Chapter 21

    As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living, even if it means, as in his case, we wind up being put to death for our examinations. For what is death, for the fortunate wise, but the passage from the darkness of this world into the perfect clarity of the next? And the final death only comes easily and sweetly to those who have already, by examining their lives, put to death the desires of their flesh, the badness of their will, and the ignorance of their intellect. Examine, examine, examine.
    No matter how much we examine the past, either for the sake of our own conscience, or for some legitimate curiosity over the behaviour of others, we regularly come up with new information or a new understanding of old information. In my striving to make a fully fair and accurate recollection of the material of the current passage, I have run into quite the remarkable bit of irony, and it was at that point, more or less. that I thought of Socrates' declaration. I remembered something I don't think I had thought of for decades, not a very large memory at all, and of little more, given the context of the times, than a passing idea; yet something which eventually set against the ultimate reality of the sins of the Catholic university I came to, created a masterpiece of contradiction, or, as I said, irony.
    In the months of my last year in high school, even though I was much in receipt of a steady schedule of spiritual favours, such as my life-long goal of working inwardly for the collapse of atheistic communism in Russia, and the certain knowledge of just why and how I was going to university - to make friends and to learn to write - I did run into the fear of losing what faith, as I understood it, that I actually possessed. In my own unschooled way I did have an obscure sense of the Trinity - although Christ was much more the Great Teacher than the absolutely necessary Saviour - and what I had I did not want to lose, in my heart, no matter how much undergraduate skepticism I might allow myself to verbally, publicly, revel in. From a single copy of the Ubyssey I had discovered in the Britannia library I was as made wary by the apparent irreverence as I had been ignited by verbal brilliance. I was apprehensive enough to be moved to wonder if I should try to enroll in one of the Pacific Northwest's confessional colleges. Somehow I had learned that there were one or two of these in the state of Washington - I had a couple of friends who were regular church goers, of Protestant denominations - and I had also read in the newspaper, I think, that a small Catholic college had recently opened up in the Interior of my own province. This might seem like an odd possibility to some - the Catholic possibility - but I knew in my heart of hearts that I had met through my own cadet corps and my time in Vernon cadet camp a lot of young Catholics, both boys and girls, who certainly proved to anyone with the abilities of a novelist, that there had to be something to the oldest of the Christian faiths.
    But of course UBC was cheaper, as I could live at home while attending, and God seemed to be assuring me that I would be all right. I suspect that it was in those troubled hours that I gained some real understanding of the reality of the Holy Spirit, and of the necessity of His presence in a life that wishes to hold on to the clarity and strength that it has already acquired.
    So there I was, at seventeen, feeling confident that some far-off Catholic college could, if necessary, help me keep my youthful faith in Christ insofar as I thought I knew Him. Eleven autumns later I was to settle by that very institution only to realize that I had landed amongst a set of clerical derelicts second to none in the history of the Church, with a bishop determined to keep them all in place, and the faith of the students therefore compromised to a most unfortunate degree. I need to make it clear that in the days of my looking to the Kootenays for the preservation of my little faith, when I was a youngster, this horrendous condition was not in control. The founding bishop was an entirely different sort of man, and no one in the region had as yet heard of the fornicating monk who had become president of the university by the time I arrived.
    But God, of course, had heard of him as much as he needed to, and therefore, to make my own assignment somewhat intelligible, He took the trouble, in the spring of `1960, to ram a mighty log into the propeller of the Canadian Prince, the coastal steamer that was then serving the west coast from Vancouver to Prince Rupert, including Alert Bay, the fishing village - half of it most wonderfully Kwakiutl Indian - where Shawn and I were living while she taught before she became a mother and I studies - and worked - before I became a teacher in the Catholic school system.
    The log did its job handsomely, bending the propeller shaft enough that the ship required nine hours repair in Prince Rupert, its northern destination. I was working in the local post office, as a humble bag boy, but my brother, who stayed with us when he was not off cooking on the small ship operating out of Alert Bay, was between cruises, and thus available to fill in for me while I caught the delayed steamer on her way back to Vancouver. I called the head of the Nelson university to see if he would be available for an interview - I was thinking of teaching English - arranged with my brother and my boss for the substitution, and , with my wife, caught the Canadian Prince that evening.
    The fitful coastal weather had changed. In the morning, when I phoned the Kootenays, the sun was shining, but by evening the clouds had settled in and a light rain was falling on Johnstone Strait. We minded none of that, because no matter what happened as a result of the interview, we were getting ourselves a little holiday. Shawn would get to visit her family, and we would both have some time in our favourite city. There had been no question the summer previous but that we should leave Vancouver, perhaps forever, but we had also missed the old town mightily, from time to time, and did not mind at all the chance to see it again. In spite of the rain, as soon as we had located our cabin and stowed our suitcases, we betook ourselves to the stern, to watch Cormorant Island fall behind us. I had been off the island a number of times, in various boats; this was, as I remember, only Shawn's second trip. In the autumn we had crossed over to Sointula. the heart of the Finnish settlement on nearby Malcolm Island, to take in an anniversary celebration, including a play in Finnish, and my very literate, observant, and appreciative wife had subsequently written up a nice little essay on the settlement, to be aired on a CBC radio show out of Vancouver.
    This well put together little feature was, I might add, a much more cogent and useful piece of work than anything her supposed novelist husband had been able to come up with during our months on the island thus far. My studying was wonderfully successful, as both the Summa and John of the Cross' Ascent of Mount Carmel were going into my soul with a clarity and penetration I was to subsequently learn, to my sorrow, that few Catholics, including priests and bishops, never seem to experience; but none of this enviable success as both a student theologian and young mystic somewhere short of the seventh mansion could find its way into my sporadic attempts at storytelling. The best thing I could accomplish for Canadian literature at that point in my life was to recognize, finally, many months after it was written, some of the flaws in my second complete version of the "yacht novel", and burn it.
    So, plainly, I had yet to reap fame and fortune as a writer, and had to look for a job. As someone has already said, a wife and family are hostages to fortune. I had no resentment of these facts of life; after all, I had happily tried to become a lawyer because I knew it might take me years before I could earn a living solely as an author and, so I thought at the time, the law would give me all sorts of material to write about. But the law studies had come a cropper, to be replaced, in the order of temporary vocations for the aspiring writer, by thoughts, inspirations, and experiences of teaching.
    Shortly after I was baptized, and at about the same time as I was cranking up the opening pages of the afore-mentioned "yacht novel", I read in the B.C. Catholic, to which I had become a mightily satisfied subscriber, an article about a Catholic elementary school; and this article, or the Holy Ghost through it, had fed me an unforgettable sense of my needing, quite absolutely, to become a Catholic school teacher, but with the distinct view of making my young charges aware of the glories of Thomas Aquinas. There was also some intimation of instruction in the arts, I think, for I was not only a musician of sorts, but had just recently performed the leading role in my first play.
    I was quite swept away by the idea, and in the calm of perfect hindsight brought on by forty years of a well-examined life, I can say with complete confidence that this inspiration was as primal as it was clear and powerful, and it was, in time, to be utterly fulfilled, both as to philosophy and the arts, with the addition of a result which at the time I had no way of knowing could come to be. In the time of the inspiration I had not read the Carmelite mystics, nor hear of the term spiritual director.
