In the hallowed halls of Heaven, Toby's prayer must have set some kind of record as a joke, or, in a moment redolent with serious criticism of educational methods, at least an interesting commentary on the educational methods of his time, still bobbing along in the wake of the theological betrayal of a nation once outstandingly dedicated to the Catholic Church and the Virgin Mary. We speak, of course, of England, Mother England, home of innumerable saints and excellent mystical writers - up the sixteenth century - as well as the teaching platform for John Duns Scotus, whom, like Albert the Great, they took an awfully long time to canonize, and also who, unlike the otherwise impeccable genius of Thomas Aquinas, was able to figure out that yes, God could do two things at the same time in regards to the Virgin Mary, i.e., both have her conceived, and conceived free of original sin.
And then came Henry. Henry the Damned, when you think about it, simply begging, through his assault on all that was best about England - the Church, the monasteries, the schools, to say nothing of ordinary common sense monogamy - for all those lovely punishments God promises in the Bible over and over again for loutish leaders who misuse their clout. And oh, so many barons and bishops to go along with him. Thus more punishment. What a joke. What a tragedy. What a recreation of the Augean Stables, without a Hercules to shovel the proverbial. And following so closely on the new technique of the printing press, so that the plethora of heretical vomit that would follow Henry's lechery and treachery could find itself a ready vehicle of distribution. Any idiot who could scribble a pamphlet, let alone a book, could find a reader, and any reader, thus capable of finding himself in ecstasy over being able to put one word together with another could thus find himself not only a philosopher, but even, what ho, a theologian!
And in certain locations of the literate globe - principally Europe, at that time - he could find armies of half-wits to defend his imbecility.
Being born where and when and to whom he was, coming out of the Great Depression, and just before the second of the wars that was to punish the world for its chronic neglect of religion and the guidance of he Gospels and the Popes, little Toby Skinner, if he were to make sense of all this self-indulgent nonsense -as he was born with the skills of the writer - would need no little Divine help and intervention if here were to get to any point from which he could survey the universe he was born to report upon with any reasonable degree of accuracy and genuine, practical, realistic hope. Thus, his angels would not only have to be there, but to be rampantly there, infinitely more swashbuckling and spiritual sword-waving than any coterie of pirates, and God Himself, the Lord of the most inner boy and man, would be hard put to keep away the malformations of the world and the psychological abuses of heresy.
Well, perhaps not hard put, as omnipotence is not really hard put for anything, but quick off the mark, and then constant, in a variety of ways. Some of these, of course, were perfectly natural, or ordinarily graceful, and others were downright out of the usual.
The very first of them had been the Light. He had been all but three, only three, when he had seen a strange light around his grandfather's head. His grandfather was saying the grace for Christmas dinner. Toby's grandfather was a very prayerful man, and Toby's father did not pray anymore in his young manhood, but he had been raised with grace for every meal and knew his parents would be most upset without it, so he had asked Toby's grandfather to say the grace.
Admittedly, for all his kindly piety, Walter Skinner was also a victim of the follies of Henry the Damned and his numerous sycophantic, greedy, unprincipled followers, and had wound up in less of a religion than that which once had set the tone for "Mary's England". In fact, as a Baptist at that point, he had not had much time for Mary at all, as far as Toby was thereafter able to ascertain, but he was nonetheless a strong man for the Bible, which habitually lay at his bedside, and did little in life without prior and continuing consultation with the Lord as he knew Him. In such an example, Toby could have done a great deal worse, and it was significant of Providence to provide him, in his inquiring days, with a Redemptorist brother as the first Catholic man of vows he ever spoke to, and a spitting image of his grandfather. Profoundly gentle, as humble and useful as a fence post, with a personal presence that was nothing but comfort.
But that was in Toby's young manhood. Back to his infancy, when, to square away some of the future in an overall accurate balance, the God of Light also shed a few rays on the little squirt when he was in a private kindergarten, rather younger than the five of the public schools that had such things in those days, if they did at all. He was in a basement room, riding on a tricycle, under the care of a young teacher who from time to time gave out chocolate covered buffaloes. An apt location, given that Toby would one day fall in love with teaching, to hold it in such esteem that he found all other callings boring. In our Father's house, there are many mansions, but Toby found it hard to believe that any of them was complete without a desk and a blackboard.
And all this interference with the ordinary was to continue, and thus the real burden of our story, so lately allowed to be told.
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