The Passion of the Infant Christ

Critical Edition

Houselander, Walters

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498234160
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Although forgotten until quite recently, Caryll Houselander, who died in 1954, was a sensitive and profound English Roman Catholic writer on Christian spirituality. In this critical edition of her 1949 book The Passion of the Infant Christ, Houselander argues that the physical world is an "inscaped" revelation of the mind of the Creator. Every concrete object and every temporal event mirrors the eternal, just as the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus mirror the circumstances surrounding his death and resurrection. Editor Kerry Walters discusses both Houselander's life and the primary themes of The Passion of the Infant Christ in his introduction to this critical edition of one of Houselander's most insightful books.

Chapter I

The Sown Field

The Kingdom of Heaven is likened unto a man who has sown his field with good seed.

—Matt 13:24

The countryman is not impatient because the season of flowers and fruit is swiftly over and the winter is so long. He comes in early from his fields, to doze content while firelight weaves the long dusk with gold. He is as conscious of life in winter, when the crust of the earth is iron and not a leaf is on the hedges, as he is when the fields are green and the bough is white.

He has lived through cruel winters and heard old wives moaning, full of foreboding for the spring; he has seen frost and flood and driving wind alternating through the dark months; but he knows that with spring the snowdrop comes again, and the pale drift of crocus, and the delicate green blade of his early wheat.

He knows that the life sleeping in the earth is stronger than that which assails it, that the life that is in all living is stronger than death. That is the knowledge which is the root of his peace.

The mystery of the seed is his. It is one, but multiple. Dry, but contains the water of life. Little, but fills the earth. Black, but is white bread. It is within the ripe ear of wheat, and the ripe ear of wheat is within it. Scattered on the wind it is not lost, but carries life wherever the wind blows. It sows the meadows and the woods. It sows the cleft in the rock. It sows the roadside and the ditch. It sows the dust-heaps in the cities.

Buried, it springs from the grave, a green herb of life. It is the symbol of Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven.

While the seed sleeps it grows. The season of the sleeping seed is the season of man’s rest. Rest is the condition of natural growth; equally it is the condition of supernatural life.

If Christ is to come to flower and bear fruit in individual lives, there must be seasons of rest in which there is almost no activity but the giving wholly of self to nourish the supernatural life; just as the earth in which the seed is buried is given to nourish the bread. But, and this is even more important, there must be a permanent state of inward rest, founded in the peace of mind which comes from complete trust.

A state of mind inducing such rest becomes habitual if we fold our thoughts upon the knowledge that in us is the seed of Christ-life. If we fold our whole being round this fact, as the earth is round the seed, our minds will be at rest.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is likened unto a man who has sown his field with good seed” (Matt 13:24).

God is the Divine Sower—the world is His field. He sowed it in the beginning with all our necessities. Bread, fruit, water, wine, linen, silk and wool; resin, crystal, gold, oil, salt, fire and light.

Before sin had brought pain into the world, God had hidden remedies for pain in it. Men would discover the gifts of the Divine Healer and call them by names as melodious as the names of the nine choirs of angels; chamomile, hellebore, heartsease, thyme, verbena, lavender, dwale. Most wonderful of all there was bread. God rejoined in the world that He had made: “And God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good. . .” (Gen 1:31). The Creator had stored the world for man, and to man himself He had given a mind and a will that would enable him to respond to His love, but God’s joy at the dawn of His creation was in more than this.

In His field, He had one little plot apart, lying under snow, where no foot had ever trodden, silent with the silence of snow, that no voice had ever broken. In it He sowed Living Bread.

This little plot was Our Lady. In her was sown the seed of Christ. The good seed which God had sown was the seed of His Son’s life.

When the newly created water still trembled in the breath of the Spirit, and the seed was still hidden and all the wheat hidden in it, God saw His harvests. He saw the fields of ripe corn that would be irrigated by the Water of Life, the bound stooks, the grain sifted and gathered into His barns. He saw the green wheat springing up everywhere, from the most unlikely places on earth; not only from remote villages and hamlets, where no one would trample on it, but from the thickly populated cities, forcing its way up between the paving stones. Trampled, but lifting itself up when the sun, that was His own love, shone upon it. In the narrow streets of the swarming slums, in the yards of tenements and prisons, from the ruins of men’s homes destroyed by men. Whenever the world grew old, the green fields renewed, whenever it grew drab, the burnished harvests were its splendor.

What is this wheat with which God has sown His field? Christ answered that question plainly, it is Himself. It is the Christ-life that gives life to the world. Here are His own words: “It is I who am the bread of life” (John 6:35).

“God’s gift of bread comes down from Heaven and gives life to the whole world. . .I myself am the living bread that has come down from Heaven. If anyone eats of this bread he shall live forever. And now what is this bread which I am to give? It is my flesh given for the life of the world” (John 6:33, 51–52).

