From Night-Lights to Stars

                              

We go through life with dark forces within us and around us, haunted by the ghosts of repudiated terrors and embarrassments, assailed by devils, but we are also continually guided by invisible hands; our darkness is lit by many little flames, from night-lights to the stars. Those who are afraid to look into their own hearts know nothing of the light that shines in the darkness.            

~Caryll Houselander, Catholic mystic, poet


Miss Houselander was educated at the French Convent of Our Lady of Compassion in Olton, Warwickshire, England. Her two last years at school were spent at the English Convent of the Holy Child, St. Leonard's Sussex. During 1945 she worked in an advertising office, and did layout for advertisements, being skillful with her hands. She likes to draw with pencil and chalk. Her illustrations appear in many books, her latest being Joan Vindlsani's New Six O'Clock Saints. In 1936 she drew the pictures for the book A Retreat with St. Ignatius in Pictures for Children by Reverend Goeffrey Bliss, S.J.
She prefers carving to painting and is planning to carve crucifixes for a Belgian firm.
Much of her spare time was devoted to occupational therapy for the benefit both of child refugees from the Continent, whose nerves had been jarred, and shell-shocked soldiers, in the war...Catholic Authors


"...in the childhood lies the whole life, hidden like the life of a flower or a tree in the seed. Certainly we can't always read its secrets, but they are there."
 
...Her first book, This War is the Passion, was published in 1941 and in it she placed the suffering of the individual and its meaning within the mystical body of Christ. For a time, she became publishers Sheed & Ward's best selling writer, drawing praise from people such as Ronald Knox:

"she seemed to see everything for the first time, and the driest of doctrinal considerations shone out like a restored picture when she had finished with it. And her writing was always natural; she seemed to find no difficulty in getting the right word; no, not merely the right word, the telling word, that left you gasping."^[1]

During the Second World War, doctors began sending patients to Houselander for counselling and therapy. Even though she lacked formal education in this area, she seemed to have a natural empathy for people in mental anguish and the talent for helping them to rebuild their world. A visitor once found her alone on the floor, apparently in great pain, which she attributed to her willingness to take on herself a great trial and temptation that was overwhelming another person.
A psychiatrist, Eric Strauss, later President of the British Psychological Society, said of Houslander:
                    ..."she loved them back to life... .she was a divine eccentric."
Houselander titled her autobiography A Rocking-Horse Catholic to differentiate herself from those termed "cradle Catholics". She died of breast cancer in 1954, at the age of 53.     -Wikipedia

• "Caryll Houselander 1901-1954" by Margot H. King
• "Seeing Christ in All People" by Karen Lynn Krugh
• Caryll Houselander: Essential Writings, reviewed by Francis Philips 

   

I dedicate this

to all those who did not live

to tell it.

And may they please forgive me

for not having seen it all

nor remembered it all,

for not having divined all of it.  ~Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago (I)

   
     In a Foreign Hospital
Valleys away in the August dark the thunder
roots and tramples: lightning sharply prints
for an instant trees, hills, chimneys on the night.
We lie here in our similar rooms with the white
furniture, with our bit of Death inside us
(nearer than that Death our whole life lies under);
the man in the next room with the low voice,
the brown-skinned boy, the child among its toys
and I and others.  Against my bedside light
a small green insect flings itself with a noise
tiny and regular, a 'tink; tink, tink'.

A Nun stands rustling by, saying good night,
hooded and starched and smiling with her kind
lifeless, religious eyes.  'Is there anything
you want?' -- 'Sister, why yes, so many things:'
England is somewhere far away to my right
and all Your letter promised; days behind
my left hand or my head (or a whole age)
are dearer names and easier beds than here.
But since tonight must lack for all of these
I am free to keep my watch with images,
a bare white room, the World, an insect's rage,
and if I am lucky, find some link, some link.    ~Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (1963).
(h/t Stephen Pentz, First Known When Lost)