed to go rambling, and if so, I can only say that my guardian angel must have been on my side, for I did get to go.
    I think also that my guardian angel must have put me into a literary mood - whatever that meant in a lad of six-and-a-half - even before I saw the horses, for I remember that I was thoroughly enjoying everything around me: the dirt road, the trees and grass and spring flowers, the sheer balmy air with the sun filtering through it; and I was especially pleased to be full up with the leisure to take it all in. Just being out and free to ramble was adventure and intoxication enough. I doubt very much that I was even looking for any excitement beyond what was already present in my wonderfully pastoral little town.
    And I must have been rambling, because our new home was not far from the road which was both highway and main street, as I remember them, yet I was coming back up to the main road from some location to the south, perhaps the railroad tracks.
    I think I felt the horses before I heard or saw them. I was no more than half-a-block from the intersection in question, and the ground under my feet was rumbling. I looked up, hearing, of course, the sudden thunder of hooves, and beheld perhaps thirty or more saddle horses, neighing, rearing, kicking up a mighty cloud of dust, being herded one on top of the other by a band of native cowboys: yelling, waving sombreros, crowding horse flank to horse flank themselves as they guided the broncs around a tight corner. It was all very fast, very noisy, the grandest vision of organized confusion I had ever seen, right out of a movie, and yet unforgettably real.
    It was also different than a film in that the cowboys were not whites, but native Indians, probably Shushwaps, and that was the second part of the amazement. Aside from the absence of a six-gun, they were quite as gallant and expert as any white cowboy I'd seen in the movies.
The remuda hurtled forward as directed, and much more quickly than my little legs would take me there, were safely herded safely into the pens at the rodeo grounds.
    I was allowed to go to the rodeo, later in the day, of course - who could have resisted the wide-eyed ecstasy that came flying in from the streets?- and viewed the whole thing with some of my knowledgeable schoolmates. I furthermore adopted a young native rider as my hero, and then had to suffer the sorrow of watching him break his arm when his bronc threw him, but the drama of individual riders and ropers going up against individual horses and steers and calves did not quite equal that first vision, of the thundering explosive, herd and its ki-ing, dark-skinned drovers.
    I'd had my first experience of the epic, that is, outside a book, a movie, or a comic strip, and I knew it.

Chapter 18

    There were to be more rodeo adventures, this time more akin to my own size and prowess - and also including a further exhibition of the superior skill of the local natives - but the reader knows by now that I was born to ramble through the events of a book, as a writer, because the immeasurable value of my principal theme, the spiritual life, just as I was made to wander through my native land, as a youngster, by the vicissitudes of the war.
    So I need to speak of another of the great events of Falkland, my first real hearing of a riff by a country and western guitar player. There were radio stations in Vancouver, of course, and from them I had already learned some of the classics of the day: You Are My Sunshine, and Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town. I was learning these at the same time as I was learning the children's hymns and the anthems, one had at the very least a teacher who knew the song and more often than not, an accompanist whacking out a sturdy, supportive, four-voice harmony on the piano. There were no problems in meeting the goals of the group sessions: a good ear and a good voice was the heritage from both sides of the family.
    But with the popular tunes off the radio, I was on my own. There was a challenge, and I can recall being awfully proud of myself, or perhaps simply full of gratitude, when I was able to remember and re-render the lyrics and melody. Furthermore, I learned to purse my lips and whistle, and that was another great breakthrough, fraught with an enormous pall of failure and frustration if I had failed to do so. I remember getting You Are My Sunshine right as I hoofed the long six or eight blocks to school in grade one, and the whistling came about as I strolled up the lane to call on a friend on a Saturday morning. So far, so good. I was shown a continent: I conquered it, I was shown a second continent, I conquered that. I could learn to sing a tune and I could learn to whistle a tune.
    But ah, to play a tune! To take up an instrument other than my own human voice and make that sing: now there was a wonderful deed. Yet until I was eighteen years old, in spite of my sporadic bits of instruction in theory in the many, many, schools I attended prior to my high school days, I never found myself and an instrument compatible.
    It was not from lack of desire, although such desire was never constant, because most of the time, as I had not understanding of how music worked, I had no confidence in myself as a player. In the subjects which required understanding: maths, science, grammar, I was habitually a top student; but in music as I had learned it, there did not seem to be anything to understand in the same way as these other subjects. I did manage to learn something about notation in grade eight, my last year in any kind of music class, but nothing at all of the pure numbers - as I know and play and teach them now - of scales and harmonies. In this absence of the common sense approach to music theory, in our schools, I suspect we are much less intelligent than the often abused classrooms of the middle ages, so passionate about eights and fifths and fourths. Our composers since then have learned to make more use of the other intervals - thirds and sixths and so forth - but in how many recollections of our school days do we hear of learning the straightforward syntax of harmony as we learned the multiplication tables and the parsing of a sentence?
