Chapter 27

    In half-a-year of daily acquaintance, they had unquestionably known their stormy moments; for one reason, because at the least provocation, Toby could go off like a land mine. Or, in fact, a mine field. And there was not really any telling ahead of time what could trigger his explosions, with his great variety of opinions and apparent convictions; until in the last weeks before he trotted off to the clergy, he had become predictably tiresome, even exhausting, in his attacks on the Church. And these had been so unpleasant and wearying that she had all but forgotten the very interesting guarantee of the first time they had actually spent any time in each other's company, although not talking with each other. (She had been deliberately away from any social scenes for so long that it was only natural to catch up with fellow students she had not been seeing in her classes or around the Green Room, and Toby had simply missed his friends over the holidays spent primarily with family and working at the liquor store for the seasonal rush.)
 
     In the middle of his holding court in the rec room of the house of the party two days after Christmas, while everyone was singing along with Toby and his banjo, she had seen something flash across his face she had never before seen on a live human being. That was a swift image of Christ, and it was a surprise because it was not something she looked for in another human, male or female, as her own meditative focus had been as a rule on God the Father, whom she knew from her doctrinal education never wore a created human face, any more than did the Holy Spirit. She also knew - or thought she knew - that she could have the lad who wore the momentary image for a lifetime, if she were up it. This permanent situation seemed to be the major point of the experience.
 
     Did Toby know what had happened? Probably not. She had by no means made a thorough academic study of spiritual phenomena, but she knew from reading Saint Teresa that such things were even more mysterious to the possessor than to the observer, at least some of the time. She also knew that no one could fashion such a thing for himself. Only God could put it there, and God could most certainly take it away. But it helped explain why he could be so puzzlingly contradictory, so quiet sometimes, so noisy at others, and not infrequently utterly lacking any sense of direction that made sense to her. Well, that was before she had told him she wasn't marrying a lawyer, and he had left law school, although this also had many more causes than just her conviction. Once he was away from the law building he was writing fiction again, going back to a novel he had been working on months before. Then, he had a focus: that, and lashing out at the Church from time to time.
 
     Perhaps, she thought, she should study Saint Ignatius of Loyola. It was the founder of the Jesuits who had provoked him the most, so violently that she had just about fired him right out of her life. She had not known a lot of Jesuits, simply because there were not that many of them in her part of the world, but there had been one or two associated with the college in Hastings, and they were certainly far too pleasant and useful men to have to endure such verbal abuse from someone who had never laid eyes on them.
 
     But then he had finally shut up and gone to see the clergy. The desperate-to-be-scientific novelist, hah hah, at last goes out on an observational tour of the priesthood. Science finally catches up with the self-styled scientist. No. That was a bit cruel. It was not that he had had ever hated the clergy, like the infamous anti-clericals of Europe, or some of the confused Protestant youth she had known on this side of the pond. Toby was such a mixture of a sense of duty to the world at large, to sympathy for the spiritual struggles of his own peers, and a fear of taking too much comfort from religion. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, had he not immediately contracted a very nice sense of scruples from his decision to turn Catholic? Was he only doing this, he had reasoned, because it would make him more notorious as a writer?
  
    That announcement had come as a complete surprise, and made her wonder if she knew him as well as she had thought she did. And then he had told her that while he didn't think much of Thomas Merton's description of his childhood, or his later education, he had completely enjoyed his description of life in the Trappist monastery. "All that peace and quiet! He makes it sound almost too easy. Where's the pain in it?"
 
     "Nothing's right unless there's pain wrapped up in it?"
 
     "To some degree, no. I learned that right away with the Ubyssey. I was enormously happy with belonging, for a lot or reasons. Just like Merton in his monastery. But there was a cost, because I had also carried on with the army, by joining the officer cadets. I still felt very much at home with the military and it guaranteed me a summer job for at least two years. But some of the people at the paper thought I was an idiot for being involved with the army - their name for the COTC was Trained Killers - and that hurt, and then I learned that some of the cadets thought I was a Communist for belonging to the Ubyssey, and that was just as annoying. So much for the intelligence of your average university student, don't you think?"
 
     "The average university student is a very poor reader, and no real judge of human nature. Just like your common man. You know, if you keep going with your studies of the Church - my God, just think of all the new kinds of books you'll be reading! - you'll have to get rid of that profoundly fictional creature you carry around in your brain. Or at least find out what an ordinary and very boring sinner he is. Then you'll know what Jesus had to die for, and that clearly does not make the common man something to be admired, and certainly not something to be catered to. Do you think he's a creature you picked up from being a journalist? From working for the Star? I've heard it said that newspapers are written for twelve-year-olds. Maybe that's was the common man is, a twelve-year-old going on forty. And your common man would not enjoy Thomas Merton's account of life in a monastery because it utterly lacks sex, violence, and profiteering. The last thing the common man is interested in is the prayer life, with or without pain."
  
    "But not everyone was born to love learning like you do. You would have done wonderfully as a professor, if I hadn't decided you should be a mother."
 
     "Aren't you counting your chickens - or should I say children - a little too soon?"
  
    "You did say you wouldn't marry a lawyer, and now I'm no longer a law student."
  
    "I've never actually taken a logic course, but I suspect that if I had I would know some very precise explanations of what's wrong with that kind of syllogism."
 
     "What's a syllogism?"
  
    "A form of reasoning. It's a word invented by Aristotle for a reasoning process invented by Aristotle and the Church made a big deal out of it in the middle ages and since. They don't take it very seriously in the UBC philosophy department. You'd have to go to a seminary or a Catholic university to actually get a real course in logic, although they probably still teach it in the Ivy League colleges. Everybody else is all hooked on logical positivism and symbolic logic, which is really a mind game for mathematicians trying to look wiser than they really are. At least you've actually read some Aristotle, and of your own free choice. Once you get to Aquinas, there'll be no living with you. Try it in the Howay-Reid room again and see if they throw you out for doing it this time."
 
     "Aquinas certainly does create problems for the common man."
 
     "Aquinas creates problems for highly educated bishops."
 
     "How do you know?"
 
     "Hearsay, to tell you the honest truth. I have not studied him myself, I can tell you. One of these days, maybe, but not yet. The 'marriage of true minds' in him is something Shakespeare never dreamed of, and right now I have to be content with Shakespeare. Speaking of which, how much have you been aware of how much art there is going to be in the city this summer, for the provincial centennial?"
  
    Toby had grunted. "You've mentioned it a few dozen times, but I'm running out of money and have to find a job, remember? When that's taken care of, maybe then I'll be able to think about it."