Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Archives for 2011

Christian Blogging and Holiness

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Image by Fitzy

Blogging –A Matter of Words

Holiness–A Matter of Heart
Anyone who has known many writers, preachers, and bloggers will know that the characters of those gifted with words–preachers, or Christian writers or bloggers–does not necessarily match their eloquence.
But we want it to match up, don’t we? 
I think it would be dreadful if my blog ran ahead of me. If the insights I developed and shared in my blog did not more or less match the insights I was living. If I were not making a serious effort to walk what I blogged.
                                   * * *
This blog, while steadily growing and finding its audience, is doing so more slowly than I would have liked.
And so when I go to Christ and ask for ideas, strategy, redirection (for, like everyone else, I do not like to fail at what I undertake–nor do I want to invest my time and energy in an enterprise which does not have God’s blessing) my session of prayer and discernment comes to this:
That I should seek to be filled with the Spirit each day, and that filling will pour out into blog posts.
That I should seek to follow Christ each day, and that adventure can then be recorded in my  blog.
That I should seek to love people–and that quest will stretch, shape, mould and refine me.

And from that will come blog posts with life.

Now, being me, I am likely to forget this in a couple of months when my blog stats displease me, and so I am recording it now, so that I can re-read it and again try to live it then.

Ninja Blogging versus Stream-of-Spirit Blogging

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Painting by Fitzy


Rachel Held Evans and John Piper are Ninja bloggers. Pretty much every post is well and carefully written, and appears to have gone through multiple drafts.
I sometimes wonder if I should blog that way–producing the best writing I am capable of in every post, even if I have far fewer of them.
                                   * * * 
I produced carefully written, much revised and rewritten work for years. And also developed writers’ block–was so self-critical that writing became anxiety, self-doubt and work rather than play for me. It lost its joy.
For me to try to blog that way would be the sure way to stress and writer’s block. 
For me blogging is a way to psychological, spiritual and emotional health, as I keep current with what I am working out intellectually or spiritually or emotionally. It is deep play.
So, I have made peace with being good-enough rather than consistently excellent in my writing on this blog (as in all other areas of my life).
                                  * * * 
One of the most empowering writing teachers I had, Charlie Sugnet at the University of Minnesota, would give us really low-bar, low risk of failure assignments. I did the best writing of my life that term. (See this  or this published in my first book, Wandering Between Two Worlds).
 
Setting a low bar—being willing to open myself to the possibility of small failures on a daily basis–that is the only way I can see myself maintaining this enterprise of sharing my innermost thoughts with the world on an almost-daily basis without burning out.
* * *
What I am far more interested in could be called, I suppose, stream-of-Spirit blogging.
To hear what the Spirit is saying to me. To record it.
When I don’t know what to write about, which is often, I either look at my drafts folder for the overflow of those creative days when I have ideas for five posts, or I ask, “What is the spirit saying to me? What worry, joy, emotion, idea, insight or epiphany is uppermost in my thoughts?” And then I play with it. And as I do, the germ of the idea frequently develops into a fully-fledged 800 word blog post.
My blog will consist of other posts, of course, but this will be one way for me to maintain my own interest in it. To try to hear what the Spirit is saying to me, and to record it. (God’s ideas are limitless, and by tapping into them, we too find limitless ideas for blog posts.)
“A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Robert Browning wrote.

So I guess my perhaps far-fetched ultimate ideal for the blog is that I may overhear what the Spirit is saying to me, and saying to the Church, and record it. Can a blogger or a blog have a sort of prophetic ministry? Who knows? Perhaps!
                                          

Anyone can come. Anyone can play.

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The Friend of God

“Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness, and he was called God’s friend” James 2.23. 

Cool, how low that bar is. All one needs to do to be accounted righteous, and to be God’s friend is to believe. 

And it’s one of life’s cooler experiences when your thoughts naturally turn towards Him, through the day, and in wakeful nights, until you realize that God, incredibly, mysteriously, is your friend.

That is an amazing thing about the Christian faith–the very low bar. The generous, immense rewards promised in return for very simple actions.

