Carryl Houselander on not getting upset about politics

She recommends a change of reading

Though notoriously eccentric — among other things she covered her face in white powder —the English Catholic writer Caryll Houselander was asked for advice by many, often about how to live in a world in such bad shape. A young friend had gotten caught up to an unhealthy or unedifying extent in reading about current politics. He’d asked her about Georges Bernanos’s expose of Francoist atrocities during the Spanish Civil War, A Diary of My Times, and she told him not to read it. The letter, from 1943, appears in Letters of Caryll Houselander.

Her friend has "wrestled with controversial matters with great courage,” Houselander writes.

[I]t is well to know what one can about everything concerning the Church and human beings and so on; but this not mean that it is always, in every case, advisable for each individual to do violence to themselves by reading books likely to raise storms in their particular mind.

You must remember that you have only time and energy to read a certain number of books in your life, therefore each one you do read is a choice: it is read instead of another. This being so, it is wise to choose ones most likely to increase your consciousness of the presence of God, and ones most likely to enter into your mind and to enrich it forever. . . .

I do really think that if, for a year or two, you read some of those great books about God which teach the soul to rest in Him, you would afterwards find that you view hard, controversial matters much more easily. When I say “rest in Him,” I don't mean any sort of complacency or any sort of cessation of activity or activity of mind, but a rest like the rest in the wings of a bird spread upon and abandoned to the current of a great wind, swifter and stronger than its own flight. . . .

I am sure the solution is to abandon yourself to the contemplation of the love and beauty of God, to the mystery of the Trinity, to the unutterable bliss of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit; because if you do allow your soul to be swept along on this great storm-wind of love, like the bird with spread wings, you will find that one day you can look upon the face of the Passion, on what is ugly and confusing in the world, without faltering and with an increase of compassion for God and man.

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