    There has been lots of rousing singing, of course. I had a wonderful few months in grade five in a Burnaby school, ringing out the British Isles favourites in company with twenty or thirty other lads and our music teacher and his piano. But the singing of the numbered parts can be just as rousing, and because of the peculiar nature of the intellect and its appetite for design as some point actually more satisfying. The Ash Grove is a particular melody, but the skills behind learning the tune and the harmony for it, in all its possible arrangements, are universal. And universals, despite the current state of philosophical studies, are, as the normal goals of thought, the most liberating and delightful of possessions.
    In the 'Forties, every household that I knew had a radio, and the good folks we lived with in Falkland were no exception. It would have been one morning before school, just as I was out of bed and getting dressed, that I heard - naturally speaking - the most wonderful bit of instrumental that had ever blessed my ears. I don't recall what song it was, probably some country and western classic emanating out of Kamloops or Vernon. It may have simply been an instrumental, or some fine old chestnut like The  Wabash Cannonball, with room for a guitar run between the verses. But I do remember the most nimble of passages on a steel-string flat-top, and from the top to the bottom of my little soul I knew that I had never heard anything like it before. I had no thoughts whatsoever for the composer, but I did think that the man who could play what I heard must possess the greatest gift known to man, and I also had the most firm conviction that I had not then, and possibly never would have, the means of doing the same thing myself.
    I should make it clear that I was not terribly wounded by this estimate of myself. I was probably more disturbed by knowing there was no means of making the radio station play the tune over again for me, and I do not recall that the house boasted a phonograph. I'm sure that had I been meant to be a professional musician I would have been moved to make a thorough racket about my interrupted delight, but my very favourite hobby for the entire next decade of my life was to be reading, not making music - aside from the singing, from which I was to get a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction - and when I wasn't reading I had such a passion for the usual outdoor activities of boyhood that I'm sure lessons and practise might not have been all that welcome, especially if I'd not been given the right sort of teaching. By this I mean that a thoroughly organic approach might have generated a constant motivation, but I suspect that such teachers were hard to find in those days and are not too much more available still.
    So what do I mean by organic? 
    Well, in the first place I suspect that I have been searching back to the middle ages, before the invention of printing, and especially before the employment of relatively cheap reproduction of music, especially music written out for students, because I have recognized that teaching music in those days would have been done with an absolute reliance on the instrument, and with very little reference to written scores, which were time consuming and expensive. And also much less relevant to a grounding in the basics, according to the medieval mindset, happily more realistic than the paper-rooted conceptualizations of our own times, especially when it comes to education.
    How hard it is to find a piano student, for example, who was not set right away to reading music. And, moreover, how impossible to find a piano student who, when directed to this reading, was advised to read by numbers rather than the letters C,F,G, and so forth.
    Yet music, like faith, comes by hearing.
    I do not mean to criticize the skill of reading music, of course. No one can deny the cultural value of such an ability, and I have always been in awe of any and all of those lovely youngsters who can whip off, at the age of eight or nine, a bit of Bach or Haydn. Half-a-century older than they, I still balk at the imposed arrangement, and remain incapable of learning the left hand precisely as the composer or subsequent re-arranger has set it down. The organic musician, with great respect for the melody, has forever felt the need to be able to do his own thing with the rest of it.
    Yet, oddly enough, I seem to have discovered a method of counterpoint, that is, a musical schedule of one note in each hand, that I teach with absolute rigidity, allowing no compromise, for beginners, on the intervals, and insisting on a similar firmness with the fingering. None of this, initially, has any resource whatsoever to a written score, yet it sounds infallibly like the explorations of Johann Sebastian himself, as he might have puttered speculatively along a given key on his composer's working Wednesday morning. Also, I might say for those who have yet to learn the universality of sound methods in music, the same paired scales work wonderfully with guitar and pairs of voices, with major keys, and intelligently bending the applications of the numbers, with all three sorts of minors. (I am also absolutely rigid, as an old folk-musician, in teaching the natural minor first.)
    I'll leave the brackets as they fit the context of the previous paragraph, but then I'll also leap to the reference to folk music as if the brackets had been stripped away, because I need to emphasize that the counterpoint pairs work so well because they were determined after a full exploration of the relevant chords, played melodically, and of course it was the discovery of chords, as I have indicated earlier, that had let me loose as a performing musician. Without the discipline of triads, my counterpoint scale would never have come to be, at least not as long as I was insistent on functioning as my own teacher. And even if I had taken on a teacher other than myself, I doubt that I could ever have listened to the advice unless it contained the automatic shuffle between the two-note statement and the three.