Like coming. 

John 7: 37 On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” 

Ignite that thirst in me, Lord. Remind me to come.

Fill me with your streams of living water–which will then naturally flow out of me.

 

The Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald, Colmar, Alsace, France

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I saw this amazing piece of art last week, in Colmar, Alsace. 
It was painted by the German painter, Matthias Grunewald, on the eve of the Reformation.

See the angelic choir glorying in the birth of Christ. The lute of the angel in the foreground has the shape of a human face!!






And here is Lucifer, seemingly unable to resist viewing the incarnation of the Glorious One as a baby.




Monsters seemingly out of Brueghel’s imagination assault St. Anthony.












A beautiful Angel Gabriel

Note the detail of the slumbering soldiers

Edward Thomas and Robert Frost: A Friendship vital to each other’s success

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Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and the road to war

When Thomas and Frost met in London in 1913, neither had yet made his name as a poet. They became close, and each was vital to the other’s success. But then Frost wrote ‘The Road Not Taken’, which was to drive Thomas off to war
Edward Thomas and Robert Frost

Edward Thomas and Robert Frost … so close was their friendship that they had planned to live side by side in America. Photographs: Cotswolds Photo Library/Alamy. Digital Image by David McCoy for GNM Imaging
Edward Thomas and Robert Frost were sitting on an orchard stile near Little Iddens, Frost’s cottage in Gloucestershire, in 1914, when word arrived that Britain had declared war on Germany. The two men wondered idly whether they might be able to hear the guns from their corner of the county. They had no idea of the way in which this war would come between them. In six months, Frost would flee England for the safety of New Hampshire; he would take Thomas’s son with him in the expectation that the rest of the Thomas family would follow.
  1. Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas
  2. by Matthew Hollis
  4. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

