Houselander on emptiness and seeking

 This past Monday, my Catholic ladies book club discussed Caryll Houselander's Reed of God.  I have always loved this little book, and even this third time reading it revealed small epiphanies I didn't receive before.  Houselander creates a pattern in her design of the chapters, moving from a description of emptiness in the beginning to an exploration of body and soul, and then to a meditation on how we seek Christ to fill that emptiness, reminding us that a sense of completion or fullness is only found in Heaven at the end of the book.  I needed the reminder that emptiness can be a gift, that seeking can be a way of living a life of faith.

One of my friends didn't love the book because she thought it was going to be more narrative. I was always drawn to it because of Houselander's imagery and lack of sentimentalism, and because she presents Mary to be emulated, rather than venerated. Even sixty years after it was published, it seems contemporary to me.  Although the book is a series of meditations on Mary as an example of living the Christian life, it still opened up conversations for a book club. For instance, in the first chapter on emptiness, she asks readers to consider whether they fill themselves with trifles or causes or busyness, instead of being empty to receive Christ.  Her encouragement to look for union with God through ordinary things, or the presence of God in ordinary moments, is not a revolutionary idea, but one that needs frequent reminders.

So, too, is her reminder that all of the things that seem like stumbling blocks can be used for God's glory. He can use our losses and missed opportunities and brokenness and unhappiness, but only if we empty out our own will to make room for His grace. That's the hard part.  To live like Mary means surrender and trust and discipline our will. My own will seems to be my biggest stumbling block most of the time. She writes,  "In the world in which we live today, the great understanding given by the Spirit of Wisdom must involve us in a lot of suffering. We shall be obliged to see the wound that sin has inflicted on the people of the world . . . we shall see the Christ in others, and that vision will impose an obligation on us for as long as we live the obligation of love; when we fail in it, we shall not be able to escape in excuses and distractions as we have done in the past; the failure will afflict us bitterly and always." 

Despite the acknowledgement that failure and suffering and rejection are a part of the Christian life, Houselander always comes back to the consolation of God in the word and in the ordinary things of the world, voices, laughter, folk songs, bird songs, " The Word of God uttered in Christ's human life is a folk song. In it is all the primal love and joy and sorrow of all the world. It explains and simplifies all human lives all times." 

Houselander also meditates on the miracle of incarnation and the intertwining of flesh and spirit, another source of God's presence and grace: "Although human beings smear everything they touch, they leave touches of beauty wherever they go, too; evidence that the sense receive their unique gifts of grace, wonder, joy, and gratitude because of the beauty that is their environment. St. Thomas says that the Being of God is the cause of the beauty of all that is."

If, as Houselander suggests, "seeking" can be another expression for "spiritual life," then seeking beauty is a way of seeking Christ. Loving the ordinary things, ordinary responsibilities, little things, little people, not making idols, but looking face to face at one man:

"Face to face with one man, we cannot forget, we cannot fail to know, what he wants and what he needs. For he has a life like our own, woven of joys and sorrows, anxieties and fears, work and loves. He has a wife and children, or else the problem of living without them. He needs to think, to learn, to have poetry in his life; to see an inward meaning in the things of every day. He needs faith and sacraments; he needs some explanation of suffering; he needs wise guidance and education to help him to grasp the truth of justice; he needs sympathy, stimulus for courage; he needs work which will not only bring in the food for his body but will content his soul and will be the means by which his likeness to the Trinity can be restored to him. He needs a reasonable measure of solitude, and he has the right to the secrets of his own soul, the right to set his own standard, to suffer his own sorrows; and above all, he has the right, the necessity, and the obligation to adore. 

"All of this can be forgotten and left out when one thinks in terms of 'humanity,' but face to face with one man it cannot be forgotten.

"Before God there is one Man, Christ."

The final third of the book explores the idea of seeking Christ.  Do we recognize that "the survival of all that is worth the cost of a man's blood depends on how we foster the Christ life in the souls of the children and not only in the children but in  all the reborn of any age?"  

Not always. I need frequent reminders to desire Christ, not idols, not what I think I want, not what I think is lost, and to seek Him in small ones, in small things, in all that bears his Hand, in love and in forgiveness;

"... Those who seek the lost Lord will find traces of His being and beauty in all that men have made, from music and poetry and sculpture to the gingerbread men in the Patisseries, from the final calculation of the pure mathematician to the first delighted chalk drawing of a small child. 

"Only complacency can take away the sharp edge of love; boredom cannot do it and neither can aridity, for love is known as desire, which is stronger than we are and drives us as the wind drives a sail. 

 It is expedient that Christ should go, because we shall then seek, and seeking, touch the edge of the truths we cannot yet bear; because in the search we become aware of the wonder and mystery that contentment blinds us to."

What tastes better than a crisp, tart apple from the tree?
Memory relived.

Seeking fruits of the Spirit

Quick Takes without Complaints

1. After all my moaning yesterday, my sixth grader place 2nd in the physics category of the science fair! A minor miracle! I’m sure it is not because he earned extra points on creativity and neatness, but because he gave a good presentation to the judges, since he knew what he had done.



2. Daffodils are blooming! The end of drear February is near. Welcome spring! I don’t see a lot of bulbs coming up around here; they must not do as well with the short winters as they do up in the north, where the first daffodils arrive around the end of March or so. But these few blooming around the entrance of the library are a welcome harbinger.

