Literary / Arts
James Gray — Bush Dweller Par Excellence
Volume 28 Issue 4, 5 & 6 | Posted: June 30, 2014
Review of Bush Dweller, Essays in memory of James Gray, OSB, edited by Donald Ward, St. Peter’s Abbey, Muenster, SK, 2010
I first heard James Gray described as his favourite former editor of the Prairie Messenger by Grant Maxwell. As a young man, Grant was one of my heroes just as I gained the distinct impression James was one of his, despite their being of the same generation.
One of Grant’s great traits was his honest enthusiasm. When you came within his ambiance, you felt graced by it. So his praise and enthusiasm for a Benedictine monk and Catholic newspaper editor named James Gray launched that name well into my unconscious.
Review of Bush Dweller, Essays in memory of James Gray, OSB, edited by Donald Ward, St. Peter’s Abbey, Muenster, SK, 2010
I first heard James Gray described as his favourite former editor of the Prairie Messenger by Grant Maxwell. As a young man, Grant was one of my heroes just as I gained the distinct impression James was one of his, despite their being of the same generation.
One of Grant’s great traits was his honest enthusiasm. When you came within his ambiance, you felt graced by it. So his praise and enthusiasm for a Benedictine monk and Catholic newspaper editor named James Gray launched that name well into my unconscious.
Grant, who I called the dean of Canadian Catholic social journalists, was an oblate of the Benedictine Monastery at Muenster, Saskatchewan. An oblate is a layperson who attaches him or herself spiritually to a monastic community. By the time I got the job as first lay editor of the Prairie Messenger in 1982, James was what he preferred to call a solitary, but I referred to him as a hermit of the community.
A solitary is someone who has evolved to the point where they feel called to live apart but within the confines of the overall community. Thomas Merton developed to this stage, although the struggle to get the community to accept this calling was not easy for him in the pre-Vatican II church.
I used to go out on the quieter Friday afternoons to visit James at his cabin and talk about whatever came to mind. If I had lasted more than one year in the job, perhaps I too would have become an oblate and taken long term spiritual direction with James Gray – and gotten to put a little essay in this marvelous book which St. Peter’s Press published in 2010, the year after his death at age 82.
2.
As this volume of essays makes plain, James had a distinct and affirmative personality. There was something archetypal about him on first encounter. He was such a regular guy, and yet there was something extraordinary at the same time.
Very progressive in his thinking, a thoroughly enlightened man despite the fact he had grown up scant miles from where he dwelled all his days. Such is the universal and university nature of a monastery and St. Peter’s had a radical reputation for its openness. The Prairie Messenger has always been revered as a beacon of progressive Catholicism.
My experience of James might be likened to that of a wise and warm uncle. There was this immediately embracing thing about the acceptance from him. The writer Jan Zwicky, one of twenty essayists in the book, calls him a spiritual genius and I assume this is what she is getting at.
What she is attributing as a personal quality, James might insist was merely the accident of grace, such was the dominant Catholic theology of his time. Grace is poured through the empty vessel. As Jan Zwicky stated, it is not an action but a state of being “it seeks anonymity, it makes nothing, rather it unmakes trouble.”
James, and Grant before him, for me were the persistent channel of such grace which makes all the difference, even in especially difficult times. It was Grant who recommended me for the job and it was James who made losing it acceptable.
Another Vancouver Island writer Jane Munro, also at the Abbey for a writer’s retreat, says this about him in her essay:
“During the summer of 2004, I spent three weeks in a hermitage on the grounds of St. Peter’s Abbey. One afternoon. I was startled out of absorption in my work by an upright gentleman in Benedictine robes and work boots who’d come to retrieve a phone left by a previous occupant. He politely wasted no time…I don’t recall what we said to each other. But what I shall never forget was his luminosity. He was a figure of light. A hand might have swept across the fields, captured the July sunshine, and poured it into his black habit. He shone.”
It's interesting his immediate impact on these secular west coast writers, both women, who would have arrived at the Abbey with radically other expectations from some of the other writers, priests and bishops who went openly seeking, needing this light from the hermit.
These are pieces by priests and bishops who took spiritual direction from James; or from his friendship. The tone of their reflections is distinctly different. It lacked the element of surprise. In their expectation, James was delivering what spiritual directors deliver. Not that it was not well valued, and not taken for granted.
James was real. When someone is real, you remember them, you cannot quite get enough of them, what they meant to you takes on a further dimension. Catholics feel it is God speaking to them in a special way. Intellectuals and secular writers frame it in terms of light. I like Dennis Gruending’s honest puzzlement at the paradox of his experience of the man he listed among the best teachers in his life.
“I never really understood his desire to become a hermit… He did eventually go to live in a small house in the woods, albeit on the grounds of the abbey. This coincided with a time when I was away from Saskatchewan, then returned, got married and had a family. My visits to St. Peter's became infrequent… I found him friendly enough but also somewhat distant. I had an unmistakable impression that I was keeping him from something that he found more compelling than my interest in journalism and politics. So, I stopped going.”
3.
If anyone should have lived to be 102 it was Father James, as Bede Hubbard called him upon first introduction. Brother Bede was the prize winning editor I was to replace. Extremely intelligent and well spoken, Bede had chosen to remain a monastic Brother rather than seek ordination to the priesthood. I found it disappointing there was no essay by Bede in the volume.
He was so well read he knew that the tradition was for fewer priests, that the ordinary monk should be simply professed. This was not the order of the day in Muenster because the Monastery historically was an abbey nulius, meaning it served as the diocese for the German Catholic colony of that part of Saskatchewan which St. Peter’s was set up to serve.
Saskatchewan was established in colonies including French Catholic (Gravelbourg), German Catholic (Humboldt region), Jewish, Temperance Protestant (Saskatoon) etc. The Prairie Messenger was a German speaking paper until the early 1920s. St. Peter’s Abbey was providing parish priests throughout the region and this was a conflict in identity and purpose for a monastery. In recent years Saskatoon Diocese has assumed the diocesan responsibility.
James said about Bede how he was one of the brighter lights in the community and prized as such. After James as editor, came Michael Pomedli and then Bede, all prize winning editors until I came along. James was on the committee that hired me along with the late (and great) Andrew Britz and the present abbot Peter Novecosky who has served as editor since Andrew’s health failed after twenty years in charge following my departure.
When I took the job my wife and I had three very young daughters. With the farm, the college, the village, the press and the monastery as context, it seemed like a twenty to thirty years project. I had been director of communications with the Catholic Health Association of Canada in Ottawa for three years.
The year at the PM was a struggle because I was not properly educated in journalism. Ironically there was a mail strike all that first summer so I could have and should have stayed in Ottawa and taken a journalism course that would have smoothed the way.
I got behind the eight ball early and never really recovered from that technical glitch, plus I was pushing the paper in much too much a political direction. So, after a year, I was let go. As chairperson of the hiring and supervising committee Andrew was forced into the role of the heavy and had to give me the bad news and let me go after one year.
From James (and Peter), I received nothing but supportive empathy that it had not worked out, but I could see the necessity and wisdom of their action. It set me firmly on the path that led to ICN. But back then, the monks had really wanted Grant Maxwell but he was well beyond that stage, editing publications for the Jesuits in Toronto, and getting ready for retirement which he did in Victoria with his wife Vivian. He served on the board of ICN for a number of years in the 1990s.
Grant died a decade before James. He’s another one who I would have liked to have read what he would have written about the bush dweller.