Caryll Houselander > Quotes

“Christ asks for a home in your soul, where he can be at rest with you, where he can talk easily to you, where you and he, alone together, can laugh and be silent and be delighted with one another.”
― Caryll Houselander, This War Is the Passion

“Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover himself becomes new. It is literally like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green shoots of life.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

“The sense of the joy in anything is the sense of Christ.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

“The way to begin healing the wounds of the world is to treasure the Infant Christ in us; to be not the castle but the cradle of Christ; and, in rocking that cradle to the rhythm of love, to swing the whole world back into the beat of the Music of Eternal Life.”
― Caryll Houselander, Wood of the Cradle, Wood of the Cross: The Little Way of the Infant Jesus

“God abides in men"

"God abides in men,
These are men who are simple,
they are fields of corn...
Such men have minds
like wide grey skies,
they have the grandeur
that the fools call emptiness.

God abides in men.

Some men are not simple,
they live in cities
among the teeming buildings,
wrestling with forces
as strong as the sun and the rain.
Often they must forgo dream upon dream...
Christ walks in the wilderness
in such lives.
God abides in men,
because Christ has put on
the nature of man, like a garment, and worn it to his own shape.
He has put on everyone's life...
to the workman's clothes to the King's red robes,
to the snowy loveliness of the wedding garment...
Christ has put on Man's nature,
and given him back his humanness...

God abides in man.”
― Caryll Houselander, Flowering Tree

“Powerful to alleviate, to delay, to camouflage, though money is, in the end it lets us down.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

“In this great fiat of the little girl Mary, the strength and foundation of our life of contemplation is grounded, for it means absolute trust in God, trust which will not set us free from suffering but will set us free from anxiety, hesitation, and above all from the fear of suffering. Trust which makes us willing to be what God wants us to be, however great or however little that may prove. Trust which accepts God as illimitable Love.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic

“Sometimes it may seem to us that there is no purpose in our lives, that going day after day for years to this office or that school or factory is nothing else but waste and weariness. But it may be that God has sent us there because but for us Christ would not be there. If our being there means that Christ is there, that alone makes it worthwhile.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic

“We do not have to discover in which of several people Christ is to be found; we must look for Him in them all. And not in an experimental spirit, to discover whether He is in them . . . but with the absolute certainty that He is. . . . Christ does not choose to be known through outward appearances—even the appearance of virtue.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

“When he is sick and you stand by the bedside shaken with fear, when he sleeps and you lean over him held by the amazement of seeing this little boy who has your life, God is there, too; indeed all this love of yours is only God's love which you sense vaguely. He, the true father, is there; He is around and above and below the child; He is in his heart. You only love at all because God loves infinitely more.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic

“In many people Christ lives the life of the Host. Our life is a sacramental life.

This Host life is like the Advent life, like the life of the Child in the womb, the Child in the swaddling bands, the Christ in the tomb. It is a life of dependence upon creatures, of silence and secrecy, of hidden light. It is the life of a prisoner.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

“... 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 pâtisseries, from the final calculation of the pure mathematician to the first delighted chalk drawing of a small child.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

“Soeur Marie Emelie"

Soeur Marie Emelie
is little and very old:
her eyes are onyx,
and her cheeks vermilion,
her apron wide and kind
and cobalt blue.

She comforts
generations and generations
of children,
who are
"new"
at the convent school.
When they are eight,
they are already up to her shoulder,
they grow up and go into the world,
she remains,
forever,
always incredibly old,
but incredibly never older...
She has an affinity with the hens,
When a hen dies,she sits down on a bench and cries,
she is the only grown-up, whose tears
are not frightening tears.
Children can weep without shame,
at her side...
Soeur Marie Emelie...
her apron as wide and kind
as skies on a summer day
and as clean and blue.”
― Caryll Houselander, Flowering Tree

“I wanted to shut my mind, that my thoughts might close
on my own peace, I wanted to close
the peace of my love in my heart
like dew in a dark rose."
From "Philip Speaks”
― Caryll Houselander, Flowering Tree

