The Little Way of the Infant Jesus - Softcover

Houselander, Caryll

4.8

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9780918477330: The Little Way of the Infant Jesus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0918477336 ISBN 13: 9780918477330

Publisher: Sophia Inst Pr, 2000

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How, even as an infant, Jesus suffered for you: learn the neglected and misunderstood lessons of His cradle. God could have come into the world as an adult, but He chose instead to be born as a baby to teach you key lessons about who He is and what He calls you to be - lessons that most Christians miss. No longer. In these eye-opening pages, Caryll Houselander reveals the powerful spiritual implications of one startling fact: in the manger, even as angels guarded and shepherds sought Him, the baby Jesus was already suffering for your sins. For your sake, our majestic God became a helpless infant at the mercy of His creatures. At the beginning of His life on earth, the God who raised the canopy of the heavens let Himself be raised off the cold ground by the humble wood of His cradle. With stunning and splendid humility, He was bound by gravity to that cradle just as firmly as He later would be bound by nails to the wood of His Cross - which again raised Him above the stony ground, once more at the mercy of those He created. In these facts, Caryll Houselander discovers a wealth of spiritual insights that give dramatic new meaning to Jesus' admonition that you must "become like a little child." With brilliant simplicity and holy warmth, she shows that in order to do so - and in order to know and love Jesus truly - you must transcend the cute baby Jesus of the sentimental hymns and come to see the Infant as He really is: our God of suffering and majesty, who even in the cradle shows you the straight path to holiness: the little way of the infant Jesus.

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About the Author:

Caryll Houselander (1901-1954) was baptized as a child, but left the Faith as a teenager. She told the story of her lapse and Christian reawakening in her classic A Rocking-Horse Catholic. She is also author of the prayers in Sophia Institute Press's The Essential Rosary. Her passionate and profound writing will deepen your love for God.

Some truths need to be told over and over again. Our Lord repeated certain truths about Himself and used certain images of Himself over and over again, like the rhyme in a song. Repetition not only instills an idea into our minds, but it has the same power that rhythm has to make the idea part of us and dear to us, even when it is hard in itself - and this gently and easily, just as a tune heard many times, sometimes quite unconsciously, becomes part of us and dear to us. But there is a difference between Christ's repetition and ours. He speaks creative words because He is God, and because, as man, He is a poet whom no other poet has ever come near to: His words echo and re-echo through the human heart. We, on the other hand, tend to become tedious in repetition, even when the thing that we are saying concerns God and is beautiful in itself. Yet everyone who writes about the Christ-life knows that unless certain things are repeated in every book he writes, much of it, or all of it, will be almost meaningless to many who read it. This is just such a book, and since the basic fact of the Christ-life, which is the key to everything in it, is the indwelling presence of Christ in us, I will repeat not something I have written about it before, but our Lord's own words telling us of it, on the night before He died: "It is the truth-giving Spirit, for whom the world can find no room, because it cannot see Him, cannot recognize Him. . . . He will be continually at your side, nay, He will be in you." "When that day comes, you will learn for yourselves that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you." "You have only to live on in me, and I will live on in you." "I am the vine, you are its branches; if a man lives on in me, and I in him, then he will yield abundant fruit; separated from me, you have no power to do anything." "I have bestowed my love upon you, just as my Father has bestowed His love upon me; live on, then, in my love. You will live on in my love, if you keep my commandments, just as it is by keeping my Father's commandments that I live on in His love."

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