The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic

by Caryll Houselander

When I was a small child someone for whom I had a great respect told me never to do anything that Our Lady would not do; for, she said, if I did, the angels in heaven would blush. For a short time this advice “took” in me like an inoculation, causing a positive paralysis of piety. It was clear to me that all those things which spelt joy to me were from henceforward taboo—blacking my face with burnt cork, turning somersaults between props against the garden wall, putting two bull’s-eyes into my mouth at the same time—all that was over! But even if I faced a blank future shackled with respectability, it was still impossible to imagine Our Lady doing anything that I would do, for the very simple reason that I simply could not imagine her doing anything at all.

We have had it instilled into us since we were in the cradle that the one security is money, money alone can save us. If we were a spiritually virile people, we should not worship money but should be grateful for it; it would simply be the symbol of work that satisfied us as men and women and provided the good bread, the warm wool, the fire in the hearth, and the sweetness of sleep in the home.

The description of His birth in the Gospel does not say that she held Him in her arms but that she “wrapped Him up in swaddling clothes and laid Him in a manger.” As if her first act was to lay Him on the Cross.

How is it that a person known to be “religious” is often the very last person to whom we would go with a burden of shame, a problem to be solved, or with our simplest and most constant need for human sympathy?

It is a fact that very often it is those with whom we live that we know least. It is just as easy to grow to know someone less and less through living in the same room as it is to know him more and more. This is because we usually judge people by our own reactions, fears, and desires. We do not see them as separate people who possess their own souls and live their own lives, but as part of ourselves and our lives. We attribute to them motives which we would have in the same circumstances.

We cannot change Christ; but instead we invent imaginary Christs, and they can be made to be anything at all that we would like Him to be. Our judgements are always, or nearly always, formed by our own needs and fears and limitations, not by an objective contemplation. Christ lives in us; but we do not know Him. We form a wrong conception of Him, an ego-projection Christ, an imaginary Christ who fits into our own narrowness, who does not shatter our complacency. To this imaginary Christ we bring all the fierce zeal and force that is born of the conviction that we are serving God—when we are at least partly serving ourselves—and this is the explanation of the sometimes terrible things we do in good faith, believing that we are serving God.

Everyone who has suffered from scruples will know what I mean when I say that the mental atmosphere in which they live is like that of a forgotten schoolroom at four o’clock on a dark and foggy winter’s day, lit by a low, hissing gas jet, where they sit alone with this tremendous offended God, in an atmosphere permeated by a damp fog of tears. Even the Passion, in this atmosphere, is misunderstood and becomes something oppressive and frightening which aches in the hearts of the victims of scruples like an open sore. They have a kind of obsession for the Presence of God, and yet a real shrinking from the thought of Him.

There is a very strong tendency in the world to-day to want Christianity to be smooth, attractive, respected by everyone, powerful in the world’s sense; but now, as long ago, Christ remains on the Cross.