    The article dealt with a Catholic school in a city, not, I think, Vancouver, and it seemed to be about a school where all the teachers were nuns. So, as with most inspirations, the world and the devil had their subsequent innings. I could never teach in a Catholic school because it would not be able to afford me. (I was only months away from being married.) But I did not get depressed about this problem, as I was happily at work on a novel, and, as always, was surrounded by friends who provided me with all the meaningful mental preoccupations that a teacher is provided with, and in fact I received no further bulletins from Heaven on the teaching question until the summer, after Shawn and I were married. We were subletting a small apartment, still in Vancouver until the middle of August, and one night watching a drama on television about a youngish father who becomes the headmaster in an upstate New York private school for boys.
    Again I felt the call to the classroom, and given the ordinary superiority of emotional impact of drama over journalism, I felt it with an incredible, undescribable, keenness. As with an inspiration of three years previous, reading Hemingway, and feeling the call to one more job in the bush, I felt that I would simply die if I did not become a teacher, and a teacher of children. At the same time, I was by no means inspired to run about immediately in search of a classroom. It was Shawn who was to teach, we had decided - I was writing quite steadily for the moment, and waiting to hear from a publisher - and hopefully in some not-too-rustic, not-too-distant, somewhat rural community like Salt Spring Island. But that tidy little spot was too close to Victoria not to be able to demand a fully certified teacher, and we had to settle for the more remote Alert Bay, where, after the end of July, the school board was allowed to take on a teacher who had only a degree. (Neither one of us had ever had the slightest interest in taking teacher training.)
    Yet now I was looking for work, and teaching work at that, although not in an elementary or high school, even though I'd enjoyed myself and had a great deal of satisfaction substituting in both levels in the months previous. I was off to try for a post at a college, without a degree myself!
    Those who have struggled long and hard to get a solid arts degree, even at the bachelor's level. and never mind the post-graduate diploma that is usually required for college teaching, might think of my snap decision as ridiculous, and God's part of the inspiration as profoundly questionable, and they could be right, although neither would I listen to the arguments of any critic who had not tried to familiarize himself with Saint Thomas, which was the real fuel in my tank. But it is not the ordinary arguments of the world that are applicable here, nor the ordinary reasoning of the Church's ordinary officials. What I was about was spiritual business, something much beyond the programmed qualifications for educators, and I was by now too much of a mystic not to recognize the internal signs of an assignment. The external logic, useful for explaining an action to others, might or might not be useful to my best thought processes.
    In this particular case I had a fair degree of legitimate hope that my journey could be naturally fruitful, for there had once come a Divine inspiration about living in the Kootenays every bit as powerful as visions of the schoolroom. This I have previously mentioned, being the spirits that came while I was watching a television programme on the proposed dams on the Kootenay-Columbia river system, in the immediate previous winter.
   Nor was I being especially indulgent in regard to a special spiritual experience - always troublesome in the illuminative stage - because in thinking I was supposed to move to the Kootenays at the moment I was quite renouncing my own particular sense of responsibility toward Saint Michael's College, at the University of Toronto, and degrees in scholastic philosophy.
    What of the classroom visions as an antidote? Well, they were, psychologically at least, for the moment utterly inoperative. This for the usual reasons in an habitual victim of passive prayer: God had quite blotted them out of my working memory. It was everything I had ever thought about Nelson that was thundering through my brain and liver, ignited of course by the incident of the log, and while by no means certain of being hired, I was not at all afraid of rejection. Even if it was not time to move to the Interior, it was a good time and excuse to have a look at our future home.
    There was, moreover, another reason for God's nautical caber toss. As Providence would have it, my real future employer was also taking the Canadian Prince to Vancouver, and I was to get the chance to see him in action as the public man, not just the parish priest, in action on behalf of the Catholic school system.
    A few years ago, looking for a simple phrase which would define for my working associates a capsule introduction to the story of my latest trip into the wider community, I came up with "Go for A, get B." In other words, once again, I had sallied out with my thoughts clearly focusing on one very possible person or operation, only to find that I was away from my monastery for one or more very different reasons.
    Such a pattern has been pretty much my daily bread for many, many, years, long before the titling, but I think it really started as early as my enrollment in law school, in the autumn of 1955. Up to that point, I was used only to, as a general rule, equivalent results, pretty much aware ahead of time of benefits to be accrued from school, from scouts, from cadets, from my first two years of university and my association with the campus newspaper. Nor had there occurred any radical surprises in my summer jobs, although I do not want to pretend that there was any absence of valuable life lessons. But with law school there was a profound shock. I found, immediately, that I actually had no natural appetite whatsoever for legal texts. They were even duller than my Psychology 100 text - with a few memorable exceptions - and furthermore, no matter how hard I might try from time to scattered time, my absorption rate was the least I'd ever known. The prayer of quiet had struck, my faculties were chronically interfered with to a much greater degree than ever before, even if I had no educated understanding of what was going on, and I knew only that I was getting one of the great surprises of my young life. Furthermore, without even knowing what grace was, I knew that I was getting something that made me quite content with my lot. And I should have been so, for I had also been put into the situation of learning even more deeply how to live one day at a time, although the going-for-one-thing-getting-another pattern was by no means as regular as it was to become years later.
    When Shawn and I had done with our musing on the deck, we came back to the main salon to find a most arresting little group deep in conversation at one of the tables, in an otherwise pretty empty room. On one side sat the Reverend James Fagen, pastor of Saint Margaret's, Ocean Falls, whom we recognized from a trip he had made to Alert Bay in the autumn, in company with a mission preacher, and on the other were the then minister of education, Leslie Peterson and his wife. Considering all that has gone down in my province since that last year of the 'Fifties", in both Church and provincial government, I recall them as two of the noblest leaders of the half-century. Fagan, of course, was lobbying for a just share of the education taxes, for parochial schools such as his little one, and twenty some years later he was to see his urgings - and prayers - bear fruit. I distinctly remember admiring his open-handed forthrightness and I also remember feeling some regret that did not have the claims of position and experience that would have permitted me to join in the conversation.
    I knew about the Catholic school not from its pastor himself, as Fagan and I had not as yet had much conversation, but our own priest, new since after Christmas, had been at me in his own quiet, steady, concerned, way to head on up to Ocean Falls and Saint Margaret's, where he knew Fagan would need not only one but two teachers for the new year. His campaign had started soon after he arrived, following a spirited discussion - at least on my part - on the virtues of a Thomistic formation, and I felt encouraged and complimented by his enthusiastic trust in my abilities, but I was still thinking of Saint Michael's and writing, and was not at all sure that I had the patience for the youngest students of an elementary school. And by sailing time I had actually been brooding over Notre Dame for quite a while, and for reasons beyond my comprehension then the Holy Spirit had been making quite a spiritual to-do about that little campus, sometimes enough to make me think that it was the only place in the world I would find a job that I could be happy in. As I said, go for A, but only to later realize it really was B that was the designated harvest. B, I suppose, stood for bastards, for who could ever have suspected that a Catholic diocese would contain so many priests so little interested in being true sons of Christ?

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.

Chapter 23

    At that point in the family history, my wife's parents were still living on Sixteenth Avenue West, the house where Shawn had lived when we were courting. In her basement room, three weeks after we had experienced our first conclusive encounters, I had fallen in love with Nelson, from browsing through her scrapbook. That Friday evening there were no student parties, no interesting movies we had not already seen: there was nothing to do but look into this - as it turned out - fascinating record of not only her past, but the history of her time in the town she grew up in.
