"No man is an island," Donne hath said, and no town is only itself. Nelson has been many places to me, you might just say just about any place that I needed it to be at the time. I have rarely had to leave it' for the most part I think of travel for myself, unless it be simply within the immediate outlying regions, as a waste of time. Through the well-developed interior life, one can be in contact with the guardian angels of Rome, London, New York, Dublin, Toronto, Vancouver, Los Angeles, etcetera, any time those spirits desire it. Just before the film crew came, I had distinct experiences of the streets of Los Angeles, and now that they are pretty much gone, I've had some again, the latest in the moment I sat down to this machine and stared out my window, downhill between my neighbours' trees, across a couple of blocks of the business section, the boathouses, the lake, to the shore and the long, declining nose of the mountain rising immediately from the waterline. Was it some retired British army major from the Indian service, a child out walking, or a journalist, in the early days of the town, who noticed that the general outline of the great pile of rock and trees does indeed look like a sleeping pachyderm? It is all quite nicely proportioned: the lounging body, with his rump and upper leg sprawling to the east; then the back, the head, the trunk aiming west, with a good sized promontory - known as Pulpit Rock - just where the left tusk might have been broken off. By the government charts, the mountain is named after the town. But no one I've ever met calls it by its official name, and perhaps the government would be wiser to rename it.
And then again, perhaps it would be just as well for the government to leave the names as they are, for local traditions can and should arise, particularly when it comes to naming things. The judicious use of language includes the right to imagination, to flexibility, to alternatives. We must always be on our guard, as so much of society and the Church is not, these days, against the false accuracy of mono-nomenclature. So-called inclusive language has become profoundly exclusive, especially of intelligence, obedience and common sense.
I was not always reluctant to travel, and perhaps for an important enough cause I could be inspired again. But for the meantime the angels seem to bring me all the views I need; the most useful journey anyone can make is deep into the depths of his own spirit; and God seems to effect even more than I would dare think of doing, on my own and without Him who is already present and governing everywhere. Poland has its worst floods in five hundred years. I have often wondered if the present Pope remained too attached to his native country, as noble a land of Our Lady it might be, and not enough attached to keeping a firm hand on the plague of useless and harmful novelties that beset the Church of our time. For ten years God engaged me as John Paul's spiritual director, for the sake of deepening his spiritual life, but I finally had to resign over his refusal to forbid the use of altar girls. No one with real discernment - the mother of all true virtues, someone has said - can worship in peace with females hovering around the altar. I am referring to the altar at the time of the sacrifice of the mass, of course; that nuns and other devout women have rendered invaluable service to the sacred liturgy in other forms of care - making of hosts, vestments, altar cloths, etcetera - is inarguable, and , as well, a necessary symbol of the mystery of the division of labour that God has decreed in nature and in grace, in certain fundamental areas. Men have not been intended to bear children, and women have not been intended to offer the mass.
I did not always have this disinclination for travelling long distances. (Short distances are lovely: this morning I put in some twenty kilometers on a newly acquired ten-speed bicycle, the first bike I've owned for over two decades.) Thanks to the war I got to journey some very long distances indeed as a child, and saw myself to be full of adventure and experience because of my travels; then my travelling was to continue, as was the opportunity to live in many different places. until I was nearly thirty. I kept on being utterly thrilled by all the various means of transport, and relished the changes from town to town and all the different people and circumstances they brought, including some quite notable gestures on the part of the Almighty, who seemed to wish to mark each dwelling place with its own particular examples of the various steps and significant, identifying, events of the spiritual life.
And then we came to Nelson: a man, his wife, two children, with a third very well on the way. Finally I had arrived, as I thought, in the land of my visions and my dreams. The town was surrounded by mountains, in fact built right on their lower slopes; it lay along the shores of a huge lake, a veritable inland sea; and culturally, it could boast of a great potential, for all the arts flourished to some degree and it possessed a Catholic school system complete from kindergarten to the baccalaureate. In 1964, moreover, that bachelor's degree required at least two years of scholastic philosophy: logic, epistemology, rational psychology, and metaphysics; the four fundamental tools of the Thomistic intellect - leaving the question of faith and theology aside for the moment - delivered each in a semester, and all students seeking a degree in the little university required to take them. Even the non-Catholics were required to show respect for Aristotle as well as their own minds; if they did not want a good dose of scholasticism along with the rest of their humanities or science, they had to look to another college.
