The Risen Christ

Caryll Houselander's The Risen Christ helps to restore a balance that is sometimes lost. There is so great and natural a concentration on the Passion and Death of Our Lord that Easter Sunday at times seems merely like the conclusion of Holy Week: concentration is relaxed, interest flags, the great moment is over. But the Resurrection is the beginning of the new life we must all live if Calvary is to benefit us.

The Early Church indeed saw Paschaltide as the supreme time and considered Holy Week as part of it. St. Leo the Great never preached about the suffering of the Cross without remembering also the joy of the Resurrection. The custom of baptizing at the Easter vigil the catechumens who had been receiving instruction throughout Lent emphasized the fact that this joy flowed from Christ to his Church - dead to sin we were to rise again and to live by the life of him who had conquered death.

All her life Caryll Houselander meditated and wrote on Our Lord's passion, as he suffered it in himself and suffers it still in his mystical Body. This book on the Risen Life is a wonderful completion of all her writing. She meditates on the forty days Our Lord spent on earth after the Resurrection, the lessons we can learn from the way he spent them, and the way we should reflect his risen life in our own lives, with the Resurrection as the key to that indestructible joy which is the special mark of all the saints.

"In all she wrote, there was a candour as of childhood; she seemed to see everything for the first time, and the driest of doctrinal considerations shone out like a restored picture when she had finished with it. And her writing was always natural; she seemed to find no difficulty in getting the right word; no, not merely the right word, the telling word, that left you gasping..." -MSGR. RONALD KNOX