“I am confident now that the poetry, the beauty of life, which is nothing else than our divine Lord living in human souls, will go on, and that our lives, though they seem to leave no visible trace, will not have been in vain.”
Caryll Houselander (1901-54)—or what I’ve read of her, anyway—was a poem. One that lives on through her published words. Wood-carver, Catholic spiritual writer, art therapist, healer, disciplined chain-smoker, “critic of false religiosity, a zany and hilarious redheaded friend given to passionate attachments and driven by instinct to seek creative solitude” …what a woman. Her books are on my “favorite grab” shelf. A true contemplative who also lived it out in the love she gave. The real deal.
Isn’t this who we want to be friends with and who we want to be? —the real deal! So real that we can see ourselves as we are in all our awfulness and goodness and who we are becoming. And since we have this self-awareness, we see it in others. Which means we drop pretensions. We see Christ in everyone. We’re actually listening and looking for him. Beckoning him out of those around us.
Don’t we all want to be that person who takes risks? The kind of risks that enhance our relationships and leave footprints of our love on them?
Maybe we don’t think enough about the power we have in this. The power that is given to us just for this. We just need to use it. And it summons the divine.
I mean, think of how we in the church often measure spiritual maturity. Status. Piousness. Education. Leadership. Even by a specific cultural demographic. That’s not turning out so well.
Houselander critiques this faux spirituality and invites us to something truer:
“If [Christ’s] beauty seems at times almost hidden in what we see of Christians…it is also revealed vividly over and over again where one least expects it in what I call ‘Unconscious Christs,’ and in people who are not considered respectable by the world…It is this unconscious Christ which is the consolation for the unlovingness of the professionally righteous.”
What a burn.
What a blessing.
Even for the lost. The looking. The lonely. The wounded and suffering. The shamed. The invisible. What a blessing it would be for the professionally righteous to also see themselves in these categories.
Do you want to know how to find joy? It’s in attachment love. It doesn’t matter if things are going well or if you are really going through it. Joy is found in withness. As Jim Wilder puts it, “Joy means, ‘I am glad to be with you.’” When you experience this kind of withness, it fuels attachment love. And this is that special power we are given. It is a life-resurrecting kind of power.
As Houselander tells us, Christ “gives us his own power of consummated love to use for one another, to comfort and heal and restore one another; even, in a mysterious sense that those who have really known sin and sorrow and love will understand, to raise one another from the dead.” She quotes Jesus from John 14:12:
“Truly I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do. And he will do even greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.”
We read over this verse without dropping our jaws. Those who believe in Christ will do greater works than his disciples were witnessing? What are these works? The resurrecting of the true selves we are created to live. Calling it out. Calling our Christness out and seeing it in the rich distinctiveness to which we each reflect him. And beholding how that is enhanced in our withness. The embrace of the beauty of it all. So we can name the deaths of self that need to happen and the deaths that have been forced on us. We can show our wounds. And imagine how they will heal together. Staying to share the stories that our scars tell. Because they too make it into the resurrection. “The ultimate miracle of Divine Love is this, that the life of the Risen Lord is given to us to give to one another. It is given to us through our own human loves.”
Keep listening. Keep looking. Keep staying in the room. For joy. And wait.
“This seeking for truth is, for the Catholic too, in spite of the great help from the Sacraments, a reaching out into the darkness for the hand of God, a listening in the silence for the heartbeat of God. For truth is not a formula or a penny Catechism, it is a Person who can only be known through personal contact and of whom knowledge is inexhaustible: Truth is Christ.”
She was the paramour (maybe not consummated) of Sidney Reilly, "Ace of Spies." (If you're my age-ish, you may remember the Masterpiece Theater series starring young Sam Neill.) She had a vision of Reilly's execution during the Russian Revolution. In summary, the spiritual world is complex and fascinating.
It’s really easy these days to see all the ways we get with-ness wrong but what I appreciate about your words here, Aimee, is the picture you paint of what it looks like to live grounded and generous, “always looking” for where Love dwells.