    This personal rule of thumb has worked wonderfully for the keyboard, leading me to discover a set of intervals by which one full octave of notes in the left hand pair very nicely with two-and-a-half octaves in the right. The left hand doubles back on itself, of course, and this happily leaves some bass timbre in the arrangement of the eighteen melody notes. None of the bass notes are in unison, with the melody, or treble notes, so they add a counterpoint harmony to the exercise, thus adding greatly to the student's sense of musicianship, and profoundly reducing the boredom inherent to the practise of scales in unison.
    Only the invention of cheap printing - and the profits to be derived therefrom - could have canonized the pseudo-discipline of volumes of piano notes following each other at apparently tidy octave intervals, especially when the fingering patterns for the right hand have so little to do with actually playing music on the piano. Hopefully, my little scheme, once it is a matter of course in those cottages "which have done more than symphony orchestras to preserve the tradition of Beethoven", that is, the homes of music teachers, will make life more interesting for students of the keyboard.
    As there is a time and place for everything, an appropriate season, as the Scriptures would have it, there is a place for two-handed scales in unison. Perhaps there is no better place to begin, especially for some students. But as variety is the spice of life, so it is also the sine non qua of music, and any child with talent - or adult with spirit - wants to understand as quickly as possible the key to the complexity of what he is capable of hearing: there is not reason not to teach him immediately the other two sets of notes which are not in unison but in harmony.
    Children - and we all have to become as children whenever we are setting out on the adventure of learning a new art, science, craft, or skill - love to work out puzzles, they have an instinct for analyzing how things work, so long as the working seems logical. And music can never get beyond the question - where harmonizing is concerned - of being a puzzle. What note - or notes - goes with the first degree of the scale? What note with the second? the third? and so forth. Compound this search, this hunting, with an uninhibited exploitation of rhythms, always at the discretion of the student, and there can be no possibility of drudgery, of the boredom, that is so often a complaint of students who have been forced to study with a lesser system.
    This is not to say that boredom is never a factor. No one is always excited; no one is continually motivated by the sublimest inspiration. But we are entitled to refuse to do anything that does not seem to us at least useful, intellectually speaking, and it is according to this law of satisfactory and non-dualistic learning that natural musical inclinations of the student should be allowed to unfold, always with the understanding that a method is sound because it conforms to the natures of hands, keyboards, ears, and rational thinking as expressed, in music, by the use of numbers. Just how does one apply five fingers to eight or more notes? Is there a natural fingering, which applies to every scale, major or minor, or does the student have to memorize the notated fingering for every piece he wishes - or is told - to play?
    Some finger notation is useful, of course. I have found it necessary myself, at certain levels of studentship, and, as well as that, from the hands of a great composer, it has helped me to discover some of the laws inherent in a universal scheme for fingering. But as a standard and exclusive method, I think it is to be condemned, and putting it in the wastebasket, and replacing it with what I have quite exhaustively proved to be a better, because natural, ways of going about the scales, would bring a lot of much needed joy to thousands, if not millions, of initially eager little fingers, hearts, and faces.

Chapter 19

    It was the Lord who said it: Into every life a little rain must fall; and I have reached the point where I must begin to talk about a great deal of rain; and I do not mean simply in the ordinary course of the soul that will pass through the dark nights of the senses and the spirit, insofar as these are the essential elements of development in the interior life - and here there must be a great deal of rain indeed - but in the history of the external causes of anguish that it seems must inevitably caused by the spiritual man's contact not simply with sinners in the ordinary sense, but with sinners of the pharisaic stripe, that is, within the leadership of the Church Militant.
    Since my last chapter much time has elapsed, occupied not only by perfecting - through simplification - my current keyboard discoveries, but also by the surprising satisfactions of membership in a weight training room. It would be more pleasant, all factors considered, to talk about these things, for they are utterly positive, and cast no dishonour on anyone. My piano tykes are happily prospering - in these weeks of November studying Christmas carols - and I have gained nine pounds of sheer muscle in less than four months, plus made some progress in the new found art - for me - of nasal breathing during strenuous exercise. For a hermit I have been unusually active in the concert hall, attending three performances on three consecutive Friday nights - all wonderfully world class, in Nelson's little jewel of a live theatre - and the further inspirations and practical matters connected with the opera appear to be once again moving along, somewhat as a result of these performances.
    Yet history, even dark history, must be dealt with. If Christ and the saints have had their human enemies as well as the diabolical, then so must those who aspire, all unworthily, to follow the same paths. The Catholic Faith holds that on the uncountable numbers of God's angels, and among all their nine divisions, one-third chose to follow the rebellion of the chief of them all. They were subsequently swept down into the everlasting punishment of Hell, yet left also with a certain amount of freedom to torment and seduce mankind, and in particular the freedom to torment and seduce those for whom God has seemingly showed any special favour. Even before the Garden of Eden, it was guaranteed that Man could not be born into the perfectly simple existence that we now think of existing only in Heaven. The earthly paradise was not to be free of the whirling and swirling schedule of constant temptations the devils would create, no matter how long it lasted.
