Lea and me: when I was 22, a university student and a lapsed Catholic in a shaky marriage, I joined Therafields, the cultlike therapeutic community founded by Lea Hindley-Smith. She was a gifted healer, a real estate entrepreneur--and, as it turned out, a woman stalked by madness.

IN THE FALL OF 1964, AS A 17-YEAR-OLD, I left my home in a suburb of Schenectady; New York, .and came to Canada to study at the University of Toronto. A provincial youth travelling to Paris in a Balzac novel couldn't have felt a keener sense of release, of adventure, of expanded horizons. For the first time in my life, I was happy in my unhappiness:

Although I had been raised Catholic and took up residence at St. Michael's College, I stopped going to mass. No spiritual crisis, no troubled conscience--I just stopped going. Curiously enough, I became intrigued by the intellectual side of Catholicism, which I had not encountered before--the Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson school of neo-scholasticism, and those terribly intense, spiritual Catholic novelists, such as Bloy and Bernanos. The French intellectuals stood in dramatic opposition to the defiantly philistine Irish American priests I had known as a child; they had a kind of austere glamour, compounded of the light from the Rose Window of Chartres and the good peasant burgundy served in the cafes where they argued with Jean-Paul Sartre. I cheered them on from a distance, as it were, as if they were my team in the major leagues of philosophy.

Over the next few years, even their glamour began to fade, as various revolutions appeared on the horizon. Cosmic enlightenment, Timothy Leary with his promise of LSD-enhanced orgasms, Abbie Hoffman with his vision of politicized hippies--all this was infinitely more exciting than the Church had ever been.

In turn, unbeknownst to me, the nuns and priests at St. Michael's College--many of them, anyway--were quietly embarking on their own revolution. The year I arrived at that college, these doctoral students in theology, experts in the philosophy of St. Bonaventure and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, were sitting in a room with a woman named Lea Hindley-Smith and weeping over their negligent fathers or their angry mothers.

Lea had a penetrating gaze, a bouffant hairdo slightly smaller than a papal tiara and a corpulent frame over which she alternately draped two satin smocks: one a gold colour, the other purple. She had no social or academic status; she was born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1916, and as an eight-year-old had heard about her father being carted off to a lunatic asylum. Despising her mother as a weakling, she faced the grim task of making a living in the world with no resources but her own ingenuity and determination.