Christina Rossetti's Life as a Channel of Charity

This was the third of three talks given at our Channels of Charity creative retreat on April 27, 2024.
It has been slightly modified.

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We have considered what it means to make our artistic vocations, as Evelyn Underhill puts it, “an oblation from the first.” As we consider how to do this in our own lives, I want to put the example of a specific artist before you.

In the Church of England calendar, today is the feast day of Christina Rossetti, a Victorian poet and devotional writer. Rossetti died in 1894, when Evelyn Underhill was about 20 years old. Like Underhill, Rossetti was a member of the Anglican-Catholic movement that emerged in the middle of the 19th century. If you think you’ve never heard of Rossetti, think again—the lyrics to “In the Bleak Midwinter,” the beloved Christmas hymn, are a poem she wrote.

Christina Rossetti was born the youngest of four siblings into a family of Italian immigrants that lived a respectable, lower middle class life in London. Her childhood was happy. She shared an intimate bond with her mother, and maintained robust friendships with her siblings. She composed her first poem in her mind before she could write. A family member transcribed it for her.

Biographers have noted that the child Christina had a passionate, tempestuous temperament. The Poetry Foundation notes she, “was given to tantrums and fractious behavior, and she fought hard to subdue this passionate temper … perhaps too much so. … As an adult [she] was considered by many to be overscrupulous and excessively restrained.” The adult Christina’s scrupulosity and religious convictions affected her marriage prospects. She turned down two suitors because they did not share her depth of religious conviction. This is perhaps especially poignant because it seems she loved both of them deeply.

When Christina was a teen, her father became ill and unable to continue teaching. This plunged the family into a genteel poverty from which they never recovered. The rest of the family went back to work, but the youthful Christina stayed home to care for her father. Two years later she, too, began to experience severe health issues. Christina’s doctors diagnosed her with a heart condition, but her collapse in health continues to confuse biographers, who have speculated that the illness she experienced was psychosomatic and may have been due to a panic disorder or suppressed sexual trauma.

Christina’s health issues never fully abated. She struggled with recurrent bouts of illness for the rest of her life, and in her forties almost died from Grave’s disease. The lymphatic illness weakened her heart and left her forever changed—her physical appearance altered and her hair thinned, wasting what beauty she had had in her youth. By her forties, she was living with and caring for her elderly mother and aunts; in her fifties and sixties, she contended with breast cancer twice. Breast cancer would take her life in her 64th year.

Through all of this, Christina wrote. She was astonishingly prolific. According to one scholar, she wrote over 1,100 poems. She also achieved authorial success, publishing over 900 of her poems before she died and attaining some measure of fame among the English reading public. When Alfred, Lord Tennyson died, Christina was suggested to replace him as England’s Poet Laureate. Her health prevented this, but the fact that she was considered suggests the startling degree of her achievement, especially given the difficult plight of intelligent women in Victorian England. (Women, for example, were not permitted to formally matriculate at Oxford University until 1920.)

As Rossetti grew older, her poetic output decreased, but she began to conduct research into poets like Petrarch and wrote a significant quantity of devotional prose, including Annus Domini, a collection of daily collects; Time Flies, a daily devotional; and The Face of the Deep, a devotional commentary on the book of Revelation.

I have shared this information about Christina Rossetti because I want to sketch for you the kind of example she offers us. One can analyze her life according to various frameworks. Many scholars make persistent attempts to “get to the bottom” of why she lived the way she lived by focusing on her repressed sexuality and the oppression she faced as a woman in Victorian society. These are factors that would have had no small effect on her life, but for my part I tend to find the scholarly fixation on them limited. It seems to me people struggle to understand Rossetti because they persistently treat her faith as if it was ancillary or dispensable. For example, when analyzing “Goblin Market,” a poem about sisterhood, temptation, and redemption, critics tend to focus on the psychology of Christina’s repressed sexuality, but only give passing reference to her 11 years of volunteer work at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary, a charity that rehabilitated former prostitutes in a convent-like residential setting.

When I look at Christina Rossetti’s life, I glimpse a woman who, to the best of her wisdom and abilities, made her life a “living sacrifice” to God. She did so imperfectly, perhaps overcompensating for her faults or erring on the side of scrupulosity. The social circumstances of the world she lived in did not make this any easier, often misdiagnosing her suffering or requiring her to suppress qualities that could have opened into boldness of character and delight. But Christina Rossetti willingly and relentlessly persisted in her devotion to Christ, His Church, and the artistic vocation God gave her. Until her death, Rossetti attended church weekly. She contributed to the prayer life of the average churchgoer by writing liturgical poetry and daily devotional texts.