    But, as we know, Adam and Eve as the perfect couple had a very short history, and thus original sin and its resulting weakening of the human faculties - by contrast with what had gone before a very big weakening indeed - became just as significant an element in the succeeding drama of salvation, perfection, the spiritual life, Christian formation, and sanctity, to mention only those areas which are at the forefront of theological considerations. Each and every soul, except that tiny handful selected to be born without original sin, was destined to have to overcome the sin within itself and its companions as well as to resist the deceits and threats and even accomplishments of the Enemy.
    In certain special souls this conquest of the three thieves - the world, the flesh, and the devil - takes place at an age early enough for them to be given the full-time working assignment of , simply. praying night and day for their fellow man. (Even the dreams of contemplatives seem to be intercessory and therefore useful, and the waking hours are usually two full shifts, although not entirely at the foot of the Cross.) This is both the glory and the horror of the most mature spirits, in or out of convents and monasteries, and they are not allowed to escape either extreme, in terms of spiritual, mediating experience; nor are they permitted to avoid the destruction of their peace of mind and working mental conditions that rubbing shoulders with the spiritually needy must unconditionally necessitate. Most working writers would be astounded to learn how little actual time in the past fifty years I have actually been able to devote to writing as a full day's work. Nature being what it is, I sometimes wrestle with the Lord over His sense of economy, but I rarely win. My last blazing streak was a dozen years ago, and I have no idea when such another will return. There would seem to be a much greater need of prayer than of spiritual literature.
    On the other hand, ideas, images, sounds, words, inspiration all must come before production, and I can have no complaint over what spins around in my brain day after day, underneath, above, beside, around, the contemplation. There, the quantity, as well as the quality, is quite wonderful. And from time to time the quality actually emerges on paper, and I am content, each little word becomes an indelible part of the permanent record. Moreover, considering the mental struggles writers can go through over their work - or non-work - it is no small grace to be content with even day after day of no visible production, or the smallest addition or correction.
    We are nicely into Advent - in fact it is the feast of Saint Nicholas of Myra as I write, again, amazingly, in the wonderful working light of mid morning, over a back yard covered in snow - and I am reminded of this time in 1964, when God told me that one day there would be in Nelson a celebration of a "real Advent". At the time I assumed that He was thinking of spiritual events which would be evident to the entire local Catholic community, and perhaps other Christians in the area as well, but now I suspect that He may have been seeing into the future, for the time being of only me and those closest to me, including certain souls in the Vatican.
    In those days, of course, I needed every encouragement, not the least of which were the occasional locution or spiritual apprehension, for the rain had begun falling, and fell not only heavily, but with unrelenting regularity. I had been in Nelson for four months, gradually understanding that I had moved with my growing family to a far from ideal Catholic community, that in fact I could be living in, had been unquestionably inspired for years to settle down among, some of the most defective clergy, bishop included, who had ever been called upon to make up a diocese. In the ordinary human sense, my dreams had been utterly shattered, and had it not been for the undeniable certainties of the interior events that had been summoning me here, and on other humanly surprising factor, we would have been gone by Christmas. The clerical company, always such a satisfying source of fellowship in my previous six years as a Catholic, was now all but intolerable, almost without exception, and I had the further grim suspicion that the little university, fourteen years in the running and five hundred students strong, was counting numbered days. Yet Notre Dame University of Nelson had been my first reason, so I thought, for locating - forever? - in the town where my wife grew up.
    By this time, you see, I had been a classroom teacher, enormously happy with my work, for four solid years, in the B.C. Catholic school system. The material pay was modest, but what was that to someone who had taken a private vow of poverty? The spiritual rewards were uncountable, and we had wanted not at all for the essentials, with a social life as lively as any young couple could ask for. We had lived in three different communities, each quite distinct from the other in many ways - a great gift to a writer - and made dozens of new friends and acquaintances. And through it all - with some resistance at first - I had first decided to jump into teaching, then became more and more enamoured of the process until, when we landed in Nelson, I was personally convinced I would be teaching desks full of the young for the rest of my life, and always centering that instruction on the theology of the Church. By 1964, Nelson was the best place in the province, I thought, in which to teach and to experiment toward a perfect system of education. The elementary school dated to the beginning of the century; the university had a faculty of education and the power to grand education degrees; for a year or two there had also been in place a high school, or at least the first two years of such, with promise of the others. Providence, so it seemed to me, had created the perfect arrangement. Not only would I be able to teach all manner of subjects in the way I thought they should be taught, but I could train teachers!
