Archives for 2011

Judging others opens you up to judgement: Romans, Blog Through the Bible Project

Romans 1 28–2:3

28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. ²⁹ They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; ³¹ they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. ³² Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Because men did not treasure God, God abandons them to their own devices.

And so man continues to do what he knows is wrong. In his distorted thinking, the end justifies the means. And as long as they are successful, rich and prominent, people approve of those who might be “greedy, quarrelsome, envious, deceitful, malicious, gossipy, slanderous, arrogant, boastful, and unfaithful.”

Romans 2

¹ You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. ² Now we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. ³ So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?
⁵ But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed.

People–and the correctness of this comment can be empirically proven Reinhold Neibuhr said–are filled with every kind of greed, envy, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; ³¹ they have no fidelity, no love, no mercy.

Everyone, to a greater or lesser degree is guilty of these things.

And since all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, are guilty of evil, greed, envy, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slander, insolence, arrogance and boastfulness, we have no excuse when we judge someone else.

In the act of judging them, of commenting on the evil of their actions, we are opening ourselves up to especial judgment since we who judge them have sinned too–and ironically, and oddly, often have committed the same sins we vehemently condemn in others.

And so in judging another, we are opening ourselves to judgement. ³ So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?

Jesus reminds us of this when he cautions, in Luke 6, “³⁷ “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

(Further thoughts on judging and condemning)

Lord, open my eyes to when I might be judging and condemning others. Give me your merciful spirit.

Judging others opens you up to judgement: Romans, Blog Through the Bible Project

By Anita Mathias

Romans 2

Chronos and Chairos: Time and God’s Time

By Anita Mathias

There were two words for time in koine Greek, Chairos and Chronos. Chronos was clock time, sequential time. Chairos was special: “the right time,” God’s Time.

Jesus points out the difference when he tells his disciples. “The right time for me has not yet come; for you any time is right,” John 7.6. In fact, there are constant references throughout the Gospel to his time not having come yet, as when Mary tries to hurry her miraculous baby into action in the marriage of Cana.

Chairos. Chronos. In my own life, I am learning to wait for Chairos, the right time, God’s time.

I have many ideas, many things I want to do. I can’t do, or even start all of them right now. And that’s where waiting for the chairos time, the right time, God’s time comes in.
~ ~ ~

When the girls were young, I desperately wanted to write, and trying to do so with young children, exhausted me, and not that much got read, or written. The state of the house was a constant source of irritation and contention, and in retrospect, perhaps I should have prioritised getting the house together (though that is easier said than done).

Now, however, is the chairos time to write. I don’t have other duties or demands on me; the girls are quite independent, Roy’s does not need support from me in what he does; in fact, having retired early, he is able to run the house and the girls, and support me a bit in my work.
~ ~ ~

Both of us have lots of ideas to do with the expansion of our publishing company. However, each time, I pray about it, I sense it is not yet the chairos time to expand. Roy took early retirement in August 2010, after 21 years as a mathematician–all-consuming work. We are still recovering: sorting out the garage and barn in which we have boxes still not unpacked since we moved here from America in 2004!!, our investments could be looked at; the house could do with a bit more organizing and decluttering; we want a large vegetable garden. There’s paper work, tax stuff to worked on. The business has some nuts and bolts which could be oiled. Roy wants to see to all this…

We talked over our lives with an older and wiser friend, who suggested that when one establishes the Kingdom of God (order, tidyness) in one’s external surroundings, other things fall into place. This would not resonate with everyone. It resonated with me. I see this everywhere. I am an organic gardener. If one gets the soil right and fertile, the bounteous crops automatically fall into place.

So it’s not yet chairos time to expand our business in the same or a slightly different direction. Soon, however–in a matter of weeks or months, it will be.
~ ~ ~

When it is God’s time, it’s amazing how everything falls into place. Finance comes, connections, friends, people appear, out of the blue, to help you, there are coincidences–God-incidences. So it is best to wait for chairos time before you force something through.

And the concept of chairos time explains why sometimes one might wait and pray a very long time for something to happen–with no apparent results–and then it happens very quickly. For me, the times when things fall into place very rapidly is a hallmark of God’s activity.
~ ~ ~

I think of a reflection by Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision.

God answers all prayer. He does not answer our selfish, materialistic begging. He does not move into our sinful situation. He moves us out of our sinful situation into Himself. God sometimes moves slowly. Sometimes we don’t lack faith, but patience. Wait patiently for Him, and He will give you your heart’s desire.

