Caryll Houslander's The Risen Christ

Houselander is that Divine Eccentric as Maisie Ward called her: convert, poet, artist, wood-carver, she worked with mentally disturbed children and "loved them back to health." She "overflowed with gaiety and a mad sense of fun; her wickedly funny tongue often provoked as much hilarity among her intimates as it caused her remorse." Read more here.

Here she is--in a most interesting passage--on joy:

Most people who want to know God and who are outside the Church have just one thing that is precious to them, though to us with out clear-cut definitions, our discipline and our sacraments, it may seem so vague that it is hard for us to realize how much it means to them. This is their personal approach to God. Very often it seems to be hardly that at all, so vague is it, so closely does it lean to sentimentality. It may be simply a memory of childhood, or a stirring of the spirit when a certain familiar hymn is heard; it may be just a fling of the heart to God, on seeing the first wild spray of blossom that proclaims the spring. But it is quite surely an indication of that individual’s approach to God and of His approach to them, and it is as sweet to them as it would be to a blind man if, reaching out in darkness, he touched the garment hem of Christ.

Too often, through our own fault, we give people who are thus clinging to their own personal contact with God, the idea that Catholicism would sweep it away. Quite wrongly, we give them the idea that we are not seeking any more, that we have a formula for everything, that we hold feeling in contempt, live only by acts of will, and that there is nothing that we cannot explain.
Of course this untrue. We too are always seeking for God, always reaching out blind fingers to touch His garment, and we are blinded by the very light of the mysteries of our faith, which we can live by but cannot explain and can barely begin to understand.

To the enquirer, our hard, unanswerable arguments, dealt out blow by blow with our sledgehammer of zeal, are all too convincing—to the mind. But the heart rises up in revolt against “apologetics” which may convince against the will, and sweep away that lovely touch in the darkness which is at the heart of their lives.

When our friends come into the Church we sometimes tend to domineer them, to exert a too important influence, a possessiveness which is unlike Christ. We do not allow them the time for growth. Some of us persecute Christ’s poor shearlings with our piety, we try to force our pet saints and devotions on them, even our eccentricities, and we do this with the same peculiar insistence with which many people continually try to persuade their friends to go to their dentist! But the only real charity we could give to them is to leave them alone to listen in silence for “the still small voice” of God.

--Caryll Houselander, The Risen Christ (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1958), 46-48