Archives for October 2010

Alice Munro–Consummate Short Story Writer

Alice Munro

My favourite short story writer, hands down, is Alice Munro. I love her jewelly miniaturist’s art, her contorted sentences, the elegaic tone which pervades her work, her sharp eye, her sense of hard-won wisdom, the sadness and beauty which breathes through her work.

Her work is restful, rejuvenating, a tonic for me. I love it!

Keith Wheeler–Carying his Cross through the Nations of the World

By Anita Mathias

Keith Wheeler–Carrying his Cross through the Nations of the World

At an Oxford dinner party recently, I heard this odd story from a French woman and her British husband. They were travelling and Greenland, and came across a man carrying an enormous 12 foot wooden cross–which was the length of the cross Jesus was crucified on, historians say. That’s how he could be visible to everyone in the crowd.

He stopped to talk to them, as he had to thousands. His name was Keith Wheeler, an American, who since 1985 has been carrying this massive cross, through the world– 19,500 miles, through more than 185 countries on all seven continents.Here is some information from Keith website

In 1982, Keith Wheeler committed his life to follow Jesus. In 1985, on Good Friday, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, he began carrying a 12-foot, wooden cross. He has now walked with the cross over 19,500 miles, through more than 185 countries on all seven continents.
In 1985, as Keith was praying one night, he felt that God spoke to his heart, “I want you to make a cross and begin carrying it through the streets of Tulsa on Good Friday.” He thought this surely couldn’t be God, but felt these words burning in his heart, “Anyone can carry a cross–think about Simon of Cyrene; he carried Jesus’ cross. Anyone can die on a cross–think about the two thieves on either side of Jesus. Only One, however, could die for the sins of the world … and that was because of love. I want you to take the cross and identify that message of love along the roadsides of this world.”

Later, Keith felt God’s call, “For you, the cross is never to be a symbol of protest, but a symbol of reconciliation; I want you to be a ‘pilgrim of peace’ and a messenger of My love.”
Keith says, “This walk has not been a walk of faith … but God’s grace, in spite of my weaknesses, fears, and inabilities. I don’t have a ministry! Jesus does! I only want to be the kind of vessel that He can use to reach a lost and hurting world. It’s His ministry in our lives and through our lives touching this world. I’m not an evangelist or missionary — I’m simply a pilgrim. I only want to follow Jesus. I love God and I love the people of the world. To me, ministry is simply the overflow of a life lived in love with Jesus. I feel that Jesus has many servants but very few friends. It’s one thing to be called a friend; it’s another to actually be a friend. I want to be His friend. I believe that His heart breaks for the lost and hurting of this world. I know that one day He’ll wipe away every tear from our eyes, but we have an opportunity to wipe away the tears from His eyes by loving others and reaching out to them. I want to put a smile on His face!”
Keith has carried the cross through places such as Tibet, Iran, Iraq, China and even, Antarctica. He has walked through the Middle East, North Africa, and many former Iron Curtain countries before the political changes. Keith has carried the cross through many nations at war such as Bosnia, Rwanda, the Chechen region and Bethlehem during the standoff at the Church of the Nativity. During this time, he has been arrested many times (none for crimes) and even jailed. Once, Keith was even taken before a firing squad to be shot; and yet another time he was beaten and left for dead.

And this is Keith’s website. http://www.kw.org/

Travel with a difference, huh?

Worship, Zionism, Forgiveness: Thoughts in Prague's Jewish Ghetto

By Anita Mathias

Worship, Zionism, Forgiveness: Thoughts in Prague’s Jewish Ghetto

We spent this morning in Prague’s old Ghetto and Jewish quarter.

Jewish people have lived in Prague for a millennium—subjected to a variety of petty restrictions: for a while the only trades open to them were the rag trade and the usury. They had to wear distinctive hats and ruffs and badges, which exposed them to persecution, they were regarded as the personal property of the King under the Statuta Judaeorum, subjected to pogroms and extortion.

The Spanish Synagogue was modelled on the Alhambra in Granada. It was a privilege to be inside a synagogue, and to walk up to the place where the Torah was stored for instance, well beyond the balcony reserved for women. I do not remember going to a synagogue before, though Roy says I must have.