1) if the request is not right, He will answer, “No.”

2) If the time is not right, He will answer, “Slow.”

3) When you are not right, He will answer, “Grow.”

4) When the request, the time and you are right, God will say, “Go.”

That’s when miracles happen.
~ ~ ~

I have experienced God’s go, Chairos time a few times. I had a very stimulating time as an undergraduate in Oxford, almost like coming to life. And then, I moved to America, where we lived for 17 years, 12 of them in Williamsburg, Virginia. (In fact, I have lived longer in Williamsburg than anywhere else as an adult.) I did not like living in America, and I particularly, intensely, disliked living in Williamsburg. I never felt at home there, as if I belonged–and that was, of course, was because I did not.

Oddly, I felt home-sick not for India, but for Oxford, where, for some reason, I felt comfortable, as I did belong. A place were eccentricity is the norm, where conversations heady as champagne are not infrequent, with as much culture per square foot as New York or London–but so much easier to get to.

I hoped to return to Oxford for many years, but did not pray for it, since I saw no concrete way in which I could do so.
~ ~ ~

I used to find winters depressing in Virginia, probably because I stayed indoors so much. One November, I went on an individual retreat at Richmond Hill, Richmond. I probably planned to stay the week. However, I came across a book called Lift up your Eyes, by Glenn Clark about prayer. It goes through the different things the Father desires to give us –ideas, creativity, opulence and riches (if we desire them!!), friends.

I left within 24 hours. As I read that book, I felt I had found the key I had been seeking, the missing link.

I had been hoping, not praying, for so many things. I had the horizontal view, not the vertical view. I needed to lift up my eyes to the hills.

