The Season of the Secret

Welcome Advent with the Wisdom of Caryll Houselander

Advent is the season of the secret, the secret of the growth of Christ, of Divine Love growing in silence.
It is the season of humility, silence, and growth.
For nine months Christ grew in His Mother’s body. By His own will she formed Him from herself, from the simplicity of her daily life.
She had nothing to give Him but herself.
He asked for nothing else.
She gave Him herself.
Working, eating, sleeping, she was forming His body from hers. His flesh and blood. From her humanity she gave Him His humanity.
— Caryll Houselander

The word “Mysticism” is related to a Greek word that gives us both mystery and mute. Mute, naturally, involves silence, like being muted on a Zoom call. Mystery is trickier: it’s not a puzzle to be solved like something Nancy Drew would take on, but rather an invitation into that which cannot be “figured out” in any linear or empirical sense, but rather invites us into a knowing beyond knowledge, an encounter beyond experience, a prayer beyond language, an intuition beyond understanding. The mystery of God, or of faith, can never be exhausted or managed or controlled. What we can mostly hope for is to encounter it, to receive blessing from it, and to calibrate our lives by it.

When the British mystic Caryll Houselander (1901-1954) describes Advent as “the season of the secret,” she may be playing with an earthly sense of hiddenness (like a baby hidden in the womb) but also, simultaneously, a more mystical sense of mystery: Advent pairs growth with humility, silence with Love. The mutual love between ordinary human mother and extraordinary divine child is an invitation for all humanity: we share our humanness with Christ, who in turn shares divinity with us. As Athanasius put it, “God became human so that humans might become God.”

But the advent of this human-divine interaction may also be the foundation of what has been called deification or theosis — the mystical state of being one with God, or embodying union with God. Houselander’s poetic description of Advent, when applied to theosis, suggests that the summit of mystical spirituality, like Mary’s pregnancy with Jesus, is a process that emerges in hidden and secret ways. Living a mystical life can be very real, but probably won’t be something that our larger circle of family and friends would ever recognize or even see.

Each year during Advent we can celebrate three different “comings” of Christ: the birth of Jesus, the mythic concept of the Second Coming or the return of Christ at the end of time, and the more mystically resonant invitation to invite Christ’s coming into our hearts and lives, today — right here, right now. Houselander challenges us to accept that this “present coming” will manifest in hidden and secret ways. That may disappoint our egos, but the heart has no problem with this. Allowing the Christ to grow within us is nothing to brag about, but everything to live for — for the secret of the emerging Christ is nothing more nor less than the secret of love manifesting within us and through us, slowly, secretly, mystically. This may be a hidden mystery, but the joy it invites us into is meant to be shared with the world.

Quotation source: Caryll Houselander. The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic (pp. 56). (Function). Kindle Edition.