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.