Rumor has it that the annual Diocesan Priest Retreat features a lottery. The winner, and only the winner, is allowed to discuss his physical maladies. Such a limitation is not the case for late-septuagenarian bloggers. But I’ll not regale you, gentle reader, with physical maladies. Instead, I beg your indulgence to share a physic disability: my word allergy. (Perhaps it’s only a manifestation of my longstanding “teacher’s twitch” syndrome.)

Among the words and phrases to which I’m allergic are “relevant,” “trending,” “reach out to,” and “touch base with.” Quirky, right? But, a sorry truth to be told, I’ve never been able to make friends with “spiritual.” Too close to “ethereal.” Mind you, it’s not that I’m material—at least not crassly.

So, what about spiritual reading? Strongly recommended, of course. But unlike charity, spiritual reading does not cover a multitude of sins. Being spiritual doesn’t compensate for stilted prose. It doesn’t exculpate the jejune or the saccharine. It can’t make up for predictable pablum, much less the deadly dull.

Having rejected a manuscript that he’d submitted, a publisher recently sent a good friend of mine a slender volume titled The Art of Spiritual Writing. Well, it’s certainly not a science, and I doubt whether it can be taught. Golly, since the time of Socrates we’ve been debating whether virtue can be taught. There is, however, a rich and developed theology of the spiritual life which can be taught. Its classic “manualist” expression is the Sulpician Adolphe-Alfred Tanquerey’s The Spiritual Life: A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology (1930).

Last week I made a day of recollection. Since my powers of solo contemplation are limited, some spiritual reading was in order. Not Tanquerey’s scholarship. Nor could I smuggle in a journal of opinion, not even the New Oxford Review. Maybe a collection of poetry, the best of Gerard Manley Hopkins would suffice. But the Catholic University of America Press gave me an altogether admirable and, yes, smashing alternative. I’m delighted to see that it’s featured in CUA’s Catholic Women Writers series.

The alternative, let me say upfront, is a novel: Caryll Houselander’s The Dry Wood. Her first biographer, the great Maisie Ward (of Sheed and Ward) called its author “a divine eccentric.” Houselander (1901–1954) was a British artist, mystic, psychiatric consultant, and tireless practitioner of the works of mercy. Who she was, as a person, helped make her a widely read, and deeply credible, spiritual writer. My mother read and kept her book The Reed of God. Msgr. Ronald Knox said that she “seemed to see everything for the first time, and…seemed to find no difficulty in getting the right word; no, not merely the right word, the telling word, that left you gasping.”

How does The Dry Wood count as spiritual reading? It is a spirited story, told with often searing insight and incandescent language. A badly disabled boy, who is unable to speak, captures the imagination of a dockside and largely immigrant slum. Fearing for his life, the people unite to pray a novena, not for the boy’s cure but for his survival. They direct the novena to their saintly pastor who has recently passed on after 50 years of service.

But there is no miracle. The late pastor, at the urging of his living bishop, does not intervene. And why? Because a miracle would turn the beloved pastor into a convenient saint and the subject of a new line of holy cards. The far better course is to see Christ in the messiness and even desperation of ordinary life. He cannot be made to come down from the Cross. The mystery of sin and redemption defies commodification.

Of late, most Catholics who recognize her name have probably come across Caryll Houselander through her occasional meditations in the monthly liturgical guide Magnificat. I make it a practice to clip and save them. I’m also planning to read her psychological study Guilt. But not just yet; no, not just yet.