Caryll Houselander

The Reed of God is an inspirational classic written by a British Roman Catholic ecclesiastical artist, Caryll Houselander. This book contains a beautiful meditation on Mary, Mother of God and so much more. Reading this book will bring you closer to Our Blessed Mother, and hence, to Christ Himself. Filled with lyrical prose and touching analogies, the author shows how Mary was the "Reed of God" and that we are all vessels waiting to do God's work, and carrying Christ within us.

"Caryll Houselander (1901-54) an English Catholic laywoman, artist, and visionary best known for works such as A Rocking Horse Catholic, The Reed of God, and The Way of the Cross was driven by a strong identification with the poor that enabled her, in fresh and insightful ways, to proclaim the "Christing of the World." Wendy Wright interweaves Houselander's words and images into an intimate encounter with this fascinating woman, a "divine eccentric," and a gifted reader of souls." --Book Jacket.

2021 Reprint of the 1955 Edition. Facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Illustrated by the author. There is one dominant them in all of Houselander's writing-the relation of the Passion of Christ to the world of today. Here, for the first time, she has written a book entirely on the Passion, or on those aspects of if which we consider in the Stations of the Cross. By her imaginative recreation of the Passion itself, realized with extraordinary intensity, detail and dept, she stages a drama whose and anguish and tragedy have, for too many of us, passed into the unfelt pieties of the prayer book. She also shows us the Passion reflected in all human suffering. Contents: Jesus is Condemned to Death -- Jesus Receives his Cross -- Jesus Falls the First Time -- Jesus meets his Mother -- Simon Helps Jesus to Carry the Cross -- Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus -- Jesus Falls the Second Time -- Jesus Speaks to the Women of Jerusalem -- Jesus Falls the Third Time -- Jesus is Stripped of his Garments -- Jesus is Nailed to the Cross -- Jesus Dies on the Cross -- Jesus is Taken Down from the Cross -- Jesus is Laid in the Tomb

In the English-speaking world, the Catholic Literary Revival is typically associated with the work of G. K. Chesterton/Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. But in fact the Revival’s most numerous members were women. While some of these women remain well known⎯Muriel Spark, Antonia White, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Day - many have been almost entirely forgotten. They include: Enid Dinnis, Anna Hanson Dorsey, Alice Thomas Ellis, Eleanor Farjeon, Rumer Godden, Caroline Gordon, Clotilde Graves, Caryll Houselander, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Jane Lane, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Alice Meynell, Kathleen Raine, Pearl Mary Teresa Richards, Edith Sitwell, Gladys Bronwyn Stern, Josephine Ward, and Maisie Ward. There are various reasons why each of these writers fell out of print: changes in the commercial publishing world after World War II, changes within the Church itself and in the English-speaking universities that redefined the literary canon in the last decades of the 20th century. Yet it remains puzzling that a body of writing so creative, so attuned to its historical moment, and so unique in its perspective on the human condition, should have fallen into obscurity for so long. The Catholic Women Writers series brings together the English-language prose works of Catholic women from the 19th and 20th centuries; work that is of interest to a broad range of readers. Each volume is printed with an accessible but scholarly introduction by theologians and literary specialists. The first volume in the series is Caryll Houselander’s The Dry Wood. Houselander is known primarily for her spiritual writings but she also wrote one novel, set in a post-war London Docklands parish. There a motley group of lost souls are mourning the death of their saintly priest and hoping for the miraculous healing of a vulnerable child whose gentleness in the face of suffering brings conversion to them all in surprising and unexpected ways. The Dry Wood offers a vital contribution to the modern literary canon and a profound meditation on the purpose of human suffering.

Shaped around the writings of Caryll Houselander, A Child in Winter is a daybook for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. If you are familiar with Houselander's poetic grace, you will recognize her spirit of awe and abandonment to God. If you are new to her legacy, you will be drawn to her heart and eye for God's goodness and beauty that is artfully captured here.A Child in Winter is a faithful companion as you watch in Advent and grow large with the presence of God through Christmas and Epiphany.You will enter these holy seasons with an increased faith, renewed joy, and the promise of transformation and fulfillment.

“I was received into the church,” states Caryll Houselander at the very beginning of this work “when I was six years old. Strictly speaking, therefore, I am not a ‘cradle’ Catholic, but a rocking-horse Catholic.” This autobiography, first published in 1955, takes the reader from the author’s Catholic childhood and school days through a period outside the church while she tried to make her living as an artist, to a return to the church. This return was brought about by her insight, so central to all her books into the presence of Christ and others. A theologian in every sense of the word except the formal academic one, Caryll Houselander understood the central importance of one’s image or concept of God. “Caryll Houselander: artist, odd ball, mystic, friend, and in the end, suffering servant. In the midst of her last illness, she clung to life, loved life with a passion that did not want to die. ‘I honestly long,’ she said, ‘to be told ‘a hundred percent cure’ and to return to this life and celebrate it with gramophone records, giggling and gin.’”—Mitch Finley, Our Sunday Visitor As a classic in spirituality, the work of Caryll Houselander is very close to the top of the list.

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.