Chapter 25

    In the beginning, in Paradise, there were no priests. There were only contemplatives, that is, thoroughly wise souls who communicated with God not by sacrifices, but by prayer. And this prayer was largely a matter of appreciative observation and thanksgiving for what they saw about them and experienced in their own spiritual lives. Nor did they work, as we think of labour now. They had to gather their food, in an effortless sort of way; and had there been children in the garden of Eden these would have had to be taught, yet in an equally effortless fashion, because the teachers would have been so wise, and the young minds so innocent, clear, and docile. So there was nothing, until sin came, to disturb the utter domination of the contemplative atmosphere.

     But, because sin did come -  and quickly, so it seems -  we lost this happy condition. From not being needed at all, priests became the most necessary of human beings, and the profession of contemplatives much more than the simple obligation to rejoice endlessly in the infinite beauty and order of one's surroundings. Sin meant hell, purgatory, and the endless combat to keep the Church - in both the old and the new dispensation - in good shape, in the face of a very sadly collapsed universe that continually showed a desire to hold it in utter contempt, or even destroy it, in spite of history's continuing proofs that such annihilation was not only permanently impossible, but also had ways of rebounding on the persecutor. Contemplatives had to pray for these factors to be dealt with. Their whole lives became an extension of the priest's mass, or divine sacrifice, and of the liturgical office of the Church.
 
     Most contemplatives, of course, have been professional religious. Occasionally a parish priest or bishop, but for the most part monks and enclosed nuns. Only rarely do any of the laity seem called to experience the spiritual life in all its fullness, or even a substantial part of it. Or, if they are called, few seem to respond. But some do, and the soul and the spirit being what they are by God's creation, they are in no way inferior to the professionals in matters of the spirit, although of course they have no practical authority over canonical matters and the administration of the sacraments. Nor do they want it, for if these factors must degenerate, as so often happens, they need all their time to pray for the delinquent situations to be set right by those who have the due authority to do so.
 
     Such a situation, it almost goes without saying, is the creation of God, and by no means that of man, as the previous episode has just shown. No human can chose for him or herself either a blissful ecstasy, or an agonizing stretch of spiritual suffering. The spiritual realm, if it is genuine, is much more of the divine than the human, especially as it becomes more and more supernatural in its mode of operation. There are schools of psychology - and even politics - that would like to deny these facts, but they can only sound ridiculous to anyone who can combine a little learning with a little common sense, or read with an open mind.
 
     Reading. Ah, yes, that takes us back to Toby, who, although he was a constant reader, and according to ordinary academic standards, in the past months even an excellent reader, experiencing great depths of joy and insight in the process, was not yet versed in the mystical writers, in fact not even familiar with quite ordinary theology of the printed variety, although unquestionably something of a veteran of the infused kind. Is not God peculiar? But listen to this, from paragraph 28 of the commentary on stanza three of The Living Flame, which explains something about this infusion substituting through experience what is not known by study.

    "First, it must be known that, if a soul is seeking God, its Beloved is seeking it much more; and, if it sends after Him its loving desires, which are as fragrant to him as a pillar of smoke that issues from the aromatic spices of myrrh and incense, He likewise sends after it the fragrance of His ointments wherewith He attracts to soul and causes it to run after Him. These ointments are His Divine inspirations and touches, which, whenever they are His, are ordered and ruled with respect to the perfection of the law of God and of faith, in which perfection the soul must ever draw nearer and nearer to God. And thus the soul must understand that the desire of God in all the favours that He bestows upon it in the unctions and fragrance of His ointments is to prepare it for other choicer and more delicate ointments which have been made more after the temper of God, until it comes to such a delicate and pure preparation that it merits union with God and substantial transformation in all its faculties."

    Thus the goal which Toby had come back to continue sorting out without unwonted pressures or influences from the world. Yet the world was not the most dangerous enemy. To identify the greater source of trouble, let us continue with John of the Cross and paragraph 29.

    "When, therefore, the soul considers that God is the principal agent in this matter, and the guide of its blind self, He will take it by the hand and lead it where it could not of itself go (namely to the supernatural things which neither its understanding nor its will nor its memory could know as they are) then its chief care will be to see that it sets no obstacle in the way of Him that guides it (Who is the Holy Spirit) upon the road which God has ordained for it, in the perfection of the law of God and faith, as we say. And this impediment may come to the soul if it allows itself to be led and guided by another blind guide; and these blind guides that might lead it out of its way are three, namely, the spiritual director, the devil, and its own self."

    And many paragraphs later - 65 - the saint really puts the icing on the cake with this excellent, but to many, very shocking, advice. "Oh, souls! Since God is showing you such sovereign mercies as to lead you through this state of solitude and recollection, withdrawing you from your labours of sense, return not to sense again. Lay aside your operations, for, thought they once helped you to deny the world and yourself, when you were beginners, they will now be a great obstacle and hindrance to you, since God is granting you the grace of Himself working within you. If you are careful to set your faculties upon naught soever, withdrawing them from everything and in no way hindering them, which is the proper part for you to play in this state alone, and if you wait upon God with loving and pure attentiveness, as I said above, in the way which I there described (working no violence to the soul, save to detach it from everything and set it free, lest you disturb its peace and tranquillity) God will feed your soul for you with heavenly food, since you are not hindering Him."

