Chapter Eight

    "No Iliad ever began with the birth of Achilles."

    This is a bit of iambic pentameter I came up with one morning a few years ago when I was trying to write a long poem about the spiritual life. Homer's classic, as its readers know, gets off to a quick start, with two grown men in a battle over a young woman, in the midst of the siege of Troy. A battle within a war, like a play within a play, and even at this point we have had nine years of encamped Greeks and embattled Trojans with as yet no decisive conflicts. Inasmuch as the spiritual life is often likened to combat, especially with the forces of evil within oneself, anecdotes of war, real or fictional, have a certain relevant intensity.
    So, before we get too far along in this ramble, which has the fact dealt somewhat with my childhood, although not with actual birth, we must deal with some warfare, some gunshots, some wounds. and in fact the slow dying to the world, the flesh, and the devil without which the spirit cannot truly be set free.
    But what is the spirit? Even those who believe God gave them a soul and a mind, not just a sensual body filled with contradicting and unreliable emotions, so often seem unable to get beyond the few basic mental skills sufficient to stumble through the minimal obligations to family, workplace, school, and perhaps religion. Given the power and depth of life in a fully developed spirit, the limited existence in no small tragedy. Yet who can escape it without the grace of God, and who will go to the ultimate depths and heights of his or her soul without very special graces from God? And not only grace but the most definite participation in glory? And all of these lovely favours presume, of course, victory over grave sin. And then victory over lesser sins, and even imperfections and faults that interfere with advanced graces and the presence of glory. The growth pf the spiritual life is methodical, like every other undertaking of any consequence, and in our later years, with sufficient time on our hands and water enough flowed under our personal bridges, we delight in reminiscing and piecing together the chapter and verse, the times and places and person of these moments of instruction. This is not to say that the moments themselves were all pleasant. In order for the spiritual life to progress as it should, so much of the time spent is extremely unpleasant, in the way that mankind ordinarily measure pleasure. The spiritual life is indeed a rigorous affair, full of internal obedience as well as external, and therefore more demanding than even the military - which I was for years, on a casual basis, happily part of - and yet it also knows the most horrendous moments of battle agony. Many times over, the fully matured and experienced contemplative knows that death - would be much preferable to the spiritual trials in which it suddenly finds itself.
    The absolute sureness of this realization, for all that I had been given an habitual experience of the contemplative life, never fell upon me until I was twenty-one, and was, in reflection, a kind of graduation present or even the bestowing of a Divine equivalent of the bachelor of arts degree. After all, a large proportion of the students who had entered university with me were receiving their diplomas. so why, in a sense, not I?
    The place of this anointing was my beloved Sechelt Inlet, at Porpoise Bay, a sparse collection of homes scattered along the shore of the south end of that long, narrow, generally uninhabited Pacific fiord with a mouth so small that only sixty percent of the normal tide fluctuation is allowed to pass through it. By the summer of 1945 my mother's mother, remarried to a just-retired old gentleman of innumerable sea-going and outdoor adventures, was having a house built at Porpoise Bay - a small part of it by my ten-year-old-self - and she and Grandpa Alex were to live there for the next twenty years and some. I was awe struck by my new grandfather - the old one had died long before I came along - and fell in love with the Inlet as well. I had always loved the wild reaches of Nature, but never had any of them feel I could call my own. Now, through my Nana, I had a beachhead on my very own Eden, to which I regularly made my pilgrimages, and five years later, when my father and uncle bought adjoining houses three miles up the inlet coast, I had an even stronger grip on the meditative use of holidays and the sens of feeling doubly privileged.
    By the spring of 1957, I'd known the inlet and its profound silence for a dozen years. I'd fished regularly, hunted a little, but mostly I had simply loved being there. For those who have learned how to be still and look about them, who lack false ambitions and a guilty conscience both, the quiet, the solitude, of Nature is an overwhelming and most companionable presence, especially in a region blanketed by the very real faith of someone close to you. It was my Nana who had taught me my childhood prayers and it was my Nana who had been the occasion of my secure and comfortable access to the wilderness and its lonely reach of water.
