The Old Jesuit On The Train
In 'Fifth Business,' a wise old man tells a seeker to search elsewhere
Last night I wrote about reading the Robertson Davies novel Fifth Business over the holiday season of 1993-94, and its two sequels, having firecracker-like synchronicities during them, then three powerful dreams in short succession — dreams that changed my life. I read the trilogy (Deptford Trilogy) again probably twenty years ago (I know it was sometime not long after I was married). Looking for an audiobook for the long drive to Texas and back, I chose Fifth Business again, and am really, really enjoying it.
As I wrote last night, one of the core themes of the book is the psychology of religion, and how the miraculous and the ineffable can be true guides to reality. The novel’s narrator, Dunstan Ramsay, says at one point:
"Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all veritable facts? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire, or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvellous is indeed an aspect of the real?"
Listening to this novel on audiobook is making me reconsider where I am in my life, in new ways. Maybe there’s something unusual about this book. A reader of this newsletter wrote this morning to me:
Those books are truly haunted. At 21, I worked night security at the University of Toronto. The woman I was involved with at the time pressed Fifth Business into my hand and I read a chapter of the Deptford trilogy each between midnight rounds through spooky old academic buildings and an actually-haunted theatre building. I was a psychologically and spiritually destabilized individual after a month of that, with attendant synchronicities and even what I’d call abstract apparitions, all in tune with the trilogy narrative. Life was too beautiful and too horrible to bear, all at once. This woman was a real force of chaotic nature, more than I could handle eventually. But I’m grateful to her. Before her and Davies, I was the sort of Catholic you started out as - kind of a baby Richard John Neuhaus at least as I read him to be. Rational and polemical. I didn’t lose my mind or fall into the Gnosticism that Davies ultimately seemed to toy around with. But I learned I’m not in charge. For the rest of my life I’ll be a Catholic, living in the constant appreciation of the promise and the threat of marvels. They abound, and we do not govern them.
Another reader writes, about the novel’s lesson that bad things can be simply the shadow side of blessing:
You seem to have a lot of "burning bush" moments like Moses in the desert. It seems entirely within your Southern flair/Orthodox character.
Your recollection of Mr. Greene (no relation to me that I know of) made me reflect on a couple of good things springing from bad. I am a law school graduate. Even though I mightily prepared to it, I was a poor law student and quickly discovered every professional gate was closed to me because of it. Furthermore, law school saddled me with tremendous student debt that will never be repaid.
But--I found my Catholic faith there, and at a campus ministry event I met my wife. Those two things make the experience a bargain, and I look at my student loan payments as a something of a tax on receiving these gifts.
Another thing, this one more recent. A promotion came up at work. I thought I was eminently qualified and well-liked by management, and came away from the interviews believing I aced them. When the promotion went to a coworker (who is also qualified and well-liked and is doing a tremendous job, I should add) it sent me into a bad funk punctuated by excessive drinking and foul moods around my house.
It wasn't long, however, before realizing I lacked critical organization skills and the ability to stay on task required of supervisors. If I got the promotion, it would have been a disaster.Then last week my father was diagnosed with serious cancer. My parents live several states away in the deep South. With my new supervisor's blessing, I flew out the next day and have been here ever since. COVID powerfully flexed the work-from-home muscles of our organizations, so I don't have to miss any work to do this.
Had I received the promotion, however, duties and responsibilities would keep me closer to my office. And unable to be with family for what could be the final days of our patriarch's life.
Years back in church men's group, a man once said "Do you ever look back at life and think 'Whew, that was close'?" At the time I applied that to relationships, and after reading your latest Substack I realize it applies to blocked paths in life too.
Back to the woo-woo aspects of Fifth Business. Around noon, I got on I-35 in Temple and motored south to Austin. I was listening to a passage where a minor character named Mrs. Shanklin dies, and Dunstan Ramsey gets involved settling her estate. As the narrator told of Mrs. Shanklin’s death, I passed the Shanklin Road exit from the interstate. No kidding.
That synchronicity told me: pay attention. Shortly thereafter, Dunstan Ramsey finds himself in Europe, on a train to Vienna, in the company of a highly eccentric elderly Jesuit named Ignacio Blazon. Using Amazon.com’s Look Inside feature, I was able to find the passage in which Father Blazon delivered his monologue to Dunstan, and screenshot it. The “crazy saint” is Mary Dempster, a holy fool who lives in a mental institution in Toronto, and for whom Dunstan cares because he feels an obligation to her. If you read last night’s newsletter, you know that a boy threw a snowball with a stone inside it at young Dunstan, who dodged it. It struck Mrs. Dempster in the head, causing her ultimately to lose her mind. Ramsay believes he has witnessed three miracles Mrs. Dempster (who is still alive as he relates the story) performed in life — including appearing to him on a World War I battlefield as a statue of the Virgin Mary, as the Immaculate Conception. Ramsay believes that somehow Mary Dempster saved his life there.
Here’s Father Blazon, after having eaten a hearty lunch Ramsay packed for their long train journey:
“Who is she? This is what you must discover, Ramezay, and you must find your answer in psychological truth, not in objective truth.”
I suspect that I’m supposed to take a lesson for myself from that passage — this, owing to the synchronicity. But what? I don’t have a Mrs. Dempster in my life, strictly speaking, but there are figures and places that play a role in my personal mythology, and that keep recurring in ways that I cannot resolve or even understand. I have a couple of people in mind, but psychologically speaking, Who are they? Why were they given to me? Why were they taken from me? What is the meaning of the sacrifice?
Maybe I can make some progress towards resolving intractable conflicts I have with certain people by ceasing to ask, “What do I have to do to make this right?” (because apparently I can do nothing to make it right), and instead ask, “Which figures are these people in my personal mythology?” Maybe there will be answers there.
Have any of you reader ever undergone Jungian psychoanalysis? The second novel in the series, The Manticore, is about that. If you have, what was it like?
I usually have a second item for y’all, but I’ve got to go to bed now. Up early, quick breakfast with a friend, then to Central Market to buy 300 tortillas for my wife and kids. We store them in the freezer. They are regarded as the equivalent of the Elves lembas bread at my house. Also, some of Austin’s delicious bone dry East Side Cider. Any other food I should take back home from Texas? Don’t say Tootsie Tomanetz’s brisket. I checked — they’re open again, but only on Saturday.