Giving Ourselves Unreservedly to Life

By Caryll Houselander

Simplicity is not — as so many think, and, alas, teach — silliness. Simplicity means not being complicated, not being double in any way, not deluding oneself or anyone else. The first exercise in simplicity is to accept oneself as one is. There are two tremendous results of this: one is humility; the other is that it enables other people to accept us as we are, and in this there is real charity.

People whose demand on others is simple and uncomplicated add to the life of the world. One of the main reasons for devitalization, depression and psychological tiredness is that we make complicated demands on one another.

Everyone has, so to speak, his individual income of psychological energy — some more, some less. Everyone, in his relations with other people, makes a demand on that energy. There are normal demands, which result in a fair give-and-take, and there are abnormal demands, which result in a dreadful deprivation. Some people cost us a lot of energy; they are expensive to know; unless we have abnormally high psychological energy, they exhaust us. Others make only the slightest demands, and others actually give.

The expensive people are those who, because they are not simple, make complicated demands — people to whom we cannot respond spontaneously and simply, without anxiety. They need not be abnormal to exact these complicated responses; it is enough that they should be untruthful, or touchy, or hypersensitive, or that they have an exaggerated idea of their own importance, or that they have a pose — one which may have become second nature, but is not what they really are. With all such people we are bound to experience a little hitch in our response. If we are not sure that what they say is true, we are embarrassed. In time, our relationship with them becomes unreal. If we have to consider every word or act in their company in case it hurts their feelings or offends their dignity, or to act up to them in order to support their pose, we become strained by their society. They are costing us dearly in psychological energy.

The individual who is simple, who accepts himself as he is, makes only a minimum demand on others in their relations with him. His simplicity not only endows his own personality with unique beauty; it is also an act of real love. This is an example of the truth that whatever sanctifies our own soul at the same time benefits everyone who comes into our life.

One immediate result of accepting ourselves as we are — which is becoming simple — is that we stop striving to reach a goal that means becoming something the world admires, but which is not really worthwhile. Instead, we realize the things that really do contribute to our happiness, and work for those. For example, we cease to want to be rich, successful or popular, and want instead the things that satisfy our deeper instincts: to be at home, to make things with our hands, to have time to see and wonder at the beauty of the earth, to love and to be loved. To work for real human happiness implies unworldliness, the kind of unworldliness that is usually a characteristic of artists, who — in spite of glaring faults — prefer to be poor, so that they may be able to make things of real beauty as they conceive it, rather than to suit themselves to the tastes and standards of the world.

To accept oneself as one is; to accept life as it is: these are the two basic elements of childhood's simplicity and humility. But it is one thing to say this and another to do it. What is involved? First of all, it involves the abandoning of all unreality in ourselves. But even granted that we have the courage to face ourselves and to root out every trace of pretense, how shall we then tolerate the emptiness, the insignificance, that we built up our elaborate pretense to cover?

The answer is simple. If we are afraid to know ourselves for what we are, it is because we have not the least idea of what trial is. It is because we have not the least idea of the miracle of life-giving love that we are. There is no pretense that can approach the wonder of the truth about us, no unreality that comes anywhere near the reality.

We are "other Christs." Our destiny is to live the Christ-life: to bring Christ's life into the world; to increase Christ's love in the world; to give Christ's peace to the world.

What contemptible pygmies our most exalted ambitions and fantasies are beside this, the reality!

The acceptance of life as it is must teach us trust and humility. This is because every real experience of life is an experience of God. Every experience of God makes us realize our littleness, our need, our nothingness, but at the same time the miracle of Christ in us. Not only are we one of God's creatures — which is in itself a guarantee of His eternal creating love — but we are also His Christ, His only Son, the sole object of His whole love. These two facts balance the scales of trust: our nothingness and our allness.

If, in the light of this knowledge, we give ourselves unreservedly to life, every phase of it, every experience in it will lead us back to the inward heaven of spiritual childhood. "All the way to Heaven is Heaven," says St. Catherine of Siena, and this is a thousand times true of the heaven of spiritual childhood, because it means becoming, not any child, but the Christ Child who is the life and the heaven of the soul. •