    By this time I was stunningly - and gratefully - aware that I had never in my life met a woman who had such a deep and profound - and of course, God given - appreciation of the best and the most colorful in her fellow human beings. Her cross-section of friends, her student clubs and associations, her appreciation of faculty and all the culture they stood for, was utterly remarkable. That was the lesson of my first three weeks or so of knowing her well. Then, on that Friday evening with the scrapbook I saw that power of empathy and gratitude at work again, this time for the community that had raised her.
    Now I was about to see that very town, and what had become for me its very heartbeat - or so I thought - the little Catholic university, just a decade in being; and it was just after mid-day that I caught the Greyhound bus for Nelson. In those days the run took longer, as in the daylight the bus travelled from Osoyoos to Rossland through northern Washington state, while at night, on the Canadian side, it twisted over a wonderfully scenic but necessarily slow, mountain dirt road. When I came back four years later, for good, the provincial department of highways had built the paved highway route from Christina Lake to Castlegar known as the Blueberry-Paulsen, and the bus run was something like four hours shorter.
    I must confess that throughout the trip I was utterly delighted to be travelling toward Nelson: my heart was as full of hope as Ulysses', when he knew he was finally on his way to Ithaca, and I rather doubt that I was in any way convinced that my hopes for a college post, teaching English, were about to be dashed against the rocks. I had spent a full year appreciating the wisdom of the Summa Theologica, almost that long reading the Ascent of Mount Carmel because God had made its study as necessary as it was totally satisfying and purposeful, and I had also assumed a quite respectable relationship with the English and American Catholic writers and thinkers of the past - at that time - hundred years. I also knew that I was a writer, perhaps not yet published beyond the columns of the student papers and the daily press of a major city, but still someone with a talent that would one day - as the Lord many years later would say to me - rest among the English greats. After all, someone would eventually have to deal with those four hundred years of Anglican eccentricity, and regardless of whether or not I had any original, creative, ability, I had by then enough analytical experience, from the genuine scholastic standpoint, to understand that the Tudor and Stuart follies had cut England off from the necessary genius of the Counter-Reformation, and especially from the necessary genius of the three incredible Spaniards: Ignatius, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross. I loved English literature, but I knew its defects, and I knew the deeper sources where the souls of the young could feed with deeper adventure and absolute security and purpose.
    There was a point on the bus trip, too, where my cause appeared to be proclaimed by the circumstances of Providence. It was close to midnight, perhaps after the witching hour, when we stopped in some small Interior town, where through the windows of the bus open to the night air I heard the voices of two Grade Twelve boys, both thoughtful lads, talking about the end of the school year and their hopes for further education. It seemed to be a good sign. I really did feel that I would like to be a teacher - I had not always - and I felt prepared. And the night certainly seemed full of poetry, full of the smells of late spring in the country, and the markedly individual sounds of the hour, as well as of the musings of two young men upon their future.
    I sleep well on buses, but there was a moon in the clear sky that night, shining on the still snow-capped peaks and our twisting mountain road, and once we were east of Osoyoos I was in a part of our province I had never seen before. Also, our nine months on an island less than three miles long had reminded acutely how fond I was of an expansive geography and the means of getting about in it. I felt myself to be entering a land I would be very happy to live in forever, and I wanted to be aware of all the moments of our first encounter. Landscape has always been a member of my immediate family, and that of the Kootenays was to be no exception.
    By the time we descended into Trail, it was full light. I bought a copy of the local paper, the Daily Times, and read it quickly so as not to miss more of the passing countryside that I could help. But the paper too was part of the local flavour: I had not picked it up because I was anxious about world events; perhaps I was nothing but confident in my upcoming pitch to the president of the college, and I thought I should settle into studying local issues and interests as soon as possible. I was not to see Trail for five years after that fateful journey, when Shawn and I would be part of a quite wonderful folk music concert in the smelter workers union hall.
    Certainly part of my severe feeling of disappointment in failing to land a post, as it was to turn out, was the landscape. The bus rolled along between mountains, beside the Columbia River, even, in the area of Birchbank golf course, past the spot where my grandfather, just after the First World War, had operated a small truck farm, from which he had sold butter and eggs to Selwyn Blaylock, the manager of the smelter. My father had told me a story of watching the family horse drop dead in the field, from eating the grass poisoned by fumes from the chemical rendering of the silver, lead, zinc, and gold, and of the general slaughter of the area's deciduous trees, but then had come the electrolysis attack on the problem, after the famous law suit by the Wenatchee farmers, downstream Americans, the conversion of trouble into fertilizer, and once again the hills of the valley were green.
    At Castlegar, we encountered the Kootenay River system - some of which I had seen from the air and the to[ of a dyke in 1956, when I was a Vancouver Sun reporter - turned right, and aimed straight for Nelson. In the Kootenay valley, the hills were even greener, and the succession of dams and pools and stretches of turbulent river was quite unlike anything I had seen before, and that here lay a history I had not much, heretofore, thought about. I gazed and gazed at the passing countryside of well-kept houses resting in the midst of fields and large garden plots, alternation with stretches of evergreen timber, and found myself wondering if there could be a more idyllic area to live in. All this rural, or semi-rural, ambiance, with the forest at the back door! What could be more wonderful? In the '58-69 winter I had had a vision of the Kootenay-Columbia river system while watching a television study on the question of the new dams on the Columbia, and now I was within that vision! Of such well-arranged coincidences, or providential occurrences, are myths and legends made! My heart, my soul, could do nothing other than expand.
    The scene was the same, wonderfully the same, all the thirty miles into Nelson, with the simple. and even more attractive, exception that close to that little city, the small farm clearings, shining green in the morning sun, held their spaces hundreds of feet above the river. The hanging gardens of Babylon could have been nothing like. In earlier days, I was later to learn, many of these emerald pastures had been dairy farms.
    As my chat with the President was scheduled, I think, for the late morning, I arrived in Nelson well in advance. The bus station in those days stood at the corner of Baker and Hall, the south-west corner. I ate a leisurely breakfast of bacon and eggs in the station restaurant, asked directions to the campus and then started off on a mile walk. Since those times Greyhound has twice relocated their bus depot, but the corner, except for a respectable period as a Salvation Army thrift store, has usually had to do with food and coffee. In its latest persona, it was taken over by a family of some of our closest friends. And for the past couple of years it has been one of the two or three watering holes where I infallibly get the grace to write a few lines of the big poem while I sip my morning beverage. Although the first sketches of the epic were wrought in the silence of this study, all subsequent production has so far only been possible in a cafe, first thing in a morning, while my fellow citizens are gearing up for their day's work. The Muse insists on this condition, perhaps because He thinks I will be best fed by participating in their hopeful expectations of the day ahead.
    There is an interesting coincidence. The man I was about to try to discuss my future with belonged to a religious order whose headquarters were in the New York area. As I write, it is a week since that city was so severely damaged by the passenger jet suicide flights into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre.
    In those days, in the 'Sixties, Islamic fundamentalists were not a threat to our part of the world. The enemy then was Communism, and it was not much of a threat either, in the Diocese of Nelson, but certain Catholic clergy were to use this supposed menace, and its sometime supposed ally, trade unionism, as the paper tiger against which they could exercise their own supposed virtue in order to cover their actual vices. I suspect that our region was not alone in this convenient exercise in smoke and mirrors. Patriotism is sometimes the first refuge of a scoundrel, and it was to be better than twenty years before the justice system charged and convicted at least the priests who preyed on children. Sadly, it has been able to do little to the clergy in authority, who, because they were intemperate themselves. colluded in keeping the pedophiles in their positions.
