Chapter 21

    As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living, even if it means, as in his case, we wind up being put to death for our examinations. For what is death, for the fortunate wise, but the passage from the darkness of this world into the perfect clarity of the next? And the final death only comes easily and sweetly to those who have already, by examining their lives, put to death the desires of their flesh, the badness of their will, and the ignorance of their intellect. Examine, examine, examine.
    No matter how much we examine the past, either for the sake of our own conscience, or for some legitimate curiosity over the behaviour of others, we regularly come up with new information or a new understanding of old information. In my striving to make a fully fair and accurate recollection of the material of the current passage, I have run into quite the remarkable bit of irony, and it was at that point, more or less. that I thought of Socrates' declaration. I remembered something I don't think I had thought of for decades, not a very large memory at all, and of little more, given the context of the times, than a passing idea; yet something which eventually set against the ultimate reality of the sins of the Catholic university I came to, created a masterpiece of contradiction, or, as I said, irony.
    In the months of my last year in high school, even though I was much in receipt of a steady schedule of spiritual favours, such as my life-long goal of working inwardly for the collapse of atheistic communism in Russia, and the certain knowledge of just why and how I was going to university - to make friends and to learn to write - I did run into the fear of losing what faith, as I understood it, that I actually possessed. In my own unschooled way I did have an obscure sense of the Trinity - although Christ was much more the Great Teacher than the absolutely necessary Saviour - and what I had I did not want to lose, in my heart, no matter how much undergraduate skepticism I might allow myself to verbally, publicly, revel in. From a single copy of the Ubyssey I had discovered in the Britannia library I was as made wary by the apparent irreverence as I had been ignited by verbal brilliance. I was apprehensive enough to be moved to wonder if I should try to enroll in one of the Pacific Northwest's confessional colleges. Somehow I had learned that there were one or two of these in the state of Washington - I had a couple of friends who were regular church goers, of Protestant denominations - and I had also read in the newspaper, I think, that a small Catholic college had recently opened up in the Interior of my own province. This might seem like an odd possibility to some - the Catholic possibility - but I knew in my heart of hearts that I had met through my own cadet corps and my time in Vernon cadet camp a lot of young Catholics, both boys and girls, who certainly proved to anyone with the abilities of a novelist, that there had to be something to the oldest of the Christian faiths.
    But of course UBC was cheaper, as I could live at home while attending, and God seemed to be assuring me that I would be all right. I suspect that it was in those troubled hours that I gained some real understanding of the reality of the Holy Spirit, and of the necessity of His presence in a life that wishes to hold on to the clarity and strength that it has already acquired.
    So there I was, at seventeen, feeling confident that some far-off Catholic college could, if necessary, help me keep my youthful faith in Christ insofar as I thought I knew Him. Eleven autumns later I was to settle by that very institution only to realize that I had landed amongst a set of clerical derelicts second to none in the history of the Church, with a bishop determined to keep them all in place, and the faith of the students therefore compromised to a most unfortunate degree. I need to make it clear that in the days of my looking to the Kootenays for the preservation of my little faith, when I was a youngster, this horrendous condition was not in control. The founding bishop was an entirely different sort of man, and no one in the region had as yet heard of the fornicating monk who had become president of the university by the time I arrived.
    But God, of course, had heard of him as much as he needed to, and therefore, to make my own assignment somewhat intelligible, He took the trouble, in the spring of `1960, to ram a mighty log into the propeller of the Canadian Prince, the coastal steamer that was then serving the west coast from Vancouver to Prince Rupert, including Alert Bay, the fishing village - half of it most wonderfully Kwakiutl Indian - where Shawn and I were living while she taught before she became a mother and I studies - and worked - before I became a teacher in the Catholic school system.
    The log did its job handsomely, bending the propeller shaft enough that the ship required nine hours repair in Prince Rupert, its northern destination. I was working in the local post office, as a humble bag boy, but my brother, who stayed with us when he was not off cooking on the small ship operating out of Alert Bay, was between cruises, and thus available to fill in for me while I caught the delayed steamer on her way back to Vancouver. I called the head of the Nelson university to see if he would be available for an interview - I was thinking of teaching English - arranged with my brother and my boss for the substitution, and , with my wife, caught the Canadian Prince that evening.
    The fitful coastal weather had changed. In the morning, when I phoned the Kootenays, the sun was shining, but by evening the clouds had settled in and a light rain was falling on Johnstone Strait. We minded none of that, because no matter what happened as a result of the interview, we were getting ourselves a little holiday. Shawn would get to visit her family, and we would both have some time in our favourite city. There had been no question the summer previous but that we should leave Vancouver, perhaps forever, but we had also missed the old town mightily, from time to time, and did not mind at all the chance to see it again. In spite of the rain, as soon as we had located our cabin and stowed our suitcases, we betook ourselves to the stern, to watch Cormorant Island fall behind us. I had been off the island a number of times, in various boats; this was, as I remember, only Shawn's second trip. In the autumn we had crossed over to Sointula. the heart of the Finnish settlement on nearby Malcolm Island, to take in an anniversary celebration, including a play in Finnish, and my very literate, observant, and appreciative wife had subsequently written up a nice little essay on the settlement, to be aired on a CBC radio show out of Vancouver.
