Two Apostles of Loneliness: Caryll Houselander and Catherine Doherty on the Mystical Body of Christ

Abstract

They met only once, briefly, after prayer on a gray afternoon in London: She was a very small woman with huge big spectacles through which she could hardly see. I first met her, not knowing who she was, in chapel of Grail in England. This person was praying and I was interested in little person. Anyhow, there was an air about her that I couldn't understand--I was drawn to her. So we had tea together, eternal good English tea, at 4pm and then I found out that she was Caryll. That didn't tell me anything for I hadn't read any of her books. She was very, very shy, andYvonne, who was in charge of Grail at time inkled that she was a writer. But it didn't penetrate until I got home and first read ThisWar is Passion. After that I collected everything that she wrote. (1) It must have been quite a meeting: Doherty, who scribbled those words in front of one of Houselander's books, was a former noblewoman, but she was a self-proclaimed recluse; Doherty was a baroness larger than life with a penchant for properly placed explicative. Houselander was relatively more restrained and rather frail; Doherty was forced to flee many lands, while Houselander rarely left her comfortable London surroundings. Doherty spoke with a thick Russian accent, Houselander with poshest of English. Yet, as different as they may have appeared socially, internally they shared same solitude: neither enjoyed secure intimacy with another, neither was able to delight in lifelong companionship, neither enjoyed comforts of life-long marriage and wonder of raising her own family. Both were quintessential pilgrims of twentieth century. For has a human soul escaped pains of loneliness. The solitude of Adam echoes throughout every human gaze and in every human act, each of us stretching outward for completion and wholeness. Such solitude compels us to spend our lives searching for a savior who can finally rescue us from our restlessness. Although inevitable and inescapable, there was something about past century that rendered social divisions all more urgent, more widespread, more institutionalized. From blistering battles to cold dictatorships, from loosening of basic human virtues to strangling of simple human joys, twentieth century beheld new types of political and intellectual systems that fostered human alienation. In economics, institutionalization of Marxist theories of alienation resulted in totalitarian regimes. In philosophy, radical existentialism argued that there could be no real knowledge of other; each of us is rather doomed and destined to remain locked within our own limitations. L'enfer c'est les autres--Hell is other people. Thinkers such as Sartre and Camus highlighted our inherent estrangement from one another as unique essence of human person. Theology moved from doctrinal precision to liberative praxis, scrambling to show that God is squarely on side of those in a particular economic class, social situation, or gender. Was it not in such turbulence that Christian West received one of its great life stories, The Long Loneliness? In response, however, these years consequently produced some of most significant reflections on solitude and solidarity as well. Where political ideologies inevitably failed, spiritual remedies mercifully arose. Take, for example, Pius XII's 1943 encyclical, Mystici Corporis. At height of Great War stood a pope amid the cities, towns and fertile fields strewn with massive ruins and defiled with blood of brothers ([section]4), calling world to find comfort in how Jesus Christ never ceases to look down with especial love on his spotless spouse so sorely tried in her earthly exile; and when he sees her in danger, saves her from tempestuous sea ([section]39). Out of these tempests of Nazism, Fascism, and atheism arose another Christian leader, Blessed John Paul II. …