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.