And so I did!
~~~

I put moving to Oxford on my prayer list in December 2003. In April 2004, we were in England, and we since we now have permanent residency, we are unlikely to voluntarily move, unless God taps me on my shoulder with new marching orders. (Please don’t Lord; please leave the boundary lines set in these pleasant places.)

I had wanted to leave Williamsburg for the 12 years I lived there. I really disliked it. But things happened spiritually in those desert-ish years. When I came I was a Christian in a sense that I spent 30 minutes a day in prayer and Bible study, but God was not as central to my thoughts as he is now, I did not live in the presence of God as much as I do now, I was more of a reed shaken in the wind, than someone living in the waterfall of God’s presence, her feet on the rock.

In Williamsburg, I discovered the strength of Scripture, and started devoting 90 minutes to prayer and Bible study, no matter what else I had to do, no matter whether I did anything else significant that day or not.

I found a mentor, who went through the Gospels with me and Roy bi-weekly for five years, as well as a theology course called Sonship which he had co-written. I met weekly with another mentor, Lolly Dunlap (obit). I taught several bible studies, and gained much from my immersion in the Bible. I spoke at various church events, and gained some practice in communicating my enthusiasm and passion for prayer and scripture.

And then, slowly, it became clear that it was time to leave. I had changed. I was different. And then all sorts of unlikely things happened very quickly. Roy won a prize for the best paper published in a scientific journal in the last three years, and various other prizes for some ground-breaking work. He was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Linear Algebra Society, co-edited a successful book, was elected to various boards, won prestigious grants including a 100K one from the National Science Foundation to go anywhere he liked for a year and study. Suddenly, job offers flowed in, from Canada, and yes, the UK. We came to the UK, where he was a Distinguished Visitor at the Univ. of Manchester, and we used the NSF grant to spend a year at the Mathematical Institute at Oxford. Within a year of my prayer, I was in Oxford, and have never left.

And the last seven years in Oxford have been incredibly busy, but also creative. I have published two books, I have founded a publishing company starting with, like, zero business experience, I have become a blogger…
* * *
I give several other examples of how things tarry, then happen, very rapidly when it is chairos time, but I won’t ramble further.

These two words, chairos, chronos keep recurring in thoughts.

Roy and I are fairly energetic and there are so many things we want to do all at once–expand the garden, the business… That’s why it’s becoming more important for me to check in with God on a daily/weekly basis to get his ideas and his perspective on what I should be doing.

First things first is the title of a book by Stephen Covey, though Jesus, of course, concluded his sermon on the mount with the same thought. Seek first the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things (the things the pagans run after) will be added to you.

The thought does simplify prioritizing. The Kingdom of God on a micro-level, i.e. in each person’s life, will look slightly different. It basically means what your life would look like if Christ were ruling it/in it. For some it would mean evangelism, or feeding the poor, or preaching. For me, it would look like peace, quiet, domestic order, harmonious relationships, and using “that one talent which is death to hide” i.e. writing.

And knowing whether it is the chairos time to do something, embark on a new project, is partly determined by whether doing so contribute to ushering in, or retarding the Kingdom of God, the reign of God in my life.

And now at last, it is the chairos time for me to write–and so I just have to shrug off distraction–and get down to it.

Locusts and Wild Honey

By Anita Mathias

Mark 1 4-5–Blog Through the Bible Project

And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. ⁵The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. ⁶ John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.

It was the chairos time, the right time for John the Baptist to emerge to public notice, with an urgent message, which had to be shared. And so, despite everything against him, he spoke his message of hope. He was outspoken, to the point that he lost his life for telling the truth about those in power.

Would the wilderness–solitude, no human companionship

none of the works of art, civilization, learning, the absence of

iron sharpening iron, an absence of everything but you and

God–be considered a suitable training ground for the

development of a unique voice, which has something real,

and of urgency to say to the world?

Apparently, it was. Because he was flowing with God’s purposes, and God’s spirit was on him, what he said–repent, and you will be forgiven, someone greater than me is coming–was spot on, and spoke to the people.

And look at his diet. Locusts and wild honey. Protein and natural sugars. Not balanced. But that did not prevent his fulfilling God’s call on his life.

Sometimes, one needs to clear the decks to do what God has called us to do. To go into the desert, figuratively speaking, into silence, solitude and quietness.

To simplify one’s meals and cooking to clear time and space to hear God and to do what he has called you to do.

I am not going to go on a locust and wild honey diet, but I am going to try to eat very simply for a while–partly to lose weight and be fitter, but also to create time and space to hear the word of God more clearly.

Locusts and wild honey–simple food for a season to be able to hear and speak words from God more clearly.

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Locusts and Wild Honey

By Anita Mathias

Mark 1 4-5
And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. ⁵The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. ⁶ John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.

It was the chairos time, the right time for John the Baptist to emerge to public notice, with an urgent message, which had to be shared. And so, despite everything against him, he spoke his message of hope. He was outspoken, to the point that he lost his life for telling the truth about those in power.

Would the wilderness–solitude, no human companionship

none of the works of art, civilization, learning, the absence of

iron sharpening iron, an absence of everything but you and

God–be considered a suitable training ground for the

development of a unique voice, which has something real,

and of urgency to say to the world?

