Conor Hardy

A Discussion of Grace in Caryll Houselander’s TheReedofGod

Conor Hardy

In The Reed of God, Caryll Houselander begins a reflection on grace by examining emptiness. Rooted in the paradox of having being and having emptiness, Houselander reveals deep insights into how grace works with our nature. It is the union of nature and grace that make us participants in the love of the Trinity. The insight that Houselander delves deeper into in her reflection is that we are nothing without God; we are empty vessels to be filled with grace. She uses three analogies to embody for us this insight: a reed made into a pipe for music, a hollow cup furbished into a chalice used for sacrifice, and a bird’s nest furnished to be a home for nurturing life. 1 These metaphors serve as threads she weaves together to form for us a tapestry by which we can better understand and appreciate how we can be receptive of grace and be participants in God.

Houselander notes one must first empty or let go of the rubble one possesses. A bird’s nest cannot be the home it was made to be if it is cluttered with trash and glass and harmful things. 2 These things can be grasped onto out of fear of being empty, of the poverty of being alone, but they do not nourish us like soil does for a plant. Truly we experience a void, an emptiness, a longing unfulfilled, which we may loath and seek to avoid. This comes from the innate reality within us for which we were made: to be participants in God and be filled with love. A sense of lacking and the need to have something other than ourselves to fulfill us is intuited naturally. We do not naturally intuit the paradox Houselander examines here, which is that of the Gospels: “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” (Mt 19:21).

This participation in God is reflected in this having, giving away and then receiving again. We are given life freely, graciously, and it is

1 Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 2020), 1. 2 Ibid., 2.

by giving of our life back to God in the same manner that we receive even more (Lk 6:38). An essential insight into our role as participants in the (created) natural order and the transition to the supernatural order of grace is discovered through this capacity of giving freely. Edward Oakes, S.J., articulates this in his book A Theology of Grace in Six Controversies, where he says, “love is not love if it has been coerced out of the supposed lover . . . . Yet, in a sense, love is not due anyone. What is the value of love if it is not freely given? Thus the paradox: we need love but cannot demand it.”3 With this capacity of freedom, we can choose to hoard or let go of things other than God. When we freely empty ourselves of our own desires or attachments, we can then be filled by God and made into the kind of being for which He intended us: a saint. Houselander relays that when we are emptied, God may use us as a reed He can play and “live lyrically through us,” or as a chalice “to be sacrificed in us,”4 or as a nest for Him to have “a warm, sweet abiding in a domestic life at home.”5

For there to be this free exchange of life in love it is necessary that the instrument of God be elevated by God in some capacity. The person cannot do this on his own but must cooperate with God to achieve such an end. When a person has the capacity to receive grace, God fills that person to the extent that the person is capable of receiving His grace. This is needed for the perfection of the person who is to be emptied of self. In doings so, the person still maintains his or her unique individuality but is filled with God. As Charles Journet explains in The Meaning of Grace, “God raises us up, rather as the artist uses an instrument to make it produce what by itself it would be incapable of—joy, sadness, prayer.”6 We are made for perfection, which is to be friends of God. Friendship entails a degree of equality, and thus God gives us His grace and we are changed by our openness to it.

As perfection is what we were made for, it is most natural for man to be opened and changed by His grace. In the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas explains, in his discussion of nature and grace in the New Law, that “a thing is not brought to perfection at once from the

3 Edward T. Oakes, S.J., A Theology of Grace in Six Controversies (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016), 3. 4 Houselander, Reed of God, 3. 5 Ibid., 4. 6 Charles Journet, The Meaning of Grace, trans. A. V. Littledale (Scepter Publishers, 2020), 20.

outset, but through an orderly succession of time; thus one is at first a boy, and then a man. ”7 So too is this seen with the processes by which a reed, a chalice, or a nest are made. God uses the natural means of time, nature, and one’s freedom of receptivity to strengthen and grow the individual into a perfected state by which one can participate in the love of the Trinity.

Houselander provides these different metaphors to show that the process of grace accomplishing perfection in a soul is varied, because each soul is unique. She says, “although we each have the same purpose of knowing and loving God, we do not all achieve that purpose in the same way or through the same experiences.”8 This is reflective of Revelation 2:17, in which God reveals a white stone to the man who has conquered with a new name written on it that only God and the man know. This stone reveals the identity of the man; it reveals to the man God’s thought of him, what he was created to be and who he is. It reveals his unique participation in God and an aspect of truth about God that he reveals in particular.

How can we empty ourselves of the rubble we have cluttered our souls with in an attempt to fill the gaping absence of the Divine? Houselander explains that contemplation is the tool to furrow the soil of one’s soul to be receptive of God and His grace to take root within. This mystery of grace acting in a soul is demonstrated in Mary of Nazareth, who contemplates the Divine Word (Luke 2:19). Through imitating Our Lady’s action of contemplation, Houselander says, we see that this emptying process is to occur again and again: “it is a thing which has to be done in contemplation as often as the earth has to be sifted and the field ploughed for seed.”9 Through this process, the Holy Spirit touches and interacts with our nature and makes a new creation (Rev 21:5). The Annunciation reveals this to us and the result is a “wedding of the Spirit of Wisdom and Love with the dust of the earth.”10

Finally, when this emptying occurs through free receptivity of grace, our attachment to the rubble wanes and our thirst for God and our need for faith grow. Houselander tells us that we begin to seek Him and see Him everywhere, in everything and in everyone. This is

7 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 106, a. 3. 8 Houselander, Reed of God, 5. 9 Ibid., 3. 10 Ibid., 9.

Mary’s commission at the Cross, to have the faith to see Him, her Son, in each individual. 11 Jesus did not give the crowd to Mary to be her son; He gave her St. John. It is the universal call to each individual to become as Christ. So she looks at each individual and sees Christ in each one.

This is the truth Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins glimpses in his poem As Kingfishers Catch Fire: I say more; the just man justices; Keeps grace, keeps all his goings graces Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is Christ; for Christ plays in ten thousand places Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not His To the Father through the feature of men’s faces.12 Likewise, each of us grows to see the reality of Christ’s presence in others through the condition of emptying and losing ourselves in selfgift. In this self-emptying, one realizes that everyone is suffering. The suffering is the need for God because rubble does not quench or satisfy or fill; the sharp shards of glass in the nest only wound. Standing there beneath her Son on the Cross, Mary reflects her Son’s suffering in emptying herself for the Father’s Will to be accomplished. This was the condition to finding Him in St. John; in each individual; in you and in me. 13

11 Ibid., 93. 12 Gerard Manley Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire (London: Penguin Random House, 2015), 3. 13 Houselander, Reed of God, 3. VOLUME XV (2022) 13