    On and off, I had, of course, puttered at writing. A few poems, a few short stories, a handful of novel starts. But throughout the history of these pages, not a word on that which was growing even more significantly than my understanding of the role of the teacher: my interior life. God let me exercise my talents all I seemed to want on ordinary matters: work, play, nature, friendship between individuals, romance. But not a hint of a mystical passage ever crossed my story line, even though I hardly knew a moment in which I did not feel sensibly attached - by the inner sense of touch - to the Holy Spirit. Even my intermittent journals of those days are all but dumb about the things of the soul that were my most important daily bread. Therefore, a veteran contemplative can easily understand, as I had not yet come to the real labour I was born for, I could very easily think that teaching could fill me up for the rest of my working life. I had once thought I could be a lawyer as well as a writer; now, with a much greater sense of personal worth in my contribution to ordinary society, I thought of myself as perfectly happy being a teacher as well as a man with a typewriter. Nor did my understanding of the contemplative life, up to that point, in any way interfere with this vision of the future: Saint Thomas made it plain that so long as adequate contemplation preceded, the active skills - writing and teaching - were not against the will of God. And certainly there would always be an audience worth labouring for: the children of parents faithful enough to send their offspring to a Catholic school or college, and readers devout enough to want to read stories with a spiritual emphasis, whenever I was to be given the permission and inspiration to write such tales.
    It all sounds like quite the attractive life, does it not? And many a soul has been called to similar paths and found great usefulness, life, joy, beauty, satisfaction, and a profound sense of personal worth and dignity therein, along with that which is most important of all, the unswerving service of the exact will of God. And with good reason: nobody works harder, nobody faces more challenges, than a good teacher or an honest writer; and if you can do both, so much the better for your self-respect. Besides, there is no greater joy than that which comes from knowledge: the successful Christian teacher or writer is simply being paid to study what he has already learned to love about any other form of endeavour! What life could be more ideal? How good of God to make such a life as possible as it was desirable! How odd that I should ever have thought that I could never be a teacher, or that I should ever have believed that simply being a novelist would be life enough!
    In fact, at twenty-eight, I was much more successful at teaching than at writing. I had plenty of students, all of them interesting for one reason or another, but I had few fictional characters, and no real plots, although, as I said, I always enjoyed the process of working things out with words, just a s a good musician will enjoy his practise exercises, even if he does not perform for the public. The artist needs a certain degree of this hidden work just to keep his balance with the other things he is called upon to be involved with at the time. Yet the writing was, at best, spasmodic. I had thrown myself wholeheartedly into teaching, and into all the study and reflection I had found went with it. There seemed to be so much to learn, and prove, before I could settle down to a fully measured stare at whatever it was I had been born to write about. Becoming a Catholic and a teacher had utterly obliterated all my youthful promises, to others as well as myself, of early triumphs in the world of book publishing.
    There was, moreover, two other elements that would interfere with youthful fame. For one thing, I took very seriously my favourite theological writer's observations on spiritual perfection; for another, whenever I found Teresa or John of the Cross complaining over the faults of bad spiritual directors, I automatically asked God to help me avoid their mistakes, if ever in fact such a marvellous honour and privilege fell my way. As I was merely a layman, this did not seem all that likely, but, I was after all unquestionably a mystic, and that was said to be the best qualification. However, as I was not in the Seventh Mansion, was it qualification enough?
    For some souls, probably for most souls, one has to insist that, to a degree, spiritual direction can be carried out, even with a fair degree of progress, without the possession of the final mansions. If this were not so, the Church would rarely know what spiritual direction was about, for, as with any other skill, the process has to start somewhere, and where mankind is involved, the beginning is never the end.
    But in my case, I think I knew quite quickly into my studies of the great pair of Carmelites, that I would not relax in my pursuit of the interior life until I had, in this life itself, come all the way home. I doubt very much that I should get any credit for such an ideal on my own behalf: in the mind of a rational young man it could have been put there only by God Himself, both as a thought which by Divine support could stand on its own, and also as a conclusion, reasoned a posteriori, in the wake of certain Providentially arranged climbs to the top of the heap I had experienced in my youth. And it must be kept in mind that not only had He coached me toward academic excellence, but that after my ninth school year He created the spiritual conditions which put an end to the ordinary scholastic competitiveness that preoccupies clever schoolboys, all in the name of better preparing me for the higher calling of the contemplative path. Moreover, according the plans Christ had for me, there was little point being brilliant and acknowledged for it in relatively lesser significance of secular education.
    On the other hand - and here the thoughts become quite terrible by contrast - it is much worse to be an apparently bright young Catholic chappie, even a religious priest in an honoured order, universally acknowledged as a rising star, and yet to have an inner disposition that seems beyond correction, eventually to break out in adult independence as publicly immoral, and therefore, when in positions of leadership and responsibility, to take institutions down with it.
