Advent Day 2: Caryll Houselander
Loving people back to life
Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life…Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.
Advent Day 2: Caryll Houselander (1901-1954)
If you picture saints as pious church mice, let Caryll Houselander be your Advent reality check. Caryll loved scotch, smoked like a chimney and swore like a sailor. She was prone to panic attacks. She was sarcastic and impatient, especially with those she called common sense Christians who practiced a very sanitized brand of religion. Limited in formal education, she was nevertheless a gifted therapist and a bestselling writer. And without ever studying religion or theology, she became one of the great mystics of the 20th century.
Caryll Houselander was born in 1901 in Bath, England to attractive, outgoing parents who struggled to bond with their shy, spiritually-gifted child. Her home was not a happy one. Her banker father was often absent. Her mother was prone to wild mood swings—tender one moment, cruel the next. At eleven, the Houselanders divorced. Soon after, Caryll was shuttled off to Our Lady Of Compassion, a convent boarding school outside Birmingham. There, she received the first of the three great visions that would shape her life.
One morning, Caryll was walking down a school hallway when she noticed a German nun polishing shoes and sobbing. This was the eve of World War I when anti-German prejudice was at a fever pitch, and the nun had been shunned by both the local community and her fellow sisters.
Caryll watched as the nun worked and cried. Then, without warning, she was overtaken by a vision of the sad woman adorned in a crown of thorns.
I stood…dumbfounded and then, finding my tongue, I said to her, ‘I would not cry, if I was wearing the crown of thorns, like you are.’ She looked at me, startled, and asked, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and at the time I did not. I sat down beside her and together we polished the shoes.
Not long after, Caryll returned to live with her mother who’d taken in a priest as a boarder. This arrangement fueled gossip among the busybody neighbors, and the Houselanders soon found themselves outcast. The stress of social isolation provoked Caryll’s first panic attack. She would suffer from anxiety for the rest of her life, especially when meeting new people.
At seventeen, Caryll had her second vision while on her way to buy potatoes. As she crossed the street to the market, she caught a fluttering in the corner of her eye. She looked up and saw floating in the sky a Russian icon of a Christ-like figure, crucified and wearing the crown of a European king. Days later, the Tsar of Russia was assassinated.
But it was her third vision—an interior vision—while riding the London tube one evening, that most affected her life.
All sorts of people jostled together, sitting and strap-hanging—workers of every description going home at the end of the day. Quite suddenly I saw with my mind, but as vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them—but because He was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here too…all those people who had lived in the past, and all those yet to come. I came out into the street and walked for a long time in the crowds. It was the same here, on every side, in every passer-by, everywhere—Christ.
This powerful vision of Christ incarnate in everyone and everything set Caryll’s life on a new course. Always sensitive to the suffering of others, she came to believe that when we feed the hungry or comfort the afflicted, it is Christ himself we are comforting. Caryll thought that if only everyone could wake up to the Christ-nature within themselves and others—to our innate union with God—all loneliness would be banished.
Caryll spent the rest of her life trying to awaken people to their Christ-nature. She worked in hospitals and asylums, organized relief efforts during World War II, and wrote books of poetry and spirituality. When This War Is The Passion, a reflection on the global conflict she was living through, became a surprise bestseller, she suddenly found herself sought out by throngs of desperate people who appeared at her flat seeking counsel at all hours of day and night.
Though she had received three extraordinary visions in her life, she taught those who came to her that the spiritual life isn’t—and cannot—exist only in visions, prayer, meditation, reading, or in church…or even primarily through those expressions. Rather, the spiritual life is being present to every moment as we go about
…earning a living, clearing the home, caring for the children, making and mending clothes, cooking, and all the other manifold duties and responsibilities…it is really through ordinary human life and the things of every hour of every day that union with God comes about.
Caryll’s reputation as a healer of lost souls spread throughout England. She became so renowned during the war that, despite having no training in psychology, therapists referred particularly challenging cases to her. With each, Caryll set about restoring—or, for many, nurturing for the first time—a belief that they were beloved and made in God’s own image. That no matter what they’d experienced, what horror they’d suffered, Christ’s love still burned in their souls. That they had within themselves not only the strength to fan the coals of that love back to a flame, but also the responsibility to pass that fire on to others in need of warmth and comfort.
Nearly all her patients—many of whom had been considered damaged beyond repair—eventually recovered.
Later, other therapists tried using Caryll’s methods with their patients. Most failed to meet her success. Asked by a journalist what made Caryll special, the President of The British Psychology Society said simply, “She loved people back to life.”
Loving people back to life was Caryll Houselander’s unique gift. For her, Jesus was both key and cure. She believed in the deepest sense that in Christ we live and breathe and have our being—not a distant Christ limited to old stories and dry statements of faith, but a living Christ incarnate in each one of us, waiting to be born at every moment.
Practice
Read this passage from Caryll Houselander’s Advent book The Reed Of God then follow the prompt.
…it is his will that Christ shall be born in every human being’s life and not, as a rule, through extraordinary things, but through ordinary daily life and the human love that people give to one another…What we shall be asked to give is our daily life—our thoughts, our service to one another, our affections and loves, our words, our intellect, our waking, working, and sleeping, our ordinary human joys and sorrows—to God….To surrender all that we are, as we are, to the Spirit of Love in order that our lives may bear Christ into the world—that is what we shall be asked.
Reflect on the following questions through journaling, prayer, meditation or discussion:
What does it mean for you that Christ shall be born through ordinary daily life?
In 2024, how might you increase your giving and receiving through those things Caryll Houselander mentions: thoughts, service, affection, love, waking, working, etc.?
Name what you need to do today, then imagine how each task can be transformed from the mundane into the sacred by bringing your presence and intention to it.
Holiday Happenings at Life In The City
Dec. 10, 11:15 am: LITC’s original musical, Make Room In Your Heart.
Dec. 21, 7:00 pm: Blue Christmas, an intimate service for the longest night of the year.
Dec. 23, 6:00 pm: Christmas Eve-Eve, and LITC tradition!
Dec. 24, 11:15 am: Celebrate Christmas Eve morning at Life In The City.
Dec. 31, 11:15 am: A fun, casual service with cookies and coffee to welcome 2024.
Ready For More?
Read the Introduction to the 2023 edition of The Heart Moves Toward Light: Advent With The Mystics, Saints and Prophets.
Find more mystics, saints and prophets in our Archive.
Feedback
Did you catch a typo? Do you have suggestions for mystics, saints and prophets we might cover in the future? Leave feedback in comments section below or email Greg Durham at greg@lifeinthecityaustin.org.
I really enjoyed this one. Did Richard Rohr mention Caryll in The Universal Christ? The story about the tube seems familiar!
By the way, I’ve been sharing these with a few friends. I hope they subscribe too!
Great story, man!