    In a story of the spiritual life, which is fundamentally about the encounters of a soul - and its associates - with God, how much space does one give to a villain? Certain critics have suggested that in writing Paradise Lost the poet John Milton gave too much attention to the Devil, and I suspect that I might agree with them, because I certainly never found in that lengthy epic the same clarity and usefulness, on the same subject, as I discovered in John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, as well as other doctors of the Church. So how much effort do we put out for such as the Reverend Aquinas Thomas, S.A.? Well, even naming such a fellow requires a certain setting aside of human preference. It would be more pleasant to ignore his appellation, and simply pass him off as "The President", or, even more consoling, to be able to ignore his destructive vices and comment only on some lasting contribution to education, especially theological education, in our part of the province.
    Yet an artist must be honest, and a theologian must recollect the villains of Holy Scripture. Was not Saul a fool to be envious of David, the saviour of his kingdom> And this wretched cleric, following in the tradition, would eventually run into the problem of the musician, the singer, who also had the Word of God on his mind.
    But this was in the future. In the present of 1960, there was simply the friar of some forty years, in his robe and his sandals and his office in an utterly autonomous Catholic college, on one side of desk and a twenty-four year old layman convert young husband on the other.
    Although I told Father Aquinas I was a mystic, I did not tell him about the spiritual apprehensions of having to someday come to Nelson. I think my entire focus during the interview had to do with my own capacities to teach English literature as an introduction to the Scriptures and Saint Thomas, and I was equally concerned to evaluate just how much of a Thomist this priest was.
    He did not challenge my claim to a special relationship with God, but he did startle me by asking me how well acquainted I was with John Dewey, the American philosopher - so called - of education. In retrospect, I have to say that it was, up to that point, the stupidest question I had ever had from a Catholic priest, a wonderfully irrelevant reference to the work at hand, for I had by that time read a fair bit of Gerald Vann, the Dominican educator, and I knew that Dewey was about as far from his wisdom as a thinker could get. Nonetheless, when I got back to Vancouver I did lay hands on a copy of Dewey, dutifully read it, and was at a total loss to know why Father Aquinas had asked if I knew his thinking.
    No, he would not hire me. The lack of a degree made a job at the college impossible. But my wife had a degree, did she? He might be interested in her, he said, but I was certain this was not our road. Shawn was not only about to be a mother, but our time in the schools of Alert Bay had proved that she was not fascinated by a lifetime of teaching, whereas I was obviously getting more and more anxious to whale the tar out of a blackboard, somewhere.
    Given the enormous appeal of the original visions of life in the Kootenays, I was understandably cast down by this decision, and puzzled as to why I had been so inspired to come in the first place. But I did not fuss: ever since the dark night of the intellect in my days in the UBC faculty of law I had become something of a veteran of contradiction. I knew that God must have had a reason for my journey. But I did feel the disappointment, especially when I took a walk along the forest road about the college, beside the creek and toward the Great Northern Railroad tracks that my father-in-law had once been responsible for. To someone like myself, with such a combined affection for theological study and the wilderness - I mean real wilderness as opposed to the tamer pleasantries of a city park - I could not think of a more ideal location for living and working and creating, and I must admit that I felt the meaning of sacrifice. I may even have shed a tear or two.
    I was taking the stroll to kill time as well as to sort out my feelings. Father Aquinas had kindly invited me to stay for lunch in the campus cafeteria and it was still half-an-hour before noon. When I came back from my walk, thoroughly satisfied with the geography, and reconciled to my not being able to move to it immediately, I rejoined my host, at the faculty table, and sat directly across from him.
    Half-way through the meal, fate - or Providence - struck with a vengeance. A very attractive young woman, eighteen or so, suddenly disengaged herself from one of the student tables and came over to speak to our monk. She stood close to him, so that she could speak quietly, and I did not hear what she had to say. I was neither introduced nor included in the conversation, which was rather brief anyway and apparently none of my business. I would have taken no further notice of the event except for one small contingency: Father Aquinas blushed. Not only that, but he realized that I say him blush.
    You cannot hang a man, of course, because he blushes. It is generally understood, as well, that a good soul can blush for the indiscretions of a bad one. But I was not a little stunned, and never forgot the incident, although it was to be almost forty years before I was given the evidence that explained it. Not having the evidence at the time, I was left puzzled, and, mindful of the words of the Lord: "Thou shalt not judge.", I was reluctant to jump to conclusions. I finished my lunch, said thank you and goodbye, walked back down the slope to the bus station and caught my ride back to the Coast. The eastern part of the route lay first to the south, to the American border, and then over Highway Twenty, in northern Washington, to the Okanagan River. I remember blazing blue skies and fields and fields of hay, and perhaps winter wheat. I had a seat to myself all the way for that part of the journey, and somewhere along it I really did break down and cry for a couple of minutes or so.

Chapter 24

    If I were, in these pages, writing a novel. I would not do what I am about to do now, that is, spell out something of the grand climax of the long and bitter history of scandal in the Church, both local and universal, that, as I was to come to know it, began with the little episode just sketched. In a novel, as in a play or a film, suspense must be part of the structure, in such a way that there must be a tangible thread of it from beginning to end, so the reader can share the characters' own sense of quest and uncertainty, and thus also share emotionally in the catharsis of the resolution. Perhaps I should not exclude all autobiographies, either, for some adventures can be told pretty much as cliff-hangers, even if they are true. But this is a spiritual work in which the climax was given away at the very beginning. Furthermore, the historical incidents which support the accounting of that climax, certainly a resolution beyond which nothing greater can be attained or received in an individual, took place for the first time almost thirty years ago. (The most recent, in the visual aspect, was two days ago, in the course of some spiritual direction.) Thus all other achievements must be kept in perspective, so as not to disturb the mood necessary for an adequate reading of a work such as this. Moreover, in chewing over the significance of these latest events, I was reminded of one of the fallible ideas of my youth, and it seemed a good time to record it, as the late facts are such a good example of how God eventually, and very fully, answers any question or objection we might be moved to think up.
    After the initial terror of discovering that I was to be a writer, I who had never reaped much satisfaction from school composition assignments, quite quickly began to acquire a distinct mental pleasure in what I understood was the intellectual and imaginative preparation for the day I settled down to a story or two, and never until the rainy autumn Sunday afternoon that I began the first draught of the Yacht Novel did I have any doubts or complaints about my appointed vocation. Nor did I have any dark moments, as far as I can recall, throughout the year or so it took me to finish it, actually in two spurts many months apart. I knew, mind you, that it was only a draught, and would require much rewriting, although I could never have believed that this retelling and retelling would take half-a-century.
    But in my second year at my apprenticeship, when I began writing short stories - ah, sophomores - I found myself fretting over what seemed to be a very negative predicament of the writer: other men did things, writers only wrote about what other men did. To no small degree was this kind of thinking the lamentable result of my then neglect of the study of real philosophy, but I did not know this then, and my complaint seemed to be genuine. I sometimes thought I had been tricked into a second level of occupation.
    In many ways, I think I was done with this complaint by the end of my second year - I'd had a whopping great spiritual experience in my Ontario army camp, as well as a writer's pilgrimage to New York - and if not, then certainly my third year, my first in law school, with its definite intrusions of the dark night that rendered my brain incapable of mastering the legal world as I knew a good student must, was teaching me, albeit obscurely, that I had a vocation within a vocation.
