The year Toby became a Catholic was the same year a certain European priest, a Slav in a Communist country, was made a bishop. There was no reason for Toby to know anything about this event at the time and there would have been very few to no clergy in his part of the world who knew of it either. The only European priest Toby knew of by name then - except for the well-known cardinal enemies of the Communists - was Pius XII, the Pope of the day. That means, of course, that Pius knew all about the priest he was about to make bishop, and one of the things he knew was that this priest was such a devoted student of John of the Cross that he had written his doctoral thesis, when a student in Rome, on some of the saint's writings. The Pope had good reason to suspect that the young bishop - he was only thirty-eight - had known something by experience as well as study of John of the Cross' teachings, which would give him the best of all qualifications for going head to head politically with organized atheism.
At that point, or rather some months before the priest's elevation, Toby had yet to read John of the Cross himself. He had no idea that he should be doing so, nor did anyone else that knew him. Thus, because he was regularly subject to the kind of mental tossing up and down that is the infallible sign of the early spiritual life, he had a way of getting himself into predicaments, internal, external, or both, that he did not understand. There was no question that he was being gradually, inexorably, removed from the ordinary worldly way of doing things, and sometimes he went easily - as leaving law school illustrated handsomely - but there were other times that he had to learn the hard way, the really hard way, in fact the hardest way God knows of, and what follows is the account of one of the most remarkable of these times. Had it not turned out the way it did, it is probable that Toby would never have got to relate to the Slavic bishop. As the bishop has just now been beatified, this would have been a shame. And Toby would not have been a meaningful part of his history. Who can dodge predestination?
This is not to say that Toby should not have set off on his journey, for journey it most certainly was, and the longest he had taken since he had gone to army camp in Ontario. And there is nothing more normal to young men than to go travelling. They need to see the world, as it were, if only to acquire objectivity about their own backyard, to realize that further fields are rarely that much greener, and of course sometimes they need to travel for the sake of education, work, or romance. And, other matters being equal, travel is pleasant. Toby had from childhood been a good traveller, enraptured by landscape, whether new or familiar. In the natural order, it was impossible for him to grow tired of a field or forest, no matter how many times he had seen them. And was he not to head again up the legendary road to the Cariboo, and see even more of that fabled area than he had seen the previous year with the survey crew?
But to inquire of the whole truth, would he have gone if he was still in possession of a bank account? He had been quite content to be writing for the past several months, he had all the time he wanted for reading now that he was no longer attempting to study the law, and his courtship of Jelena had smoothed out considerably since he had decided to stop yapping at the Church and to have a look at her teachings. He was even saying the rosary, with a set of beads given him by Jelena's mother. But he had run out of money. A couple of weeks as a security guard had kept him for June, as well as given him a certain amount of new and puzzling self-knowledge, but that money was getting low and he had to find more work. So he found a line on some job or another - he never did recall what it was - and wrote to an older acquaintance whom he had always felt very comfortable using as a character reference, any time he needed one. The job, whatever it was, needed such a thing.
But he got much more than he had bargained for, and swiftly. Two days after he mailed the letter he was tapping away in his basement suite when the phone rang. The potential character reference was offering him a job. Not with his own company, a major construction enterprise, but with a son-in-law who had sudden need of a clerk in his accounting office in the North. Very well to the north, and cheek and jowl with Alberta. The job would start as soon as Toby could get there, and as it happened he could get there with the caller, who was in a day or two driving up, with his elderly mother, to visit a new grandchild, and great grandchild. Toby was invited to come along, all expenses paid.
Initially, and until the trip actually began, a couple of days later, it seemed the ideal solution. Toby had, utterly, no second thoughts, and Jelena did not seem able to raise any objections, not only because he was so full of enthusiasm for the project, but also because the whole conversion process had been so full of ups and downs that she knew she would not mind a solid spell of thinking on her own, and for herself. And probably both of them instinctively felt the hand of Providence somehow very much involved, manufacturing some sort of necessary next step. The entire year had been so full of surprises, and sudden turns of direction: why should yet another be out of line? And youth, naturally, - until it learns better - is always eager to test itself. And this was especially true of Toby, who thought that now he was becoming a Catholic he could pretty well undertake anything that took his fancy as a challenge or opportunity in any way connected with his personal abilities. He had never been un-energetic, but the Faith seemed to have augmented his ordinary enthusiasm.
And to see the Peace River country! Last year the Cariboo, this year, twice as far north! It was huge up there, with miles and miles of grain fields, and the oil patch to boot. He had felt the novelist's obligation to take the opportunity to familiarize himself with so much more of his home province. It all seemed so opportune that he never thought to ask what his salary would be, and simply assumed that board and room would be the same as the going rate for students in the city. Also, he got it into his head that Jelena would be happy to join him later on, even though he knew very well she had only recently refused to follow him to Toronto while he went to work as a journalist. Truly, there is no looser cannon than an apprentice contemplative who has yet to read the rule books. It was even a wonder that God should pay any special attention to him, should take him on in such manifold and manifest ways, and yet there it was, and there was not really anything anyone could do about it, except, hopefully, put him in the path of the appropriate reading.
And, to give the organization of the Church - not always the same thing as the organization of God, especially in the case of mystics - its due, the first priest he talked to had tried to do just that, give him a book somewhat proportional to Toby's state of soul. Toby had not actually said anything about being a mystic, because at that point he really did not think of himself as such, because mysticism was not a subject he had theoretically studied. But the priest easily realized that Toby had an intellect, and Toby had admitted that this intellect was not a little lacking in roots. So the priest had loaned him a copy of Thomas Merton's "Seven Storey Mountain", and Toby had quite enjoyed the last part of the book, about the monastery. The grounds themselves were well described, the monastic life made attractive, and from his time in the military Toby knew the value of the orderly life and felt no distaste for the obvious dominance of a strict social discipline. He had always, by reflection as well as reading, made a good silence in part of every day.But there was none of the technical language of mysticism in any part of the book - at least none that spoke to him - and he very profoundly felt that his own mental family and college education had been much more satisfactory than Merton's, a very full adventure for the mind and heart. He left the book at the rectory before he headed north. The priest was a very busy man, and there was no time to talk about it. And it was most certainly the technical language of mysticism that Toby needed to learn, especially that which dealt with dark and painful elements.
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