    As much as I wish it were so, I am not speaking of a fictional character. I refer to what I found when I came to Nelson, not only within the little university, but also within the priesthood of the diocese, and there were more characters than I would, ordinarily, like to think about. The situation was in fact so bad, and would so profoundly continue to be so, that I probably had to be a mystic, already a veteran of spiritual horrors, in order to have the strength to remain here. I think that the imagination of an ordinary novelist would not have been enough, for a writer needs good models. The mystic, of course, already has, habitually, a pretty good view of the Supreme Model. And too, there had been that initial locution, I think the first of my catechumen days" "I want you to see what kind of priests the ordinary Catholic has to live with."
    So this rain, as it were, had conditional intelligibility. I was by this time quite familiar with Saint Teresa's discussions of the trials of the Sixth Mansion, part of which was virtually certain to be opposition and enmity from the very souls one would have the most necessary reasons to rely on for co-operation. I knew that the contradictions could be frustrating, even agonizing, in the short term, but must inevitably have an eternal positive gain. Yet because they would destroy what I had thought of as one of the most important reasons for coming to Nelson, I could not help but wonder again and again what it all meant, and what could be done to halt the process of decline. So much of the time I still thought as an active, and would continue to do so for years to come. I was very much preoccupied with the Church Militant.
    On the other hand, I had been drawn further and further into the depths of contemplation. If Teresa had warned me in the Interior Castle about darker trials and persecutions, John of the Cross in the Living Flame, or the Holy Ghost through him, had tipped me off as to my fundamental reason for settling in the Kootenays. Here I was to come to grips with the art and science of spiritual direction.

Chapter 20

    It would have been just about this time of the year, in the month of February, 1964, that I was mysteriously advised by the Holy Spirit to start thinking about looking for, in a young soul. the appetite for theological perfection. These instructions did not specifically limit the search to only one, as even Divine intimations incline to go into a man according to his disposition, and I was disposed to remain a classroom teacher for the rest of my working days; so I interpreted the inspiration as a prod to continue my teaching and research within the normal classroom grouping. I was by then at the helm of a Grade Eight class, in my second year at it, and had done quite well with an introductory course in philosophy, concentrating on basic metaphysics, as well as with a bit of instruction on individual mental prayer, or meditation. There was also a lot of music, and art, and creative writing. I was feeling quite pleased with myself, but I had also been advised by the pastor that my growing family was becoming too expensive for the minimal salary structure of the Frontier Apostle programme of the diocese of Prince George and I would have to move on.
    Of course I was pondering my future, but that had to include meditative reflections on the past, which for a good six years had included periodic profound inspirations to wind up in Nelson. Moreover, Providence had come up with, that year, a new series of literature texts for Grade Eight, including a book devoted only to poetry which contained a lovely and prophetic line regarding an orchardist looking down to where "The Kootenay snaked black." The spiritual intimation worked most formidably on my understanding; the poetry drew with equal power on my imagination and my heart, and my fate was irrevocably sealed. Yet, as I say, I thought I was headed for, simply, further research an accomplishment within the ordinary classroom setting, albeit in a Catholic school.
    Furthermore, in the late winter, I had read in the B.C. Catholic of the establishment of a Catholic high school - or the first couple of years thereof - in the city of Nelson. This seemed like the perfect opportunity for me. I could enroll in the little, growing, Catholic university, to finish my degree, and at the same time carry on my teaching and research in a Catholic high school! The school in Terrace by that time proceeded only to grade nine, and the B.C. Catholic story spoke of hopes for grade twelve in Nelson. Of course there would be grade twelve, not long after I arrived, and of course the university would become the greatest Thomistic institute in western Canada! For what other purposes could all my energy and insight be devoted? I actually wrote to the bishop of Nelson, spelling out some of my intentions, and he courteously replied, and further asked me to call on him when I came to the seat of his diocese. I was not offered a post at the high school, as these positions were then all nicely filled by members of the religious brothers who had founded the school - in the buildings of what had been previously the hospital where my wife's younger brother and sister were born - and the school was not expanding at a great rate. But I did enroll in the university.
    Yet this decision was months away. In that late winter in Terrace I was experiencing a number of different ideas and thought processes and spirits, all of which were preparing me, as I later realized, for the years ahead, none of which would have anything to do with presenting Scholastic principles to classrooms full of grateful students. Nor was I always personally convinced all of the time, or even part of the time, that I would be moving to the Kootenays.
    Sometimes I felt very strongly like returning to the Lower Mainland, so that I could sniff again the smell of the ocean, so that my poet's fancies would be let loose to roam through my other life's work, the Great Canadian Novel. At other times I was sure I should go back to UBC and pick up a degree in literature, even though I had grown quite discontent with studying the same subject with the University of Ottawa, by correspondence. My beloved, who has always had a most wonderful love affair with Vancouver, could not object to either of these motives.
