Chapter Two

    My life has been salted with the light of Christ, thanks to my grandparents, from the very beginning. My mother's labour pains started up during a New Year's Day supper, in 1936, in the house where my father grew up, just down the street from the mighty coniferous forest of Central Park, in Burnaby, British Columbia. My grandparents on both sides were very devout Baptists, members of the Collingwood East Baptist Church, next door to Boundary Road on the Vancouver side. This means that my grandfather would have begun praying for my little soul the moment my mother announced that she would have to leave the table and go to the hospital. I was not aware of my Granddad then, of course, from inside the womb, but I most certainly took notice of him as soon as I was old enough. My very first memory of him contains, as I said, the light of Christ. This time we were at Christmas dinner, almost three years later, in my parent's own small rooms attached to a dairy my father was driving for. I think that my very thoughtful grandfather must have been asked to say the grace. He was sitting right across the table from me, in the little kitchen, and I remember clearly a sense of being mystified by the quality of the light around him. That it seemed to be delightful for its own sake is the way I would describe the light now, and at any rate, along with the immense kindness, patience, and prayerfulness in old Walter's voice, it certainly made me notice him.
    As with other unusual spiritual events of my childhood, I rendered no outward articulation to anyone about this incident, and immediately forgot about it, at least as an event. Yet the effect must have registered in my soul, because I was henceforth to notice quite as a matter of course that there was a light that came and went from situations. I think I was conscious of it more at some times than at others, even though I think I was vaguely aware that my light had some connection with the light of Christ, but I also think I assumed that everybody had it and therefore it was no more remarkable than the air I breathed or the ordinary light of the sun that shone on us all. In retrospect, it is clear that this special light was more evident around people and institutions with avowed Christian connections, but it also showed up elsewhere on occasion, as God, of course, was everywhere. Nor was it always or automatically present in the more specifically religious context; in fact in some specifically religious situations it was, on later reflection, noticeably absent. This absence was not always a critical comment on God's part, for He was capable of developing many other ways to catch my youthful attention, but the light coming and going did improve my natural sensibilities: the spiritualizing thereof had begun, and it began with my dear old Grandfather.
    He was in fact a builder by profession, a house carpenter. He had been first a farmer, in southern Ontario, descended, it was said, from United Empire Loyalist stock, and it was also said that discovery of natural gas on the farm had made him rich for a time. The money was apparently not invested well, and he went off to the Yukon, to carpenter there, to work sometimes as the gold digging, and to hunt most successfully. Eventually he married my grandmother, whom he had known for some time, and they tried farming foxes in the Yukon. The family has some wonderful photographs of this part of their life. But the war measures legislation subsequent to the invasion of Belgium took away access to the little fur bearer's ready and plentiful food supply, the great lake trout that lived so handily by. Apparently the Canadian government had a scheme, either for feeding the troops with Yukon togue, or else keeping bellies full in Canada should it have to send all the pigs and cows to France. Either way, my grandparents had to give up the fox farm, although no patriotic lines or nets ever graced their lake. They resettled for a time in south-eastern British Columbia, fifty miles from where I live now, then moved again to the West Coast, taking over the house, chicken barn, and huge garden I was to know and love so well as a boy. By the time I was conscious of him, my grandfather's response to the vicissitudes of life had mellowed and deepened into one of the most profound and peaceful acceptances of the necessary superiority of the afterlife that I have ever known. I say this in the context of my eventual conversion to Catholicism, which necessarily gave me the company of many priests and religious and therefore a considerable standard by which to measure old Walter's prayer life. And in fact the first man of the cloth I talked to, once I had decided to take my first steps toward entering the Church, was a Redemptorist brother, quite an elderly gentleman whose very meekness reminded me instantly of my grandfather. We said little to each other, as his immediate response - I found him praying in the church - was to take me to find a priest, but one look at him, one minute of listening to his voice, made it clear to me that Catholics also had their men of prayer, men like my Granddad Walter.
    I do not wish to canonize my grandfather. He had his faults, not the least of which was his adherence to a faith which, though very useful to my smallest years, could not answer the questions and expectations of an older boyhood. And there is no doubt that the Lord himself overrode the limitations of Protestantism and the narrowness of the family wisdom to make sure, with a view to my eventual conversion and artistic and theological employment, that I was to experience questions and events sufficient to turn me towards Rome. Moreover, of all the five grandchildren, I was the only one in whom any appreciable amount of his faith took root. And perhaps most significant of all, there is some question of the degree to which he was really the head of his own house.