One of my favorite biographical observations about her life notes that in her middle age, “her dedication to Anglo-Catholicism … intensified, and it took some odd forms, such as her habit of stooping to pick up stray pieces of paper on the street lest they have the Lord’s name printed on them.” One can see in this habit a sign of religious neurosis; but one might also see in it the sign of a consuming thirst for the presence of God, and a willingness to be made strange in pursuit of that Presence. I am reminded of an Evelyn Underhill sentence we have encountered a couple of times: “Only thus can humanity use to the full its strange power of embodying eternal realities; and uniting the extremes of mystery and homeliness.”

Christina Rossetti suffered. But in her poetry and devotional writing the concern of her speakers is always to persist in clinging to Jesus, no matter how intense one’s suffering or despair might be. The fierce intensity of this repeated theme is astonishing, even unsettling. If we are to take Rossetti seriously as a creative, we must allow ourselves to be challenged to an intense degree by this radical dedication to say yes to whatever God would ask of her.

After all, Rossetti’s writerly success—which she certainly achieved—does not seem to have obtained much more for her in earthly terms than a degree of fame that made her uncomfortable, and whatever joy she derived from the act of writing (I do suspect this was a deep joy). It did not win her financial security; romantic happiness; release from physical ailment; wellbeing for her suffering family members; freedom from grief; or a secure sense of self. Instead, it appears in large part to have been one of the ways Rossetti doggedly sought to practice what we heard Underhill call the “true and active death to self” necessary in any Christian life, and which she then freely gave to the faithful reading public as a gift. In her January 3 entry of Time Flies, she writes that all the stories and illustrations she shares in the collection are, “alike written down in the humble wish to help others by such means as I myself have found helpful.”

Underhill observes that prayer is not necessarily intended to make us feel good or happy, though pleasant emotion may follow upon prayer from time to time. Instead, it is a means by which we become accessible to God for the purpose of ministering His Charity. Rossetti seems to me to have understood this, to have known that any prayerful endeavor—whether it be churchgoing, charitable work, writing poetry, or caring for family—might not make her “feel better,” but that these things were good to do for Christ’s sake, not hers.

How do we practice such a posture? Where do we start?

To put it bluntly: we start. In another Time Flies entry, Rossetti observes, “Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes: work never begun.” If we don’t know how to begin, we take Rossetti’s advice seriously. We refuse to leave the work undone. We find a small beginning, and endeavor to begin.

This could take the form of scribbling down a bad draft, or having a go at a painting that scares us; but more than likely our beginning will be a movement to re-commit to the responsibilities of our daily lives and our prayer. Underhill writes: “ … we are not required to go outside the frame of normal experience … to fulfill the creative design of God for souls. There is no place and no career which lies outside Eternity, and cannot incarnate something of the Eternal Charity. What was done in the carpenter’s shop can be done in the engineer’s shop too.”

Rossetti seems to have known this truth in her bones, and over and over again she practiced it. She knew that a devotional commentary on Revelation might be written at home, in the midst of caring for elderly relatives, just as well as in the libraries of Oxford. She lived a life that embodied the tension we heard Underhill name earlier today—a life that “unit[ed] the extremes of mystery and homeliness.” Perhaps such simplicity offends our sense of artistic greatness. But the examples of saints and faithful people like Christina Rossetti repeatedly compel us to reconsider and surrender our need to be exalted.

Start here, their lives tell us. Begin with the materials you have. That is where the artist’s vocation takes root. Again in her January 3 Time Flies entry, Rossetti writes, “I have heard tell of a painter who sought far and wide for an atmosphere wherein to paint. At last he found an available atmosphere in Italy: and returning thither he worked? … not so: he died. A bad beginning may be retrieved and a good ending achieved. No beginning, no ending.”

There’s humor in her prose here, a sort of sardonic attention to artistic foolishness. But she’s making a serious point, and she’s right. Where can we go if we won’t begin?

Of course, to assay such a beginning requires us to die to how we think the artist’s life should look. And it requires us to submit to the reality that our art has no life if it is not a channel of God’s Charity. Such surrender is, as we’ve discussed, painful—is a death—but it is also all freedom, a source of relief from the weight of our own needy expectations. The call to give up the things that are precious to us—specific projects, artistic dreams—is a severe one. We need Christ’s life in us to fortify our efforts and endue them with love.

We want to love. But we cannot love unless Love Himself fills us with a charitable, giving love. If we are faithful to throw ourselves upon the Charity of God, He will not only make us channels of this love, but will also fortify us for the effort. He will further His purposes through our art. What else can we ask for?

Let us, then, set our eyes upon Him, and give Him every creative effort and desire of our hearts as a willing sacrifice. Through our art, let us become ministers of His love, made like Christ, shaped into channels of His Charity to a grieving world. Let us pray, as Rossetti does in one of her sonnets:

Lord, Thou Thyself art Love and only Thou;
Yet I who am not love would fain love Thee;
But Thou alone being Love canst furnish me
With that same love my heart is craving now.
… Nerve me to labor till Thou bid me rest,
Kindle my fire from Thine unkindled fire,
And charm the willing heart from out my breast.