21 Jul Caryll Houselander Part I

When the English writer and artist Caryll Houselander was thirteen years of age, she had an experience that brought her face to face with the suffering of the world.

The year was late 1914 or early 1915, and Caryll was a boarder at a convent school on the outskirts of Birmingham.  Britain had declared war against Germany only a few months earlier, and anti-German fever ran high.  Among the nuns at the convent was a lone German.  In Caryll’s brief account of the experience, the German nun remains nameless.  She was a lay sister, probably of peasant background with little education.  She spoke English badly, and unlike the cultured French nuns who taught at the school, she did not excel in anything.

On the day of Caryll’s particular encounter with her, the nun was polishing the boarders’ shoes in the boot room.  As Caryll came closer to her, she saw tears running down the nun’s cheeks.  Too embarrassed to make eye contact, the girl looked down at the nun’s rough, chapped hands and the child’s shoe she was polishing.  When she looked up, Caryll saw on the nun’s head a crown of thorns.  The vision—if that was what it was—lasted only a few seconds.  “I shall not attempt to explain this,” Caryll wrote many years later in her autobiography, A Rocking-Horse Catholic.  “I am simply telling the thing as I saw it.”

The unnamed nun disappeared into history, but within the next two decades Caryll would have two similar experiences, each as inexplicable as the crown of thorns on the nun’s head.  Each experience would contribute to her increasing conviction that the suffering of humanity was somehow a participation in the Passion of Christ.

By the time of this experience, Caryll had already known something of thorns in her own young life.  She and her older sister, Ruth, were in a boarding school because their parents had abruptly divorced four years earlier. It was a rupture that brought an idyllic world of servants who coddled her through a rosy childhood to an abrupt end.  Caryll was physically frail from birth, and as a young child had been frequently sick.  Catholicism had been somewhat thrust upon her and her sister by her mother through conditional baptism when she was seven.  Her mother, who up until then was, like her husband, a Protestant of lacklustre faith, followed her daughters into the Catholic Church shortly afterward and pressed upon them a regimen of overwrought piety.  After the shock of the divorce, which shrank a well-to-do household to one of near-poverty, Caryll had one illness after another.  As a result, she was separated from the other students for long periods and developed what she later described as a “morbid shyness”, which would never entirely leave her.

Caryll’s second unusual experience took place four years after the first, during the waning, desperate final weeks of the war.  She was now seventeen and had been taken out of school by her mother a year earlier.  Her mother had taken in boarders after the divorce, and by now the only boarder in the house was a former Jesuit priest who had become mentally unstable and unable to fend for himself.  The situation—a priest living in the home of a divorced woman—caused gossip, and Caryll’s presence was intended to mitigate the family’s embarrassment.  Her job, ostensibly, was to do housework.  One day in July, 1918, she was walking to a store to buy potatoes, when she was stopped on the sidewalk by what she later described as “a gigantic and living Russian icon” that rose above her.  It was an elaborate image of Christ the King stretched out on a fiery cross, bejeweled and crowned with gold.  The image filled the sky, Christ’s arms “reaching, as it seemed, from one end of the world to the other.”  The eyes of the image “stood sharp with grief”, but the mouth smiled, as if absorbing the sorrow inside it.

The image lasted only a short while, and then Caryll resumed her shopping.  Not long afterward, she read in the newspaper that the czar of Russia and all his family had recently been assassinated.  The image she had seen became for her a symbol of the shedding of blood of a king, the people’s anointed leader.  The contrast, and also the similarity, between the crown of gold and the crown of thorns on the humble nun from years earlier were not lost on Caryll.  In an essay published shortly before her death, she wrote, “I knew suddenly that Christ is in kings as well as in outcasts, that His Passion in the world today is being lived out in kings as well as in common men….” 

