Chapter 11

    Is it not fascinating how easily we become our own worst enemies? Just think of Satan, Judas, and certain ecclesiastical bodies of recent decades.
 
     For Toby to attack Saint Ignatius Loyola was most certainly one of the major acts of ingratitude and hypocrisy of his times. He may even have set, quite unconsciously, mind you, some sort of Olympic record for this kind of achievement. For the simple fact was, when you sat down and thought about it, that he had actually been living out of the feisty Basque's most famous note book for most of his conscious life. Ignatius was and is, of course, the master of spiritual retreats and personal social changes that can initiate spiritual growth. Attacking the founder of the Jesuits and one of the sixteenth century saviours of Christianity was like denying that he had a father, although, again, we do have to admit that his gaffe was somewhat unconscious, given the precise lack of Catholic instruction normal to bright young men fortunate enough to grow up in the bosom of Holy Mother Church. And yet how many times in his life had he been given the grace to withdraw from all the hubbub around him in order to think things out or get a grip on a new and difficult situation, and how many times had he been able to depart from present company to find new company and a therefore a different view of himself? And the fact that he had done these things without benefit of clergy, Jesuit or otherwise, was totally irrelevant, as he had always had the company of his guardian angel and, to no small degree, that angel's superiors. I've known many a soul who came home from one of those outwardly organized retreats, with a spiritual director and all, in no better shape than he or she went, and on occasion, worse.
  
    But of course, Ignatius was not just talking about getting away from it all. His purpose was not really all about new techniques for dealing with old stresses, but learning how to grow up by finally getting down to what Christ, Mary, and the Church were all about, in more or less adult fashion. And Toby was still battling with all that authoritative stuff.
  
    Just take the episode of two summers previous, for example, when in effect he had gone on retreat not for a week, not even merely for a month, but four entire months. This was in fact much closer to the original standard for a thoroughgoing run through the spiritual exercises as they were known of before Ignatius came up with the image of thirty days. Nine to twelve months was the original schedule, so that Ignatius' scheme, fascinating is it sounds, and effective as it is for those genuinely prepared by a lengthy previous attention to one's Christian and even spiritual duties, is an apparent shortcut only really justified either by an assumption of a lengthy, dedicated, follow up, or else a director who is nothing short of a soul in the full blown possession of the seventh mansion, someone who is in the inner circle of those who know the Transformation.
  
    Of course Toby had no such high falutin' concepts as these by which to talk himself into that very full summer. He had merely decided that it was time to move out of the family home, as young men are wont to do, not only because he had realized he could no longer trust his father's concept of his professional future, but also because the family was moving anyway, heading significantly east and even further from the campus. And above that, to be consistent with this hypothesis of a retreat, because he knew he had to be on his own. He had some thinking to do, and some different living.
But he not planned on as much solitude as he got, he had not planned on a retreat.
 
     In his first weeks with the newspaper, they put him on the day shift. He went to work with the rest of the world, at eight-thirty. They had to supervise him, of course, to see how he would do at the newspaper game. A college paper was one thing, a downtown daily in a major city was another. But he did all right, albeit with plenty of company of peers and supervisors, and so in a few weeks they put him on the afternoon shift, so he could cover a couple of regular municipal meetings and the election campaigns of candidates not so close to the top as to be cabinet ministers. He liked that. The office was much quieter in the evening than in the day, and he got to drive all over the city and local area when he had to leave the office. The paper paid mileage for his car. He was very happy, with the most mild-mannered editor in the building for his boss, and a growing certainty that he did not want to be a journalist for the rest of his life. No one else in the place seemed to know or care very much about literature, and that, he was pretty sure, was a valuable lesson for someone like him.
 
     But for now, the situation was perfect, and just landing the job itself, without actually having to go looking for it, or beating down any doors, he took as a sign that as long as he stayed true to his inner promptings, the outside of him would be looked after. It was one of the older staffers at the university paper that had set him up, back at the end of March. What was he going to work at for the summer? The older lad had taken an interest in Toby's writing a novel, in the first months they had known each other, when Toby was in first year but Toby had not been into having anyone read what he knew was not really the themes he was born to deal with. Toby said he hadn't really thought about his summer job, he simply knew he wasn't going back to officer cadet school and he was going to try to pass his first year law exams. The other lad said that the downtown Star needed one more summer reporter.