There were, of course, a plethora of campi eager to take them in. My own alma mater was such. It did not require one philosophy course of any student other than a philosophy major, and even there the student could pretty much avoid the happy responsibilities of moderate realism and surround himself with every doctrine opposed to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and be rewarded for doing so. (I had the impression at the time that the reigning premises of the day were based on something called logical positivism, but I made no attempt to understand what that was.) This is not to say that students were necessarily penalized for reading and thinking classically, as far as I know - although a fundamentally foolish professor is a penalty unto himself - as my wife-to-be, in her fourth year was given a very fine mark for a very fine essay on the Nichomacean Ethics. This was for a philosophy course senior students wanting only one crack at the subject in their four years were allowed to take. It was Shawn Harold's only philosophy course in her four years, but her essay did profit from the mandatory apologetics course she had taken in her first and only year at Notre Dame College in Nelson, then only half-way through its first decade of operation and at that time able to offer only the first two years toward a degree.
Why had I chosen not to enroll in any philosophy courses?
Did ever such a simple question have so many complicated answers? So many, in fact that I had to spend a day in the woods, picking huckleberries with our remarkable housekeeper - twenty-one pounds between us - in order to avoid getting the answers out of order, or missing the most important ones. And then, this morning, just to keep me on the right track, along comes another of those visits, specifically from God the Father, that have become quite regular over the past couple of weeks. Scary stuff, to tell the truth, the whole truth, not unlike dying, and one sees clearly why the Bible tells us that we cannot see the face of God and live. Was this experience only for myself, and the work at hand, or did it signify some special act of the Lord's in another location as well? It is now fourteen years - a profound scriptural sign in the contemplative life - since my community squared off on all fronts with the Vatican, and at that time - the summer of 1983 - it had been a full decade since Heaven and facts of the Seventh Mansion had squared off at my community.
Heaven had been tumbling me up and down for rather a long time, of course; even souls much less sinful than mine do not come to the full maturity of the mystical life overnight. After years of thinking about it - and, naturally, pondering the relevant texts - I have to admit that I was actually given the night of the spirit when I was twenty-one, in 11957. This happened in the merry month of May, when students of that age are usually being handed their degrees, and I have always thought that God's timing was deliberately along the same lines of graduation, but I must insist that to whatever degree such an honour was a reward in God's mind, it was most definitely perceived as a punishment and correction in the mind of the recipient, given the circumstances of its arrival. Yet even at that it was to be some months before I was able to think and do in full conformity with God's intended will, and then it seemed more because of an express manifestation of Christ's Virgin Mother than by any remarkable growth in my own personal virtue. The old man dies hard, and, as Saint Paul said to the Galatians, sin is master everywhere.
But was sin involved in my decision not to take a philosophy course in my first year? One of my high school class mates did enroll, and was shortly afterward in ecstasy over logic. Yet I had experienced a very nice flash of an extra-ordinary light in my first visit to the offices of the student newspaper, the Ubyssey, so I think our souls might have been even in terms of simple impact from choices made following an inspiration. He was plainly excited by his philosophy class; I was equally delighted and satisfied by the working/learning and companionship opportunities of the student journal.