As is appropriate in a baroque city, it was entirely too much. Absolutely gorgeous, but too much. Ornate, colourful, gold and ruby and sapphire in fantastical geometrical patterns. Absolutely lavish. I felt as I did in the Cloud Forest in Costa Rica. There was so much, such a profusion of loveliness that I did not know what to focus on or to take in first.

The places humans devise to worship God are very interesting. Some like the Puritans wanted simplicity and purity. I am with them. Some, like Archbishop Suger, who designed Saint-Denys in Paris, and who is credited with introducing stained glass in cathedrals, and with the invention of Gothic itself, wanted “More Light” as Suger said, coloured light.

If I had to devise a place of worship, it would be a simple Gothic cathedral, maybe not as high-roofed as Amiens, but still immense, with long lancet windows, with alternately stained glass and natural green views outside. It would be set in a place of natural loveliness, in the kind of surroundings the Cistercians chose in Riveaux for instance.

The reverence for the Torah was moving—massive bejewelled Torah crowns, Torah shields, Torah pointers, finials, covers. These had been gathered here from all over Eastern Europe by Hitler who wished to construct a Museum to an Extinct Race. What wickedness—wanting the destruction of an entire race.

Hitler’s pathological hatred of the Jews, the immense amount of time, organization, energy and resources he devoted towards his Final Solution was irrational—and one of the factors in his speedy downfall, most historians agree. However, as we observed the historical evidences of anti-semitism in the museum, it was clear that Hitler was not acting in a vacuum. Part of his demonizing of the Jewish people was shrewd political calculation. Jews were conjured up as the enemy to distract the populace from the miseries of hyper-inflation in the Weimar Republic, unemployment, and the crippling burden of reparations. And the holocaust would never have occurred without the tacit consent, encouragement, delight and collaboration of hundreds of thousands of people. I found the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. unbearably painful and did not go through the whole thing. One of the documentaries I remember is the gloating faces in the crowd watching Jews clear the rubble after Kristallnacht or Allied bombing raids, and the sheer exhaustion on the faces of the suited victims who had their businesses trashed, and then had to clear the wreckage.

The Pinkasova Synagogue had a chilling list, every inch of wall space covered of the names, dates of birth, and dates of death or transportation to the death camps of 80,000 Jews. It is the longest epitaph in the world, though of course, it only represents a fraction of those who died in the camps.

Artists, writers, musicians, scientists, academics, psychologists, doctors—what an immeasurable loss of individuals who had lived, and learned and suffered and thought before they could transmit their learning and life experience to the next generation. What a loss too of ordinary men and women, repositories of a wonderful oral tradition before it could be transmitted to succeeding generations.

Hitler’s Final Solution was to render the Jewish race e
xtinct. He did not succeed in this, of course. Though, he did partially succeed in his diabolical purpose. The vivid, quirky, eccentric, Eastern Jewish life of the ghettos and shetls celebrated in the stories of Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer or the paintings of Max Chagall no longer exists. And the world is the poorer for it.

Kafka grew up in the Jewish ghetto, though since his father was upwardly mobile he left it. However, the destruction of the old ghetto to make room for lavish five storey mansions on prime real estate left profound scars on his psyche. As a German speaker among Czechs who hated Germans, as a Jew among German speakers who hated Jews, and as an agnostic among believers, Kafka lived in a constant state of fear, the angst he describes.

The list of writers, playwrights, painters, musicians, academics, and scientists who either perished under or fled from Hitler is immense. What an vast amount of Jewish talent!! The victims of pogroms, fines, forced migrations, extortion of much of their history in Europe, European Jews tended to invest in the intangible–in scholarship, learning, culture, song, family ties, tradition, scripture. One would think that with all this Jewish talent amassed in Israel, we would have seen an unparalled flowering of culture, literature, and the arts. But we haven’t really.

Perhaps standing outside the party, your nose pressed against the window, is what gives you the clearest view. Being an outsider helps you see the inside most clearly. While the psychological advantages of being an insider are considerable, you no longer have the vantage point of the outsider with which to view the party, the perspective of distance, the artistic tool of defamiliarization which helps you and your reader see things more clearly.

