Chapter 24

    We now need to hear from John of the Cross at some length. What is about to unfold in this chapter is bound to be controversial. Not only will we have clashes between the world and the spirit, in our readers, but there is also the possibility, nay, certainty, of conflict of convictions between some elements of the world, and also between different representations of the spirit. For instance, in the world, we are all utterly familiar with the rows that go on between unions and management, between owners and the merely employed. And in religious circles, especially within Catholicism, there are even more acute differences among contemplatives and actives, priests and laity, the imperfect and those who choose the road to perfection, or, we might say in perfect truth, have it chosen for them. Ultimately, of course, it is only God who can know all the details that define a complicated decision as right or wrong. But John of the Cross is about as good a spokesman for the Almighty as could be asked for, so in order to come to an informed decision ourselves, we must seek his advice. Which follows, from the third chapter of book two of the Dark Night.

    "Therefore, since these proficients are still at a very low stage of progress, and follow their own nature closely in the intercourse and dealings which they have with God, because the gold of their spirit is not yet purified and refined, they still think of God as little children, and speak of God as little children, and feel and experience God as little children, even as Saint Paul says, because they have not yet reached perfection, which is the union of the soul with God. In the state of union, however, they will work great things in the spirit, even as grown men, and their works and faculties will then be Divine rather than human, as will afterwards be said. To this end God is pleased to strip them of this old man and clothe them with the new man, who is created according to God, as the Apostle says, in the newness of sense. He strips their faculties, affections and feelings, both spiritual and sensual, both outward and inward, leaving the understanding dark, the will dry, the memory empty and the affections in the deepest affliction, bitterness and constraint, taking from the soul the pleasure and experience of  spiritual blessings which it had aforetime, in order to make of this privation one of the principles which are requisite in the spirit so that there may be introduced into it and united with it the spiritual form of the spirit, which is the union of love. All this the Lord works in the soul by means of a pure and dark contemplation, as the soul explains in the first stanza. This, although we originally interpreted it with reference to the first night of sense, is principally understood by the soul of this second night of the spirit, since this is the principal part of the purification of the soul."

    Now because contemplation and the search for perfection are so much rarer that God would like - He did say, remember, "Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect", and praised Mary Magdalene over her sister on one occasion - He has different ways of dealing with the more obedient than with other people, rather like the army demands more of commandos in their training than it does of the ordinary infantry. Infantry training for combat is rough enough, but not as rough as that for special forces. And oh, what a special branch, even if unto himself alone, Toby was eventually to become, as the Church in so many areas was to drift inexorably into decline of every sort. When it becomes a duty of the laity to admonish the hierarchy, things must have come to a sorry state. But if this is so, and if it is those without collars who are to reform, it can only be because God has provided the necessary education.
  
    So, it was especially necessary that Toby should become educated, not only in matters of doctrine, but also in the qualities of the clergy and religious. This had begun in Vancouver, with a dear old religious brother and a profoundly mild-mannered and humble priest, and now the texture of his texts was to become more complicated.
  
    Wednesday he worked his second day in the accounting office, again having little to say to anyone, and again owning a head deadened beyond understanding, except for the columns of figures. But once out of the office, his soul felt almost like his own, and after supper at his new landlady's, he read for a while and then went off to see the parish priest.
 
     Except in one respect, the conversation did not go well. Toby actually enjoyed it at the time, as his head was quite free, and he found that again he was grateful to talk with a priest in his rectory, but there were to be, in a few weeks, quite enormous repercussions to precisely this conversation and precisely some of the things he must have said within it. An author is always grateful for new cultural experiences, and now, for the second time in a month, this author was doing something of profound intellectual significance that he had never done before, only this time, after his earlier step, he could feel himself to be more inside the fold of the Church than he had before. This confidence must have helped shape his choice of words, for although he could never remember later anything he said  precisely, he had some sense of trying to talk about himself as a writer suddenly finding himself on the road to Rome and wondering how this was all going to work itself out.
 
     Had he actually by then written any of the things he felt himself destined to put down on paper, or perhaps if he had been able to digest his actual accomplishments so far even as a journalist on and off the campus, he might have made more sense to the pastor, he might have seemed more reasonable and thus less worthy of the attack that would come later. But he was, without knowing it, a mystic, currently suffering intensely purgative experiences, and his interlocutor was from an order in those days, in Canada, not famous for its grasp of the more exotic levels of the spiritual life. (Has Canada ever known such wisdom, in any of its orders?) So Toby rattled on about his hopes as a writer doing great things for the Church, and the priest easily came to the conclusion that he was dealing with an exceptionally outrageous ego: an item, as a priest, that he must do something corrective to. Toby did not think to tell him that he had already been through the mental exercise of having to wonder if he were some sort of Antichrist, simply using his talents to deform the Church in some way. But he did enjoy the ambiance of the rectory. Of course. The Holy Spirit is present in all rectories, for the sake of the faithful, even if the priest is one sort of renegade or another. And as a mystic, even in his ignorance, Toby was especially sensitive to any location in which the Lord was especially present. And, actually, to his sacerdotal credit, the priest divined exactly what Toby really needed, and no one had yet given him, and that was a catechism.
  
    So Toby left with a volume of Father Smith Instructs Jackson under his arm, satisfied that the evening had gone well, which, because he now had in his possession the bread and butter of the rest of his summer, it had most certainly done so. And Toby took note that the priest had not asked him to pay for the book.
 
