New journey to God.

This is a very unusual work of fiction by a Canadian author, as its Preface reveals:

"This story is about a Saint, a modern city, an average girl, and a book. The saint is the archangel Michael, the city is Toronto and the girl could be anyone. The book is St. Bonaventure's classic of Franciscan spirituality, The Mind's Journey to God. Like everything else, it is also about God."

With one exception, all the details of the Toronto setting are realistic--The Eaton Centre, St. Michael's Cathedral, the University of Toronto buildings, and so on. The exception is the Newman Club chapel just off St. George Street, which the author re-dedicates to St. Bonaventure (instead of St. Thomas Aquinas) and puts in the hands of the Franciscans instead of the Basilians.

Chapter 1 begins with, "There should be a statue of St. Michael at the top of the CN Tower." After all, he is the city's patron saint. Catherine thinks this, as she looks down from the tower on an unlovely city full of glass boxes, one of them looking like "a gigantic waste-paper basket emerging from a purple crate." As she is thinking how graceless it is, however, a young man near her surprises her by saying, "How I love this city." When he asks in conversation, "Who is like God?" she recognizes who he is--for that is what the Hebrew word "Michael" means.

Thus begins a series of dialogues between them whose purpose the author states in the Preface: "Theology is easier to understand in dialogue form than in straight prose, because a dialogue makes room for all the dumb questions one would like to ask the theologian, but that seldom appear in academic texts." In The Mind's Journey, she found a complete summary of medieval philosophy and spirituality: "It was all there, step by step: how God is present in nature and in human society; the importance of doctrine, and its limitations; how God is present to the human mind, and what difference grace makes." To grow in prayer, she writes, we have to learn how to see nature, how to see man, and how to think about God: the secular cannot be irrelevant to the sacred.

So the book tells a story of education in the Faith. Early on, Catherine is overwhelmed by what the Archangel tells her, and begs him to stop. On Armistice Day, at the war memorial in front of Hart House, the rain mingles with her own private miseries as a victim of Modernism: "It is hopeless. How can I commit myself to anything, when nobody believes in anything any more: art, science, politics, education, health, nation, family. It has all been tried: nothing works." Cheerfully and systematically, Michael strives to give back to her what modern thought has stolen from her.

Even in the last chapter, her questions become complaints: "How can you love God in nature when nature has been colonized by the technological society in the service of greed? How can you love God in man, when the face of man is gone, and only the skull remains? If there is only death . . ." Michael's reply is an exclamation: "Then find him in death!" So his final exhortation is for her to find peace in the Cross of Christ.

Over the previous months, she says, "We had seen the grand movements of time, space and spirit in creation, the history of nature, grace and glory, and we had looked at my own life path, intersecting the rest as worker, sinner and Christian." Her visionary experiences offer plenty of material for both our reasons and imaginations to contend with. They are also communicated with a great deal of wit--as in aphorisms like the following:

"Dogma is to man the best reduction of the vision of the angels."

"Evil is a poison, not a problem."

"Even in Toronto, existence is coherent."

And, of the representation of Michael in the St. Michael's College quadrangle, "Six panels of steel do not an anchangel make."

The only part of this book whose suitability I might question is the vision of Purgatory in the last chapter. Otherwise it is a very effective portrayal of the stages in the mind's upward ascent to God. Michael is a bringer of light, a messenger of the Almighty, the Word which enlightens every man who comes into the world. In Bonaventure's thought, when we perceive an object as beautiful or pleasing we are implying a reference to an idea of beauty which is stable and unchanging. The same applies to moral principles; they imply standards of goodness and justice which are unchanging and necessary. To apprehend them, we need the guiding action of divine light. Michael is sent to bring Catherine to an awareness of this fact, and to an understanding of the stages in the mind's upward ascent to God.

A note on the back cover of this book says only that "Catherine Dalzell was born in Toronto, Canada, some years before they built the CN Tower." However, she is a mathematician and a physicist, not a philosopher or a theologian, and she has degrees from Toronto, Oxford, and Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburg. Articles by her have appeared in a number of Catholic publications, including the Canadian Catholic Review, and in a very recent book, Empowering women: Critical Views on the Beijing Conference, she has a chapter entitled "The bracket brigade at work: The UN's vision of Utopia." Whatever turn her literary career takes in future, in The New Journey to God she has written a book which is thoughtful, demanding, and well worth meditating upon. It deserves to be widely read.