    But now, so many years later, comes the teaching among teachings: the Vatican has taken a resolute and major step against sexually abusive and undisciplined priests, going over the heads of the bishops - who have proven so negligent and incompetent - and placing such matters under the authority of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. The contemplative, who, among other things, prays for the needs of the Church, has seen this need about to be, by canon law, more satisfied than it has been. The lamentable habit of protecting, even fostering, the lack of chastity among priests and even bishops, in future should have a swifter means of correction. Had such a system been in place forty years ago, this diocese might have kept its university and one of its private high schools, to say nothing of its honour as well. How much damage ensues, when hard facts of wrongdoing are not communicated to the proper authorities; how much labour must be undertaken, primarily by contemplatives, to restore or create what should be the ordinary exercise of vigilance and responsibility.
    So it stands to reason and to faith, does it not, that God should have ordered a contemplative into the diocese of Nelson, certainly one of the worst in the country and continent and set the labours of his soul - and the souls of his contemplative associates - against this scourge? But being God, He did not have to explain Himself in full, only give the grace for surviving such a task from day to day. All would eventually be explained in Heaven, of course, and, as the unearthing of scoundrels is, in cases such as these, the job of bishops and police, the daily bread of the man of prayer was to be growth in the spiritual life and help to those who sought the same thing. Yet details from time to time came his way, sooner or later.
    The last of these was just over a year ago. Six months or so after I was told the story that explained the blush, I mentioned it to the Pope, in company with some other considerations: one, thoughts on the proposal to make Louis de Monfort a doctor of the Church - a most excellent idea, in the current collapse of Marian devotion - and the second, possibly a veiled reference - certainly hidden from me - to the events of the Black Tuesday of the upcoming September 11th. It was, again, a half-year or so before the Roman legislation was announced.
    The information that was passed on to me, some forty years after the event, and this because it was generally known that I had been involved as much as I could be, with police, the courts, and the journalists, in dealing with the clergy - quite numerous in the Nelson diocese - who had been charged, finally, with sexually abusing the young.
    From a certain point of view, this activity might be seen by some to be fairly extensive, and it is a fact that over the years, especially in the decade or so following the revelations first emerging, in Canada, in the archdiocese of Saint John's, Newfoundland, I was from time to time pretty busy about it; but the most important work was in the praying, for it was in this, by the laws of the spiritual life, that I was given the deepest misery. This was profoundly true even before the attaining of the seventh mansion, but it was much more so subsequently. Christ indeed came to earth to suffer. I had run into the devil before the Easter of 1973, and that was unpleasant enough, but these incidents were still only certain degrees toward the raw, naked, horrors that were the final bequest of the fully mature state. For the first time in my life I had to see, and to some extent, share, the spirits of perversion, although I was not given the satisfaction of being able to identify the actual human exercisers of these spirits and point them out to the police. God, it seems, had no special wish to see the diocese of Nelson cleaned up before the rest of the Church.
    Could this have happened? Probably I shall never completely forget how to turn the possible scenarios of correction over and over in my mind, not entirely uninfluenced by memories of earlier successes in helping the authorities catch a felon, albeit in much less serious issues than the molestation of children. The first was an assault, the second an attempted fraud, the third a robbery. In all three cases it was pretty much the result of being in the right place at the right time.
    But, as equally important in the matter of law and order, and the protection of victims, in those earlier instances - all on the lower mainland - the powers that be were doing their job. One very efficient pair of the juvenile detail of the Vancouver police, an alert Dun and Bradstreet credit investigator, and quick acting little squad of Burnaby RCMP. And in the last case - I think this is relevant - there might not have been an arrest had not the entire episode began with a kindly officer bending the rules in the first place to offer me a ride as I was walking the Lougheed Highway in the middle of a rainy night.
    But in Nelson, there was not this kind of efficiency, and my participation in it, until the morning of February 14, 1988 - a Sunday - when a Nelson police corporal called our home to ask my wife to ask our four daughters, all graduates of Saint Joseph School, if they had been victimized by the Reverend John Frederick Monaghan, former pastor and vicar general of the diocese. At that point I was able to go into gear, and stay there, on and off, for the next five years, by which time all the criminals except two had been rounded up, tried, and sent to prison. The victims had finally come up with the simplicity and courage to complain to the police, and the police and the press had finally realized that there was a problem.
    The two who had not been put behind bars were the pair I started with, the university president and the bishop, and they remained free and uncharged because they had not in fact been accused of sexual activity by any victims young enough to have them put away, or simple enough to carry a provision of information all the way through to the courtroom. They remain severely guilty in my mind, however, of conspiracy to maintain Father Monaghan in his predatory position. In the spring of 1967, as I was preparing to leave classroom teaching for more obscure forms of sharing my mystical life with mankind, both my principal and a member of the school board told me about the results of an inquiry arranged over allegations of that time brought against Father Monaghan.
    Monaghan was sent to Father Aquinas, the university president. Father Aquinas declared that Father Monaghan was a good and devout priest and the sister principal was an over-anxious nun, and the adjective is a euphemism for what he actually said. Father Aquinas was recommended, of course, by Bishop Doyle. Nor was he the only faculty member with an interest in attacking the reputation of a sound religious concerned with the morals of Nelson Catholic education personalities of that time.
   To this day the province's attorney general has declined to make a full inquiry into Bishop Doyle's dereliction of duty. This could be because a thorough examination of the history of the last forty years of the diocese would show that, in His own mysterious ways, God was warning all the authorities all the time, and all the authorities were too stupid or too involved in their own sinful behaviour to pay attention. This may seem hard and judgmental, and if it is, then I have to be sorry; but it may also be the most logical comment on the thought patterns of professionals in the Canadian province widely recognized to be the least religious in the nation, perhaps priding itself the fullest on the so-called separation between Church and State.
    At the very least, British Columbia has not been the easiest or most productive province for a mystic's practising his profession, as far as it affects the ordinary needs of provincial society. Future legislatures, police academies, law, medicine, and journalism schools might do well to take note of the realities of the mystical life, and thus learn to co-operate with the unusual graces of God rather than resist them.
   

Chapter 25

    Rather than follow my usual habit of moving on to a chapter in fiction, I think I must keep on in this autobiographical vein. The interesting news just keeps coming. Just as trouble has a habit of coming in batches, to exercise our endurance, so triumph and success can form a pattern, perhaps to fore-shadow the scheme of unbroken joys that await us in Heaven.
    Yesterday my beloved received an E-mail, on her museum computer, which informed her that our diocese, along with the rest of the Catholic churches in western Canada, would be returning to the ancient practise of kneeling for that point in the Mass when the priest performs the rite of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. The source was a long-time friend, actually a convert somewhat from our influence, and someone who with her husband, one of the finest liturgical musicians in the country, had finally left this diocese in disgust for the more traditional climate, at least as it then was, of the archdiocese of Vancouver. Yet, to tell the whole truth, this couple wavered when, fourteen years ago, the horrifying practise of standing was first introduced. Burt we were too solid as friends for them to withstand the combination of my growling and the inward prompting of the Holy Spirit, and they, along with one other family of our closest friends and spiritual associates, defied the folly of the bishop, the priests, the nuns and so-called lay leaders, and continued to kneel.
