Night Office

He was a Trappist and a chatterbox, guestmaster at the little orchard house in Georgetown, aging man of paradox if not comedy. Father Canisius welcomed us with hours of talk on silence and the use of mantras.

He had a history of chat: twenty-five years a garrulous Jesuit before his leap to Benedict and the cheese-maker monks, Oka’s most unsilent man. He nearly burst. An abbot pitied all the pent-up words, sent him to this daughter-house as greeter to talk at will, just not to his chanting brothers.

Novice SJs, high on Merton, we drove from Guelph to see these monks and their apple trees— expecting what, some upward catacomb? Practitioners of the perfected heart? What I saw was a young Trappist talking to a dog—where else might mysticism start?

Our older ones, Crosby and Lilburn, came away sceptical of Canisius, who had wasted their day with anecdotes. I found him mad and reverent, something of the street saint Benoit Labre, living out his illness under the eye of God.

A year later, I was assigned to a prison, a minor chaplain whose job was kindness to burglars, arsonists, and boys who sold grass. Vows looming, I went back to Georgetown alone, listened to Canisius, attempted the chant, ate a barren meal, and stayed the night.

Was it 3 a.m. he knocked at my door, calling me to the night office? He saw I would not make it and told me to sleep on. The next day he asked his practised question, “Did you find what you came for?”

I went back to my work at the jail, and to a sense of a cage that I alone had erected around my heart. Caught between “Ours” and my own, I made the choice, leaving one lost self to chant the night office among the apple trees.