Over the years, a couple of people have recommended that I read Caryll Houselander. Well, I have finally gotten around to it, starting with Essential Writings – edited by Wendy Wright of Creighton U, a volume in Orbis Press’ very good "Modern Spiritual Masters" series. It’s an excellent introduction. I’ve moved on to The Dry Wood, one of her novels, although at this point it is less a "novel" than a series of rich meditations in between people do a few things, and then contemplate some more, and then go do some more things. But I’ll post more on that when I finish it.

Until then, I’ll be posting some passages. It is rich, rich spiritual reading. Poetic and true.  An Archbishop, looking out the window at people leaving their work, considering the possibilities of a saint in the making, contemplates the Church:

…she was both peasant and queen, a queen crowned with stars, who wore her jeweled cope over her peasan’ts frock and her wide apron, a mother who must wash her children with her own hands in the shining waters of Baptism and absolution, who must feed them at her table on the living Bread and the water of Life, who must close their eyes with her own, firm, pitiful fingers for the little sleep between death and resurrection.

It was part of her wisdom that the glory of the the saints is secret, that we on earth see their tears, their struggle, their wounds, the old clothes they have left off, and their bones; that she cherishes their bones as a mother cherishes her children’s milk teeth, when the children have grown to manhood, because they remind her once they were little and weak, and were fed at her breast. Part of her illimitable wisdom that we must ask a miracle of every new waint, that to prove that they are at God’s side they msut reach a hand through the cloud to alleviate our sorrow. The sign of their glory, a touch of love in the darkness.