    And then there was the startling, very clear and powerful, intimation that I perhaps should get involved in the recording and broadcasting industries, as both a performer and producer. This last had hit with a sudden smack, late in January, while the four members of the Exiles, of which I was one - guitar, banjo, and vocals - sat over coffee in the restaurant of the Lakelse Hotel, taking a break from Sunday afternoon rehearsals. 1963-64 was the first winter that Terrace had television, most of it flown up from Vancouver in a can, with an hour or so every evening set aside for local events and even local performances. There was no taping. The Exiles - two lads from Ireland, one of whom knew the youngest of the Clancy Brothers, a girl from Ontario, and myself - were to do an hour show that night. We had a MC, a switcher, two cameramen, a monitor, and as comfortable a studio as I have ever been in since. I was enjoying the chance to perform, of course, but I was enjoying the process of the mechanics even more, for the moment, as much as I had enjoyed the mechanics of the classroom. Great God in Heaven, thought I, as the comprehension of the possibilities of spiritual satisfaction in this business hit me, are we all supposed to turn professional? That evening, actually, we did do rather well, prompting all sorts of phone calls to the station, and the four of us pondered what kind of debt, professionally speaking, that we might owe God for our talents. Yet I missed the performing company of my wife, who I considered the best of all of us, and left the group after two more appearances - one for television, one for the stage - and years later realized that the inspiration to a new career had really been for one of the Irish lads, who married the girl from Ontario and took her home to Ireland, where he wound up with his own radio programme.
    And then there was the darker side, in that year of interesting events, both interior and exterior.
    Once I had established contact with the bishop of Nelson, I experienced, for the first time in my life, a setting upon me ugly spirits, some kind of obsession, which could be driven away only with the use of the discipline. I had to take the belt out of my pants and use it vigorously on my legs for a dozen or so good wacks.
    This was not a form of mortification I had never expected to use, ever. Of course I had heard of flagellants, in medieval history studies, and I admired their courage and sense of penance on behalf of their own sins and those of their fellows, but I habitually shrunk, in my own disposition, from outward display. For one thing, I think I had always known how to suffer inwardly, even before I was understandingly aware of the hard side of the mystical life; and once I was done with my first two years of university, during which I had been properly spoiled by consolations, in spite of my grand neglect of organized religion - and God had begun revealing the rougher patches, I could only assume that the various suspensions of the faculties, the aridities, the scruples, and the steadily growing incursions into the horrors of the second night where more than a match - as indeed they were - for any legitimate series of swats on the shoulders or any other part of the physical anatomy.
    So what was this new, and somewhat negligible, self-inflicted onslaught all about? To tell the truth, as best as I can remember, I did it only once in Terrace, and not again, for more than a year, until one strange summer evening in Nelson. In neither case, at the time, could I connect a particular cause to the devils in question, but the whipping was cause enough of their departure, and I was led further into understanding the life of a good monk. And not for a quarter-of-a-century would the police and the courts establish the reasons for my surprising acquisition of that part of the monkish tradition.
    The other workload, much larger a consumer of time, and of what until that time in my life had been a great facility for getting a good night's sleep, was the thought, as I interpreted it, of going to teach on an Indian reserve. Once our pastor had told us our Terrace days would end with the school year, the reserve idea came again and again, waking me up in the middle of the night, and keeping me awake for rather a long time. Even though I had done a kind of practicum fortnight in the Indian day school, in Alert Bay, four years previous, and quite enjoyed that, this was a radically new notion, because my focus had fastened more and more on the idea of training teachers with an interest in philosophy and the arts. The force of the idea moved me to think that natives might be even more open to metaphysics and music than whites, but the thinking on the subject, even though it temporarily eclipsed the old inspiration to settle in Nelson, did not lead me to any concrete action, and when the thought of perfection came, the reserve plan passed away. Where perfection among the young was concerned, God already had a soul in mind, and she did not live on an Indian reserve. But there were victims of sexual abuse by clergy and religious living on reserves, and this was the Lord's way, I realized years later, of having me start to pray for that horrific situation.
    Those who live by passive prayer must be, unquestionably, by the graces of God, the wisest souls on earth; yet they also must be, in so many ways, the most uninformed. They are very much aware of God, in admirably special, mysterious, and to the unexperienced, inexplainable fashions, but of the specific reasons for the particular joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, of their prayer life, they can be the most ignorant of men or women. By the time I was seventeen I had made a few choices as to the long term intentions of my life from day to day, but I was to learn that there were and would be others I would not currently identify, some certainly not at the moment, and perhaps not for some time, while the rest would have to wait for Heaven. "Do not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing," He said, and that made one hand different from the other.
