Chapter Three

    The other grandparental house was also, in its own way, an oasis of Christianity, and because of the Second World War, and my father's moving about to deal with it, I actually lived in this house for a comfortable and formative period. There, my mother's mother, a widow and my Nana, as I called her, was the chatelaine; and her second son, my Uncle Alfred, was a younger version of my grandfather Walter. Both my Nana and my uncle were church goers, at the same Baptist Church. My Nana taught me my bedtime prayers, and my uncle, until I could handle reading for myself, was the man who read me the funny papers and stories from books. He also was a very tender soul, a sheet metal mechanic by trade, and spiritually enough inclined that some years later, when I was a teen-ager, he considered for some time becoming a Baptist minister. His question might have been temporary, like the vocations of some seminarians, but it deepened my own thinking and, in the face of my father's rampant materialism, gentled my own attitudes.
    My mother was the oldest of my Nana's four children, and the first married. My Uncle Alf was to be the last to enter the state of matrimony, not until the war was over and I had returned to Vancouver - for the summer holiday - so in those formative years I knew him as a bachelor, and was without rival for his attention. He was a sunny soul as well as a devout one, and very competent at his trade. And, like my grandfather, he was a teetotaller. His own father, the grandfather I never knew, was a drunk, so I was later told, and this may have had as much to do with his choice as did his Baptist beliefs. This grandfather had also been gassed at Ypres, my Nana said, but she was not inclined to blame his early death on the war.
    Her house too insisted on abstinence from alcohol as the domestic rule. My father, therefore, had to conduct his moderate affection for the grape and grain that cheers man's heart under other roofs, until he had a home of his own, and it has been said that his moderation - as it existed from my earliest memories - was a gift from my mother's inherited determination not to be widowed young by alcohol. To a degree, I was made to imitate my Dad: my wife-to-be and I had known a bare three days of our first conversations when she stiffed it to me over her Catholic Church's views on the legitimate methods of spacing the conception of children. Let me say in defense of my own intentions at the time, already much hosed down by daily experiences of the contemplative life - and not a few of these purgative - that I had not even begun to argue the point the other way, but she was ever a prudent woman, and determined to have that problem out of the way before she spent anymore time wondering if I were a suitable husband. You cannot say she was precipitous: I had already told her, on the second day of our acquaintance, that she was to marry me one day. And this in front of witnesses.
    But I am ahead of myself. As my prayerful grandfather was the principal breadwinner in his house by way of the eminently useful trade of house building, so my maternal grandmother has supported her family by cooking. She was in fact a dietitian by training, a graduate so she later told me, of the London Polytechnic, for she was a Cockney born and bred, raised within the sound of the Bow Bells, with a father, so she claimed, who had sung on the stage of the London Paladium. Whether this professional career was a fact or not - my Nana was not a strict historian, as I was to learn - there was without a doubt a great deal of singing ability in that side of the family. Grandmother Jessie Robinson was trilling as clearly as a songbird into her 'Eighties, in a church choir, and my mother, had she been born in kinder circumstances might very well have trained as an opera singer. I might have done the same, had I not been born to theology and fiction, and her eldest grandson has just made his opera debut in a small role in La Boheme. She always sang around the house, and sang truly. She was my first and probably my most important voice teacher, although I did not really think of myself as a singer until the summer before I went into the fourth grade.
    It was my Nana who taught me my prayers. These were quite simple, carrying little of the information available in the catechisms of the day drawn up for Catholic children, but through her faith, they made Jesus quite real to me, at least while I was saying them at bedtime. Anytime that I was living at her house, which was a good part of my childhood until I was seven years old, these bedtime prayers, along with grace at her meals, were pretty much a habit, and thus I was given a good little beginning to God's intended norm.
    In my parent's care, once the regular company of my grandmother was no longer such a part of my life, the formal prayers fell away. In their young adulthood, both my father and mother left churchgoing and its related customs, so it has seemed, forever, and pretty much expected that I would follow suit, except when I was around the religious sensibilities of their parents. As far as I know, my grandparents were never forbidden to raise religious questions to me, nor to take me to church and Sunday school, and, happily, they took every opportunity Providence arranged. I got to know quite well, sometimes Sunday after Sunday, the Collingwood East Baptist Church. And there too, most emphatically, I encountered the Light that is willed to shine on us all. In his desire to consolidate the good efforts of my grandparents, Our Lord Jesus Christ simply appeared to me himself. He also spoke to me some very specific words, which, although I was not to consciously remember them for years, left a permanent effect. This was my first experience of what scholastic theologians call the grace of words, and of course I was awfully fortunate to be granted such a favour, especially so young.
     I might have been four years old, but more likely I was five, and living at my Nana's house because my father was either in army camp in Canada or had already been sent to England, sometime in the wake of the main thrust of the air battle for Britain. Nana had started taking me to Sunday school, and I don't think had been at it too long before the Lord made his presence felt so uniquely. As I remember it, all the younger children were assembled in a large basement room, dutifully singing "Jesus Loves me, This I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong; They are weak, but He is strong." There was a pianist, and I think a second lady conducting us.