3. Completed and filed taxes and now am planning what to do with the money the government pays me to have children in the form of the child tax credit, if Mr. IRS doesn’t announce an audit…



4. When I passed a house under construction on my run with the lab today, a construction worker called out “Beautiful Day!” Another said, “Beautiful dog!” Beautiful indeed. And beautiful work they were doing! Spring sunshine makes everything seem a little prettier.



5. Books in the mail! My father in law sent some thrillers to pass the time with, and my new old copy of Caryll Houselander’s Way of the Cross arrived from some Benedictines’ library, providentially. It begins with reflections like this:
                 "The Stations of the Cross are not given to us only to remind us of the historical Passion of Christ but to show us what is happening now, and happening to each one of us."

                      and "Each one meets himself on the Via Crucis, which is the road through death to life. In Christ he finds the meaning of his own suffering, the power of his own capacity for love. . . . The stations show us how each one can lighten the heavy cross that is laid upon the bent back of the whole human race now, how each one in the power of Christ's love can sweeten his own suffering and that of those around him."

Thanks for the recommendation, Anne.



6. A letter, a letter, I love a love letter! I love seeing my name written by my husband’s hand. Emails are for business and spies, phone calls are for catching up and feeling distant, but letters are a physical presence, transcenders of time when they take 20 days to arrive, tangible joys to be revisited.



7. I got a hair cut I like, and it was free! My mom trimmed it up while she was here.

Welcome, weekend!

Thanks, Jen, for hosting.

Curatives

Exhausted by a daylong carnival fundraiser at the kids’ school, my husband slept (relatively) late Sunday morning. I drug myself from the nest of our warm bed downstairs to monitor the volume of the kids comparing their candy stashes. They were rapidly moving toward an “it’s no fair” argument. But I threw out the grand prize from the silent auction: a Playmobil airplane. Now all six of them are working together to put it together and to people it with figures from their collection. A rare moment.
Their cooperative play gave me enough time to read this in Magnificat this morning:

To the eye that sees, littleness reveals infinitely more than vastness. God is known more truly by a little finite creature through the contemplation of a snowdrop than through the contemplation of the universe. Very soon the intellect staggers before immensity, it is used up, exhausted, only the rare heart responds to it at all. But the inward eye fills with light when it contemplates a little thing, the heart can fold upon it, and so the heart expands and the mind does not wither, but puts out petal upon lovely petal of thought. . . . If you ever had a little green tree frog and watched him puffing out with a pomposity worthy of a dragon before croaking, you must have guessed that there is a tender smile on our heavenly Father’s face, that he likes us to laugh and he laughs with us; the frog will teach your heart more than all the books of theology in the world.

 From Caryll Houselander, whose little Reed of God is a revelation of beauty in itself.

Perhaps this meditation stuck out because I’ve been reading Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv. I’d seen it on a number of lists, and when the ranger at the Sandhill Crane preserve highly recommended it, I checked it out from the library (I think she meant for me to buy it in the gift shop – instead I bought Scary Stories from the South, which more than one of us will enjoy). Houselander articulates briefly in a paragraph the highest purpose and necessity of nature, which Louv attempts to communicate in a less poetic book with lots of studies and anecdotes, but without ever really spelling out the connection between nature and the eternal.

Not that Louv doesn’t make a lot of good points. Even after reading only a few pages, I felt an urgent need to send the kids outdoors to play. I don’t want them suffering from nature deficit disorder. And they could all use a hit of nature to make them more cheerful and peaceful. We’re a family without a lot of tech gadgets or good TV reception. But sometimes my kids want to stay instead and play Legos or read books more than they want to go outside. Louv pointed out the fact that a/c and central heating deters kids from leaving their controlled climate, an issue here, but since I keep our thermostat at frugal temps, I suspect my kids stay indoors more for other reasons. Perhaps number one is that I can’t let them just bike aimlessly around the neighborhood like I did as a kid. I’m too afraid, both of molesters and of fearful, well meaning, spoilsport neighbors.


Then again, Louv points out that a lot of these fears are unfounded and based on misperceptions of the frequency of random acts of violence.


I suppose I shouldn’t automatically assume a defensive position when I read this book. My oldest are just now hitting the age when they can be a little more independent, and I do let them go fish on the pier and bike to the Air Force Base without me. I make the littles go outside when they’re too noisy. We go to the beach and camping and on hikes. In our old neighborhood, the kids used to play in the swamp and on rocks at Plum Point Park, as I ran around in circles on the road. I don’t really fear that my kids will lack a connection with nature, but I do fear that their opportunities to have free access to green space to play freely will continue to shrink.


When I was little, my parents moved counties to a more rural area, next to a vacant lot. We made a small trail and a stick house in the brambles. We watched may apples die to make room for violets and then for goldenrod. We ice skated on the pond next door (to the neighbor’s consternation). We rode bikes on county roads. And then one day someone bought the lot next door and built a house. And eventually, after I was grown, my parents’ bought 40 acres – a good part of it a big vacant lot.


So we go there when we can to get a dose of nature. I hope my kids have memories of time spent outdoors there and the other places we haul them to. While I may not finish reading Louv’s book because I don’t need to be convinced of the importance of unstructured time spent connecting with God’s creation, I’m thankful for the reminder to encourage to look for little things to contemplate.