    This well put together little feature was, I might add, a much more cogent and useful piece of work than anything her supposed novelist husband had been able to come up with during our months on the island thus far. My studying was wonderfully successful, as both the Summa and John of the Cross' Ascent of Mount Carmel were going into my soul with a clarity and penetration I was to subsequently learn, to my sorrow, that few Catholics, including priests and bishops, never seem to experience; but none of this enviable success as both a student theologian and young mystic somewhere short of the seventh mansion could find its way into my sporadic attempts at storytelling. The best thing I could accomplish for Canadian literature at that point in my life was to recognize, finally, many months after it was written, some of the flaws in my second complete version of the "yacht novel", and burn it.
    So, plainly, I had yet to reap fame and fortune as a writer, and had to look for a job. As someone has already said, a wife and family are hostages to fortune. I had no resentment of these facts of life; after all, I had happily tried to become a lawyer because I knew it might take me years before I could earn a living solely as an author and, so I thought at the time, the law would give me all sorts of material to write about. But the law studies had come a cropper, to be replaced, in the order of temporary vocations for the aspiring writer, by thoughts, inspirations, and experiences of teaching.
    Shortly after I was baptized, and at about the same time as I was cranking up the opening pages of the afore-mentioned "yacht novel", I read in the B.C. Catholic, to which I had become a mightily satisfied subscriber, an article about a Catholic elementary school; and this article, or the Holy Ghost through it, had fed me an unforgettable sense of my needing, quite absolutely, to become a Catholic school teacher, but with the distinct view of making my young charges aware of the glories of Thomas Aquinas. There was also some intimation of instruction in the arts, I think, for I was not only a musician of sorts, but had just recently performed the leading role in my first play.
    I was quite swept away by the idea, and in the calm of perfect hindsight brought on by forty years of a well-examined life, I can say with complete confidence that this inspiration was as primal as it was clear and powerful, and it was, in time, to be utterly fulfilled, both as to philosophy and the arts, with the addition of a result which at the time I had no way of knowing could come to be. In the time of the inspiration I had not read the Carmelite mystics, nor hear of the term spiritual director.
    The article dealt with a Catholic school in a city, not, I think, Vancouver, and it seemed to be about a school where all the teachers were nuns. So, as with most inspirations, the world and the devil had their subsequent innings. I could never teach in a Catholic school because it would not be able to afford me. (I was only months away from being married.) But I did not get depressed about this problem, as I was happily at work on a novel, and, as always, was surrounded by friends who provided me with all the meaningful mental preoccupations that a teacher is provided with, and in fact I received no further bulletins from Heaven on the teaching question until the summer, after Shawn and I were married. We were subletting a small apartment, still in Vancouver until the middle of August, and one night watching a drama on television about a youngish father who becomes the headmaster in an upstate New York private school for boys.
    Again I felt the call to the classroom, and given the ordinary superiority of emotional impact of drama over journalism, I felt it with an incredible, undescribable, keenness. As with an inspiration of three years previous, reading Hemingway, and feeling the call to one more job in the bush, I felt that I would simply die if I did not become a teacher, and a teacher of children. At the same time, I was by no means inspired to run about immediately in search of a classroom. It was Shawn who was to teach, we had decided - I was writing quite steadily for the moment, and waiting to hear from a publisher - and hopefully in some not-too-rustic, not-too-distant, somewhat rural community like Salt Spring Island. But that tidy little spot was too close to Victoria not to be able to demand a fully certified teacher, and we had to settle for the more remote Alert Bay, where, after the end of July, the school board was allowed to take on a teacher who had only a degree. (Neither one of us had ever had the slightest interest in taking teacher training.)
    Yet now I was looking for work, and teaching work at that, although not in an elementary or high school, even though I'd enjoyed myself and had a great deal of satisfaction substituting in both levels in the months previous. I was off to try for a post at a college, without a degree myself!
    Those who have struggled long and hard to get a solid arts degree, even at the bachelor's level. and never mind the post-graduate diploma that is usually required for college teaching, might think of my snap decision as ridiculous, and God's part of the inspiration as profoundly questionable, and they could be right, although neither would I listen to the arguments of any critic who had not tried to familiarize himself with Saint Thomas, which was the real fuel in my tank. But it is not the ordinary arguments of the world that are applicable here, nor the ordinary reasoning of the Church's ordinary officials. What I was about was spiritual business, something much beyond the programmed qualifications for educators, and I was by now too much of a mystic not to recognize the internal signs of an assignment. The external logic, useful for explaining an action to others, might or might not be useful to my best thought processes.