    And as well as these key decisions regarding real estate and religion, it was also my Sechelt grandparents who subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, the weekly magazine founded by Benjamin Franklin and in my youthful days, before television swept away most of the magazine storytellers, North America's favourite source of short stories and serials. My parents did not subscribe, but the Post, so often with its cover adorned with a Norman Rockwell illustration, was the journal no doctor or dentist's office could be without and I no doubt read it as well in homes where I visited or babysat. But in the months prior to the discovery I made in my grandparents' house I must have slipped up on my reading, because when I arrived at the inlet late in a certain summer - I think it was 1950 - I dipped into their great stack of Post issues and came upon a serial I had not been aware it had carried.
    The story was Perilous Passage, by Canadian author Arthur Mayse. I was swept into it instantly, landing by chance in an early episode, and after locating the first installment in the pile kept in Grandfather Alex' workshop at the back of the little house, I found to my great joy and relief that my Nana had preserved every relevant issue. The entire tale was there: I could relax and read it at my leisure.
    As far as I can remember, Perilous Passage was only the fourth novel I had ever read that was set in a landscape I could call my own, and the first of these was not of much use to a boy. It was located in my native province, and I suppose that may have been of some influence on my young mind that did not yet know it belonged to a writer, but I did not like it much and that may have suggested to me that people could not write well about British Columbia. That first book was written for adults, and ended unhappily.
    My next discover of a local author was Roderick Haig-Brown, with his two excellent books about a young lad's adventures along the east coast of Vancouver Island, first with a trap line, then with a salmon troller. Therein not only did I find my own territory very well written about, but I was also in no small way consoled over the uprooting from Nature that had come upon me when I was going on twelve and was hauled away from eighteen months in a coastal island paradise. It was probably best that this rupture occurred, for no paradise is complete without the prayers and education that come with a monastery, and my island had possessed no monks: I was to make great use of the opportunities the city could provide; yet I missed the island and was much pleased to have it restored by Saltwater Summer and Starbuck Valley Winter. Sometimes a good book can put us into a place, or back into a place, more suitably than can the place itself. A healthy mind makes more journeys than a body ever could hope to, and often better, and for all that I probably needed the city, and made good use of it, I also absolutely required regular journeys to the country, journeys real or imaginary yet always open to the spiritual law by which, where one considers the intellectual quality of the company, the imaginary journeys may be more real according to the actual relation to what Being truly is.
    Roderick Haig-Brown was awfully good company for a boy, especially a boy already well versed in the young reader's classics that have descended from Homer's detailed love for life on land or sea. Starbuck Valley Winter - it came first - was simply another of these, with the pleasant surprise of it being my own turf that acted as the setting. I had indeed read a few stories set in Canada - Glengarry School Days being one of the most notable, discovered when I was already familiar with the Ontario landscape - but in a country as big as this one, your own province merits its own treatment, and each generation of its writers need some rooting in those who went before.
    In a new province, in a settlement and colonization too young to have its own indigenous cultural history, those first writers will have had to be born somewhere else and have brought their culture with them. Haig-Brown had been born in England, and brought over many of the best things British, yet he became thoroughly at home in the Canadian West, making ti completely and comfortably his own back yard, therefore helping myself and any other apprentices to the work of words to truly make British Columbia our own back yard. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the eye, really the understanding and appreciation, must be trained, and trained again. Following young Don Morgan about was no bad training programme, and part of my being able to accept and be at peace with my return to the city, the settling in to urban ways.
    Initially, except for losing a new friend who had just come to my school on the island because his had closed, I did not mind leaving Lasqueti. My mother was already in town with my youngest brother and my father, of necessity, was winding down his logging operation. All my aunts and uncles and one set of grandparents lived in Vancouver or Burnaby. The urban area was full of libraries, athletic facilities, scout troops, cadet corps, movie theatres, and the high schools and the university a lad born to use his brains had to leave the coastal corners to go to anyway. It also contained the employment opportunities that would eventually be just right for my father, and a newly begun inexpensive veterans' rental housing development that would be just right for our family needs and economics. For the second half of grade seven and then for all of grade eight I landed myself two very fine male teachers - excellent role models for the trade I would one day take up - to my own astonishment and my luck continued on into high school. It seems pretty clear that I was meant to come back to the city of my birth. In fact anyone not so fond of the wilderness as myself might have thought that the year-and-a-half on the island was simply a necessary interlude, some time my family had to spend before work and accommodation came available for returned veterans.