  1. Tell us what you think:Star-rate and review this book
So close was the friendship that had developed between them that Thomas and Frost planned to live side by side in America, writing, teaching, farming. But Thomas was a man plagued by indecision, and could not readily choose between a life with Frost and the pull of the fighting in France. War seemed such an unlikely outcome for him. He was an anti-nationalist, who despised the jingoism and racism that the press was stoking; he refused to hate Germans or grow “hot” with patriotic love for Englishmen, and once said that his real countrymen were the birds. But this friendship – the most important of either man’s life – would falter at a key moment, and Thomas would go to war.
Thomas was 36 that summer of 1914, Frost was 40; neither man had yet made his name as a poet. Thomas had published two dozen prose books and written almost 2,000 reviews, but he had still to write his first poem. He worked exhaustedly, hurriedly, “burning my candle at 3 ends”, he told Frost, to meet the deadlines of London’s literary editors; he felt convinced that he amounted to little more than a hack. He was crippled by a depression that had afflicted him since university. His moods had become so desperate that on the day he was introduced to Frost, he carried in his pocket a purchase that he ominously referred to as his “Saviour”: probably poison, possibly a pistol, but certainly something with which he intended to harm himself.
At such periods of despair Thomas would lash out at his family, humiliating his wife, Helen, and provoking his three children to tears. He despised himself for the pain he inflicted on them and would leave home, sometimes for months on end, to spare them further agony. “Our life together never was, as it were, on the level – ” Helen reflected candidly after his death, “it was either great heights or great depths.” But Edward’s heights were not Helen’s, and his depths were altogether deeper. He sought professional help at a time when little was available, and was fortunate to come under the supervision of a pioneering young doctor, a future pupil of Carl Jung’s, who attempted to treat him using a talking cure. The clinical sessions had been progressing for a year when Thomas abruptly turned his back on them. Yet he continued to look to others to help wrench him from his despondency, believing that a rescuer would one day emerge. “I feel sure that my salvation depends on a person,” he once prophesised, “and that person cannot be Helen because she has come to resemble me too much.” Such a figure would indeed arrive to help him in his distress – Robert Frost.
Frost had moved his family to England in 1912 in a bid to relaunch a stalled literary career. Then in his late 30s and a father of four, he had managed to publish only a handful of poems in America’s literary magazines. He had not been sure whether to relocate his family to London or to Vancouver, so while his wife did the ironing, he had taken a nickel from his pocket and flipped it. It was heads, which meant London, and two weeks later the entire family was steaming across the Atlantic.
He found a publisher in London for his poems soon enough (partly subsidised by himself), though few critics gave his work a second look. But Edward Thomas did. Where other reviewers mistook Frost’s verse as simplistic, Thomas was moved to announce his 1914 volume North of Boston as “one of the most revolutionary books of modern times”. Thomas was a fearless and influential critic, described by the Times as “the man with the keys to the Paradise of English Poetry“. He had been quick to identify the brilliance of a young American in London called Ezra Pound, and instrumental in shaping the early reception of Walter de la Mare, WH Davies and many others besides; and he was quite undaunted in taking to task the literary giants of the day if they fell below the mark, be they Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling or WB Yeats. When Thomas praised Frost, therefore, people began to take note.
North of Boston was a revolutionary work all right. In a mere 18 poems, it demonstrated the qualities that Frost and Thomas had – quite independently – come to believe were essential to the making of good verse. For both men, the engine of poetry was not rhyme or even form but rhythm, and the organ by which it communicated was the listening ear as opposed to the reading eye. For Thomas and Frost that entailed a fidelity to the phrase rather than to the metrical foot, to the rhythms of speech rather than those of poetic conventions, to what Frost liked to call “cadence”. If you have ever listened to voices through a closed door, Frost reasoned, you will have noticed how it can be possible to understand the general meaning of a conversation even when the specific words are muffled. This is because the tones and sentences with which we speak are coded with sonic meaning, a “sound of sense”. It is through this sense, unlocked by the rhythms of the speaking voice, that poetry communicates most profoundly: “A man will not easily write better than he speaks when some matter has touched him deeply,” Thomas wrote.
Neither Frost nor Thomas claimed to be the first to think about poetry this way, but their views certainly set them apart from their contemporaries, who were in furious competition in the charged atmosphere of the years before the war. Strikers, unionists, suffragettes, Irish republicans and the unemployed were just some of the rebellious groups that England strove to tame in 1914, and might very well have failed to suppress had war not broken out. The young poets emerging at the same time were, in their own way, also in revolt against the decrepitude of Victorian Britain. The centre of their activities was the newly opened Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury, from where two rival anthologies were produced: the manicured but popular Georgian Poetry, compiled by the secretary to the first lord of the Admiralty, Edward Marsh, and the radically experimental Des Imagistes, edited by Ezra Pound. It took no time at all for these parties to quarrel: so exasperating and offensive did Pound find Georgian verse that he challenged one of its protagonists to a duel.