    In the right circumstances, travelling can be a considerable help toward facilitating just such a mode of operation, and Toby was now most certainly travelling, something he had always been used to as a great encourager of the most restful and appreciative of speculative undertakings. What could be more pleasant than simply absorbing the passing countryside. especially in a young man whose earliest memories of such things had been no less than paradisaical? And who could not help but feel that he had narrowly escaped a jail sentence?
 
     But rolling south in the northern sunshine, he gave no thought to the circumstances that had sent him north, as other young men might have done. His life had never lacked a sense of the mysterious, a suspicion of the habitual intrusion of something much more powerful and manipulative than himself, especially in these latter months of his abandoning the ordinary ways of education and logical progress within an ordinary career. The impetus to live a day at a time was as rigorous as the Daily Orders, Parts One and Two, posted on the bulletin board in an officers' mess, and topsy turvy as the results might seem to ordinary mortals, they were all very plain to him. At his centre, he stayed very much alive, and made whatever changes were necessary when that sense of life seemed threatened, so he could go on staying alive.
  
    So he enjoyed the landscape, freely now, without the intrusion of the circumstances that had previously befallen, and also appreciated the low hum of his fellow travellers. Sometimes nothing was of greater comfort than a vehicle full of strangers. Company, but without the obligations of conversation. But mostly he dwelt securely in the comfort of knowing he had made the right decision, of realizing that the bus had suddenly loomed in his sights to make the decision for him, like an angel appearing to some character in the Old Testament.
 
     Nor could he worry about the days ahead. He had made the right choice for this moment, and the next would thus take care of itself. This was the way God directed the process of time unfolding: if he knew anything in this confused time, he knew his own memories. And he knew there was something enormously important in having a catechism to study, although he did not pull it out of his bag and start reading it right away. That would take a more scholarly environment, and a state of mind in which he could think of himself as a becoming Catholic, instead of just a young writer getting the crap beaten out of him by his Maker. How could two journeys, only a year apart, be so different? A year earlier, nothing but triumph, in both the going and the coming. This year, nothing but tragedy in the going, and in the coming nothing nobler than a complete retreat, although surely a retreat necessary for his sanity and peace of mind. And except for the hour's entertainment he had provided for the Dominion Day celebration, what good had he done?
 
     One good he had not done was writing novel. In the days away from the city he had written nothing of that, and now there would be more days down until his typewriter arrived from the north. Throughout his whole career so far he had known plenty of times when he could not find any inspiration for fiction, and it seemed time just to study and learn about life, but for the past two or three months the typewriter had been flaring away on what he thought of as a swan song for nihilism, or the proof that he could write about a youthful lack of direction as well as anybody else, and he felt eager to bring it off and get it to a publisher. He'd never tried a whole novel on a publisher before, only a few short stories, and in fact he had only ever finished one novel, years ago, and knew full well it was not ready for scrutiny. But the work at hand would be worth shopping around. He had been full of energy for it, and was having a good time, basically, with not nearly as much fear - that he could not write - as he'd known last year, when he'd made his first attempt at what he thought of as honest fiction, even unto using a few memories from his own childhood.

    So whatever happened when he got back to Vancouver, he had to make writing a priority again. And the neat thing about Jelena was that she would expect him to do just that. She had no interest in interfering with the thing that lived at the centre of his understanding of himself, just as she had no interest in his interfering with her own self-image, now that the issue of the Church was behind them.
They had both been born to live by their wits, in the best possible sense, and thus let nothing and no one interfere with the spirit and the circumstances that made for such a course.
  
    Yet Toby did not feel that he could immediately turn his mind to writing about the Church, or himself within it. He'd had far too little experience of her operations, of her personalities, for all that he accepted that Jelena was the wisest and best educated of all his peers, to say nothing of the liveliest, and most understanding of him. (Whatever his father might think of his running back to the city, she would take it in stride. They had clearly been together on a course of mental explorations since they met, and this event would go down simply as one more of such.) No, clearly he had to carry on with what he had begun at the end of May. He had to study the Church, and write of a world which was unaware of her existence, or else assumed that it didn't matter. This might be a contradiction, but it was the best he felt he could do at the moment, and therefore it was the most honest thing he could do at the moment, especially when he simply knew no words for all the unusual things that had always happened to his soul, from his earliest memories, at intervals, and now were occurring on an infallibly daily basis.
 
     The recent miseries had been much more frequent and prolonged than their predecessors, however, and in that they indicated a particular uniqueness, definitely something new to think about, and definitely not anything he could remember reading in the book by the monk, Thomas Merton. His monastery had seemed a most pleasant and attractive model of good order, with ample scope and support for the prayerful and inquiring intellect. There had been nothing like the mayhem of the north.
  
    Of course, he'd known for a long time that there were supposed to be certain elements of suffering in a genuine Christianity, and yet when he did take on any sort of situation which initially involved a disadvantage to himself there had quickly showed up some method of consolation. A place, a person, an assignment might at first expose something of itself to be born, but he would get to it and then find a presence of a spirit that saw him through. His first year in law school had been a huge example of such a contradiction. If he had made so little academic conquest of his texts and classes, he had still enjoyed the company of the law students themselves and of course the campus generally. So often enough he had to wonder if he really knew what suffering was.
 
     But it had not been like that, this time, in any way. Something much more severe had moved into his soul, something that seemed intent on destroying him then and there if he did not submit to its will, something that unequivocally rode over all and any deference he might have felt for the opinions and feelings of others, no matter how highly placed on the social scale. And not just for a brief moment. This had gone on and on and on, as if to make a point he would be incapable of forgetting.