*

When Adam sinned, involving us all in sin and suffering, the punishment given to him and to his descendants was this: “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” (Gen 3:19). But even while those words still sounded in the ears of Eve, God looked on another woman, in whom the seed would be hidden, which would prove His punishment to be His mercy.

Already love and death were face to face. In the thought of God, even before time, she who was to be the Mother of Christ was already pregnant with the Life of the world, clothed in the sun, standing upon the moon, the head of the serpent already crushed under her foot.

“In the sweat of your face shall you eat bread.” It is part of the mercy of the punishment, that through it many men would begin to know God, even before the full revelation of His love was given to the world, or to them individually.

When the revelation came, it would be, in spite of its depth within depth of mystery, one that would come, at least to the countryman, as something familiar, in a sense already known, like the reawakening of a sleeping memory of childhood.

The man who grows wheat—who ploughs 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, 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 infinite love, and that nothing, even when it dies, is forsaken by that love. If he learnt for the first time that to this hidden Power every bird is individual, that not one can fall to the earth by chance and that every stem of grass is valued for its own intrinsic loveliness, he would feel no surprise. He has learnt to observe as carefully and accurately as a painter. He has seen evidence of this personal love. Sometimes in his wet fields, beaten down by a driving storm that has uprooted trees, he has seen a wild flower lift its ring of thin petals, tethered only by a stem like a thread of green silk; and, more wonderful than that and more certain, year after year he sees the first delicate green spear of wheat pierce the hard crust of the heavy earth and break its way through into the light.

How often he has held a grain of that wheat in his hand, and in that grain the germ of life!

The life in the wheat means his own life to him, but so much more than simply not being dead! It means the gladness of life: the delight that he has in his work, the bracing of his body to the frost in the morning air, the stretch and ripple of his muscles, his enjoyment of food and drink, the blessedness of sleep—the answer of his senses to the loveliness of the world around him, the sight of his roses in the dew, the smell of his apples in the loft, the touch of his children’s hair, the volume of infinitesimal sound that fills his silence. His awareness of the wonder of life on earth, which comes to him from the response of the life in him to the life around him.

It means, too, the color of his face and his throat and his arms, the long ropes of his muscles, the strength and line and sinew in his large hard hands, the goodness and strength and beauty of his own being, which attracts others to him, which brings the love to him that is the core of his life, and gives him the fruitfulness of his love. Moreover, this life of the wheat within him gives him the strength of restraint, the power to pity and comfort, to face and accept his responsibilities, to carry the burdens of his family.

Even more than this, it is not only in him, this life that good bread gives; it is in his wife and children and friends. One life in them all. Not only does he share it with them, and through it abide in intimate communion with them, but in a true sense he has given it to them, by giving his body to the earth. He gave his body to be their bread, and he wrestled with storm and drought, with frost and scorching heat. When he worked until darkness covered his land, when the sweat ran down his face as he tilled the earth.

He can look at his children gathered round the tea table in his cottage, beautiful in the ring of the lamp’s light, with their bleached hair like locks of flax, and their russet and golden skin, truly children of the fields of wheat, and he can know that not only is he their father who gave them life, but the laboring man who has given them the joy and the health and the beauty of their life, in giving his body to the sowing and growing and reaping of their bread.

This gives a wholly new meaning to the idea of earning a living; it is not, or should not be, just earning a “living wage,” but working for a sacramental life, part of, but only part of, the answer to the petition that Christ put onto our lips: “Give us this day our daily bread!” (Matt 6:11).

*

“The Kingdom of Heaven is likened unto a man who has sown his field with good seed” (Matt 13:24). God has sown the world with living bread, he has sown the seed of Christ in the Virgin Mother. He is the Father who has given us life, and Christ, who is God made man, is the laborer in the Father’s field, and the seed He sows is Himself. “A Sower went out to sow”—the countryman has his Divine prototype in Christ our Lord. Christ is the sower who went out to sow, who, having seen the green corn ripen to red, went out to reap, and, having reaped and bound and threshed, sowed the earth again with the seed of His own blood that the harvest might never fail. The laborer in t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Editor’s Introduction: An “Inscaped” Universe
• Introduction: There Are Some Truths that Need To Be Told Over and Over Again
• Chapter I: The Sown Field
• Chapter II: Rest
• Chapter III: Inscape of Tabor
• Chapter IV: The Infant
• Chapter V: The Passion of the Infant Christ
• Chapter VI: Becoming Like Little Children
• Chapter VII: Redemptive Childhood
• Chapter VIII: Justice
• Chapter IX: The Christ-Child’s Mother
• Chapter X: The Host-life