Thomas and Frost ploughed their own furrow. Whenever Thomas visited Frost in 1914, they would walk out together on the fields of Gloucestershire; wherever they walked, they moved in an instinctive sympathy. Frost called these their “talks–walking”: and in them, their conversations ranged over marriage and friendship, wildlife, poetry and the war. Sometimes there was no talk and a silence gathered about them; but often at a gate or stile it started up again or was prompted by the meeting of a stranger in the lanes – a word or two and they were off again. They went without a map, setting their course by the sun or by the distant arc of May Hill crowning the view to the south; at dusk, the towering elms and Lombardy poplars or the light of a part-glimpsed cottage saw them home.
“He gave me standing as a poet,” Frost said of Thomas, “he more than anyone else.” But Frost would more than repay the favour that summer, recognising an innate poetry within Thomas’s prose writings, and imploring his friend to look back at his topographic books and “write them in verse form in exactly the same cadence”. Thomas would do just that, and with his friend’s encouragement, started down a path that would take him away from the “hack” work from which he earned his living. Jack Haines was a poet and solicitor living nearby in 1914 and was one of the few people who witnessed the transition at first hand. “It was towards the end of this same year that Thomas first began to write poetry himself,” Haines recorded, “and he did so certainly on the indirect, and I believe on the direct, suggestion of Frost, who thought that verse might prove that perfect mode of self-expression which Thomas had perhaps never previously found.”
The poems came quickly, “in a hurry and a whirl”: 75 in the first six months alone. He revised very little, explaining that the poetry neither asked for nor received much correction on paper. Often he went back to his prose to find his poem. Sometimes his source was a notebook that he kept on his walks, at other times his published books; and though the gap between his initial notes and a verse draft could be many months, once he began on the poem itself he usually completed it in a single day.
But poetry was not the only thing waking in Thomas in those summer months as the war began. Late in August, walking with Frost through the afternoon into the night, Thomas jotted in his notebook:
a sky of dark rough horizontal masses in N.W. with a 1/3 moon bright and almost orange low down clear of cloud and I thought of men east-ward seeing it at the same moment. It seems foolish to have loved England up to now without knowing it could perhaps be ravaged and I could and perhaps would do nothing to prevent it.
The war was three weeks old, and for the first time Thomas had imagined his countrymen fighting abroad, under the same moon as he. He was indifferent to the politics of the conflict, but he had begun to weigh up the worth of the land beneath his feet and the way of life that it supported. What would he do, if called on, to protect it, he asked himself. Would he do anything at all?
For a year, Thomas would question himself this way. It would take two incidents with Frost to help him to find his answer.
In late November 1914, Thomas and Frost were strolling in the woods behind Frost’s cottage when they were intercepted by the local gamekeeper, who challenged their presence and told the men bluntly to clear out. As a resident, Frost believed he was entitled to roam wherever he wished, and he told the keeper as much. The keeper was unimpressed and some sharp words were exchanged, and when the poets emerged on to the road they were challenged once more. Tempers flared and the keeper called Frost “a damned cottager” before raising his shotgun at the two men. Incensed, Frost was on the verge of striking the man, but hesitated when he saw Thomas back off. Heated words continued to be had, with the adversaries goading each other before then finally parting, the poets talking heatedly of the incident as they walked.
Thomas said that the keeper’s aggression was unacceptable and that something should be done about it. Frost’s ire peaked as he listened to Thomas: something would indeed be done and done right now, and if Thomas wanted to follow him he could see it being done. The men turned back, Frost angrily, Thomas hesitantly, but the gamekeeper was no longer on the road. His temper wild, Frost insisted on tracking the man down, which they did, to a small cottage at the edge of a coppice. Frost beat on the door, and left the startled keeper in no doubt as to what would befall him were he ever to threaten him again or bar access to the preserve. Frost repeated his warning for good measure, turned on his heels and prepared to leave. What happened next would be a defining moment in Frost and Thomas’s friendship, and would plague Thomas to his dying days.
The keeper, recovering his wits, reached above the door for his shotgun and came outside, this time heading straight for Thomas who, until then, had not been his primary target. The gun was raised again; instinctively Thomas backed off once more, and the gamekeeper forced the men off his property and back on to the path, where they retreated under the keeper’s watchful aim.
Frost contented himself with the thought that he had given a good account of himself; but not Thomas, who wished that his mettle had not been tested in the presence of his friend. He felt sure that he had shown himself to be cowardly and suspected Frost of thinking the same. Not once but twice had he failed to hold his ground, while his friend had no difficulty standing his. His courage had been found wanting, at a time when friends such as Rupert Brooke had found it in themselves to face genuine danger overseas.
The encounter would leave Thomas haunted, to relive the moment again and again. In his verse and in his letters to Frost – in the week when he left for France, even in the week of his death – he recalled the feeling of fear and cowardice he had experienced in that stand-off with the gamekeeper. He felt mocked by events and possibly even by the most important friend he had ever made, and he vowed that he would never again let himself be faced down. When the moment came he would hold his nerve and face the gunmen. “That’s why he went to war,” said Frost later.
But it would take one further episode in Thomas’s friendship with Frost to push him to war; and it would turn on a work of Frost’s that has becomeAmerica’s best-loved poem.