My husband Roy’s post-doctoral advisor at Stanford University, a old worldly Jew called Gene Golub told me that before the second World War, the Jewish culture of the shetls and ghettos was described as yiddishkeit, which I understood as an Old Worldly gentleness, sweetness, courtliness, courtesy, even unworldliness. I have sometimes encountered it, and it is charming. After the trauma of the Holocaust, Golub told me, the Jewish psyche and culture changed. Their watchword became “Never Again.” What a dreadful psychological burden to live under!! The Israelis describe themselves as Sabras, prickly on the outside, sweet on the inside.

Not long after my conversation with Golub, Roy and I took a flight from JFK to Israel, where Roy was speaking at a Conference around the time of Succoth. The plane was full of Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn going to Israel for the festival—black clad, black hatted, ringlets to die for on either side of their faces, tassels, scrolls on their forehead, the works. At the correct time, they all stood up in unison, whipped out their prayer books, and proceeded to chant in unison, with synchronized bowing.

We hit turbulence. They continued unperturbed, though their swaying now owed something to atmospheric disturbance. They steadfastly ignored all pleas to sit down by the increasingly agitated stewardess. Their chanting and bowing and swaying continued unabated. Finally, she announced over the intercom, “Could any Hebrew speaker here ask these guys to sit down?” knowing full well that they were New York Jews and understood every word she said as well as she did!!

Never again. What an enormous psychological burden to grow up with!! It is just the opposite of the philosophy taught by the Jewish Messiah, Yeshua or Jesus—though where his philosophy led him to in the short run is a matter of historical record.

Interestingly, Gandhi who achieved one of the most amazing Velvet Revolutions in the history of mankind by following the Nazarene’s principles of non-violence (and Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience) counselled the Jews of Europe not to resist Hitler. I wonder what would have happened if they had resisted him even less than they did?

* * *

At the end of this day full of thought and emotion, we walked through the Old Jewish Cemetery, Beit Hayyim, House of Life, full of massive gravestones. The same half acre or so has been used as a graveyard for a millennium. It was massively overcrowded as the ghettos were in life, people were buried twelve deep. Pretty much all the ground was taken up by a pell-mell assortment of gravestones, large, small, intricately carved in Hebrew. Masses of them.

Irene asked as we walked home, “Will the Jews ever forgive Hitler? Will the Jews ever forgive the Germans.”

Interestingly, that was the question Elie Wiesel asks in The Sunflower. As I remember it: A German commando, dying in pain, tells Wiesel how the SS crowded a village of Jews into a house, doused it with petrol, set it alight. He sees a man and a woman hold a child out of a window, put their hands over his eyes, and then jump. He shoots. Dying, in pain, he asks for a Jew, any Jew, to ask for forgiveness. Wiesel, seeing him blinded, dying, in immense pain, walks away, silently. The German dies, unforgiven.

Should he have forgiven him? Wiesel asks a panel of thinkers. Most said No.

And what did I answer Irene, aged 11, who asked me if the Jews and Israel would ever forgive the Germans. I said, “Yes. They will. They have to. They cannot go through life bearing the psychological burden of the wrong done to their families. They cannot be Atlas bearing the weight of all that evil on their shoulders. They have to toss that wrong into the dustbin of history. They have to forgive. They need not forget, but they have to forgive. For their own sakes. For the sake of their children. For the sake of their children yet unborn.

Because, in an irony of history I do not understand, those who cannot forgive or forget a wrong done to them WILL REPEAT THAT WRONG. It is an inexorable law. The bullied becomes a bully. The abused become abusers. Those who cannot forget the Nazis may repeat their conduct when they hold the reins of power.

We saw moving exhibitions today of anti-semitism through the millennia. We left convinced that the Jews undoubtedly need a homeland of their own, and why not the homeland promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a homeland to which they are perhaps physiologically and psychologically adapted? But please, Israel, treat the Palestinian people who also love the land, as you would have wished to be treated in the long centuries of your exile, when by the rivers of the Vlatva, or Don or Danube, you sat down and wept as you remembered Zion, and wistfully said, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Irene and Prague

By Anita Mathias

Irene and Prague

Irene loves Prague. We ate out last night facing the astronomical clock after having walked down the Charles Bridge. We had had a decadent day of good meals, lots of shopping, lots of art. “That was a good day,” she sighed with happiness. The last time she was this happy was after she discovered the Olde Sweete Shoppe on High Street, Oxford. She was so astounded by their huge variety that she could barely speak. “Mum,” she said, “Mum, Mum. It’s like Willy Wonka’s Factory.”
She has been going down to the liqueur chocolate store every hour. Finally we said, “No Irene, it is too late.” She, “That is what chocolate is for. Choco Late.” And dimpled winsomely, as if that would get her her way.
No way!