    The city also possessed something else I had been able to avoid in good conscience on my little island: church and Sunday school, and therefore the opportunity to wrestle with the angels over the question of some sort of regularized allegiance with church buildings. congregations, Sunday school teachers and ministers before the Lasqueti interlude and then for eighteen months only the daily Bible readings in school had been there to remind me that Nature and books were not quite everything my spirit required. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these things had continued to be the means through which I was pursued by a light that I took for granted, by which I was given a nourishment in grace that I did not truly comprehend. But with parents who had left religion behind as they entered their adult and family lives, my conscious and articulate relationship with anything formal. and external. when it came to my Creator and Redeemer, was bound to be spasmodic, relying on the good will of relatives, good luck in schools - two months in a denominational college in Belleville, Ontario, for example - and whatever inner promptings and other special moments God might bestow upon me. Not the least of favours too, would be friends and associates, with their particular, better organized, relationships with specific religions.
    I am not by any means suggesting that there was no religion on Lasqueti Island. On the contrary, as I have always recalled very clearly and with much affection the spirit what was quite common to the island generally and exercised some definite benefits in my direction. The first house of influence had a mother who was Catholic by birth, the second was Jehovah Witness to a moderate degree, and in the third the mother came from a devout Mormon upbringing. But on an island barely twelve miles long and boasting no more than a hundred-and-fifty souls. there were no churches and no services of regular obligation. One could be both a Christian and a free spirit without a sense of guilt or estrangement that can come in the presence of specific buildings, specific congregations, and resident pastors. I had lived for the time in a kind of child's paradise, where there were all sorts of benefits but not so many obligations. And yet, because I was a child, not yet an adolescent, and because I was actually not all that many years away - a mere decade - from becoming a Roman Catholic and finding myself a theologian as well as a novelist, in so many ways, I think, the Holy Spirit made it to no small degree a Catholic paradise, if only because I had so much love for the Nature He had created and then renewed, and on the island so much time to exercise that affection and regard.
    And regard nature I most certainly did, continuously absorbing her unspoiled beauty and variety from the moment I awoke until the time I fell to sleep. Except for the hours I was in school. or at my chores at home, there was little else to be preoccupied with. I read habitually, of course, but even there in my reading the wild outdoors, with a farm or a ranch as home base was pretty much my favourite reading. We had battery radio on Lasqueti, and I listened fairly widely to any serials we could get, but I recall that the most important stories were those set in the Old West - again the outdoors - The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid. Being a story-teller in the making naturally I enjoyed any well-told tale, so I was also aware of Superman, The Green Hornet, and so forth, but I was basically convinced that the country mouse had the better side of life.
    I think that one of the reasons for this poet's preference was my instinct for mystery. The city was full of information, very necessary and useful information, but the fields and the woods, the coastlines and the mountain ridges, streams and pools and lakes: all these were an endless source of wonder and mystery. And this fascination over bottomless personality of nature was a very general passion. I had none of the ear-marks of the young botanist, geologist, forester, butterfly or birds' egg collector. From time to time I managed even to feel inadequate because of the lack of a special interest. I simply found the entirety of it all a satisfying companion, a necessary companion, and endless friend. Had I known anyone with the talent to teach me, I might have become a fairly competent landscape painter, but even this is only supposition; I might equally as well have realized that the particular concentration required of an artist injected far too much material interruption into the generally metaphysical tone of my happy brooding. And even a trained and accomplished painter is wary of asking his best friends to pose, for he knows it can be difficult to get into a painting all the right qualities of those he knows and loves the best.
    And the face of the created earth I certainly loved, and most of the time it seemed to be smiling fondly back at me. Fondly, and always full of mystery.
    If I seem to be insisting, in the early part of this recollective argument, that the towns and cities held no beauty, no mysteries for me whatsoever, let me say that such is not my intention, because in fact one of my earliest memories of being sublimely wounded by the glory of nature took place not in the forest or the middle of some vast and lonely meadow, but right in the front garden of a small nursery, close by the house and office building, just off a busy main thoroughfare. Nor did the inside of houses and other buildings lack many wonderful and arresting moments, especially where books or religion were natural elements, and gardens - I have just spent some time looking over mine, which lies south of the house, gleaming most provocatively in the November sunshine - November is the month of the dead - gardens could be inebriating too, especially when they were huge and full of everything from chickens to strawberries, corn and apple trees, like my paternal grandparents' garden. And later, perhaps even before I left childhood and entered the labyrinthine passages of adolescence, God exerted His rights over His own creation and began to teach me that not only is beauty in the eye of the beholder, but that from time to time the eye of the beholder is, divinely, radically, and not a little unpleasantly, interfered with. This happened even on my beloved Lasqueti Island, before I'd been there half-a-year. In these circumstances, even Nature loses all her charm, ceases to be a friend and ally, is for emotional and educational purposes nonexistent until God choses to restore the normal - or better than normal - relationship.