    The Browns went a further step. They queried the then bishop - still Emmett Doyle - and were told that the entire Canadian conference had ordered this step. This was a lie, which he later retracted. And we knew, of course, that Vancouver under Archbishop James Carney, a true son of the Pope, would never co-operate with such nonsense. (Carney's "rigours", as they were thought of in this msis-managed zoo, were always a great consolation in those difficult years.) Finally, Martin Brown, former professor of philosophy at Notre Dame of the Nelson and constant student of Church history, put the ultimate cap on the dunce by telling us that standing at the consecration was first introduced by the Anglican, Cranmer, as an attack on the belief in the Real Presence. How much lower could the guilty bishops go?
    As I write, it is the 8th of January, 2002, a Tuesday. Monday, a week ago, was the eve of the New Year, and we were scheduled for the 6 p.m. Mass. As, for some years now, I am ordinarily awake for hours before the normal rising time, I usually have a nap at some point in the afternoon. On that afternoon, I had awoken at four, to find myself - this is not uncommon - drowning in a sea of the utmost bitterness. It was of the severity that John of the Cross says cannot continue for too long, otherwise the soul will die. As my principal local prayer intention is at the time for a marriage in grave difficulty, I assumed the bitterness had had to do with this. But later, at Mass, I sensed that the parish priest was somehow connected with this ring of fire, and now one prays, of course, for the half-wits to take the order gracefully. The standing down, altar girls, and inclusive language still to go, and perhaps then can the Church be returned to a degree of normalcy, and the roles of priests and religious redefined along the original lines of dedication, humility, genuine learning, and an automatic deference to the will of Rome.
    The relief of the souls in purgatory, the conversion of sinners, the needs of the Church. These are the first line of the contemplative's intentions. So much of the time in this diocese, it seems that only the first category has obtained what I would think of as first rate results, and only God knows where the released spirits held their earthly domicile. (Every other day or so I get a modest vision of soul-lights, rising into Heaven.) More often than I care to think about, these have seemed to be the only regular and proportional result of a life allowed to do little other than pray. No acting, no public singing other than in church and even that for the most part proscribed because the hymn selections, since my wife quit the choir, are abysmal, and the writing is up and running perhaps two days out of the seven. I cannot really complain, as the prayer life of the seventh mansion is in itself infinitely more adventurous and satisfying as any of these other activities, but my temperament is of the kind that likes visible results, and I cannot help but ponder the lack of proportion in the continuing disreputable state of the Church in my own part of the globe.
    Will the edict go forth as whispered in the ranks? Will it be obeyed and effected quickly? One of my closest friends says he'll believe it when he sees it. In this diocese, a not unreasonable position. As I write, it is two-and-a-half hours until the Saturday evening mass, the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, so we wait and see.
                                                    *     *     *     *     *
    And a good thing, too. Not a peep from the pastor. A mistaken source - usually reliable, however - or are they waiting for a so-called appropriate time, such as Lent, not too far away this year? I have had my delights in the possibility of correction, but it did seem, as well, to be too good to be true; so often the Church has to get so awfully worse before it gets better. After the interior life, nothing so preserves the peace of mind of a troubled Catholic as a good knowledge of Church history. In my youth, I studied history much harder and more scientifically than I did music. This was my inspiration. It would seem that God could see what was coming.
    He is, of course, immensely fair. As I could not be consoled by the sight of the parishioners kneeling as they should - our two kneeling families sit in the gallery, above their heads - Our Lord chose to put on a bit of a light show at communion time. It happened that the eucharistic ministers ran out of hosts just before it was my turn. As I waited for one of them to collect more hosts from the tabernacle on the altar below the Sacred Heart, my old kneeling spot in the days when it was refreshing rather than disturbing to visit the Cathedral of Mary Immaculate, God began shining some special light on the front of the church. The longer I had to wait, the stronger it grew, and the affection for my person that came with the consumption of the host when it finally arrived was all that one could wish for, although I should say that I do not ordinarily look for any special feelings from communion. Thus God treats those who, like Saint Teresa, would happily die for any one of the essential rites if that were required. Yet I am as a general rule counselled to make no racket about it with the locals. Withdraw, retreat, ignore, punish by silence and lack of active participation, although it is not unknown that we regularly complain to Rome, and I must also admit that I would probably be rather vocal in the newspapers if it were not for the general refusal of such activity by my spiritual advisors. Always to them, and usually to me when I am clear headed, the problems are so incredibly deep as to be solved only by prayer.
    The one exception occurred nine years ago, to the month, when a presumptuous late vocation to the priesthood, driven by the psychologisms he had ingested in his former profession, decided to neutralize the genders in the Nicene Creed, and ordered the congregation to follow. There was an enormous blast from me, or rather from the Holy Spirit using my lungs: "We will not! You do not have the authority to do this!" And we did not. The congregation carried on with the Creed as usual. Perhaps the priest had enough sense to know that had he continued in his madness he would have had Elijah storming his altar.
    Later in the day, I had to answer the phone. It was a fat nun, known to me by the quality of her voice, although she did not give me her name, ringing up to tell me I had made a food of myself. (Her words) Is it the fat nuns who have been the most aggressive in their rebellions, in every diocese? I think they lead the averages in ours. This woman, fortunately, did not stay here long, although it must be said that most of her views seem to be shared by the sisters left in her wake.
    The priest recently died, of cancer. We all knew of his illness, and some of us knew of trouble he had caused after his transfer from the cathedral parish, trouble for better and more orthodox priests. As has often been the case where troublesome souls are concerned, and not just clergy, some time before this man became a priest, while we knew he was studying for our diocese, I had been given a special, very strong, spirit of praying and caring for him, of intending to assist him in every way possible, before his ordination. When I saw the notice of his death, pinned on the vestibule wall for all to see as they entered the cathedral for mass, I could only think of his meeting Christ, and with not a shred of joy in my soul. Regarding my experience at the news of the death of a priest, it seemed radically new and different.
    I should add that this priest made a public and defiant reaction to a papal encyclical on birth control, and was ordained by Emmett Doyle. He was also rather quickly made chancellor by the same bishop, who must have known the man also had a drinking problem. But then, as I was to come to learn over the years, Doyle seemed to have a fondness for priests and other fellow ecclesial workers with weaknesses that he could exploit for his own ends.
    This is not to say that he was not exploited himself, of course, for the vicious play games of equality with each other, even where it is a bishop who slips to being the mere pawn. The modernistic nuns thrive - and continue to do so - in such a setting, and all too few were the priests who could put them in their place. It is interesting to note that in the neighbouring parish, where Marianne and I took a much needed rest from steady conflict, from the summer of 1988 to the Advent of 1992, driving thirty miles each was of a Sunday morning, the resident pastor had swiftly got rid of the nun he found there on his arrival in 1984, and never allowed another of these creatures into his parish thereafter. He was a missionary, retired from Africa, and he knew from long experience what real sisters were made of. Moreover, a large percentage of his parishioners continued to kneel after the change to standing came into being. He had an interesting observation: "Those who know they are sinners will kneel; those who think they are not will stand."
    Who is wiser than an old, real, parish priest?