Apparently, it was. Because he was flowing with God’s purposes, and God’s spirit was on him, what he said–repent, and you will be forgiven, someone greater than me is coming–was spot on, and spoke to the people.

And look at his diet. Locusts and wild honey. Protein and natural sugars. Not balanced. But that did not prevent his fulfilling God’s call on his life.

Sometimes, one needs to clear the decks to do what God has called us to do. To go into the desert, figuratively speaking, into silence, solitude and quietness.

To simplify one’s meals and cooking to clear time and space to hear God and to do what he has called you to do.

I am not going to go on a locust and wild honey diet, but I am going to try to eat very simply for a while–partly to lose weight and be fitter, but also to create time and space to hear the word of God more clearly.

Locusts and wild honey–simple food for a season to be able to hear and speak words from God more clearly.

Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf, his mother, and himself

By Anita Mathias

Virginia Woolf, my mother and me

Ahead of Review’s book club on The Hours, Michael Cunningham explains how discovering Virginia Woolf as a teenager inspired him to write his novel about her life – and how his mother provided a surprising solution when he got stuck

Comments (15)

Michael Cunningham
The Guardian, Saturday 4 June 2011

Jack Rovello and Julianne Moore in the film of The Hou

Virginia Woolf was great fun at parties. I want to tell you that up front, because Woolf, who died 70 years ago this year, is so often portrayed as the Dark Lady of English letters, all glowery and sad, looking balefully on from a crepuscular corner of literary history with a stone lodged in her pocket.

She did, of course, have her darker interludes. More on that in a moment. But first I’d like to announce, to anyone who might not know, that she, when not sunk in her periodic depressions, was the person one most hoped would come to the party; the one who could speak amusingly on just about any subject; the one who glittered and charmed; who was interested in what other people had to say (though not, I admit, always encouraging about their opinions); who loved the idea of the future and all the wonders it might bring.

And, fearless feminist though she was, she could be reduced to days of self-recrimination if someone made a snide remark about her outfit. She had some difficulty putting herself together and, like many of us, suffered from a dearth of fashion sense. She was also enormously insecure about her work. She suspected, more often than not, that her “tinselly experiments” in fiction would be packed away with the rest of the artefacts and curiosities, all the minor efforts that occupy various archives and storage rooms.

That’s not a new story: the under-appreciated artist, vindicated by time. But still. Woolf, an often charming but always delicate creature, prone to fits of depression, sexually frigid, never dressed quite right, most likely did not strike many as a figure heroic enough to withstand the gale force of history. Not compared to someone like James Joyce, the other great modernist, who blustered about his own genius to anyone who’d listen, who planned for his immortality as carefully as a general plans an attack.

Among the reasons Woolf drowned herself, 70 years ago, at the age of 59 was her conviction that her final novel, Between the Acts, was an utter failure. There are relatively few significant writers who were, in their lifetimes, quite so uncertain about their accomplishments.

Since the publication of my own novel, The Hours, in which Woolf figures as a character, I have unexpectedly become some sort of acknowledged, if peripheral, expert on her life and work. I’m surprised at how often someone will say to me: well, yes, Woolf was wonderful, but she was no Joyce, was she?

She was no Joyce. She was herself. She had her limits. She wrote only about members of the upper classes, and she wrote not at all about sex. Her entire body of work contains two romantic kisses – one in The Voyage Out, another in Mrs Dalloway – and after those two relatively early books, no erotic episodes of any kind.

But really, I suspect that whatever reservations some people may harbour about Woolf, as opposed to Joyce, have to do with the fact that she wrote about women, and about the domestic particulars that were, at the time, women’s primary domain. Joyce had the good sense to write mostly about men.

As a woman, Woolf knew about the sense of helplessness that can afflict women given too little to do. And she knew – she insisted – that a life spent maintaining a house and throwing parties was not necessarily, not categorically, a trivial life. She gave us to understand that even a modest, domestic life was still, for the person living it, an epic journey, however ordinary it might appear to an outside observer. She refused to dismiss lives that most other writers tended to ignore.

That may have had something to do with Woolf’s own precarious mental condition, and her fear that she herself was one of the figures likely to be dismissed and forgotten. If she took on too much, if she became overly excited, she could tumble into a state of despair for which the term “depression” seems rather mild. In her lucid periods, she was great at parties. In her other state she was inconsolable. She hallucinated. She lashed out at those closest to her, her husband Leonard in particular, with the deadly accuracy available to a genius and which, it seems, she retained even when reason had deserted her. That Virginia was no fun at all.

The black spells always passed, usually in a matter of weeks, but Woolf not only lived in terror of the next onset, she worried she was too mentally unbalanced to sustain a career as a writer. Her fear of her own madness led her, when she started writing novels, to write two relatively conventional ones: The Voyage Out and Night and Day. She wanted to prove to herself and others that she was sane enough (most of the time) to write novels that were like those of other novelists; that were not the ravings and rants of a madwoman. She was further driven in her ambition to appear healthy by the fact that her editor was George Duckworth, her half brother, who had molested her when she was 12. It’s not difficult to imagine that, with those first two books, Woolf wanted to show Duckworth that he had not done her any lasting harm. It is also not difficult to imagine that few male writers of the period found themselves in similar situations.

After the publication of Night and Day, in an effort to ameliorate Woolf’s black spells, to lessen her agitation, she and Leonard moved to the suburban quiet of Richmond, and set up a printing press in the basement of their house. This was the birth of the Hogarth Press, and one of its first publications was Woolf’s highly unorthodox novel Jacob’s Room. Publishing her own books, in concert with Leonard, made the crucial difference. Woolf was, rather suddenly, answerable to no one, and she had already demonstrated her capacity for writing novels that resembled other novels. And so began her period of great work, which continued until her death. She no longer needed to prove anything, to anyone.Jacob’s Room was followed by Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse,Orlando, and on from there.

