Christ in the Carriage

Caryll Houselander was standing in a crowded train on the Bakerloo line, in the London of the nineteen-thirties, when she saw it. She has told it herself, so I will not improve on it. Quite suddenly she saw Christ in all of them: in every person in the carriage, sitting and standing and strap-hanging, the tired ones and the ones reading the paper and the ones who looked as if they had never been loved; Christ living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them. And when she came up out of the station into the street it was the same, the people on the pavement, in the shops, in the buses, Christ in every one of them, and it did not stop for days. She said afterward that she had known it as a doctrine all her life and that this was different. This was seeing.

I want to say that word to you now, in this time, because it is the only word I have that is big enough for the time, and because it was given to her in a decade very like ours, when the cities were afraid and the news was bad every morning and everyone could feel the thing coming and nobody could stop it. She did not write her books in a quiet age. She wrote them in the blackout, with the sirens going, for people who were going to be bombed that night, and what she wrote to them was not that it would be all right. It was that Christ was in it.

So let me begin where she began, with the fear. You are tired. I think most of us are tired in a way we have not been before, not from work but from watching; from the feeling that the world is coming apart in a glass rectangle in our hands and that we are required to watch it come apart, all day, without being able to touch any of it. The people are divided from each other by a wall that runs through the middle of every family and every street. The old consolations have been taken to the clinic and the new ones are for sale. And underneath it there is a question that nobody quite says, which is whether this is the end of something, whether the light that was in the world is going out and we are the generation that gets to watch it go.

Here is what she would say, and what I say, because it is simply true. The light is not going out. It cannot. It was never a light that the world kept lit; it was a light that came into the world, and the darkness, which was there before and was very thick, did not overcome it. That is the oldest sentence we have about it. It was written by a man who had seen his teacher executed and his friends scattered and his city about to be destroyed, and he did not write it as a hope. He wrote it as a report.

And what the light is, is this. Christ is in all. Not above us, waiting at the end of the century to see whether we managed. In us, now, in the carriage. In the man at the coffee shop looking at the ring on his hand; Christ is in him, and is tired in him, and is afraid of dying in him, and the ring cannot measure that. In the girl scrolling in the dark at two in the morning; Christ is in her, awake in her, waiting in her, and the column of pictures goes past him and he does not go away. In your neighbour who voted wrongly; Christ is in him, exactly as much as in you, and he is kind to your dog. In the plumber in the hallway. In the woman in the detention centre with no bed. In the young man who has been sold a wolf and believes it is himself. In the one who has been told that his guilt is a wound and so cannot find the door; Christ is in him, carrying the guilt that the clinic would not let him carry, and waiting for him to turn round. There is no one in whom he is not. That is not a comforting thought. It is the structure of the world.

Houselander’s great image for this was Advent. She said that we are living in the Advent of the world, in the long season in which Christ is hidden and growing, as he was hidden in Mary, who went about Nazareth for nine months with God inside her and nobody could see. Nothing looked different. She drew water and ground flour and was tired in the afternoons. And the whole of the redemption of the world was being carried about the village in her, unseen, in the dark, growing. That, Houselander said, is our condition. Christ is in us, and in each other, in the dark, growing. The age does not look redeemed. Nazareth did not look redeemed. The thing is in the hiddenness, and the hiddenness is not a failure of the thing but the way it works.

And she said a harder thing too, which I will not leave out because the age needs it. She said that the sufferings of this time, the war and the loss and the fear, were not an interruption of Christ’s life in us but the very shape of it. He has a Passion, and he is still having it, in us, because we are his body and the body is in the world. When you are afraid at night, he is afraid in you, as he was in the garden. When you are ignored, mocked, scrolled past, he is scrolled past in you. When you sit by the bed of someone who is dying and smells of it, he is dying in that bed, and he is sitting beside it in you, and both of these are true at once and neither is a figure of speech. The suffering is not wasted. It is not a bug. It is the place where the Passion of the Infant Christ, as she called it, is still being lived, in small, in the smallest people, and it is the exact place where the redemption is happening.

Now the glory. I have not forgotten it; it is the reason for everything else. Paul, who had been beaten and shipwrecked and was in prison when he wrote, said that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed in us. In us. Not in the sky. The whole creation, he said, is groaning like a woman in labour, waiting, and what it is waiting for is the revealing of what we are. John said it more simply: we are God’s children now, and what we shall be has not yet appeared, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And Houselander said it in her own way, in the book she wrote at the end of her life about the risen Christ: that the risen life of Christ is not a thing we wait for but a thing we already have, in seed, in the dark, in the carriage, and that the glory to come is only the seed come up.

Think what that means. The light that is in the man with the ring, hidden under the dashboard, will one day be all that there is of him, and it will be beautiful beyond anything the ring could have scored. The girl in the dark will be revealed, and the plumber, and the neighbour, and the woman with no bed, and the one whose guilt was taken from him so that he could not be forgiven, who will be forgiven. The glory that is going to be revealed is Christ in all of them, finally seen, as Houselander saw him for a few days on the Bakerloo line and then had to go back to taking on faith. That is the end of the story. Not the empire’s twilight and not the republic’s silence and not the feed’s last rectangle. Christ, all in all, and every one of us in him, with our faces.

So, to you, in this difficult time, a few plain things, as she would have said them.

Do not wait to be strong. Mary was not strong; she was a girl with a reed’s emptiness, and that is why the music could be played through her. The emptiness you feel at the end of the day is not a defect. It is the space. Let him be in it.

Do not try to save the world. It has been saved. Your part is the one person in front of you, in whom he is, and the cup of tea, and the hour. Houselander said that the only way to love Christ in the world is to love the people he is in, and that this will nearly always be inconvenient and unglamorous and will not look like anything.

Do not be afraid of the dark. He is in it. Advent is dark; that is not the enemy of Christmas but its womb.

Do not count. Not your sins, not your failures, not the days. He is not counting. He is growing.

And do not believe, whatever the glass tells you, that you are the last generation. You are the Advent generation, as every generation has been, carrying him about unseen through a frightened city, and the light that came into the world is in you, and in the person beside you on the train, and the darkness has not overcome it, and it will not, and one day what is hidden will be seen, and it will be him, and it will be you.