This was an old theme we had going, in the summer, I think, but I’m reading something fun, so I’m resurrecting it.
Nathan Mitchell loaned me a book of excerpts from Caryll Houselander’s works, and it’s provoked me to buy and read her autobiography, A Rocking Horse Catholic (99 cents for the Kindle version! ), and a meditation, The Way of the Cross. I’ve also ordered a volume of her stories for children, but it’s not here yet.
Houselander was a British Catholic living in the first half of the twentieth century who did most of her writing during the Second World War. She was a mystic of the mundane, a painfully sensitive woman with an unexpected shot of earthy humor, who was given a deep insight into the unity of the mystical body of Christ. Her autobiography tells the story of times in her youth when, as she says wryly, she tried to get out of the Catholic church, but failed. At one heartbreaking moment, she writes, “I began to hope that there might be some other Church in which there would also be the Real Presence, but in which one could approach and receive Christ, not among respectable people, but among those who were despised, who were failures, who were sinners, but who loved one another.” The story of how she overcomes this withdrawal has elements that reveal her specific moment in English Catholic history as well as aspects of the timeless story of God seeking the lost. As a spiritual autobiography, it is unusual in not being a tale of a conversion, but a tale of ongoing conversion. (She was baptized at six, hence her playful self-designation as a “rocking horse” Catholic.) It tells of the doubts of one who never doubted, the growth in faith of one who never left the faith. It also powerfully recounts the visions that awakened her, even in time of war, to the inextricable oneness of the global church.
The Way of the Cross is a meditation on the Stations of the Cross, with one chapter on each station, concluding with a poem. This would be especially appropriate for Lent, but it’s appropriate at any time (and those of you that seek out readings for Lent might appreciate knowing this early!). Here’s an extended quotation from the introduction, on the significance of the stations and their revelation of the Passion:
[In Jesus’ Passion,] all His secrets were out. Every detail of His Passion revealed something more of His character as man–not only His heroism and His majesty but His human necessities, and the human limitations which He deliberately adopted as part of His plan of love in order to be able to indwell us as we are, with our limitations and psychological as well as physical necessities and interdependence on one another. He was not only simulating our humanness outwardly but feeling as we feel; not only feeling His own grief, fear, compassion, need of sympathy, and so on, as man, but ours; not only knowing every nerve and fibre of His own love for us, but that of each one of us for one another.
She continues later:
Each one [who makes the Way of the Cross] meets himself on the Via Crucis, which is the road through death to life . . . . Yes, in the Stations of the Cross the person who has the eye of faith sees the story of Christ’s historical Passion–His own individual story–and the story of the suffering world, in which Christ’s Passion goes on through time; the way of the cross which, though it leads to the tomb and the dark sleep of death, leads on beyond it to the waking morning of resurrection and the everlasting springtime of life.
I hope Caryll Houselander might be a new spiritual companion for some of you. She has a grounded and grounding voice; reading her work feels more like accompanying a “holy fool” than a saint, although I think more and more that it’s hard to tell the difference.
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