Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Archives for August 2010

Bayeux Cathedral, The Bayeaux Tapestry, Visiting Bayeux, Normandy

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I had a perfect day. I loved Bayeux Cathedral–a fantastic mish-mash of flying buttresses and gargoyles from the outside, inside, a chaste Gothic cathedrals with the most amazing stained glass.

I just love Gothic cathedrals. Nothing prepares you for the moment of sheer awe and wonder when you enter from the dusty exterior, frequently covered with scaffolding to the chaste, pure, magnificent interiors, illuminated by stained glass.

It’s sad that architectural fashions changed, but I suppose as Tennyson put it,“God fulfils himself in many ways, let one good custom should corrupt the world.”

I loved walking by the canals in Bayeux, not as celebrated as Bruges or Ghent or Amsterdam, but lovely.

And I loved the Moules Marinieres for dinner, though the bowls were enormous, far more than one person could eat.

We enjoyed the Bayeux Tapestry, though have bought an illustrated book to go through it slowly. I was particularly charmed by the mythical animals, and the medieval clothes & armour–well, I guess they were modern and up-to-date when the tapestry was embroidered.

Now on our way to the D-Day beaches.

D-Day is still remembered here. Everywhere. The Churchill Hotel. Operation Overlord Hotel. Signs in bistros saying “Welcome to our Liberators!!”  An ironic copy of a sign from the British cemetery in the Bayeux tapestry museum read (well, in Latin), We whom William Conquered are now happy to return as Liberators. What an ironic turning of the other cheek.

The Normans were initially the Norseman, the Northman. The far-reaching Viking influence which we noticed in Ireland earlier this month, and which is evident everywhere in the North of England was evident again.

A Christian in Business, II

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Frederick Buechner had this description of a vocation, “The vocation God calls you to is where your deep joy and the world’s deep need intersect.” 


I think the same can be said of a good and successful business idea. Find out how your skills, talents, and interests, what you could have fun doing, can somehow intersect with and serve the world’s deep need. No one can meet all the world’s needs. So discover people’s real needs in an niche which interests you and turns you on. Meet that need. Earn your living–plus–in that area.


So a business, ideally, should be an exchange of blessings. The business owner blesses the customer with his or her skills or products. The customer, in return, leaves cash–and good will.


When I seek God’s direction in our business, one thing I always seem to hear him say, is “Think bigger.” I think of how he told Abraham to look up, and count the stars…

Prayer is powerful in every domain of life, even business

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I own a business, a small publishing company, and since I got into business 4 years ago, in my forties, with no previous training or experience, I need to run it by prayer. Which I do. Successfully when I remember to pray, stressfully when I do not.

And here’s an example which is pretty amazing. We have published nearly 400 books over the last 3 years, with the help of 7 of our friends who are working with us. We’ve entered 40 of them into various wholesaler’s networks, and they have sold almost as much as the remaining 350 which we sell through retail outlets. So we’ve wanted to get all our books into wholesale channels and get out of retail.

But, though we have wanted to do this ALL YEAR, and were in agreement on it, setting up the titles with images, description and details to fit the wholesaler’s specifications is time-consuming. And somehow, much to our frustration, things kept coming up which seemed to be a higher priority. It was becoming like Mr. Holland’s Opus (remember that heart-breaking film?) and Roy was getting most irritated and frustrated by it, as was I, to a lesser degree.

Last Friday, it struck me: Gosh, I haven’t prayed for time. And so I did. “Lord, please provide time for us to undertake this massive project.”

And almost instantly, He did. Our clever daughter, Zoe, almost 16, who like Irene, 11, has a solid understanding of our business, having  seen it grow from nothing and been involved in all our deliberations about it over the supper table, came up with a solution. The printer had all the data. Get the printer to send us his spreadsheets. Upload those to the distribution networks. We did that, and in a few hours, the mammoth task was done.

Lesson 1. Automate everything you can.

Lesson 2. Never ever forget to pray!!

Smilla’s Sense of Snow

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I hardly ever watch thrillers, since I get emotionally over-involved in them, and hence nervous. However, I was fascinated by the premise of this novel when I first read a review of it–Smilla who can read snow. I remember studying in linguistics that people find words for what is important to them. The Eskimos, for instance, are supposed to have 17 words to describe snow.

(The Handbook of North American Indians (1911) by linguist and anthropologist Franz Boas. …just as English uses derived terms for a variety of forms of water (liquid, lake, river, brook, rain, dew, wave, foam) that might be formed by derivational morphology from a single root meaning ‘water’ in some other language, so Eskimo uses the apparently distinct roots aput ‘snow on the ground’, gana ‘falling snow’, piqsirpoq ‘drifting snow’, and qimuqsuq ‘a snow drift.)

I wanted to read this book about this woman who could read snow. But time being the finite element that is, I watched the film instead.

It has the rarefied unsmiling quality of most Scandinavian films, but it also a totally gripping story of the conflict between big business whose money reaches up and down the corridors of power and society, and an individual determined to find the murderer of a six year old boy, even if it kills her. I particularly liked the portrayal of the six year old doomed boy, Isaiah, and his relationship with Smilla.

We watched it on a lethargic Sunday when we couldn’t find the energy to do anything else. I can think of worse ways of spending an evening.

Our Pet House Rabbits

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The other joy of our summer, Irene’s in particular, was the three young baby rabbits. One of them is going to the Mitchells, but Irene has it for the summer, and has walked around cradling and kissing them, and got them so tame. Rabbits are the most loving animals ever, and are capable of multiple attachments, like a good dog, and so they are wonderful family pets if you take the time to love them, as Irene does. Our grown bunnies are Empress (black and white)  and Bandit and the babies are called Sunshine (brown) and Lightning (black with a white stripe).

A Waterfall Cascading Down Upon Me

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I have a friend, who believes she has ME, who, perhaps because of her physical limitations, is forced into closer communion with God. She is very prophetic. We prayed together just before I went to Ireland, and she said that she had an image of a waterfall cascading down on me during my travels.

Well, it did. I woke up with a dream image, and wrote a short book based on it,”The Church Which Had Too Much.”

Holidays are very creative periods for me. I pray a lot. I reconnect with God. I get his direction for the next term. I tweak my life. I allow God to tweak my spirit. I come back, full of ideas and focus.
I am travelling again very soon. What I really need is the waterfall to cascade down on me again, not just on my mind, creativity and imagination, those shadowy realms in which our spirit and God’s spirit meet and intersect, but also on my heart and spirit, for I need healing, I need wisdom, and, most of all, I need God to pour his Spirit into my spirit, so that I have some of his love for people–for, in and of myself, I have little.

 

In your anger, do not sin. Psalm 4.

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I have reached Psalm 4 in my daily rotational Bible reading of Psalms.
And here is what stood out
“In your anger, do not sin;
When you are on your beds,
Search your hearts and be silent.”
Hmm. Not do not be angry (impossible, when you are a woman of unclean lips, living amidst a people of unclean lips), but do not sin.
How? Turn your focus away from the occasion of anger. Examine yourself. Have I ever, ever done what is making me fume, or done something like it? Why? Search your heart. Repent. Be quiet until you have perspective.

All this requires so much more self-control than venting, but it is more productive, and positive. Venting our anger is highly unlikely to change the other person (though praying for both of you might well do so). But searching our hearts, trying to understand the hidden motives and fears of our own hearts, and what makes us tick, may well produce lasting change.

It’s useful to use our annoyance with another person as a trigger to examine our own hearts, and repent. In Jesus’ metaphor, when the temptation to remove specks becomes overwhelming, first clear your own log-pile.