    This is nothing to complain about. If the created is so wonderful, then the Creator must be even more so, and the wisdom we are inspired to acquire by natural observation and experience must be rather less than the wisdom that comes to us through supernatural interference. And this supernatural seizing and purging of the faculties, one way or another even educates and stimulates our capacity for using and enjoying creation and the natural experience of it. Mountain climbing is a noble and exhilarating sport, stimulating to the mind as well as the body, but these passive steps by which we are enabled to ascend the inner mountain also present great challenges, with an even more lasting result.
    As God is everywhere, obviously this kind of experience can take place in a city as well as the heart of a lonely forest, and thus the opportunity for mystery is available to other than the country mouse. Moreover, as people. absolutely speaking, are greater sources of mystery than even the most awesome feature of non-rational creation, a truly civilized city is an immense source of the most wonderful, the most endless, occasions of mystery. It is for this reason that Saint Augustine employs his immortal image and title of The City of God, because we need this virtual infinity of human spirits, before our eyes in one way or another, as the proper material of the meditations that will one day take us to Heaven. In the afterlife we will have all the benefits of the solitude and quiet of the wilderness, of the lonely inlet or the desert island, yet we will have no shortage of company. If we need the outback to give us the space for looking into our souls, we need the roaring city to remind us of the inevitable quantity of our eternal brothers and sisters.
    Augustine's City, as its students know, is a town within a town, a numbering of the saved, and constantly rubbing elbows - in this earthly life - with those of an opposing spirit, even within the external signs of fellow membership in the Faith, every man jack of these will have to acquire that solitary wisdom of the wilderness before he enters the heavenly city. That is the great paradox of the spiritual life: the soul must learn to be totally alone with God, utterly detached from all created things, in order to learn how to be totally united in the spirit with those souls who have also learned to be completely alone with the Infinite and completely detached from anything created. Nor is this detachment applicable only to the material and the visible, as certain amateurs of the spiritual life like to pretend; to be truly effective it must also embrace the devotional life, the soul's own specific ideas, even genuinely spiritual events that have taken place at the very centre of the soul itself. This is a rule of thumb that beginners, by definition, find difficult to accept, but it is the law of the life of the spirit and completely unbreakable. No advancement in possible without adhering to it: God will toss the defaulting practitioner - no matter how highly placed in the spiritual or canonical journey - right off the path, sometimes without ceremony and quite brutal in His exposure of the soul to its spiritual acquaintances and even, on occasion, to wide open public scrutiny. The standards of the spiritual life, the integrity of the rules of perfection, are to be respected, for it is they, and they alone, through which is fulfilled God's desire that men and women be totally fulfilled in His image and likeness. No amount of masses and communions, no legions of good works, no quantities of devotions, as excellent and useful toward salvation as these may be, can do the work of the spiritual life. and this is a "work to rule" situation if ever there was one. And one works with a ruler, that is, a spiritual director. whose first obligations - after holiness and learning - are to exact obedience and to instill fear of the Lord.
    Do I seem to have strayed from my topic, my youthful anecdotes? No, because without having followed the rules of the spiritual life, most rigourously, and with frequent recourse to interpretation by, and deference to, another, I would not have been able to interpret these stories accurately, and in their right context. In fact I might not have been able even to recall them, or at least not all of them. And what writer wants to tell an incomplete story? No author can function without the Muse - study Homer, at the very beginning of the Iliad - and the Muse will co-operate only to the extent that the author lives up to his own standards as he has been granted the grace to acquire them.
    And, most certainly, the Muse requires deference to the principle of spiritual direction, even in its most obscure and tentative beginnings. That is part of the great paradox of the language of the spiritual life. More romantic images than the two great Canticles. the first of Solomon, the second of John of the Cross, cannot be found. Yet neither is there a stricter atmosphere of discipline than in both of those works, albeit spelled out more specifically, and at a completely exhausting length, in the Carmelite's masterpiece. The soul, the spirit, is called to love at the most profound level both God and man, yet to love with only the most refined, disciplined, purged of loves, a true charity, which sees all objects of affection as either Divine in themselves, or as a simply lent effects of the Divinity.