    The logic of the contemplative situation can be annoying, can seem even somewhat criminal to those who think only by the standards of the world, and even, on occasion, by contemplatives themselves, who have as much appetite as anyone for seeing the evil done in. But the contemplative is, by definition, not an active. His role is influence toward perfection and the interior life, and even formation of the same in any souls qualified. Unless he is an abbot or a bishop, punishment or dismissal is unlikely to come under his authority, except in cases of spiritual direction, which are not what is herein under consideration. The contemplative, in fact, is so bound to pray for those in grave sin, which is always so common to both Church and State, that he is ordinarily allowed to do very little to those in possession of it. This at least has most certainly been my experience of the great majority of situations particularly in the face of my actual natural temperament being passionately inclined toward action. God only knows how hard He has had to work to keep me tied to my chair of reflection.
    This is not to say that I have never been allowed into activity, and I have also to say that I have from time to time been quite definitely inspired to it, being given an idea, a direction, a targeted soul or two, and further given no rest nor peace of mind whatsoever until I have fired off a telegram, a phone call, a letter, or taken on the culprit face to face, even or perhaps especially when I had no idea just how much of a culprit I was sent to warn. My modus vivendi in this regard was established early on, even before I became a Catholic, just before, in fact, I undertook instruction in the Faith, and it came in no less authoritative a form than within only the second locution of my life so far, some fifteen years and more after the first one.
    "I want you to see what kind of priests ordinary Catholics have to put up with." This was Our Lord's answer to my question, in the early summer of 1958, as to whether I should take my catechism from the Basilians, stationed at the UBC campus, and specializers, of course, in the supposedly complicated and subtle minds of university students; or from the more middle class oriented Redemptorists of my neighbourhood parish, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I had left my basement apartment - I think on Thirteenth Avenue - on a lovely balmy Vancouver morning in the beginning of June, and was headed for Tenth Avenue, the only commercial street in that part of West Point Grey, and the principal access to the university. I was pondering within myself whether I should turn left at Tenth and head out to the campus and the Basilians, and through them submit my intellect and will to Rome, or if I should turn right and stroll down the hill to the church I had first noticed five years earlier, on my initial bus rides to the campus, from the east side of the city.
    To tell the truth, I had already had a couple of good experiences, in terms of evaluating the Faith, and the priests of the Faith, on the campus. The priest introduced to my medieval history class, when I was in second year, and then a most energetic moral theologian from Europe, who gave a few days of a Lenten mission, just weeks prior to my decision to inquire, were both profoundly provocative to my processes of selection. I was, after all, a novelist, a student and creator, hopefully, of strong and interesting characters. Both priests, in their own, probably unconscious, ways, had exhibited, to me, clarity, energy, and self-possession greater than anything I had ever seen in my other teachers or professors to that date. I knew I could go to either or both of them, and no doubt get involved in a fine series of intellectual and spiritual conversations.
    But was that that the bravest and most useful road for a writer who so very much, he thought, had the common man on his mind? Especially when he already had a Catholic girlfriend who read good books as habitually as most people breathe? Nor was I incapable myself, of looking up the relevant texts. What did the ordinary fellow do? Thus were my musings as I neared Tenth Avenue in the lovely sunshine, and thus spake the Lord to determine the direction my steps would take.
    I have written earlier that I ran into a dear old Redemptorist brother who immediately reminded me of my eminently prayerful Baptist grandfather, and I have probably also said that the priests that I met at Our Lady's were generally that kind and helpful that I for some years puzzled at the fair degree of negativity in Christ's instructions. But finally, in this diocese, I realized quite what He had in mind, and also took comfort in understanding, as He pinned me down, that I had no obligations to act as a good bishop should. I should simply see, as best I could, what was going on, and make my writer's notes. None of this standing on the sidelines, of course, would in any way prevent me from guiding others - none of them clergy - who had the faith and courage to do the same.
    Is there a country in the Christian world where the spiritual life is generally so badly understood as in Canada? And where this condition is general, who can be at fault other than priests and bishops? And how, in the general acceptance these days, of so called inclusive language, have these Canadian clergy and bishops so radically revealed their complete and utter failure to grasp the most fundamental and elementary principles of the life of the soul? The truly inclusive use of either masculine, or feminine, or neuter, by the mystics, is absolutely necessary to even beginning to comprehend the doctrines of the soul as bride, in relations to its divine Bridegroom; so necessary that all true sons of prayer have no recourse against the current practises than that of cheerful, but implacable, contempt, laced with the mercy of praying for God's lightening as much as possible the bishop's ordained punishment in purgatory.
    Have I wandered from my original intentions? Not at all. Some of the perfect souls it has been my honour to discover in the diocese to which I was sent for precisely that purpose were no doubt set out long ago in God's plan to pray for just that modern stupidity, and being female, their prayers against exaggerated feminism, have in a sense, a better chance with God than mine do.