1/4/2024 0 Comments Orbis books location![]() ![]() Compassion is often born from experience, for our experiences of pain can help us understand, albeit only in part, the pain of another. Their tender responses, even though my pain was by no means comparable with theirs, was profoundly healing. Due to the stigma surrounding such violence, they faced shame and isolation within their communities.ĭuring the project in Nigeria, I shared my own journey through trauma for the first time. As women from religious minorities, they had suffered persecution and forced displacement, and many had been subjected to sexual violence. I hoped this could help create a safe place for them to share their stories, process traumatic memories, and begin to heal and reclaim their voice and dignity. In Iraq and Nigeria I taught the women to paint their self-portraits. But Houselander's spiritual writing, now often overlooked, was devoured on both sides of the Atlantic.Samkina, fifteen, a Rohingya Muslim, fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar. Ward became a devotee of Houselander, constantly encouraging her to undertake new projects - including a novel late in life, and a treatise on guilt, neither of which was successful. ![]() ![]() Her first writing appeared in devotional periodicals, including The Grail magazine, where it was spotted by Frank Sheed and his wife Mazie Ward. Houselander spent her early career as a struggling artist and woodcarver. From that point on, Houselander's books elaborated on the theme of Christ present, not just in saints but in all persons - and in human history generally.Īs she wrote to wartime Londoners, "Because he has made us 'other Christs,' because his life continues in each of us, there is nothing that any one of us can suffer which is not the passion he suffered." In this way, her intuitive religious vision anticipated Pope Pius XII's encyclical on the " Mystical Body of Christ." She was baptized as a young girl, went through an intensely devout phase, left the church briefly in early adulthood and came back after a vision in the London subway in which she saw Christ in all the travelers there. She decided the Catholic Church was hypocritical and walked away from it when asked to pay a fee for sitting in a pew.Ĭoady is especially sensitive to Houselander's religious development. She spent her youth in convent schools, where she was sometimes considered a "freak" for her looks and mannerisms but where she flourished.Īfter moving to London with her mother and older sister, she attended art school for a time and went through a bohemian period, doing odd jobs to sustain herself. She was a sensitive, artistic girl, totally unlike her impulsive mother, Gertrude. She tells of Houselander's early years, the child of mismatched parents who divorced when Houselander was 11. Her truncated autobiography, A Rocking Horse Catholic, was not initially distributed in Britain because her family complained of its errors and omissions.īut Coady sorts it all out in this factual, carefully-researched biography. In Caryll Houselander: A Biography, Mary Frances Coady has done an excellent job of bringing Houselander back to life - a life particularly difficult to get a handle on because Houselander, like her mother before her, could be careless about facts when telling her own story. ![]()
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