I did browse the university calendar, and looked over the offerings of the department of philosophy, but the course, indeed the department, seemed much weighted in favour of the moderns. and in my youthful confidence, much buttressed by those frequent spiritual infusions for which I did not know the philosophical or theological terms, I felt myself to be the equal or superior of any of the modern philosophers, and indeed - I blush to recollect - I thought of my intellect as superior to Aristotle's, although at the same time I could acknowledge to myself in my heart of hearts that I would one day have to settle down to studying him. And I had a little knowledge of phrases of his, certain phrases I knew I could not do without, such as "the whole is the sum of the parts", and some hazy curiosity about the difference between form and matter, resulting from a very unsuccessful read in a high school literature text, which attempted to apply these terms to the analysis of poetry, where, frankly, I do not think that Aristotle meant them to apply. Nor was there anyone in my high school, I'm sure, who could have helped me through the questions the literature text presented. The public school system of my native province hates and fears scholastic philosophy, and does not encourage its grasp in its employees.
But does not a bright student have an independence from the limitations of his teachers, especially where good libraries abound and access to any and all books is guaranteed by the rule of democracy? In this latitude, I sailed badly, and always later wished I had at least started to read on my own in philosophy, especially in Aristotle, and particularly in the Ethics. For what, in fact, can be more readable, what more simple and common sensical to anyone who wishes to be unconfused? And to come upon the great Peripatetic's discourse on the contemplative life, at the conclusion of the Nichomachean Ethics! Oh, my; and where outside the wisdom literature of the Scriptures can one find a better, clearer, warmer, defense of real friendship, tranquillity, and the essence of the most worthwhile conversation? And that includes silent conversations. For me, Plato talks too much. And one finds great conversations in Shakespeare, of course, but he came long after Aristotle, and always acknowledged his debt to the Greeks. Thus he remains one of the few Englishmen who co-naturally understands that the best meaning for action is that which goes on in the mind. Modern English-speaking culture - by modern I mean since the Renaissance - has paid a terrible price for the willful stupidities of Henry VIII, John Knox, and so on and as someone who could not help but grow up in the confusion of a British inheritance, I would take more time than a high school graduate's summer allowed to come to a free decision as to the absolute necessity of scholastic metaphysics. Nor would I do that without the help of not a few most excellent friends, considerable pursuit of the lesser humanities, and a great deal, in fact a regular, infusion of the night of the senses, especially in my first year in law school. And as well, we must remember that these sort of infusions, one way or another, had been pursuing me all of my conscious life, even without the existence in my soul of the sacrament of baptism, or the regular company of clergy and religious. Omnipotence has infinite ways of overcoming error and working without the normal channels. Neither too much Britannic thinking - or lack of it - nor the absence of the ordinary scope of preferable Catholic influence could completely prevent God from making me a theologian, even at a comparatively youthful age. So that once I got hold of such a term as theologian, and the profession it signified . . . .
And yet later, in Nelson, in the very heart of the region to which the grace of Providence had always been calling me, I found myself face to face with an incumbent bishop who, especially in the latter days of our relationship, could only heap scorn on my claims to such a title. A sad situation, obviously, for an energetic and much studied young man, by then four years a happy and successful classroom teacher convinced that the Catholic education system was his life's work. What to do? Leave for a more amiable climate? Lead a revolt? Look for a new vocation in the same place? Go deeper within in order to discover what secrets lay behind this mysterious maneuver on God's part? Just watch, wait, and pray?
The first two alternatives did present themselves continuously. There was little reason for them not to, as the frustrations, surprises, disappointments, and dark mysteries were virtually infinite. Could any corner of the universe have more things wrong with it? And yet I had been warned. My wife was not anxious at all to return to the town of her childhood, for all her affectionate memories so well transcribed in me; she knew the provincialism would be trying for a city boy primed to take on the world, and she was particularly prophetic in fearing that I would find the local Church in the van of mediocrity. And God had warned me as well as inspired me, although it took some months for me to understand just what He had been up to: I was to find myself in fact not that vehemently imported for the parish, the schools, the diocese the large measure of common association, but for the sake of a tiny few who were being called to the life of the spirit, the life of perfection. I cannot say that I was not to have some effect on the Church at large, but not nearly so much as I had expected; where I found my general common ground, and for the most part with great effort and great delight, was in the arts, especially in music and the theatre. These, in turn, led to small forays into recording and film, yet all of these endeavors were made to contribute toward the ever developing association with perfection and the spiritual life/
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