    But now it is Saturday eve again, a fat couple of hours before the mass, and a second answer to this interesting question. God has been quite busy passing some of the best parts of my life before me: memories of the times and places when He has bestowed upon me the sublime touches of His uncreated beauty, the Poetry, as it were, behind the poetry, in just any old place, here and there - Vancouver, Vernon, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Lasqueti Island, Ocean Falls, Terrace, New York, Seattle, my hours in law school or the army or the newspaper business - whenever things were at their best, it was unquestionably He who was at the bottom of the sense of the glory of being, or Being; and He has been most concerned to remind me of the good and orthodox bishops and clergy and religious I knew before I was parachuted into the diocese of Nelson. He always prepares a soul, of course, before a difficult assignment. Did any priest have better clerical contacts and instruction in the seminary than I had between 1958, when I first dipped into the catechism, and 1964, when I left the care of Oblates of Mary Immaculate in Terrace? Had I not sat with the legendary Father Henry Carr, in his office in Saint Mark's UBC, and felt the unmistakable presence of the Holy Spirit descend upon us both as I spoke of my newly discovered love of Thomas Aquinas? Had I not engaged Archbishops Duke and Johnson in a certain degree of useful spiritual encounter, and in fact worked for the great Fergus O'Grady, founder of the lay volunteer programme that built so many Catholic schools in the north of the province, in British Columbia of all places so irreligious or pitifully Protestant in its general culture. (As I write, the provincial government, calling themselves Liberals, have just unreleased the most unLiberal assault on the poor in the history of the party. A spiritual friend of mine has demanded of God the appropriate response, and will no doubt get her way.)
    This was, obviously, a good diocese in which to be a layman, if one were inclined to actually believe the Son of God and all He said. A genuine mystic in a collar might have been able to work some improvements, or he might have simply left for lack of decent companionship. But certainly no such thing in habit was domiciled in the diocese of Nelson. The depths of the spiritual life seemed to be entirely in the hands of the laity, and that spiritual life seemed to have been created as much for conflict and contradiction as for harmony, amongst the members of the local Church Visible.
                                      
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    It is Monday. In the morning, a wonderful-as-usual meeting with my agents and spiritual advisors. In the afternoon, a delightful walk along the city's newest section of the lake-shore path. We have new snow, and a small but welcome allotment of sunshine. Our housekeeper and family medical expert has a useful conversation with one of the few other people in town cognizant of the wisdom of Ayurvedic medicine. But a second week-end liturgy has come and gone, and there has been no mention of kneeling. In the Western Catholic Reporter, however, there was a story of a bishop, unnamed, who had written to Rome to ask if he was permitted to oblige a priest to use altar girls. Rome replied that he was not so allowed.
    Somewhere, there is a priest with a head on his shoulders. I wish the Western Catholic had given his name. For such single-mindedness and courage, I might tell him the story of how the present Pope lost a spiritual director who was a veteran of the seventh mansion, back in 1994, because he allowed the altar girl nonsense. Certain headline-oriented journalistic commentators have suggested John Paul II will known to history as John Paul the Great. Those who understand the spiritual life, that is, the very heart of the Church, are for the present at least inclined to think of him as John Paul the Distracted.

Chapter 26

    For some reason not quite plain to me - except that it would seem to be the will of God - I have to continue with the present time and the question of kneeling - or not kneeling - during the consecration. Another weekend passes by, another exhibition of silence by the cathedral pastor, even though the latest news from the bishop's office, via our friends, is that the Most Reverend has asked for dialogue within the parishes.
    The novelist in me would much rather be dealing with the latest chapter of the sequel, for now after so many months it's actually been two or three years, I have returned to that loveliest of wilderness settings, the south end of Tatlayoko Lake, there to begin Book Four. I have some definitely spiritual and cultural designs on this majestic corner of the Cariboo, so dear to my recollections, all happily augmented this week past by reading in the work of Mohan Sen, the learned Hindu writer, that the first guru schools of India were in fact forest schools. Moreover, I may be hiking tomorrow to the local Ashram, which is very much set in a forest, and that too will no doubt sweeten the memories of the spirits of Tatlayoko, and make me that much keener to get going with my fiction.
    But he who relies absolutely on the Holy Spirit for his musings for his readers must be obedient to the work of the moment, or nothing stays in proportion, and I must putter on with Church politics.
    So the bishop would like a discussion? Would he like what I might have to say in such a chat, especially if the Transformation showed up? Is it for such a dialogue, in fact, that the recent visible manifestations of The Man have emerged? Perhaps he would be wiser - the bishop, not The Man - if he simply took to heart what Cardinal Ratzinger has more than once suggested, and used his authority as a bishop to order the faithful to kneel. An Italian priest, visiting here once for a special liturgy for the Italian community, and seeing the Nelson cathedral full of standers at the wrong time, simply barked out the Italian for kneel. To a man, they dropped to their knees as if to avoid a sudden burst of machine gun fire. If a mere priest, and a visitor at that, could command such normalcy and common sense, why should not the resident ordinary?
    But there seems to be a lot of effeminacy in the episcopate these days, for which the solution has yet to be found. Will they improve after all the nuns die off, or will some different pestilence arise to continue their condition?
                                                  *        *        *        *        *
    We did make it to the Ashram, and thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of the day, especially the fact that I seemed able to stay on top of the drabness of the world that is always a threat to any substantial tour outside the monastic walls of this house. The day sparkled pretty well throughout, whether on the bus, the ferry, or in the walking the road to the Ashram, always in view of the lake, and the institution itself seemed to give back some spirit, although I must complain that what passes for spiritual music there - a tape was playing - is certainly no improvement on the self-indulgent slush that is usually served up in our parish. Not all those who sing "Lord, Lord . . . ."
    In the four years we have set our steps in that direction we have undoubtedly had the angels with us, sometimes putting on quite the light show, and early on, the Transformation made a rather significant appearance, to confirm the propriety of our presence in such an avowedly neutral territory, but perhaps this Tuesday past was the first time I had a sense of a kindred spirit amongst any of those present. Only time will tell if this was a genuine resident, or merely a symbol. At any rate, I was genuinely provoked to a concentrated read in the twenty-fifth stanza, second redaction, of the Spiritual Canticle. And once again, the Ashram bookstore yielded up a perfect gem of first communion present for on of our grandchildren. This was a Tomie de Paola illustrated story about Benedict and Scholastica. It stresses that Scholastica learned by staying in one place what her brother had to tour Italy to realize. So it was from his sister that Benedict got the idea of the vow of stability! That was certainly worth the trip to find out. In my quite regular categorizing of my self as a sort-of Benedictine because I have stayed in one place in spite of all the difficulties here and the attractions elsewhere, I have always given Benedict the credit for that fourth promise. (But it is the Cure of Ars who gets the credit for making me stick to it!) How interesting to learn that a woman was the source for his genius in this regard.
    In this time of non-action in the matter of kneeling for the consecration, the Yasodhara Ashram of Kootenay Bay, on the east shore of the lake, is a happy image. Last year I learned from a book written by one of the staff, Swami Gopal, that some years ago there was a battle to maintain the original standards of the Ashram founder, Swami Radha, in the matter of celibacy amongst the permanent residents. The founder had found it necessary to give a certain pair the boot. Radha had not only been decisive, she had been firmly and swiftly decisive. The Ashram is not especially Catholic, yet here is the orderly sort of behaviour one would expect of a Catholic bishop, yet in these days in so many dioceses one expects in vain. The Ordinaries do not seem to understand the root meaning of their title, which had, of course, not a little to do with the need and capacity for giving orders. In 1958, I was in perfect conscience so happy to join the Roman Catholic Church because it reminded me so vehemently of the many advantageous attitudes I had acquired from my extensive experience with the military.