In the early summer of 1915, six months after the row with the gamekeeper, Thomas had still to take his fateful decision to enlist. Zeppelins had brought the war emphatically to London, but Thomas’s eyes were on New Hampshire, to where Frost had returned earlier that year. Thomas prepared his mother for the news that he might emigrate, and told Frost he seemed certain to join him: “I am thinking about America as my only chance (apart from Paradise).” But Thomas’s prevarication got the better of him once more, and though conscription had yet to be introduced, he told Frost of the equal pull of the war in France. “Frankly I do not want to go,” he said of the fighting, “but hardly a day passes without my thinking I should. With no call, the problem is endless.”
But the problem was not endless as Thomas thought, for a poem of Frost’s had arrived by post that would dramatically force Thomas’s hand: a poem called “Two Roads”, soon to be rechristened “The Road Not Taken”. It finished:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Noble, charismatic, wise: in the years since its composition, “The Road Not Taken” has been understood by some as an emblem of individual choice and self-reliance, a moral tale in which the traveller takes responsibility for – and so effects – his own destiny. But it was never intended to be read in this way by Frost, who was well aware of the playful ironies contained within it, and would warn audiences: “You have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem – very tricky.”
Frost knew that reading the poem as a straight morality tale ought to pose a number of difficulties. For one: how can we evaluate the outcome of the road not taken? For another: had the poet chosen the road more travelled by then that, logically, could also have made all the difference. And in case the subtlety was missed, Frost set traps in the poem intended to explode a more earnest reading. The two paths, he wrote, had been worn “really about the same”, and “equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black”, showing the reader that neither road was more or less travelled, and that choices may in some sense be equal.
But the poem carried a more personal message. Many were the walks when Thomas would guide Frost on the promise of rare wild flowers or birds’ eggs, only to end in self-reproach when the path he chose revealed no such wonders. Amused at Thomas’s inability to satisfy himself, Frost chided him, “No matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d taken another.”
To Thomas, it was not the least bit funny. It pricked at his confidence, at his sense of his own fraudulence, reminding him he was neither a true writer nor a true naturalist, cowardly in his lack of direction. And now the one man who understood his indecisiveness the most astutely – in particular, towards the war – appeared to be mocking him for it.
Thomas responded angrily. He did not subscribe to models of self-determination, or the belief that the spirit could triumph over adversity; some things seemed to him ingrained, inevitable. How free-spirited his friend seemed in comparison. This American who sailed for England on a long-shot, knowing no one and without a place to go, rode his literary fortunes and won his prize, then set sail again to make himself a new home. None of this was Thomas. “It isn’t in me,” he pleaded.
Frost insisted that Thomas was overreacting, and told his friend that he had failed to see that “the sigh was a mock sigh, hypocritical for the fun of the thing”. But Thomas saw no such fun, and said so bluntly, adding that he doubted anyone would see the fun of the thing without Frost to guide them personally. Frost, in fact, had already discovered as much on reading the poem before a college audience, where it was “taken pretty seriously”, he admitted, despite “doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling . . . Mea culpa.”
“The Road Not Taken” did not send Thomas to war, but it was the last and pivotal moment in a sequence of events that had brought him to an irreversible decision. He broke the news to Frost. “Last week I had screwed myself up to the point of believing I should come out to America & lecture if anyone wanted me to. But I have altered my mind. I am going to enlist on Wednesday if the doctor will pass me.”
In walking with Frost, he had written of the urgent need to protect – and if necessary, to fight for – the life and the landscape around him. “Something, I felt, had to be done before I could look again composedly at English landscape,” he explained, though he had struggled for some time to see what it was that might be done. Finally, he understood. Thomas was passed fit by the doctor, and the same week, in July 1915, he sat down to lunch with a friend and informed her that he had enlisted in the Artists Rifles, and that he was glad; he did not know why, but he was glad.
“I had known that the struggle going on in his spirit would end like this,” his wife wrote.
Thomas brought a unique eye to the English landscape at a moment when it was facing irreversible change. His work seems distinctly modern in its recognition of the interdependence of human beings and the natural world, more closely attuned to our own ecological age than that of the first world war.
Though few of his poems were published in his lifetime, his admirers have been many: WH Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Andrew Motion and Michael Longley among them. But perhaps no poet ever valued him more highly than Robert Frost: “We were greater friends than almost any two ever were practising the same art,” he remarked. A war, a gamekeeper and a road not taken came between them, but by then they had altered one another’s lives irrevocably. Thomas pulled his friend’s work from obscurity into a clearing, from which the American would go on to sell a million poetry books in his lifetime. Frost, in turn, released the poet within Thomas, and would even find a publisher for his verse in the United States. That book would carry a dedication that Thomas had scribbled on the eve of sailing for France: “To Robert Frost”. Frost responded in kind, writing: “Edward Thomas was the only brother I ever had.”
At twilight when walking, or at the parting of ways with a friend, Thomas could feel great sadness that his journey must come to an end:
Things will happen which will trample and pierce, but I shall go on, something that is here and there like the wind, something unconquerable, something not to be separated from the dark earth and the light sky, a strong citizen of infinity and eternity.
He was killed on the first day of the battle of Arras, Easter 1917; he had survived little more than two months in France. Yet his personal war was never with a military opponent: it had been with his ravaging depression and with his struggle to find a literary expression through poetry that was worthy of his talents. And on the latter, at least, he won his battle.

