Vigils Reading – Memorial of B.V.M.

The Lost Child
A Reading from Caryll Houselander’s “The Reed of God”

Surely there can be no one with a spark of imagination who has not, at some time or other, felt baffled and even hurt by the Gospel record of the loss of the Child Jesus. The striking thing about it is that it was not really loss. Our Lady did not lose Christ; He deliberately went away. He allowed her to imagine Him safe in the company of travellers; and without a word He slipped away and went back to Jerusalem… When she had found Him, after three days of utter bereavement, He returned with her to Nazareth; but after what must have seemed a very short time to her, He left her again, and from that time forward her life was a continual seeking for Him. We hear of her standing outside in the crowd during His public life; of her following Him to the Cross, where the very life she had given Him was taken away from her. For a brief moment He was put into her arms again, and then taken up quickly… and put into the tomb.

Why did Christ treat Our Lady in this way? It was not only to show His absolute trust in her or her trust in Him (although she was the one human being in whom God’s Will was completely unhindered). It was because Our Lady lived the life of all humanity. Concentrated into her tiny history is the life story of the whole human race, the whole relationship of the redeemed human race with God…

Everyone experiences this sense of the loss of the Divine Child. Everyone knows it in different ways and in different degrees. Converts, and others who have received some great revivifying grace, find the springtime of their souls suddenly chill. The uprush and thrust of spring fails, and they are left empty. It does indeed seem to them that the Child was born into their lives; filled the little house of their souls with His laughter: and now, without warning, He is gone. There is no emptiness like the emptiness of the house from which a child has gone away…

…When we were young, or when Faith was young in us, we were aware of the call within us, of the Holy Spirit inspiring us to lead the austere life of sacrifice and uncompromising charity which is the only really free and fetterless life on earth. Then, indeed, there was space, light, and air in us. But we have gradually frittered away the vocation to be free… gradually we have frittered our freedom away: alwaysincreasing our wants, little by little making more and more necessities for ourselves; forming habit after habit of petty indulgence; until one day (if we are given the grace of realizing it), we discover that we too have lost the Divine Child… We started with the one idea of serving God, but gradually the formalities, the necessary social life, the business side, has overcome us.

But whether it be for a long or a short time, a searing grief or one that wears the mind and heart gradually, the experience itself is universal; and if one things stands out particularly in the case of very devout people, it is that in them you can see that it is not a loss but His deliberate going away. They pray, they meditate, they deny themselves; they perform all the works of mercy; nevertheless, Christ seems to leave them…

In every man the impulse to desire and pursue his happiness, his own good, is deeply rooted… This equality of desire makes every man search, makes everyone (whether he knows it or not) seek, seek, seek all his life, for the lost Child, whether he knows Him directly as Christ or as the goodness of his human love; as the peace of his home, the joy in his work, or just as the indefinable lightness of heart which descends upon him like Pentecost