    Toby had boogied and got the job. The money was the least he'd ever made in the summer, and keeping himself was going to cost, but the opportunity had been too good to miss. The universe had unfolded according to plan. And then it got even better with the afternoon shift because this meant he would have the morning free to take the creative writing course that was being offered in July and August, headed up by none other than Lister Sinclair, whom Toby remembered from Sunday afternoon CBC radio theatre in his house. In his second year, his last in arts, Toby's writing angels took him into short stories, and did not seem to object to his aiming at outlets like the Saturday Evening Post or the Star Weekly. He failed, of course, but had a good time anyway. But in his third year, when he was less than brilliant at his legal studies, and was also busy working in a mill a long way from the campus, he found himself ready to deal with the mentality of the "little magazines" and wrote a small handful of tales which were not romantic, nor did they feature guns. He had shipped these off to the campus teacher of short story writing, who answered kindly, invited him for a chat, told him he could write, and that he would really help himself by attending the summer course in creative writing the English department was setting up for the summer. There would be one general class, for all the students at once, for the first hour of the morning; a short break, and then three separate classes: poetry, drama, and the short story. Regardless of whatever section he chose, the teacher said, Sinclair was too good an opportunity to pass up.
 
     All progress in the spiritual life begins with self-knowledge. It is to accept the role that the infinite almighty has fore-ordained for oneself that brings self-recognition, honestly, thus contentment, thus creative progress toward an accomplishment that will be genuinely useful to the completely informed sprawl of mankind, especially as it is sprawled over the endless plains of eternity at the event of judgement day. Now, item by item, Toby had suffered no shortage of events in his young life that confronted him with an accurate knowledge of himself, both negative and positive. Sometimes this came about from circumstances in which personalities played only an incidental part, on other occasions the personality was everything, whether adult or a peer. He had been very fortunate in some of his teachers, a particular scout leader, and two or three of his university professors, in the adult category, and extremely blessed, he was to think for the rest of his life, in a number of his peers, especially at the university. He had been, and was to continue, coming through a golden age of west coast journalists and critics.
  
    But Lister Sinclair was something else again, an utterly pleasant, utterly stunning, utterly liberating shock, and perhaps the single most spiritually freeing encounter Toby was to know in his life as a young adult, in the sense that he was a real, live, working artist, a writer, performing in the classroom Toby sat in happily five days a week, and not merely a slice of wisdom gleaned from a book published far away.
 
     For Toby, he was the source, precisely, of a most inspiring flight of imagination. This was something utterly possible. He, Toby Skinner, might one day be a teacher of creative writing! It was possible, it was exciting, it was himself, reacting to the inspiration of a genuinely learned, world traveled, professionally successful, mentor. It was the sort of thing he had expected would catch fire in him from his law school professors, yet somehow never had. Nor had it happened in officer cadet school, from his instructors there. And none of the newspaper reporters, interesting characters as they might be, were making him feel so much at home.
  
    Nor, in fact, was the actual instructor in short story writing. He was a professor in the subject, from an American university, with a story recently published in a leading American journal of creative thought, but he was not a spark for Toby, nor did Toby catch fire from any other member of the class, with an exception that one of them would later prove profoundly, inescapably, useful. To be blunt, Toby was personally convinced that he himself was the only member of the class who would ever amount to much as an author. One young man showed enough talent, when he read his piece, that Toby was later to speculate for a time if he might have been Jack Hodgins, but Hodgins was too young. Everyone seemed to write too close to "what they knew", which was their own personal sensitivity. Too small a palate, too few colours. But this made the experience, in its own way, a model for the spiritual exercises. Sinclair was the consolation, the other business the desolation. While the newspaper office might not have been Parnassus, it was much more real than the second classroom. Toby remembered all the names of his fellow reporters, very few of the fellow students.
  
    Should he have signed up for the play writing course, which was the part Sinclair taught? Afterward, he would wonder. The two of them might really have hit it off, as from the first time he'd stepped up to the story-teller's keyboard Toby had known he could write dialogue as easily as catching a bus. But would Sinclair have tried to convince him to move to Toronto? In which case he would never have met Jelena, never had his wonderful months in the time that followed the course. No, it had been right to tough out the Slumber Lodge for those two hours, after Sinclair and before lunch. At least he had been resting after the very short night's sleep he got getting home at two-thirty.