    In this particular case I had a fair degree of legitimate hope that my journey could be naturally fruitful, for there had once come a Divine inspiration about living in the Kootenays every bit as powerful as visions of the schoolroom. This I have previously mentioned, being the spirits that came while I was watching a television programme on the proposed dams on the Kootenay-Columbia river system, in the immediate previous winter.
   Nor was I being especially indulgent in regard to a special spiritual experience - always troublesome in the illuminative stage - because in thinking I was supposed to move to the Kootenays at the moment I was quite renouncing my own particular sense of responsibility toward Saint Michael's College, at the University of Toronto, and degrees in scholastic philosophy.
    What of the classroom visions as an antidote? Well, they were, psychologically at least, for the moment utterly inoperative. This for the usual reasons in an habitual victim of passive prayer: God had quite blotted them out of my working memory. It was everything I had ever thought about Nelson that was thundering through my brain and liver, ignited of course by the incident of the log, and while by no means certain of being hired, I was not at all afraid of rejection. Even if it was not time to move to the Interior, it was a good time and excuse to have a look at our future home.
    There was, moreover, another reason for God's nautical caber toss. As Providence would have it, my real future employer was also taking the Canadian Prince to Vancouver, and I was to get the chance to see him in action as the public man, not just the parish priest, in action on behalf of the Catholic school system.
    A few years ago, looking for a simple phrase which would define for my working associates a capsule introduction to the story of my latest trip into the wider community, I came up with "Go for A, get B." In other words, once again, I had sallied out with my thoughts clearly focusing on one very possible person or operation, only to find that I was away from my monastery for one or more very different reasons.
    Such a pattern has been pretty much my daily bread for many, many, years, long before the titling, but I think it really started as early as my enrollment in law school, in the autumn of 1955. Up to that point, I was used only to, as a general rule, equivalent results, pretty much aware ahead of time of benefits to be accrued from school, from scouts, from cadets, from my first two years of university and my association with the campus newspaper. Nor had there occurred any radical surprises in my summer jobs, although I do not want to pretend that there was any absence of valuable life lessons. But with law school there was a profound shock. I found, immediately, that I actually had no natural appetite whatsoever for legal texts. They were even duller than my Psychology 100 text - with a few memorable exceptions - and furthermore, no matter how hard I might try from time to scattered time, my absorption rate was the least I'd ever known. The prayer of quiet had struck, my faculties were chronically interfered with to a much greater degree than ever before, even if I had no educated understanding of what was going on, and I knew only that I was getting one of the great surprises of my young life. Furthermore, without even knowing what grace was, I knew that I was getting something that made me quite content with my lot. And I should have been so, for I had also been put into the situation of learning even more deeply how to live one day at a time, although the going-for-one-thing-getting-another pattern was by no means as regular as it was to become years later.
    When Shawn and I had done with our musing on the deck, we came back to the main salon to find a most arresting little group deep in conversation at one of the tables, in an otherwise pretty empty room. On one side sat the Reverend James Fagen, pastor of Saint Margaret's, Ocean Falls, whom we recognized from a trip he had made to Alert Bay in the autumn, in company with a mission preacher, and on the other were the then minister of education, Leslie Peterson and his wife. Considering all that has gone down in my province since that last year of the 'Fifties", in both Church and provincial government, I recall them as two of the noblest leaders of the half-century. Fagan, of course, was lobbying for a just share of the education taxes, for parochial schools such as his little one, and twenty some years later he was to see his urgings - and prayers - bear fruit. I distinctly remember admiring his open-handed forthrightness and I also remember feeling some regret that did not have the claims of position and experience that would have permitted me to join in the conversation.
    I knew about the Catholic school not from its pastor himself, as Fagan and I had not as yet had much conversation, but our own priest, new since after Christmas, had been at me in his own quiet, steady, concerned, way to head on up to Ocean Falls and Saint Margaret's, where he knew Fagan would need not only one but two teachers for the new year. His campaign had started soon after he arrived, following a spirited discussion - at least on my part - on the virtues of a Thomistic formation, and I felt encouraged and complimented by his enthusiastic trust in my abilities, but I was still thinking of Saint Michael's and writing, and was not at all sure that I had the patience for the youngest students of an elementary school. And by sailing time I had actually been brooding over Notre Dame for quite a while, and for reasons beyond my comprehension then the Holy Spirit had been making quite a spiritual to-do about that little campus, sometimes enough to make me think that it was the only place in the world I would find a job that I could be happy in. As I said, go for A, but only to later realize it really was B that was the designated harvest. B, I suppose, stood for bastards, for who could ever have suspected that a Catholic diocese would contain so many priests so little interested in being true sons of Christ?