Superlatively gifted–and grumpy!

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1 If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels,

 but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

 2 If I have the gift of prophecy
 and can fathom all mysteries
 and all knowledge,
 and if I have a faith that can move mountains,
 but do not have love, I am nothing.

 3 If I give all I possess to the poor 
and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,
 but do not have love, I gain nothing.
(I Corinthians 13).

This is a passage I frequently remind myself of, and if I fail to do so, Roy very kindly reminds me of it!!

The other day, I realized that 1 Corinthians 13 is not just brilliant rhetoric. 

The I Paul refers to is a real person. Himself!

Paul was the man who spoke in tongues of men and of angels, who had the gift of prophecy, and could fathom mysteries (he talked of being snatched up to heaven) and had spiritual knowledge. His faith sowed the seeds of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. He owned little, and tells us of his shipwrecks, beatings, floggings, hunger, thirst, illnesses and sleeplessness.

His faith and spiritual insights, his lofty conceptions and brilliant and poetic expression of them all shine through his letters. As does his irascibility.

 Watch out for those dogs, those men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh.  Phil, 3:2. 12 As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves!  Galatians 5:12. He falls out with Mark, and splits up with his beloved Barnabas rather than give Mark a second chance. He laments later that everyone has deserted him.

He does, however, realize what was really important. 

 4 Love is patient,
 love is kind.
 It does not envy,
 it does not boast,
 it is not proud.
 5 It is not rude,
 it is not self-seeking, 
it is not easily angered,
 it keeps no record of wrongs.
 6 Love does not delight in evil .


What’s beautiful is that these traits–being patient, kind, not indulging in envy or boasting, not being proud, or rude, or self-seeking, or easily angered–are all behavioural traits.


So the gifts which God gives you, which you can do nothing about either way–eloquence in speech, spiritual gifts like tongues, prophecy, spiritual wisdom, understanding and discernment, faith, the ability to endure heroic self-sacrifice– have nothing to do with character, with the kind of person you really are.


What matters is the behaviour that the wise man of the age, as well as the simplest and least privileged of God’s children can adopt–being patient and kind, not arrogant or boastful or rude or easily angered, not keeping a record of wrongs.


Easy, isn’t it? 


Except when someone takes it upon themselves to be just the opposite to us. To be impatient and unkind, to be jealous of us, to boast, to show off, be rude, self-seeking and irascible. 


Our reactions reveal to what extent we are really controlled by the spirit of God.


And if, we fail?


We repent, pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again.


And that is the true beauty of the Christian life.
   
  

How to Make Real Friends Rapidly

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I loved this Noel Piper article on friendship.

Some reflections on it
1) One is never to old to make new friends. Noel says she formed her first real friendships at the age of 60.

2) The best way of establishing friendships–be open and honest, undefended.