The postwar world of the 1920s lay open to the young woman as she left her teenage years and faced the necessity of making a living.  She received a scholarship to St. John’s Wood Art School in London.  There, Caryll reveled in the artistic life, which was giddy with the new freedom from pre-war Edwardian constraints.  She frequented the fashionable cafes that sprang up, and she became briefly engaged to a young man from the same Oxford crowd as her sister, who was a student at that university. Then she met and fell in love with the British spy Sidney Reilly. (He later married a wealthy woman and two years after that was assassinated in Russia.)   It was a journey of self-discovery for Caryll, and in some ways, the unconventional life of nonconformity set the stage for the rest of her life. For now, she threw off the constraints of Catholicism, but a spiritual urge still persisted, and she tried out the religious practices of various churches throughout the city.

Having completed art school and needing to earn a livelihood, Caryll took on a series of low-paying jobs.  She worked as a commercial artist for a time, as well as a charwoman (which, due to an extreme fear of mice, she could not hold onto for long).  She baby-sat, wrote love letters for men who were unable to express their feelings, and did sound effects for an acting troupe (her off-stage specialties were “sound of a cock crowing” and “sound of a husband and wife quarrelling”).  She continued to roam the streets looking for churches that might satisfy her spiritual longings.

In her autobiography she speaks of herself as lost and lonely, living hand to mouth when the third strange encounter took place.  By now she had moved out of her mother’s home into a room in a boarding house.  Having forsaken Catholicism, she felt the lack of a sacramental presence in her life and yearned for a replacement.  She decided to give up, to live a life without any kind of faith.  The third experience, like the other two, took place in the most mundane of circumstances.  She was riding on an underground train at the end of a work day.  The train was crowded, people jostling one another as it sped along, rattling noisily.  Suddenly Caryll saw the people around her as Christ, and not only those on either side of her, not just all the people on the train itself, but all people everywhere, living and dead. This sense of the shared participation of all humanity in the life of Christ—in his suffering and in his glory–lasted, she writes, for several days.  After that, it was a matter of blind faith: “Christ was hidden again.”  But there remained “the ever-growing reassurance” that “we are the Church, and that “Christ and His Church are one—and that because Christ and His Church are one, the world’s sorrow…is only the shadow cast by the spread arms of the crucified King ….”

This encounter with the sacred made her “realize more and more intensely that Christ has put Himself into our hands,” she wrote.  The belief “that we are in the hands of God,” consoling as it was, did not amaze her as much as “the fact that God is in our hands.”  She later described each experience as “seeing not with the eyes but with the mind,” and she added that “the knowledge they gave was not such as could be wholly assimilated at once, but it was rather like a tiny little seed sown in the mind, which would increase and flower only through years of prayer and of study of the doctrines of the Church, which invariably endorsed them.”  The papal encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ would be published in 1943 and would give further strength to her own spiritual conviction.

By the time the threat of a second war loomed, Caryll was more settled in her faith, if only marginally more settled in her employment.  She was now living in London with a friend, Iris Wyndham, whom she had met when designing a nursery for Iris’s young daughter, Joan.  She had returned to the Church and had met the Jesuit Geoffrey Bliss, who was the editor of the publications Messenger of the Sacred Heart and Children’s Messenger.  Father Bliss hired Caryll to make drawings for his magazines, and in the process discovered her talent as a writer.  He became her spiritual guide, and remained so until his death.  She also met a Dutch aristocrat by the name of Yvonne Bosch van Drakestein, who belonged to a society of committed lay women called the Grail.  Yvonne had arrived in London in the early1930s in order to establish the Grail in England.  Caryll’s letters to Yvonne would later become the basis of articles that she eventually wrote for The Grail magazine, which Yvonne edited.

In late August, 1939, as planes roared overhead and makeshift first aid posts and bomb shelters were readied for a possible invasion, Caryll wrote to Yvonne: “We may be spared still, and one understands so well now our dear Lord’s prayer in Gethsemane, His fear and His courage….He is saying, ‘Fear not, it is I.’”  Her letter went on: “I felt vaguely that somehow or other our becoming Christ—the consummation of our love for Him—has to take this form of knowing something of His Passion, so that even the feeling of fear, and the awful moments when one just wants to cry and cry like a child, need not shame us, because they are all part of Christ’s own experience in us.”

War was declared a week later, and Caryll found herself an unlikely first-aid worker. She continued writing for The Grail even as bombs fell nightly on London.  For the next five years her spiritual insights would bring hope and consolation to people suffering through the terrible conflict.