In which Celebrate Jan Hus, The Czech Republic’s Heroic, Naive and Tragic “John Wycliffe”

By Anita Mathias

Jan Hus is an iconic figure in Prague. He was peasant born, but a follower of the John Wycliffe, the English reformer. He preached in the language of the masses (Czech) against the wealth, corruption and hierarchical tendencies within the church. Though a devout, mild-mannered man himself, he become embroiled in the disputes between the conservative clergy backed by the pope and the Wycliffian Czechs at the University of Prague.

King Vaclav IV supported Hus (who was the confessor to his wife, Sophie). However, when Hus broadened his attack on the Church to attack the sale of indulgences to fund the inter-papal wars, he incurred the enmity of the King (who received a percentage of the sales.) In 1412, Hus and his followers were expelled from the University of Prague, excommunicated and banished from Prague. They travelled throughout Bohemia, spreading the ideas of Wycliffe and the reformers.

Hus naively attended the Council of Constance in 1415, believing in the guarantee of safe conduct from the Emperor Sigismund. He was there denounced as a heretic, and, refusing to renounce his ideas, was burnt at the stake in 1415.

The anniversary of his death is now a national holiday.

Religious disputes, when mixed up with money and power, as, in the last analysis, they often are, can be deadly.

Hus’s most famous dictum was Pravda Vitezi –Truth Prevails–which has been the motto of every Czech revolution since his time. And in the long run, I believe it does!

Prague–The Fruits of Peace

By Anita Mathias

Prague: The Fruits of Peace

Prague is gorgeous–largely because it escaped bombing in the second world war!

Roy and I are taking a course in Medieval Continental Cathedrals at Oxford University this term. The lecturer, Hubert Pragnell, showed us some absolutely beautiful medieval stained glass windows in French cathedrals, and said it was one of the few instances of medieval stained glass which survived the devastation of the two World Wars.

That’s all that war and conflict does: destroys. And that is, sadly, the work of Satan–pulling down, destroying, undoing.

Creativity and beauty flourish in times of peace. In peace, humans can display some of God’s endless creativity.

War and conflict just leave wreckage–emotional, spiritual, and physical. The winners often are left with a hollow victory, and the losers lose, but get the best poetry and stories!!

What about righteous conflict? Is it an oxymoron? Of course not, because we live in a fallen world–of sin, greed and unrighteousness.

It is probably only to be embarked on when all else has failed, if mediation through righteous channels has not worked. I guess one needs patience and determination if one is to righteously challenge unrighteousness. And, thank goodness, not everyone is called to do this, all the time. I guess now and again, one has a Joan of Arc moment–when one has to confront what is wrong, as cannily as one can. But for the most part, God spreads the burden of seeing justice done around–so that generally one just has one Ahab or Pharaoh to confront in a lifetime–unless you are the wonderful Baroness Caroline Cox!

Prophets, Deserts and Alternative Power

By Anita Mathias

Prophets, Deserts and Alternative Power Sources

I was thinking last evening of prophets. It is interesting how many of them had to go out into the Judean desert to hear the word of God.

Why? I used to wonder. Why did one need to go into the desert–outside, often in opposition to the traditional power structures of the day–why did one need to be powerless, lonely, quiet, possibly hungry and thirsty, and sensorily deprived to hear God?

I now realize that, of course, one has to. It is the best, if not the only, way. The voice of God, a well-bred, considerate, gentle voice for the most part–a gentle whisper, Scripture calls it–is not easily heard amid the noise and clamour of popularity, friendship, social life–all good things, all good things. Except they do militate against the solitude one needs to hear God. Almost to a man, prophets don’t choose the desert. They are only human. God has to call–sometimes push–them into the desert. Because it is in the desert that a prophet develops his greatest and priceless gift: his ability to hear the voice of God.