3) And then, the miraculous counter-intuitive truth: Being open and honest about the very things which we think will repel people in fact attracts people to us.

We might think it’s our shiny, glitzy, perfect exterior which will win us friends and approbation. But it does not–people either do not believe in it, or are intimidated by it. It’s by sharing the real you–failures, faults, fears, weaknesses, and humiliations (along with the peaks) that we attract friends who love and trust us.

Christian and Buddhist Solutions to the Problem of Suffering

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Carl Bloch






Okay, so we were somewhat early at Heathrow, breaking a bad habit of being the last people to board the plane–just when we hear “passengers Mathias, passengers Mathias.”

And so I wandered through the shops; oh my goodness, what an onslaught of consumerism!
Now I rarely shop. Literally, rarely enter a shop! Roy buys groceries, and most other things. I buy what I need on the internet. (In fact, I moved back to the UK in mid April 2004, and I reflected that the only piece of clothing I have bought in the UK in the last 7 years is a cardigan at Edinburgh Woollen Mills. I have got used to the American catalogues I shopped in LL Bean, Cold water Creek, Norm Thompson, and like a boring stuck-in-the mud have continued shopping there, and have paid shipping and customs duty for the clothes to be sent here. Roy tells me that this does not make economic sense, and he’s probably right, though I just shrug because I hate shopping. I pick up sweaters when we travel—and it’s harder then to resist entering shops because I have two girls.)
And so, the Alladin’s cave of Harrods and other blingy stores really caught my eye.
‘
“Do you know I haven’t bought any clothes in the UK for the last 7 years,” I said to Roy, in poor brave me tones.  “I don’t even know what my UK size is.” (Well, perhaps that’s just as well!!)
I glance at the price tag on a silk shirt and the drum beat of consumerism began to beat.
Must. Make. More. Money.
                           * * *
Now if it is essential to make money—for instance to  pay for the right school for the girls, albeit private, or for something we really, really want, like our house which we both fell in love with—that dreary drumbeat Must Make More Money can be energizing and creative. I enjoy lying face down, in concentrated prayer, seeking wisdom and creativity if I need money for an altruistic or creative or spiritual or healthy endeavour. Or even to pay bills!

But to buy stuff?
Nope. Condemning myself to make more money to buy pretty stuff is like signing my life away to being pricked by many griefs.
                               * * *
There is another way to deal with the siren call of consumerism and shops with all their pretty glitzy things. The endless black hole of The Next Thing.
Buddha discovered this.
It is a two world koan.
Desire less.
* * *
Buddha, Prince Siddharta, saunters forth from his sheltered palace and sees a sick man, an old man, a dead man. The inevitabilities—sickness (perhaps), aging, and death.
And is this the end of all mortal desire? He meditates under the Bodhi tree in Gaya, and formulates his Four Noble Truths,
Life is suffering.
The root of suffering is desire.
Suffering can be eliminated by eliminating desire.
Desire can be eliminated by the noble eight fold path–right views, aspirations, living, mindfulness, speech, conduct, effort, conscience.
Yeah, nice way to live if you can manage it.
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God is just and God is merciful. And so God gives every religion some shadows, some intimations of the truth.
And that is indeed one way to avoid suffering. Reduce your desire. Witness: The subprime crisis and the global credit crunch and economic crisis, unmanageable consumer debt, home repossessions, the whole sorry freight of grief caused by unruly, out of control desires.
Tone down your desires, do not buy things unless you really, really want or need them,and you save yourself a lot of unnecessary  more-month-than-money syndrome, make-more-money slavery.  overwork, debt, anxiety, constrictions, sleeplessness, and sicknesses caused by overwork and worry.

