Faith in the Midst of Drought

As we enter the Church's Year of Faith, we are in the midst of a drought.

Everything seems withered and parched, which is perhaps a good metaphor for where we are morally and spiritually. Our nation, our world, has lost Jesus, like Mary and Joseph did in Jerusalem.

Caryll Houselander -- a British mystic, poet and spiritual teacher who lived during World War II -- described in her writings how events in the Gospel are relived over and over in the lives of individuals and nations. She wrote about how everyone at some point experiences the loss of the child Jesus.

And "there is no emptiness like the emptiness of the house from which a child has gone away."

In the middle of the last century Houselander wrote: "gradually we have frittered our freedom away: always increasing 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 realising it), we discover that we too have lost the Divine Child."

How much truer that seems today.

Houselander wrote the following about World War II England, but she could have been describing the present-day United States as well:

"England, as a nation, is also going through the experience of the loss of the Divine Child.

"The Christ Child in a nation is like the presence of the child in a house: everything centres upon his youth; and he fills everything with his life. If he goes away, the child's values go, too, such as the sense of wonder, mystery, beauty, and adventure: the poetry which, free from materialism, is the most complete realism.

"In England, there are traces of where the Child onced lived: there are remnants of the Faith; but not the certainty of the Faith that there once was. There is a wistful longing to believe; but not the joyful freedom of living in belief.

"There is the desire to set up laws of justice for everyone's happiness; but not the spirit of the Child's obedience to God's Law in the heart of all men: and indeed without that no codes and laws can have value; because those who make them have not the capacity to keep them."

Houselander's advice: "seek, seek, seek" all your life for the lost Child.

He is the fulfillment of all our longing. He gives us the Living Water for which we thirst in this drought.

Inspired by this Year of Faith (which began a week ago today) we will be posting columns like this about exporing and/or deepening our faith. Watch for it on Thursdays.