    By the time I came along, my grandmother seemed to me to be a kindly Christian woman, not a little devoted to her first grandchild, and ready to shower upon him all the love and confidence-building that goes with grandparenting, although without indulgence. She was a firm lady, my father's mother, and I was to hear stories as I grew older about how her firmness with me was nothing compared with the way in which she had raised my father. In fact, it is sad to say, she seems to have had quite the mean streak in her younger and middle years, and my father and his sister suffered from it in no small degree. To some degree, I think, my grandmother did learn from her mistakes with her own children, and subsequently saw in me, the oldest grandchild, a second chance at the power of love, encouragement, and tenderness. With me too, she managed to find ways to show me, albeit somewhat stiffly, that she appreciated my considerable affection toward her. It seems, from my father's accounts that this exchange was not possible in his childhood. He was to speak of the happiest summer of his boyhood being the one he spent away from his mother, although he was nonetheless, at a mining claim in the Cariboo, in the company of his father.
    Part of the problem between my father and my grandmother, most certainly, came from the fact that my father and my aunt were actually adopted, a bit of history I never learned until I was fifteen or so, and my aunt had just returned from an extensive visit with relatives in California and other places south of the line. Perhaps this sense of the children not being from her own womb was something my grandmother could not overcome. But she was also from Ulster stock, as I learned when I was nine, and bore many of the flaws of Calvinism, as well as failures that are common to souls of any religion that do not truly understand the beatitudes. Yet, in her faith, she kept trying, and I was to benefit much, much more than if her failures as a human person had not been couples with a certain faith in a Divine person, and also had not been coupled with a strong personal will, at least for my good.
    Being materialists, the Marxian and Freudian philosopher-psychologists fail far worse than my grandmother in their view of human nature: lacking her faith, they give directions in mockery of her faults, but also in contempt of her saving graces. They do not see that as she gave, for my sake, a place where the Spirit of Christ could operate with relative freedom, I was much better off with her limitations, plus her faith in Jesus Christ, than I would have been with someone less rigid but also lacking that more important channel on my behalf. Where our beliefs have a foundation in sound proportions, though we may be less than that which we believe in, we are still quite well off, operating within some degree of normalcy. Where the belief is less than we are, because of the potential with which the Creator and Saviour endowed us, we are not at all normal, but in fact perverse, and stupid and insensible enough not to know it. Unlike the communists, my grandmother did not have to refuel herself with gallons of vodka to spark herself past her frustrations and failures; unlike the Freudians, she did not require the so called "healthy outlet" of unrestricted genital manipulation. Her faith was imperfect, perhaps markedly imperfect, but it was nonetheless an absolute guarantee of a relationship with God that saw her through a fair percentage of life's difficulties. It was a definite part of the household atmosphere, the aura, as it is spoken of in our times by many souls interested in the spiritual aspects of life. She did not have my grandfather's meekness, in the sense of the beatitude, but she was in fact an integral part of the house wherein, when I came through the door, Jesus always said, "Hello."
    This is in a manner of speaking, of course. In the first thirty years of my life, locutions proper were few and far between. What I mean by the greeting, the regular and constant greeting, from Divinity, was that my grandparents' house, to me, was never without the presence of the Lord; and I cannot remember that I ever felt there the lack of that presence, nor found its comfort missing. With my parents not being church goers, and my schooling being secular, it was my grandparents' house that functioned most like a parish church or a monastery in the development of my childhood religious sensibilities. The atmosphere simply inclined me to think about God on a regular basis, and for the most part made it difficult for me to regard Him as an enemy, or unaware and uncaring.
    There is a saying attributed to the Jesuits: Give us a child until he is seven, and he'll be a Christian forever. It is a fact that I trotted about in my Granddad Walter's shadow precisely until I was seven, for it was in the spring of my second year that my mother and I followed by soldier father to the other side of the country, and I was not to see my Grandfather for a full two years. Of course he was not the only influence - in those days Canada was in many ways a profoundly Christian country - but he was the most powerful influence, the inescapable evidence, not a little absolute, for me at least, that constantly going about - or sitting still - with and for the God-Man was the only normal thing to do. Nor could any other attitude create a better atmosphere, nor do so little harm, to one's fellow human beings.
    And yet, as I was to grow older, I could not simply follow in his footsteps, any more than Christ could settle down as a simple village carpenter. My grandfather was not an intellectual, not an artist. Nor was he, God bless him, a Catholic. And his wife, to some degree, hated Catholicism. Hers was the bitter, blind, legacy of the wisdom of the Book corrupted and leached by Calvin, Knox, and the Tudor and Cromwellian rape of Ireland. My grandfather's Christ was always kindly and patient, if a touch narrow; my grandmother's Son of God was a part time half-wit, quite out of touch with His own creation, with His own scheme of perfection. Yet these mistakes were only occasional, thank Heaven, for a young chap, and their house was, as I said, the station on the way where He could always be found.