    I owe Swami Gopal a further debt. (In earlier years he was David Forsee, a CBC broadcaster.) There are so many things we understand only through conversation with souls with companionable inclinations. Chatting with him one day in the Ashram bookstore I think I solved a personal riddle, and learned at the same time that God can make one spiritual experience do as a sign and source of grace for more than one future spiritual consequence.
    For years I had attributed a certain very keenly wounding vision, of the loveliest little corner of a forest, solely to my future at Camp Lourdes, the diocesan summer camp on the south shore of the West Arm of Kootenay Lake. The vision came in the summer of 1959, a few weeks after Shawn and I were married, and was in part a consolation for a mix-up which prevented a day's hiking Seymour Mountain with some very good friends, members of the family I had lived with for the eight months prior to our wedding. The occasion was the older daughter's return from summer school in San Francisco, for a few days only before she was off to somewhere else. It was arranged that we two Catholics would go to the early morning mass at the Cathedral, then be picked up on a nearby corner shortly afterward. But no car showed up, so after waiting what seemed to be long enough, we bused our sad way home and spent a quiet day in the Kitsilano apartment we were sub-letting for the summer.
    After breakfast, I went to my typewriter and either started up a story set in the woods or else carried on with one that was already there. In the midst of it, suddenly, came this profoundly delightful little moment, too delightful to be created by anything other than God, in which I beheld, as it were through a back door of a building of some sort, the most hauntingly beautiful and charming little nook of trees, in which, as in the fairy tales I had loved so much when I was a little fellow, a most marvellous adventure must have been about to take place, although I then had no idea as to what it could possibly be. Nor was I to receive an explanation for eight years, until the summer of 1967, when I was for the second year the cook at Camp Lourdes and also, by a few months only, the spiritual director of one of the young persons at the camp. (I am writing this on February 11.) Those few souls who have been so fortunate as to have been called to perfection, to the Seventh Mansion, to the guidance of other souls to the same place, will understand and appreciate, by their own indescribably sublime experiences, not only the depth of the haunting of the original forecast, but also the unspeakable satisfaction of its proving out.
    The setting at Lourdes was precise. My domain, the cook house and dining hall, all in one building, backed on a small creek - both our water supply and the cook's cooling facility at times - and thus my very back door opened on the green woods, as total a forest and nothing but a forest - except for the railroad tracks beyond a bit - as you could ask for, sweeping on up and over the mountains to the main lake twenty miles away. So, once the spiritual direction details were in place, the answer to the riddle was clear. Certainly none of my other living near or rambling in the woods - a constant since we left the city in August of our marrying summer - as naturally or spiritually delightful as it was - the dark night excepted - had solved the mystery of that haunting image, And, moreover, it solved it most wonderfully. Amazing and astounding as God might be in his promises, he is even more so in his fulfillment of his intimations.
    So, once I had encountered Lourdes, even before I was a spiritual director, I was quite content with the many graces of the place, and thought they would do very satisfactorily as the solution to the riddle that had arisen from the mysterious ecstasy. It was a beautiful place, it was the Catholic fulfillment of the Salvation Army summer camp I had attended as a boy - there was Mass every day - and it was the opportunity to give my wife and children a summer on the beach.
    That was in 1966, my first year at the camp, and no one could ask for a spiritually or poetically sweeter time than I had in those two very full months of July and August. Hopefully, I will be able to spell this out in more detail, in either history or fiction, some other time, thereby giving more of a due place to an institution founded by Bishop Johnson and built by the energies of a number of the faithful, but for now I have to concentrate on the chief of the spiritual advantages of the camp, as it was a sacred role in the formation of none of the most glorious vocations that to date has emerged from the diocese, that which was unfolding, so dramatically, by the summer of 1967. In contrast to the utterly satisfactory previous year, the second summer was unquestionably a prime example of what the Lord meant when He said that to those who already have much, even more shall be given, as by that time I had been granted the office of spiritual director to a young soul that was destined for the final mansions of the mystical life. The little vision of the forest could in no way under the sun have had a greater significance.
    Yet, could it also have applied to a parallel development? By 1959, when I had the little vision, Sylvia Hellman - Swami Radha - had returned from India to Canada. She had gone to India from Montreal, but would try to establish a spiritual community on the West Coast, near Vancouver. This did not really take, and by 1963, I think it was, she was settled in the Kootenays, on the east coast of the north arm of the lake, at a location which interestingly enough had already been called Yasodhara, the name of the wife of the Buddha. The new location proved out, and the community not only grew but multiplied, inspiring from graduates of the yoga and meditation programmes the creation of satellites in North America and overseas. The enterprise appears to be thriving, and more and more people are being given the opportunity to find some of silence and solitude and self-knowledge of the interior life, all because Swami Rhadha found her suitable place in a corner of the Kootenay forests. And, of course, the steadily growing interest, in the West, in all aspects of Eastern culture has also contributed to the attraction, and not only in the simply meditative or spiritual sphere.
    More and more people are finding Eastern medicine extremely applicable to their health problems, usually in conjunction with sensibilities they have already acquired through Western herbalists and naturopaths, and therefore it seems providentially coincidental that Swami Shivinanda, the Indian guru of Swami Radha's, was a doctor before he was a spiritual teacher. In the Ashram bookstore, Marianne finds certain items to add happily to the extensive library that began with Maria Trieben and Michael Moore, both of whom for some years have added to much delightful medicinal satisfaction and adventure to those hours of strolling through the wilderness, hours that were initially all to do with recreation, literature, and the spiritual life.
    Why is Western science as much of a curse as it is a blessing? And why does Western confidence, based no doubt on innumerable profound achievements, turn so easily to arrogance and insularity? And even more puzzling, why does it turn against itself? Europe was once unquestionably herbal, and no one doubted the role of the apothecary. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, the British had got rid of all but one of their herb gardens - and that was maintained only by a mere fluke - and, earlier, in Mother India, they had outlawed Ayurvedic medicine, just as foolishly as they had outlawed the Catholic faith at home. Sometimes I wonder at the history of the language in which, by dint of knowing no other, I am required to write.
    But history, of all things, goes in cycles. What goes around comes around. The blessings of chemistry and biology turn ugly, and Man, to save himself, returns to the roots of science, to the bosom of Mother Earth in her most original self. The most ordinary plants, including the weeds we have been trained to eradicate - dandelions, plantain, Saint John's Wort - turn out to be the best of friends and utter allies in the war against ill health.
    My interest in the East did not start with the Ashram. It was in fact cemented into my brain as early as June, 1955, when I had a rather profound ecstasy while reading Somerset Maugham's Razor's Edge in the anti-artillery barracks in Picton, Ontario. Larry Darrel had gone wandering and come upon a Tibetan lake, and I was myself moved, on reading this, to some spiritual wanderings of my own. This blessing lasted for some time, probably a couple of minutes. I was grateful, and not especially ego-struck, as far as I can remember. In subsequent years I came to regard this experience as a sign of three things: God's pleasure in my reading good literature; God's pleasure in my occasionally looking into the spirituality of the East - later He would get pretty insistent; and God's efficiency in giving me this standard of delight and divine encouragement in one area of study when He would not, in days to come, give the same to me as I perused my law texts.
                                         
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    Since beginning the last paragraph, a rest of some weeks, while I waited for the mysterious conclusion of this unusual schedule; then when the sing of the conclusion came, it has taken a month to prove out its purpose. The Orient again, and I have become, under the most wonderful teacher, a student of Chi Gong and Tai Chi, in the manner of the Chen style.

    Since be