Caryll Houselander Quotes & Sayings

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

Christ subjected himself to the law of the seed in the earth, to the law of rest and growth. He was "one of the children of the year," growing through rest, secret in his mothers womb, receiving the warmth of the sun through her, living the life of dependence, helplessness, littleness, darkness, and silence which, by a mystery of the Eternal Law, is the life of natural growth. — Caryll Houselander

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

Powerful to alleviate, to delay, to camouflage, though money is, in the end it lets us down. — Caryll Houselander

We are the mediocre, we are the half givers, we are the half lovers, we are the savourless salt. Break the hard crust of complacency. Quicken in us the sharp grace of desire. — Caryll Houselander

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

We must carry Jesus in our hearts to wherever He wants to go, and there are many places to which He may never go unless we take Him to them. None of us knows when the loveliest hour of our life is striking. It may be when we take Christ for the first time to that grey office in the city where we work, to the wretched lodging of that poor man who is an outcast, to the nursery of that pampered child, to that battleship, airfield, or camp — Caryll Houselander

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

By his own will Christ was dependent on Mary during Advent: he was absolutely helpless; he could go nowhere but where she chose to take him; he could not speak; her breathing was his breath; his heart beat in the beating of her heart ... In the seasons of our Advent - waking, working, eating, sleeping, being - each breath is a breathing of Christ into the world. — Caryll Houselander

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

There is no way of learning of God except through the adventure of our own heart. — Caryll Houselander

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

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

Advent is the season of the secret, the secret of the growth of Christ, of divine love growing in silence ... For nine months, Christ grew in his mother's body. By his own will, she formed him from herself, from the simplicity of her daily life. — Caryll Houselander

We are united to Him, we are one, and it is when His Passion becomes real to us, through experience and love, that we grow aware of His presence in us. — Caryll Houselander

We usually judge people by our own reactions fears, and desires. We do not see them as separate people . . . but as part of ourselves and our lives. We attribute to them motives which we would have in the same circumstances. — Caryll Houselander

God speaks silently, God speaks in your heart; if your heart is noisy, chattering, you will not hear. — Caryll Houselander

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

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

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

It is a time of darkness, of faith. We shall not see Christ's radiance in our lives yet; it is still hidden in our darkness; nevertheless, we must believe that He is growing in our lives; we must believe it so firmly that we cannot help relating everything, literally everything, to this almost incredible reality. — Caryll Houselander

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

God is everywhere: yes, but how dim faith is, what a remote idea heaven is, in the modern world! — Caryll Houselander

Every ordinary thing in your life is a word of God's love: your home, your work, the clothes you wear, the air you breathe, the food you eat ... the flowers under your feet are the courtesy of God's heart flung down on You! All these things say one thing only: "See how I love you." — Caryll Houselander

People like to give the sort of presents they — Caryll Houselander

The Child Christ lives on from generation to generation in the poets, very often the frailest of men but men whose frailty is redeemed by a child's unworldliness, by a child's delight in loveliness, by the spirit of wonder.

Christ was a poet, and all through His life the Child remains perfect in Him. It was the poet, the unworldly poet, who was King of the invisible kingdom; the priests and rulers could not understand that. The poets understand it, and they, too, are kings of the invisible kingdom, vassal kings of the Lord of Love, and their crowns are crowns of thorns indeed. — Caryll Houselander

The love for material things grows like a fungus in the soul and destroys the loveliness of the human heart utterly. — Caryll Houselander

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

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

In every passerby, everywhere - Christ ... He is in everyone - there can be no outcasts. — Caryll Houselander

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 emotions roused by that most unavoidable of things, food, are astonishing. — Caryll Houselander

Christ used the flesh and blood of Mary for his life on earth, the Word of love was uttered in her heartbeat. Christ used his own body to utter his love on earth; his perfectly real body, with bone and sinew and blood and tears; Christ uses our bodies to express his love on earth, our humanity. A Christian life is a sacramental life, it is not a life lived only in the mind, only by the soul ... Our humanity is the substance of the sacramental life of Christ in us, like the wheat for the host, like the grape for the chalice. — Caryll Houselander

The Passion of Christ was an experience which included in itself every experience except sin, of every member of the human race. If one may say this with reverence, the fourteen incidents of the Stations of the Cross show not only the suffering but the Psychology of Christ. Above all, they show, in detail, his way of transforming suffering by love. He shows us, step by step, how that plan of love can be carried out by men, women, and children today, both alone in the loneliness of their individual lives and together in communion with one another. — Caryll Houselander

The sense of the joy in anything is the sense of Christ. — Caryll Houselander

I often think that the ideal of our perfection that we set up, and often go through torture to achieve, may not be God's idea of how He wants us to be at all. That may be something quite different that we never would have thought of, and what seems like a failure to us may really be something bringing us closer to His will for us. — Caryll Houselander

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

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

It is part of God's plan for us that Christ shall come to us in everyone; it is in their particular role that we must come to know him. He may come as a little child, making enormous demands, giving enormous consolation. He may come as a stranger, so that we must give the hospitality to a stranger that we should like to give to Christ ... — 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

We are only syllables of the perfect Word. — Caryll Houselander