Chapter 22

    "Where sin abounds, grace more abounds."
    This is the ancient formula of the saints, wherever and whenever they realized that their particular swamps were full of moral crocodiles. Wherever He allows the crocodiles to gather in force, He also provides a steel-hulled boat and a mighty crossbow. The vicious amphibians keep coming, but the prayerful man gets to be a stout oarsman and a damned good shot. Then, eventually, God might even decide to drain the swamp, and all the crocodiles soon go belly-up and feed the vultures.
    This might not be perfect zoology, but it will do quite nicely for the history of the diocese of Nelson, or, more correctly, the diocese's history after 1958. The first bishop of Nelson, Martin Johnson, rector of the Toronto cathedral before his appointment in the mid-Thirties, was also one of the noblest men of British Columbia in the days of my young manhood, as well as the builder of some of the institutions I would later come to the diocese to try to preserve. But as I think I have mentioned earlier, he was kicked upstairs to be archbishop of Vancouver in 1954, followed in Nelson by another decent man, also a genuine educator, and then, late in 1958, Pope Pius XII signed the bull that made Wilfrid Emmett Doyle the third bishop of Nelson.
    Bad bishops, and even bad popes, from time to time, have ever been the bane of the Catholic Church. All men, even clergy, have free will, and thus can be sinners, even great sinners, and priests in high offices can be the greatest sinners of all because they have so much to betray. Aaron with the golden calf; the temple rulers who defied the prophets; the Pharisees who blasphemed against God Incarnate; Judas, forever; Peter, James and John, temporarily; and then two thousand years of heresy and schism amongst the episcopacy have all scarred the image of the Church Militant and guaranteed the continual bleeding of the wounds of Christ. By the time I got to Nelson, in the spring of 1960, I had converted my voracious appetite for novels, criticism, and general reading to a voracious appetite for theology, Church history, and biographies of the saints. Being a novelist-in-training I did not give up the other stuff - the lightest of reading can provide some remarkable symbols, one gets to learn - but greatest writings to do with the Catholic Church had become my wonderfully light-some passion and primal purpose, albeit with a soberly increasing understanding of the scope of failure that Christ's whole religion made possible. Moreover, in my daily digesting of the Summa that was the central work of the months in Alert Bay, I had run across reference to the duty, of an informed Catholic, to rebuke even a bishop, and, I think I can say after all these years of reflection, God's grace made me ponder Thomas' instruction with a certain gravity, even though the bishops I knew of - Duke, Johnson, O'Grady - were not men I could think of criticizing, let alone rebuking.
    In the trip to Nelson I never did meet Doyle, nor any other priest of the diocese except his appointment - in 1959 - to the presidency of the college. Years later I learned that the Reverend Aquinas Thomas - of the New York based Society of the Atonement - had actually been banished to south-eastern British Columbia because of his political ambitions. He had lobbied extensively to be elected head of his order, and thus been sent down for an attitude so flagrantly contradictory to the ideals of a monk. The Atonement Fathers were a modern species, founded by a converted Anglican, of Franciscans. Father Aquinas wore both sandals and hooded robe, but in fact no man more unlike the real monk ever strolled more incontinently through the halls of a Catholic institution, and never with more blessing and support of his bishop. Abelard is of little use as an example of moral failure, because at least Abelard was faithful to his Heloise. Our poor reprobate believed in a succession of victims.
    Now of course I knew none of this prior to arriving at the campus. I had read of villainous churchmen, but all the priests I had encountered up to that point, as far as I knew, were admirable in the celibacy, their basic energy for life and their concern for souls, and, without even questioning the issue - as we do do often now - their fundamental commitment to the teachings of the Church. What Newman found, I had found. Granted, there had been varying responses to my status as a mystic, but even among priests the lack of experience, as John of the Cross insists, must be allowed for. God had his way, even unto inspiring Archbishop Johnson, as he was by then in Vancouver, to say to my anxious mother-in-law to be: "Is it possible, Viole, that he is a visionary?" And by the time Shawn and I were sailing into Alert Bay the first time, I was in minor ecstasy reading Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, a novel in which all the principal male characters are clergymen! They were Anglican, of course, but I had every confidence that in time I could fill a legitimate plot with Catholic priests.
    So much for the crocodiles, for the moment. Now we must speak of the grace that abounds where sin abounds. But of course that too contains an element of the crocodile, where we have the abundance of graces that come with the matured spiritual life, or even with fairly early stages that are nonetheless precociously augmented by the will and skill of an omnipotent heavenly Father.
    In the autumn of 1958, I had my first and perhaps greatest, experience of the flight of the spirit, during which I was conscious of at least three major and unforgettable elements. I was in an indescribable state of happiness; I utterly lacked any sense of possessing a body; I was not only in Heaven but also in Mary's womb. It was this event that made me realize the I was in fact more than a novelist, I was a mystic. But it was also an event which followed a proportionate series of acutely uncomfortable experiences, going back to the same time of year, the autumn, of 1956, when I left law school for the first time to study under, as I thought at the time, my own guidance.
