The Passion of the Infant Christ

The focus of this book is the Divine Infancy as it is lived in the members of the Mystical Body. Our age, says Caryll Houselander, is the age of Redemptive Childhood: it is in fostering the life of the Infant Christ in us that we shall find the answers to the peculiar sufferings of a world burdened with an overwhelming sense of the futility of individual efforts. No life is then trivial: "No life is impotent before suffering, no suffering is too trifling to heal the world, too little to redeem, to be the point at which the world's healing begins.... It is true that the span of an infant's arms is absurdly short; but if they are the arms of the Divine Child, they are as wide as the reach of the arms on the Cross; they embrace and support the whole world; their shadow is the noonday shade for its suffering people; they are the spread wings under which the whole world shall find shelter and rest.""In all she wrote, there was a candour as of childhood; she seemed to see everything for the first time, and the driest of doctrinal considerations shone out like a restored picture when she had finished with it. And her writing was always natural; she seemed to find no difficulty in getting the right word; no, not merely the right word, the telling word, that left you gasping..." -MSGR. RONALD KNOX