Caryll Houselander ‘The Dry Wood’

“Save me, O God: for the waters are come in even unto my soul.”

He had wanted his prayer and to be a draught of the shining water of Life, clear and sparkling, a fountain springing up from the dry dust of his heart, but the water that entered into his soul was the dark mysterious water of the Thames.

The water that carried men away to other lands, that brought them from distant, unknown worlds to London, that carried merchants and sailors and travelers to and fro on errands that sometimes separated, sometimes united men forever. The waters that flowed with tears of old mothers and lonely lovers. The waters that ran strong and black with tides of longing and of destiny, bringing men and women to one another’s arms or sweeping them away over seven seas. The waters that carried food and wine and merchandise to and fro between the cities of the world. Cargo of fruit, grapes and oranges and golden pomegranates, sugar candy, candy peel and spice, tea and coffee and sugar and nuts, bales of cotton and wool and silk, dyed vermilion and emerald and blue, and rugs from Persia and China and Egypt and India, and treasures of ivory and teakwood, metal and copper and jade, all the full measure of delight for the feast and splendor and laughter of living.

The water that whispered dark secrets down its tides, drugs that passed swiftly, silently from hand to hand, from thin yellow fingers in far off lands, to hands tattooed with flowers and hearts entwined with roses, to hands already crimson with blood, and black with the touch of evil gold, to terrible soft hands white in the moonlight, with scarlet nails.

Waters that carried outcast and derelicts and the lost and the forgotten, all the flotsam and jetsam of wrecked humanity to and fro, to and fro through time to the ultimate harbor. Waters that caressed strange little wooden wharfs, running furtively beside ramshackle warehouses and taverns, where here and there, a light behind a blind in a window cast a shower of golden petals on the dark ripples. Water that carried rats along the side of the wharfs, and into the ships and cities, waters that knew dark and lovely secrets, water that is the soul of London and brings the world to her heart.

Water that is part of the darkness of humanity flowing forever round the mystery of its light, water that is, with all its whispering and weeping and seeping darkness, symbol of the water of Life.
Water of the Thames, dark and lovely water, gently, gently lapping against the dockside, chug chug chug of the river Thames against the wharf, and Father O’Grady rocking, rocking, rocking, into the sleep of the dark water. Now his deep breathing too is woven into the lapping of the river and the rest of his prayer is sleep.

“Save me, O God: for the waters are come in even unto my soul.”

I returned to work in Twinsburg, Ohio.  Still reflecting, there will be more to say on this during the coming weekend.  For now, my thoughts go to reuniting, a coworker specific.  I learned his six-year-old daughter suffered immensely, the grace of mystery touching allowing the sorrowful opportunity for expanding faith, hope, and charity.  Her illness started as strep throat, then advanced to a flesh-eating virus that attacked her back and one leg severely.  The poor thing lost her leg just above the knee.  A solid Christian family, loving and intact, thoughts seem to linger regarding the reality.  It reminds me of words from a novel ‘The Dry Wood’ by Caryll Houselander.

“They had put Art’s misshapen infant into his own hands to hold, and he felt sure that they would not have done that if they meant him to live.  It was only for a moment, however, and then the nurse took him.  That was a black, agonized moment for Art Jewel.  In it something fierce and primitive awoke in him which afterwards never died.  He desired his son’s life as a thirsting man desires water.

And that son’s life was a tiny atom, a spark against which the whole force of what we call civilization conspired, the whole force of it, past, present, and future.  Out of the past a towering mass of evil cast long shadows across him—the greed, the selfishness, the cruelty, the lust, the infidelities, of generations of human beings.  A multitudinous procession of murder and innocence cast its fire and shadow on the wizened little face, as on the face of all children born into our world.

First of all, as if they swept past the Christ Child sleeping in the stone manger, the flock of Holy Innocents with jubilant cries like wild birds migrating, wild birds winging to the sun of the eternal light; the first martyrs, baptized only with the baptism of blood, with crimson stars tangled in their burning hair.  After them, all through the ages, came the martyrs whose death and resurrection seem the inevitable co-incidence of Christ’s birth, of the birth of life into the valley of the shadow of death.  And always dark on the burning brilliance of martyrdom, the shadow of murder, of the sevenfold evil that is death in man’s heart fighting against life.”

Caryll Houselander as a child.