Not my will...

~ From Chapter 9: "Imitate Mary's Trust in the Father's Will" ~

Here concludes my month for Caryll. All the excerpts have been from her Little Way, but I just was given (thanks, Mom!) another rocking book: Caryll Houselander: Essential Writings. More Caryll to come!

"Christ in his infancy asks no gift but self from those who love Him. But God does not ask love from His creatures greater than the love He gives to them. On the Cross, Christ Himself was stripped of everything but Himself. In the sacrifice of Himself, He gave Himself to God and to man.

"Just as the mother who is wise knows that if Christ waxes strong in her child, he will go out to meet suffering halfway (and will meet it, but his suffering will redeem and comfort and heal), so those who foster the infant Christ inwardly in the life of their soul know that the same applies to them.

"Christ, wherever He is, in whomever He is, must be about His Father's business."

~from Caryll Houselander's The Little Way of the Infant Jesus

First Sunday

In the bleak mid-winter...

Is it really Advent already? What happened to November?

I am so grateful to begin the "quiet season" this year. May it be quiet for you as well... more on quiet thoughts later. Now, for some rest and recovery.

Go in peace. Behold, He comes.

The infant king.

~ from Chapter 4: Fix your gaze on Christ ~

I can't tell you how beautiful this chapter is. Her description here of the way an infant changes us articulates perfectly the radical change that motherhood (and fatherhood) bring: and all this from a woman who never married! Sometimes those outside can best see. The description is meant to show us how our openness to the gift of life and willingness to serve our children brings us a real experience of Christ, who came as the Infant King.

"The first giving of this [Christ] love to a newly born child is the reshaping of our whole life, in its large essentials and in its every detail, in our environment, our habits, ourselves. The infant demands everything and, trivial though everything may seem when set out and tabulated, the demand is all the more searching because it seizes upon our daily lives and every detail of which they are built up.

"The sound of our voice must be modulated -- the words that we use considered, our movements restrained, slowed down, and trained to be both decisive and gentle.

"Our rooms must be rearranged; everything that is superfluous and of no use to the infant must be thrown out; only what is simple and necessary to him must remain, and what remains must be placed in the best position, not for us, but for him...

"There must be a new timing of our lives, a more holy ordering of our time, which is no longer to be ruled by our impulses and caprice, but by the rhythm of the little child.

"We must learn to sleep lightly, aware of the moonlight and the stars, conscious even in our deepest sleep of a whimper from the infant and ready to respond to it. We must learn the saving habit of rising with, or a little before, dawn. The rhythm of our bodies must be brought into harmony with his. They must become part of the ordered procession of his day and night, his waking and feeding and sleeping. Our lives, because of his and life his, must include periods of silence and rest. We must return with him and through him to the lost rhythm of the stars and the seed."

~Caryll Houselander, The Little Way of the Infant Jesus

The Long Loveliness.

Betty Beguiles wants to know: Was it love at first sight?

How did you and your significant other first meet? Was it love at first sight or did your affection develop over time? And how did you know he (or she) was The One?

I first (knowingly) set eyes on Todd in the halls of high school. I thought he was cute. He was also the best friend of a guy everyone thought I should date. I really had no interest in Dave (the friend) and, besides, I was going to become a nun.

But Dave's really tall friend, Todd, was really cute.

Todd liked classical music, studying, and arguing about death and life and meaning. He was something else. So, while it was not love at first sight, I sure liked him. But I was going to be a nun, so it really didn't matter. We started hanging out and debating the hot buttons.

We argued a lot. You see, I was the school papal nazi (a rather unflattering term coined by some other guy in high school). And Todd, well, he was a evolutionist/atheist/scientist guy. Darwin was his man, and the pope was mine. It was the best fun I'd ever had.

By the time he graduated high school, I was smitten by his intellectual integrity and passion for truth. I knew he was the one, except for Jesus. But he was dating someone else. They split up, but then he almost immediately started seeing someone at his new college (Oberlin, far far away Oberlin). We kept in touch, nevertheless, exchanging handwritten letters and still arguing about God, life, sex, religion, the Church, history, and the meaning of love.

Hindsight is 20/20, but I really think we both "knew" from about the time he left for Oberlin. We just had work out a few things. He had to fall in love with Jesus Christ. I had to work out that nun thing.

But we did. Deo Gratias Ago. And now for the hard part...

It will make a great novel one day, because it is true.

"...an age of childhood."

~from Chapter 2: Rest in Christ~

"There is in fact a huge force, a tremendous power for love, being neglected, not being used, at the time when it is needed as never before, and when every sign seems to be pointing to it and challenging it as the only answer: the power of the infancy of Christ.

"The infant Christ is the whole Christ. Christ was not more God, more Christ, more man, on the Cross than He was in His Mother's womb. His first tear, His first smile, His first breath, His first pulsation in the womb of His Mother, could have redeemed the world.

"In fact, Christ chose the life of growth and work and suffering, and the death on the Cross which we know; but by His own choice all this was to depend on a human being giving herself to Him in His infancy, giving her own humanity to the actual making of an infant's humanity and giving Him her life in which to rest."

~Caryll Houselander, The Little Way of the Infant Jesus

RIP-- Henryk Gorecki

I'm interrupting the month for Caryll, because Henryk Gorecki has died at the age of 76. A true artist of the postmodern world, he is best known for his Symphony No. 3, "The Sorrowful Songs," written in response to the Shoah in general and Auschwitz in particular. May choirs of angels welcome him with songs of joy.

Below is the third movement. Gorecki took the words etched by an 18-year-old girl on the wall of a Nazi holding cell. "Mother, do not weep for me..."

"In the sweat of your face..."

~from Chapter 1--Allow Christ to dwell in your soul~

"The man who grows wheat--who plows and sows and reaps, who sets his pace to the rhythm and time of cycles of light, to seasons of gestation and birth, death and resurrection, who measures by the shadows of the sun and calculates by the width of the skies--lives, even if he does not fully realize it, in harmony with the eternal law of love.

"By a beautiful paradox, he touches the intangible with his hands and sees the invisible with his eyes. He sees the wonder of life in the frailest living thing, how certain flowers and fruits, and certain crops and birds and insects, are in the keeping of some unseen power, before he learns that everything that has life is in the keeping of some infinite love, and that nothing, even when it dies, is forsaken by that love."

~Caryll Houselander, The Little Way of the Infant Jesus