Quotes from Caryll Houselander

It is impossible to say too often or too strongly that human nature, body and soul together, is the material for God's will in us.

It is a great mistake to suppose that those who have inherited the material for their life from suffering generations, and who have poor health and a timid approach or some vice or weakness, have not been designed and planned by God as much as others who seem luckier in the world's eyes.

We are all asked if we will surrender what we are, our humanity, our flesh and blood, to the Holy Spirit and allow Christ to fill the emptiness formed by the particular shape of our life.

This is very like Purgatory, and it is a pain which we would not willingly forgo once it has touched us, because it is our necessity and our joy. For Purgatory, after all, is the fire of the love of God, cauterising the wound of sin.

People like to give the sort of presents they

She is not wearied with our littleness; her smile comes down to us like a benediction through the sea of flickering candles, and she blesses our wild flowers withering at her feet. For each one of us is "another Christ"; each one, to Mary, is her only child. It is therefore not tedious to her to hear the trifles that we tell her, to look at the bruises that we bring to her, and seeing our wound of sin, to heal it.

After the war there will be many thousands of women who will need to live as Our Lady did after the crucifixion. A generation of mothers will need to know, with the heart, that "there is only one boy, Jesus Christ." The world's future will depend upon this, upon everyone's realising that the survival of all that is worth the cost of a man's blood depends upon 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.

Perhaps Our Lord took so young an apostle as John into His motley little company in order that he should be still a boy when he took Our Lady home. Perhaps, too, His very special love for John may have had something to do with the future, in which Christ foresaw John giving His Mother no time to grieve.

It is moving to think of her once more baking the kind of cakes she knew boys like; once more patching and darning, and sewing buckles on sandals; once more talking of the things that interested the boy and being a companion to his thought. And how fitting it was that the companion of John's thought should be Our Lady. For John's was the mind of crystal in which all the fires of love reflected, and Mary's was the mind of the girl who sang the Magnificat.

He prefers to be known, not by His own human features, but by the quickening of His own life in the heart, which is the response to His coming.

It really needs to be practised to be understood. We need to say to ourselves a thousand times a day: "Christ wants to do this"; "Christ wants to suffer this." And we shall thus come to realise that when we resent our circumstances or try to spare ourselves what we should undergo, we are being like Peter when he tried to dissuade Our Lord from the Passion

From the hour when Gabriel saluted her, the little girl in Nazareth, she had had to seek for Him through faith: to believe that he was in her; to believe that this little child whom she rocked to sleep was God; that it was God whom she taught to walk, to speak, to hold a spoon.

There must be a period of gestation before a nything can flower. If only those who suffer would be patient with their early humiliations and realise that Advent is not only the time of growth but also of darkness and hiding and waiting, they would trust, and trust rightly, that Christ is growing in their sorrow, and in due season all the fret and strain and tension of it will give place to a splendour of peace.

Christ's "Not my will but thine be done" brings Our Lady's "Be it done unto me according to thy word" to a culminating surrender.

Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." Once again the music is measured by silence. Christ is in the tomb as He was in His mother's womb, and just as that first silence was part of the rhythm that moved forward to the visible coming of Life into the world, this silence in the tomb carries the music forward in three great beats to the hour when Life shall again come out of darkness and sweeten and sanctify the world.

From the moment when Christ told Our Lady to see Him, her son, in John, she saw Christ in all Christians. She took her only son to her heart in all men born. She saw now but one Man abiding in mankind.

If you leave a thought, a chance word, a phrase of music, in your mind, growing and cherished for its proper reason, you will have the wisdom or peace or strength that was hidden in that seed.

The voice from the Cross speaks in the desert, in the hospital, from the open seas, from every place where young men are giving their lives. Mary hears the voice of her son in all these voices, and they echo her fiat.

The light is shining in the darkness, but the darkness does not comprehend it. To a soul in such a condition, peace will come as soon as it turns to Our Lady and imitates her. In her the Word of God chose to be silent for the season measured by God. She, too, was silent; in her the light of the world shone in darkness. To-day, in many souls, Christ asks that He may grow secretly, that He may be the light shining in the darkness.

Education is no longer primarily intended to teach him to serve God, or to enrich his life, but only to give him a passport into the commercial scramble.

What courage it would take to try to walk on the sea, even if we could see the face of Christ; but it needs much more courage to leave our false securities, our leaking boats of materialism, and to walk towards Him on the churned-up, angry sea of our civilisation.

Christ surrendered the secret of Himself to each one of us when He gave us His Body. In Holy Communion this surrender of the secret of Himself goes on. "With desire," He said, "have I desired this hour." The hour when He was to consecrate bread, in order that not only to the whole race would He give His Spirit, but to each individual, the gift of Himself.

But it happens as often in following as in losing a vocation. Perhaps we were called to found, to organise, or to lead some little movement or society or a group in an existing society, or to take charge of a hospital or club or post—any such thing. We started with the one idea of serving God, but gradually the formalities, the necessary social life, the business side, has overcome us. From being an apostle we have become an organiser; from being an organiser, a business man or woman.

The world of the society or group becomes our whole world; our little job assumes a ridiculous importance; we lose sight of the Universe; and presently that little world of ours—did we but know it—resembles a beehive where the queen is continually stroked and flattered and soothed by the others to keep her going. Once again we have been untrue to the first love and have lost the Divine Child.