Let’s consider Moses. An interesting part of his story is that he did not choose to go into the desert, nor does he go there in obedience to the voice of God. He is pushed there by his own sin. He loses his temper, takes the law into his own hands, kills a man, and flees to the desert in terror when this is discovered.

And in the desert, outside the court to which he had once belonged, and its power and pomp, he experiences God, and in a dramatic way that could only have happened in the desert. A fire that steadily burned and was not consumed. Continually renewed energy. A manifestation of infinite Power. And with it, a simple new name for God, I AM WHO I AM.

And in contradistinction to the power of Pharaoh, Moses is given power, a shadow of God’s power. He can turn sticks to snakes, turn the Nile bloody, summon locusts and frogs and pests, turn the land dark at noon. He is a man to be listened to–and he finally is.
* * *

Elijah also operated outside, and in opposition to, the normal centres of power–Kings, who were anointed, but who, continuing in sin, had lost their ability to hear the word of God. Ahab interestingly calls him, “You troubler of Israel.”

He is given power of his own. He can command the rain. He can command fire. He can do what 400 false “prophets” could not.

David, Daniel, the list goes on. Men formed in the desert, operating outside normal locii of power, often in opposition to them, yet gifted by God with such extraordinary and startling power that people had to sit up and pay attention.

Because power eventually comes from God. Comes from the Lamb who has all “power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and praise.” Comes when the Holy Spirit comes upon us.

And, interestingly, looking at prophets from both Old Testament and the New (John the Baptist, and later Paul and John who both had amazing Christophanies) this divine power always, I think, falls on the powerless who operate apart from and often in opposition to the normal locii of power. It falls on those who have learnt to hear God’s voice in the solitude and loneliness of the desert.

The End of the Story: The Lamb upon the Throne

By Anita Mathias

The End of the Story: The Lamb upon the Throne

At my boarding school, St. Mary’s Convent, Nainital, we Catholic girls had to go to Mass five days a week, go to Benediction (sung worship) once a week, Adoration (personal prayer) once a month, and choir practice once a week. These were the minimal devotional requirements! A LOT of singing. I decided, as a school girl, that if I did not mean the words, did not understand what they meant in practice, had no experience of them, I would not sing them. That is what I now tell one of my daughters, who is most rational in her approach, to faith to do.

Therefore, I do not sing,
Let the streets resound with singing,
Dancers who dance upon injustice.

Or,
These are the days of Elijah
Declaring the Word of the Lord
And these are the days of Your servant Moses
Righteousness being restored

These are the days of Ezekiel
The dry bones becoming as flesh
And these are the days
Of your servant David
Rebuilding a temple of praise

Oh, come on! I’ve been singing that for 15 years. Whose days are these? Make up your mind.

So, what do I do while the hypnotic music whips the young and emotional into a frenzy as they sing “dancers dance upon injustice.” Can’t very well sleep: music too loud. As I advise my daughter who finds worship a trial, think of God. Have an alternative image in your mind. Meditate on it.

Here’s the image I meditate on most often during worship when they are singing something I do not connect with. (The songwriters at St. Aldate’s are in their twenties, and love to bounce songs they have written off the congregation at Sunday worship.) I flick forward to the end of the story, and the lovely image of the lamb upon his throne.

Revelation 5
Then I saw in the right hand of him who sat on the throne a scroll with writing on both sides and sealed with seven seals. And I saw a mighty angel proclaiming in a loud voice, “Who is worthy to break the seals and open the scroll?” But no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth could open the scroll or even look inside it. I wept and wept because no one was found who was worthy to open the scroll or look inside.

Then one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.”

Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders. He came and took the scroll from the right hand of him who sat on the throne. And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song:

   “You are worthy to take the scroll
      and to open its seals,
   because you were slain,
      and with your blood you purchased men for God
      from every tribe and language and people and nation.
¹⁰You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God,
      and they will reign on the earth.”

Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders. In a loud voice they sang:

   “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,
   to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength
   and honor and glory and praise!”

Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing:

   “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
   be praise and honor and glory and power,
         for ever and ever!”

The four living creatures said, “Amen,” and the elders fell down and worshipped.”

Isn’t that something lovely to meditate on? What a perfectly lovely end of the story!