    Although most of the time I was the happiest student I had ever been, reading for the most part the most serious psychology texts I could find - Freud, MacDougal, Havelock Ellis - I had also to pay a certain price for my freedom. For the first time in my life, so far as I can remember, I was regularly threatened with failure; as punishment for my radical break from the normal order of education and social responsibility I would never again be able to find a job. It was usually as I was trying to go to sleep at night that the devil carried on this abuse. In the daytime, I was happily busy at some useful study or reflection on what I was reading. Earlier than this of course, throughout the entire first year of law school I'd known the habitual exercise of the ligature of the faculties that prevented real scholarship, but that had been more consoling than anything, and I had always enjoyed the setting and the company. This nagging threat was downright unpleasant, and occasionally seemed to take quite a lot of courage and determination to endure without a change of direction. We should not meander too far off our subject of the moment, however, and I will simple say that after six weeks of not-so-quiet ecstasy as an independent student I ran out of funds and immediately found a month of temporary work, ideal for a young fellow, and at an excellent rate of pay. The Father of Lies lost the first round, and I was well on my way to learning how to live, by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, one day at a time.
    But of course we do not know about any given day the same way God does, or even in the same way History will be able to judge a few decades later. Now it is easy to see Heaven's correcting principles at work. My experience of the flight of the spirit, following a sustained programme of the dark night and the lower mansions, came in the same weeks that W.E.Doyle was being made bishop of Nelson. He was consecrated in October, installed in Nelson early in December. I cannot give an exact date for my experience, but I do know that it was a few weeks before Christmas. God knew the diocese I would be settling in, eventually, and wanted me well set up spiritually, not only to survive such wickedness, but also to increase the numbers of those interested in perfection, even in such a contradictory environment.
   Not that I in any way thought of myself at that time as a spiritual director, either for the present or the future. My passions were for study, writing, and some form of classroom teaching. I read Teresa and John of the Cross so constantly, and with such respect and deference, that I could not think of a director as anyone with less than a mastery of the seventh mansion and the night of the spirit, and this I knew I did not have. At that point, my best working asset, in the mystical order, was the inner sense of touch. For much of every day, God had a manifestly tangible hold on my brain. For the most part, I was kept out of trouble and in the right direction.
    It should be emphasized as well - and as often as I am moved to say it - that I was most certainly kept away from the one kind of writing that ordinary thought would expect me to be trying the hardest with at this point: writing about the spiritual life, especially about my more phenomenal adventures with mysticism. Nothing is more natural to a writer than the desire to work up his strongest material. One could think that Hemingway got himself involved in a war simply to be able to write with authority over an area always popular with many readers. Prior to realizing that my central field was to be contemplation, I prided myself on, and took great comfort in what I though of as a considerable variety in experience. Going on twenty-three, I thought of myself as having had a varied education, a varied history of work, a wide circle of friends with different interests. I had rubbed shoulders with all the social classes and political and religious inclinations  or convictions, and before becoming a Catholic, would have insisted that I possessed a universally open mind. This was all going to be most helpful, I assumed, to my literary career.
    And to the extent that I could think up a plot or a group of characters, I of course drew on this youthful history. But never was I allowed or inspired to draw on my history of the mystical, not in the slightest, so of course all my stories were out of whack. The best I could do was to insert some degree of religious flavour, but this was never close, spiritually speaking, to what I actually knew as an every day life. Occasionally I dipped into catechetics, but there was not even much grace for that, as my characters were so skimpily formed, in my complete inability to set down what I knew the best and thought about the most. But I did enjoy my writing, for I had ever loved nature, and had some pleasure in jotting of the wilderness, or things of town and humanity insofar as I was inspired and permitted to take them on.
    In the weeks after we were married, I had even essayed a priest, my first attempt. It was a bold venture, for I had my young lay hero as a friend of his, and certainly I had yet to claim a priest as a personal friend, although the dozen or so men of the Catholic cloth I had encountered up to that point had all for the most part been friendly enough, and certainly these engagements had all held a flavour quite unknown to me before. I suppose, for a novelist, their virtue and affability created a problem: none of them were evil, or even especially stupid, although God had seemed to advise me to beware trying to seek a spiritual director in Vancouver. But in firing me off to Nelson, He had begun to lift the screen from the chiaroscuro.
    So, now, back to the Canadian Prince, plowing south through the Inside Passage. In earlier years, incidentally, she - or he, as a prince - had been dubbed the Princess Nora, a CPR ship, and the husband and father of some very dear friends of mine in my student days had been one of her engineers. He was, like so many sailors, a Scot from Glasgow, God rest his kindly soul. Furthermore, as the Prince, this boat could claim, a few years before we first sailed on her, a third mate who had become a friend of ours, then godfather to our first-born. He had left the sea for studies, and stored extra books of ours when we left Vancouver, and later, when I was up to my ears in the troubles of Nelson, blessed the beginning of the third full version of the yacht novel. He was by then a university librarian. Sadly, however, he finally committed suicide, so God bless him too. How rarely we know as effervescent youngsters, what sorts of tragedies will come upon our friends.
    Shawn and I had managed to get a part of a night's sleep on the narrowest bunk ever designed. Perhaps there was also an upper bunk, but that would have been ridiculous for a couple still married less than a year. As it was, the relative discomfort of the bunk had us awake in time to see the south-west corner of Lasqueti Island, lying across the choppy gray seas to port as we sped toward Vancouver. My beloved had heard so much about the island from me and always insisted that I write about the days spent there. We had not seen it on the northward journey, as it was still part of the night when we had sailed by. Now we had a clear view of the rocky shore and its mantle of evergreens. Perhaps as well we picked up some of the angels who had been part of my experience there, experiences in innocence, an immensely useful introduction to the Virgin Mary, and a most profound - for a youngster - encounter with the dark night and a subsequent equally profound encounter with the Being of God.
    Getting this chance to see the island - I had not been back since I was fourteen - was not a mere happenstance. In the place where I was heading, I was about to encounter, as far as I have known, my first impure priest. Perhaps, for all his Catholic background, he had not known the same good fortune in his youth as I had.