    And then for a surprising moment there was a third adult, a man. He had a very nice face and kind eyes, long dark hair, and a full length white robe. It was plainly the Jesus of our illustrated Bible stories. He seemed to be there just for me, and he only stayed long enough to utter one sentence: "I am both stronger and more tender than your father, and I will look after you."
    The song continued but the image vanished, and so did the memory, for the time being. I said nothing to anyone, neither to my Nana when she came to collect me after church, not to my mother when I got home. In fact, with no ordinary memory of the event, I did not say anything to myself about it. But it does perhaps explain a subsequent habit I had seemed to acquire without any conscious effort, that of most cheerily forgiving my enemies. As a youngster, once old enough to ponder my personal ethics, I would frequently wonder why I had found turning the other cheek so easy, but I never recalled the vision or the words. It was not until I was in my mid-thirties, being brought to the God-given conclusion of my long apprenticeship to the interior life, that a clear memory of this incident was granted to me, more or less provoked by a question from a friend. She wanted to know, following a little very necessary counselling, what I had that others did not. I said nothing at the moment of the question, but I was inspired to search for the answer that would mean the most to her - she did not want to hear about the Catholic sacraments that meant everything to me - and browsing August Poulain's accounts of the childhood experience of various saints, I suddenly had the most wonderfully clear recall of that cloudy, gray, Sunday morning in the basement of the church of my first childhood years. The image and the words were both as plain as if I had recollected them all my life, but obviously they had been waiting for the friend's question, coupled of course with my spiritual progress and the approaching moment when I would be allowed and inspired to start writing about my life of prayer.
    The rationalist and the skeptic - and these include all manner of Catholics, and not just lay Catholics - might be tempted to think that I simply invented this vision, inspired to falsehood, or too much trust in my own imagination, inspired by what I was reading, but that was not the case. Such a creation was actually meaningless and unnecessary, as I had already know for a quarter-of-a-century spiritual experiences which each in their own way were as initially significant, and in the long run, more confirming by way of making the interior life habitual. as well as maturing it toward the seventh mansion. Imaginative visions, as important as they may be, are not the greatest or most necessary experiences on the spiritual ladder. Long before this sudden revival of a memory I had been given intellectual visions, and locutions having to do with not God's care of me, but my care of others. And, at least as efficient, I had known the dark night of the soul, in the spirit as well as in the senses. Invention, therefore, offers no foothold to the observer. 
    For the truly rational man, the soul with enough wisdom to realize that the Almighty is in fact Omnipotent, even unto unrestricted power over a mind, there is only one answer to all the questions surrounding this suppression of memory: God does God's business in God's time. Anyone who would be habituated - oh happy prison - to the life of passive prayer must accept its mysterious conditions. In no other profession is one's life so little one's own. All for God, it is nothing for itself, even as regards the employment of its own habits of memory.  One thinks, or does not think; one acts or does not act; one goes out or comes in, or does not go anywhere at all; only as the Holy Ghost decrees. To some, this might seem too rigid, too predictable. But actually the opposite is more the truth. The contemplative is forever in a mystery story, not knowing for sure from day to day how each day will unfold. God is most faithfully full of forecasts, of intimations of one kind of employment or another, but where and when, with or for whom, how and for what reasons - the particular situations in which the foreshadowings will be realized - these all await the careful. efficient, reckoning of grace' and the soul can only guess how that will go.
    I am not suggesting that the imagination, even of a mystic habituated to the seventh mansion, is always in the complete control of God. Much of the time, yes, but not always, as uninterrupted subjection of this sort would take away the useful exercise of free will, would eliminate a very valuable source of merit, especially for others, for those who have yet to acquire the skills needed to fight with an unruly and often victorious imagination. That is, victorious by way of the lack of wisdom or virtue's control.  An imagination victorious through true discipline - whether in the arts, in morals, or in the spiritual life - is a glorious achievement, something altogether different. Where the intellect has made a thorough, meditative, study of the theological and spiritual tradition of the Church, in fact, thus moving the intellect to be assimilated to the Father, the imagination becomes a kind of the Image that is the Word, the Son.
    But of course it helps when the Lord has taken such an initial step himself, of imposing a vision, and some rather meaningful words, on a small boy, even if the boy does not remember the incident for thirty years/
    This interesting piece of forgetfulness - I repeat, quite Divinely arranged - has also a particular symbolic relevance, for it signifies, at the highest possible level, the many different ways and occasions, the coming and going of skills and interests, with which God has exercised his right to keep me focused on my prior obligations to the life of contemplation. Of all the arts and sciences, prayer is the most universal and the most necessary, and therefore, as odd as this may seem to the inexperienced, it is the most satisfying, the most fulfilling, the most adventurous. Ordinarily, therefore, a vision would be something to be retained, even amplified. But such was not the case. Why? One reason could be the Lord's sense of justice. If he could remover himself from the recollected items of my faculty of memory, then he was being only fair when he interfered with any skill or natural desire of mine. And the interference has certainly been real, present, and effective. How else to explain that in the course of writing my first novel I spent seven years with the first third, then one year with only the last two-thirds of the text? And why, after forty years of occasional provocations, which swiftly came to nothing, am I suddenly thrust into an entire week of brooding, not a little creatively, over the composition of an opera? In fact, perhaps, three operas.