Charles Dickens (who like Chekhov had has health permanently damaged by having to work hard as a young person to help support his family, a feckless family in Dicken’s case) famously formulated one secret to happiness “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds and six, result misery.” Saving 2.5% of one’s income can make the difference between happiness and misery, Dickens guesses.   I now, mercifully, can save a minimum of ten percent of what I earn, and am grateful for this, but there was a tense period of a couple of years when I was establishing my little business, when I did not do so. And so I can second Dickens.
Or to put it another way. Do you want to suffer less? Desire less.
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And what’s the flaw in this noble injunction?
Yeah, tell a woman with PMS to desire less chocolate. Simple, ain’t it?
Tell an overweight person to run and diet until he or she is slim.
 Tell an anxious person to be a bit rational about their anxieties.
Tell an angry person to keep calm.
Tell a disorganized person to do first things first
Or an untidy person to put things in the right place.
Easy, isn’t it.?
Just stop it.
As in this sketch
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The focus of Buddhism is cautious and negative—life is suffering, and we can avoid suffering by avoiding desire. If we want nothing, and love nothing, then nothing can wound us by its loss, brokenness, recalcitrance or betrayal.

However, Lewis famously says in The Four Loves,
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one,  not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.
But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as a way in which they should break, so be it.   
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Christianity has a positive focus. We are not to focus on the negative—on suffering and how to avoid it, not to live our lives in fear of suffering, tiptoeing on eggshells trying to avoid it.
We are to focus on a person. A very creative person (whose creativity is so essential an attribute that he is known as the Creator.
We are to align our lives with his wisdom.
And what will that look like?
Well, since God is infinitely creative, it will look different for each person. For C.S. Lewis, it meant writing, as it does for Michael Wenham of the brave Donkeybody blog, or for me. For Simon Cozens, it is being a missionary to the Japanese. For Beth Moore, writing Bible studies. For Heidi Baker, adopting 10,000 orphans. For my friend and fellow-blogger, Lesley Crawley, pioneer ministry.

So instead of avoiding desire to avoid suffering, we are to follow a person, whose words have been recorded. Certain things will stand out for us in letters of red or gold as the Spirit highlights them. And his spirit fills in the gaps of the written word. Offers specific directions for our lives.
It’s a far better road map than avoiding suffering by avoiding desire, isn’t it?
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What does Christ say about suffering? That some voluntarily chosen suffering is essential to a decent Christian life. Follow him. How? By taking up our cross.
This again will mean different things to different people. For me, who am not particularly disciplined, it means, for starters, staying in the battle to exert self-discipline in what I eat, in trying to keep my body reasonably strong and healthy, in keeping up with the house ( I’m naturally untidy!!), in controlling my speech, annoyances, and moods, in basic self-discipline in sleep wake cycles (I am naturally a night person, but staying up reading or blogging till 2 is not the best thing if one lives with people—neither is it the best way to spend the next morning).  In making as much use as I can of my gifts. All these things give me plenty to be getting on with—and ironically, they are just the starting point of a life of taking up one’s cross and following Jesus.
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What else does Christ say? That suffering is inevitable (John 16:33) This world has a crack in it. It will be redeemed, but while we wait, we groan.  However, we are to be of good cheer, despite the certainty of suffering, because of the power of Christ to give us grace to endure, to change us (and sometimes to change our circumstances). As Paul says, we will be able to handle both being abased and abounding through Christ who strengthens us.
And while we would never choose this refinement, suffering does refine us like diamonds, like gold. It takes its place as black borders, and splashes of red in the tapestry of our lives.
What else does Christianity have to say about the problem of suffering? We might not be told to desire less, but we are certainly told to sin less. Much—though by no means all!!—suffering is self-inflicted through sin– laziness, greed, self-indulgence, meanness. Selfishness. We sow bitter seeds, and sadly eat their fruit.
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So while reducing desire reduces suffering, as Buddha said, and as anyone in debt or struggling with decluttering and messy houses can tell you, and while avoiding sin will reduce suffering as any counsellor can tell you, Christianity is not about avoiding, but embracing. Embracing a person, and dancing with him where he leads, sometimes on the mountain tops and sometimes in the valleys, sometimes in the wilderness and deserts, and sometimes through green pastures.
Bless me, oh Lord, and may I dance with you on the heights,  the mountain peaks, though green valleys, quiet waters and places of blessing, but Lord, better the wilderness and desert with you, than the fleshpots of Egypt or the milk and honey of the promised land without you.
                            Amen