Well, I can’t find an image of the cover of this book anywhere on the ‘net (after 5 whole minutes of effort), so you’ll just have be satisfied with one more boring no-graphics post.

I just finished The Dry Wood by Caryll Houselander, an English Catholic convert/writer who died in 1954.

Two appreciations of Houselander, one from NCR(eporter)

As with so many mystics, Houselander was paradox. She preached a social gospel, yet she was a virtual recluse. She felt overwhelming sympathy for the world, yet she had a razor-sharp tongue and biting sense of humor. (When she worked in a wartime first aid station, a nurse asked, "Houselander, are you sterile?" Houselander quipped, "Not as far as I know.") She swore, told off-color jokes, liked gin, and chain-smoked "with a dandelion-yellow upper lip." And by all accounts, she was a difficult person. She was not patient, kind or gentle. She did not suffer fools gladly or even tactfully She wrote that most Catholic writers started with "the idea of preserving the good in people," but that she started with "the idea of everything being in ruins." She did not expect "to find people good, but I expect to find Christ wounded in them, and of course that is what I do find." And for human woundedness, she had an overwhelming, some would say pathological, empathy

A woodcarver and ecclesiastical artist by trade, she followed a literary path at the encouragement of friends and others who recognized her genius for seeming "to see everybody for the first time," and for describing human suffering by using not merely the right word but "the telling word, that left you gasping."

and another from Crisis:

Her spiritual teaching is a testament to the capacity of the human
soul to wrest beauty and wisdom out of personal suffering, a
witness to the power of grace to supply what is lacking in
nature’s provision. Because she was an artist, Houselander’s
teaching is infused with an intuition so strongly visual that it
manifests itself as a kind of <iconography>. This extraordinary
visual intuitiveness permitted her to write such vividly
descriptive prose that it is impossible not to visualize what one
reads in Houselander. More, perhaps, than any other spiritual
writer of our time, she achieves the effect she desires by
illustrating (rather than by <telling us>) what we need to know.

Like Julian of Norwich, whose teaching was also based on a
singularly vivid series of visions, Caryll Houselander’s work has
the same force of revelation. It is absolutely convincing because
we can see what she is talking about. Her books and poems, like
Julian’s visions, are <showings>. And what she saw everywhere, in
every possible guise, in every conceivable condition of beauty or
degradation, was <Christ> hidden within and imprinting himself
upon matter: <human> matter.

The Dry Wood is expressive of all of these qualities. Passionate – as in finding Christ’s Passion in every scrap of life, sacramental, intensely visual. Overwrought, perhaps, for some of the more rarefied among us, but honestly, in a faith rooted in the realities of a helpless child and a tormented, dying man, what tells that story but passion?

It is a novel, but of only the barest plot: a priest has died in London, and he is revered as a saint, even before his body is cold. The idea is hatched to call upon his intercession in the case of a severely disabled child, Willie Jewel – to pray a novena for the child.

And that’s it. Each chapter centers on a character in the drama – various clerics, a Jewish tailor, a young journalist convert, a tragic alcholic Irish woman, the boy’s parents. Houselander unpacks their inner lives, their fears and hopes, their always tremuolous, shadowy faith, seeking, hoping, trusting against all external evidence.

To me, the most powerful elements of the book were Houselander’s rhapsodies, for lack of a better word, describing the masses – the crowds leaving their work at the end of the day, hard workers seeking a bit of life and fun on a Saturday night, the whole neighborhood, mysteriously brought together by this boy, gathering their prayers in his passion – the Passion of Christ.

The overall impact can be that of a total shift in vision. I thought the world was about that…but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s about something else. Maybe it’s about this.

As a novel that’s really a spiritual meditation, The Dry Wood might be accused of idealism, but that wouldn’t stick. Houselander, deeply sacramental to the core, sees the presence of Christ in every aspect of human life, but that doesn’t mean that her picture of life is idealized – with the suffering of Christ at the core of her spirituality, it can’t be. Things are very normal in Houselander’s world – people fail, see through a glass darkly, fall back into ordinary, unseeing ways, continue to miss the mark…but in all of it lives Christ. Because that it what He came to do – to dwell among us.

One of the additional pleasures of reading this kind of mid-century Catholic literature is that we can see how little things change. Church bureaucrats still miss the point, liturgies fall short of the ideal of the heavenly banquet, Church programs and trendy movements still try to solve all of our problems (in this book it’s the "Flames" – a movement of trendy young Catholic adults determined to show the world how trendy being Catholic can be), and Christians can still be outshone by non-believers in their compassion and devotion to the poor.

What is spirituality? In our pragmatic days, we think of it as a system. As a program, because that is what we like. That’s doable, that’s manageable. We can fit it into our schedules, chart our progress, and compare ourselves to others, secretly.

But spirituality is more of a vision, isn’t it? A door into the life of God, coursing here among us, calling us to attend, to listen, to see what is promised and what awaits. Most of all, it is a call to love. Love of Christ and love for all of God’s children course through the work of Caryll Houselander. I’ll post more quotes over the next day or so, so you can catch a glimpse.