     So much for the Wednesday evening, after which Toby fell easily into a good sleep, even without opening the text. It was on the Thursday that the real warfare began, the battle, for the understanding of which, John of the Cross was brought into the beginning of this segment.
There is no question that the lad had known a long history with the extraordinary phenomena of the spiritual life, thrust into his life by special actions of the Trinity, and even by the Virgin Mary, for all that she had been so little an academic feature of his thinking. Nor was he a stranger to the darker, painful, side of contemplation. He had known what it meant to be numbed, crushed, overcome, and given the stripping that gives all hardy souls the instinct for seeing the world for what it is, a graveyard of dreams broken over and over again because their fulfillment might only mean damnation.
 
     But none of this psychological annihilation had ever taken place so far from his ordinary support system and ordinary student scheduling. In his own somewhat untutored way, he had habitually been quite docile to John of the Cross' characterization of the basic rule of the spiritual man: only happy either alone or being useful to someone else. It was impossible to think of checking columns of figures, now that he was actually doing it, as a useful occupation for his abilities.
 
     On the Thursday morning he and his employer headed even further north, fifty miles up the Alaskan Highway to put in three days in a town of small businesses that also needed their books scrutinized. They arrived well before lunch and started work as soon as they had checked into their motel. Also begun, as far as Toby could describe it, was a new and deeper level of internal agony, which as long as he was at work, seemed to refuse to let up. He could eat and sleep in relative comfort, but most certainly not deal with the numbers. This is not to say that he could not do his work. He did that, and did it efficiently. But there was no satisfaction in it.
 
     Nor was there any relief in his going off into the bathroom, on the Friday afternoon, to close the door and kneel down in order to pray off the affliction. The little that his mind could work on any sort of concepts had suggested that perhaps he was being punished for his pride, and simply asking for relief would help. But the device did not work. In fact it seemed to make it worse, if that were possible. He staggered out of the bathroom even more stunned, more amazed at the ways of God.
The Saturday and the conclusion of the work finally came, to his relief, and they headed home after their supper. They drove under clear skies, and Toby could finally enjoy the vastly sprawling landscape,now under the soft light of a northern midsummer evening. In his heart he was sure he would have a letter from Jelena waiting for him, and his head hardly hurt at all, until his boss brought up the subject dear to so many when they thought about the Church: birth control. No priest was going to tell him when he could sleep with his wife. Toby disagreed, saying as little as possible, probably no more than "We've already talked about that, months ago, and we agree with the Church." The discussion  did not continue.
  
    There was a letter, in fact two, all full of news of what Jelena had been doing in the city while he was away and not carrying the least hint of her being eager to join him in the far north. It was good to hear from her, but there was no real comfort for his present predicament. And why should she join him? She was making an excellent salary toward going back to university for her last year - sending freight cars around the continent - while he was making less money than he ever had, and paying considerably more board than was the going rate in the city. He had not thought to inquire about these factors when first talking to the Brig about the job, nor had he said anything in reaction when he was told his terms after he arrived. Such is the way of entering into playing by the rules of the spiritual life. But they were unmistakable signs of there being something wrong with his grand design.

      He was very happy to be by himself, after three days of company, but once he had read Jelena's letters he found himself restless, and though the northern night was beginning to fall, he went out for a walk.
 
     It was Saturday night, and the town was certainly alive. But it was not a town in which he was likely to meet someone he knew, just passing people walking on the streets, like he was. But he kept going until he found himself on the highway, filled with the lights of the cars coming into town, and walked for a mile or so against the traffic, then turned around and came back and went to bed.
Had he hoped that being out among the citizens would rekindle his original sense of purpose in coming? If he had, he was not successful, and as he lay in bed trying to fall asleep, he grew and grew in the conviction that if he did not get out of town and go back to where he came from, God was going to kill him. Perhaps not directly, but He would certainly let him die. He had yet to read Aquinas, who said that without consolation, a man will die, but he could find not one source of consolation in his present situation, no matter how hard he worked his mind to do so, and he believed without having studied. What could he call the past three days especially, but a living death?
Of course everyone would say he was a quitter, a man who avoided his responsibilities and broke his promises at the first sign of any difficulty, but he had got to the stage where he could see the vast difference, in action, between the thoughts of men and the thoughts of their maker.
 
     He finally went to sleep, awoke again to a sunny morning, and went for another walk. He was refreshed, and would give the town yet another chance. He could walk, and then he could go to church. That might give him the strength and a clear head to see into the next steps.
 
     But he had not walked far before he came upon the bus station, and there parked in front of the building was a bus announcing that it was bound for Prince George, thus headed south. It was an older style of bus, not a sleek cab-over-engine like a modern Greyhound, but to Toby it was suddenly the chariot of his freedom. He raced into the station and asked the woman at the counter how soon the bus was leaving. She gave him the time, which left him with twenty minutes to get his gear and get out.
"Don't let it go without me," he said, and started running for his boarding house.
His landlady was up.

    "I'm going," Toby said. "I can't stay here. I never should have come in the first place. Tell Rob I don't want any money for the week, but I would be really grateful if he would come here and crate up my typewriter and send it to me. I'll give you my folks' address."

    She did not try to argue with him. This had no doubt happened before in her business, Toby thought, and at any rate he was too full of the fire that goes with a sudden, clear, and unmistakably right decision. He ran up to his room, filled his old army duffel bag with his clothes and books, and strode for the bus station. He bought his ticket with five minutes to spare, settled into a right hand window seat, and completely relaxed for the first time in a week.