The Apostle Martyrs
- CARYLL HOUSELANDER
We realize, when we consider the martyrs, how mediocre our own lives are.
This comes home to us all the more, if we realize that they are giving us everything that they suffer, giving on their deaths. We are in the deepest imaginable communion with them. What they do belongs to us, and what we do belongs to them; we are one with them, because we are one Body in Christ.
Equally we are one with the sinners of the world, and just as we realize with shame that the martyrs give us so much and we give them so little, we realize with shame that sinners need so much and we give them so little, because we are sinners too.
But how can any one person, limited in knowledge, imagination, circumstances, as most of us are, reach out in love to these widely different people?
Only through a yet closer and more real identification with Christ. So far we have thought of how we can be identified with him in our love of one another; if we are to reach the whole world, we must be identified with him in his love for his Father. Those who are, are not content merely to accept the suffering that comes. They go out to meet it, inflict it upon themselves, not through any morbidity, but because Christ did so, in reparation to the Father, for sin.
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Acknowledgement
Caryll Houselander. "The Apostle Martyrs." excerpt from The Risen Christ (London, U.K.: Bloomsbury Continuum, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. , 1958).
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury Continuum. This excerpt appeared in Magnificat.
The Author
Caryll Houselander (1901-1954) was a British Roman Catholic laywoman; a mystic, writer, artist, visionary and healer. Her first book, This War is the Passion, written during World War II, launched her prolific writing career. She is best known for: A Rocking Horse Catholic, The Reed of God, The Way of the Cross, This War is the Passion, The Risen Christ, The Letters Of Caryll Houselander: Her Spiritual Legacy, and Wood of the Cradle, Wood of the Cross: The Little Way of the Infant Jesus.