“Light's glory is to dispel darkness. Christ has illumined you with wisdom and the fire of his presence. It has been sparked and kindled in you. Let it blaze.”
― Caryll Houselander, A Child in Winter: Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany with Caryll Houselander

“In our seeking for the lost Child, our contemplation of Our Lady becomes active. The fiat was complete surrender. Advent was a folding upon the life growing in our darkness. Now the seeking is a going out from ourselves. It is a going out from our illusions, our limitations, our wishful thinking, our self-loving, and the self in our love.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic

“Most of us know how cruel those people who think of themselves as more sensitive than others can be. We know the torture of liking—let alone loving—someone who is always taking offence, who watches us, using his own socalled sensitiveness as a magnifying glass to detect slights and coldness in the smallest involuntary expression on our faces; who has mental ears like whispering galleries, ready to detect hardness of heart in the tones of our voice; who interprets our every action in the twilight of his own obsessional self-pity. We are unable to maintain friendship with these poor people. The tension in which they force us to live, the nervous self-consciousness they engender in us, becomes unbearable, and if we do not somehow manage to escape (even if it be only through the hardening of our own hearts), we shall become even worse nervous wrecks than they are.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic

“Why must we be always seeking for the lost Child? Why must we be always feeling the pain of loss? If we did not, we should not realise that our idols are not God, are not Christ. Bad as they are, they match our limitations; and if they could content us, we should never know the real beauty of Christ:we should not become whole.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic

“We could scrub the floor for a tired friend, or dress a wound for a patient in a hospital, or lay the table and wash up for the family; but we shall not do it in martyr spirit or with that worse spirit of self-congratulation, of feeling that we are making ourselves more perfect, more unselfish, more positively kind.

We shall do it just for one thing, that our hands make Christ's hands in our life, that our service may let Christ serve through us, that our patience may bring Christ's patience back to the world.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

“Working, eating, sleeping, she was forming His body from hers. His flesh and blood. From her humanity she gave Him His humanity. Walking in the streets of Nazareth to do her shopping, to visit her friends, she set His feet on the path of Jerusalem. Washing, weaving, kneading, sweeping, her hands prepared His hands for the nails. Every beat of her heart gave Him His heart to love with, His heart to be broken by love. All her experience of the world about her was gathered to Christ growing in her.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic

“There is a possessiveness in the idealist’s attitude . . . . “You are to be like me. I will shape you, or hammer you, into the shape of my ideal. You must enjoy my pleasures. Your tastes must coincide with mind. You must have only my values. You must be restricted by my limitations”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

“Christ must be born from every soul, formed in every life. If we had a picture of Our Lady's personality we might be dazzled into thinking that only one sort of person could form Christ in himself, and we should miss the meaning of our own being.

Nothing but things essential for us are revealed to us about the Mother of God: the fact that she was wed to the Holy Spirit and bore Christ into the world.

Our crowning joy is that she did this as a lay person and through the ordinary daily life that we all live; through natural love made supernatural, as the water at Cana was, at her request, turned into wine.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

“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.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

“The modern world's feverish struggle for unbridled, often unlicensed, freedom is answered by the bound, enclosed helplessness and dependence of Christ—Christ in the womb, Christ in the Host, Christ in the tomb.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic

“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.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic

“In the world as it is, torn with agonies and dissensions, we need some direction for our souls which is never away from us; which, without enslaving us or narrowing our vision, enters into every detail of our life. Everyone longs for some such inward rule, a universal rule as big as the immeasurable law of love, yet as little as the narrowness of our daily routine. It must be so truly part of us all that it makes us all one, and yet to each one the secret of his own life with God.

To this need, the imitation of Our Lady is the answer; in contemplating her we find intimacy with God, the law which is the lovely yoke of the one irresistible love.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

“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.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic

“There is only one cure for fear—trust in God.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic

“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.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic

“The emotions roused by that most unavoidable of things, food, are astonishing.”
― Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God