'Neurotic' mystic saw Christ in all: Caryll Houselander was sharp-tongued recluse with overwhelming empathy for the suffering

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 12, 2003 by Deborah Halter

As German "Doodlebug" bombs convulsed wartime London, Caryll Houselander looked through her thick eyeglasses into the bathroom mirror and saw her carroty red pageboy framing a face that was not pretty. As she did every day, for reasons known only to her, she covered her face with a chalky-white substance that gave her the kind of "dead-white face" that a friend described as "the tragic look one associates with clowns and great comedians."

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." One of these admirers was Maisie Ward, who with her husband, Frank Sheed, formed the Sheed & Ward publishing house in 1927. Ward wrote a colorful account of their professional and personal friendship, and her out-of-print biography is one of the few remaining sources of information concerning the unlikely mystic (Caryll Houselander, That Divine Eccentric, New York: Sheed & Ward, 1962).

Houselander penned 15 books for Sheed & Ward through the 1940s and early '50s and wrote more than 700 poems (which she called "rhythms"), short stories and articles.

She wrote for the people of her time, victimized by war, but she also wrote for people of all time. It was easy, she said, to see Christ indwelling in saints and "imaginary people," but far more difficult in "our own relations and our intimate friends." Her message was spectacularly simple: It's always easier to see a finely carved Christ hanging on a gilded cross than it is to see him in our boss, our estranged sister or our enemy in war. But wounded and helpless people in war camps, prisons, workhouses and mental asylums were "obliged to offer them selves to God in the hands of other people, like the Host in the priest's hands at the Mass." This offering, this trust, was essentially human--when we are able to give, we give to the Christ in each person; and when we are needy, we trust ourselves to the Christ in each person.

'Persecution of piety'

Born in 1901 in Bath, England, Caryll Houselander was the second of two daughters born to Willmott and Gertrude Provis Houselander, an attractive and athletic couple. Willmott was a skilled huntsman; "Gert" had played center court at Wimbledon. But little Caryll was a sickly child who wasn't expected to survive a day Her physical weakness (she was never healthy) immediately distanced her parents. But when she was 6, her mother's conversion to Catholicism led to Caryll's baptism, followed by "multitudinous prayers, devotions and pious practices" and a "persecution of piety" that caused her and her sister to spend their pocket money on "deplorable statues, flower vases, flowers, lamps and candles and candlesticks, as well as lace and linen cloths" for the home altars their mother insisted they construct. These altars, which may have sparked her interest in ecclesiastical art, became what she described as "positive riots of the worst that repository art can produce."

The day after Caryll's 9th birthday, her parents permanently separated. With her financial security gone, Gert opened a boarding house and later sent Caryll to the cloistered Convent of the Holy Child, where the girl was left even during holidays. At the school, the French and Belgian nuns taught the children how to make jams, knit woolen helmets, and hate Germans. Here, Caryll experienced her first mystical experience. One day, she noticed a Bavarian ("To us, Bavarian meant German") nun sitting alone, cleaning shoes and weeping. After a long silence, Caryll saw a mental picture of the nun's head weighed down by a crown of thorns. From this vision, she came to understand that Christ was suffering in this nun.

But Houselander was far from saintly In fact, she wasn't particularly religious. Her vision in the convent, combined with two more revelations, would take years to transform the girl. At 13, her diseased appendix sent her home to London, and her subsequent schooling was erratic and never completed. During her teens, she lived and worked at her mother's boarding house, where she administered injections to an ailing friend of Gert's, a priest, whose residence at the boarding house had caused a scandal. Local Catholics shunned and vilified Caryll and her mother, contributing to Caryll's later departure from the church.