This new freedom was essential to Woolf as an artist, but did not have much effect on her periodic lapses into depression. They plagued her throughout her life. Psychiatry was not even in its infancy at the time – Hogarth eventually published early books by Freud – and there was no remedy available to Woolf. In the 1920s it was thought that mental disorders might stem from infections in the teeth, which by some means worked their way into the brain. She had several teeth pulled. It didn’t help.

And yet. If Woolf was better acquainted with profound sorrow than most, she was also, by some mysterious manifestation of will, better than almost anyone at conveying the pure joy of being alive. The quotidian pleasure of simply being present in the world on an ordinary Tuesday in June. That’s one of the reasons we who love her, love her as ardently as we do. She knew how bad it could get. And still, she insisted on simple, imperishable beauty, albeit a beauty haunted by mortality, as beauty always is. Woolf’s adoration of the world, her optimism about it, are assertions we can trust, because they come from a writer who has seen the bottom of the bottom. In her books, life persists, grand and gaudy and marvellous; it trumps the depths and discouragements.

I read Mrs Dalloway for the first time when I was a sophomore in high school. I was a bit of a slacker, not at all the sort of kid who’d pick up a book like that on my own (it was not, I assure you, part of the curriculum at my slacker-ish school in Los Angeles). I read it in a desperate attempt to impress a girl who was reading it at the time. I hoped, for strictly amorous purposes, to appear more literate than I was.

Mrs Dalloway, for anyone unfamiliar with it, concerns a day in the life of one Clarissa Dalloway, a 52-year-old society matron. In the course of the novel she runs an errand, meets an old flame in whom she is no longer interested, takes a nap, and gives a party. That’s the plot.

We are not, however, confined to Clarissa’s point of view throughout the novel. Consciousness is passed from character to character, like a baton passed from runner to runner in a relay race. We enter the mind of Peter Walsh, the old suitor; we go on a shopping trip with Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth; and we spend considerable time with one Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the first world war who is mentally unhinged. We also enter, more briefly, the minds of entirely incidental figures – a man who passes Clarissa on Bond Street, an elderly woman sitting on a bench in Hyde Park. We return, always, to Clarissa, but we see as well that as she goes about her unextraordinary day she is surrounded by the various comedies and tragedies of those around her. We understand that Clarissa, that everyone, in the course of performing their daily business is in fact walking through a vast world, and is ever so slightly altering that world simply by appearing in it.

In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf asserts that a day in the life of just about anyone contains, if looked at with sufficient penetration, much of what one needs to know about all human life, in more or less the way the blueprint for an entire organism is present in every strand of its DNA. In Mrs Dalloway, and other novels of Woolf’s, we are told that there are no insignificant lives, only inadequate ways of looking at them.

I did not, at the age of 15, understand any of that. I couldn’t make sense of Mrs Dalloway, and I failed utterly in my attempts to appear intelligent to that girl (blessings on her, wherever she is today). But I could see, even as an untutored and rather lazy child, the density and symmetry and muscularity of Woolf’s sentences. I thought, wow, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar. By which I meant she walked a line between chaos and order, she riffed, and just when it seemed that a sentence was veering off into randomness, she brought it back and united it with the melody.

My only experience with sentences before then had been confined to the simple declarative. Woolf’s sentences were revelatory. It seemed possible that other books might contain similar marvels. And, as I discovered, some of them did. Reading Mrs Dalloway transformed me, by slow degrees, into a reader.

Decades after that first reading, which rendered me both baffled and awed – which converted me, if you will – I attempted to write a novel about Woolf and Mrs Dalloway. I approached the idea with appropriate nervousness. For one thing, if one stands that close to a genius, one is likely to look even tinier than one actually is. For another, I am a man, and Woolf was not only a great writer but is a feminist icon. There has long been a certain sense that she belongs to women.

Still, I wanted to write a book about reading a book. Mrs Dalloway, despite my general incomprehension of its larger purposes, showed me, at a relatively early age, what it was possible to do with ink and paper. It seems that for some of us, reading a particular book at a particular time is an essential life experience, and so every bit as much a part of our writerly material as the more traditional novel-inspiring experiences – like first love, the loss of a parent, a failed marriage, etc.

With my misgivings firmly in place, I decided that it was better to risk going down in lurid blue-green flames than to write the book one knows one is able to write. And so, I set out.

My novel The Hours originated as a contemporary retelling of Mrs Dalloway. I wondered how much, or how little, Clarissa Dalloway’s character would be altered by a world in which women were offered a broader range of possibilities. That quickly proved, however, to be merely a conceit, and not an especially compelling one. We already have Mrs Dalloway, a fabulous Mrs Dalloway. Who in the world could possibly want another?

Being dogged (doggedness is an essential quality for any novelist), I was reluctant to abandon the book entirely. I tried rewriting it as a diptych, in which I would alternate between chapters that concerned a contemporary Mrs Dalloway and chapters devoted to the day in Woolf’s life when she began writing the book. When she, ever doubtful and insecure, set down the opening lines of a book that, as it turned out, would live for ever. I even tried writing the Woolf story on the odd pages and the Clarissa story on the evens, so that they would kiss every time one turned a page. Ideas like that tend to make better sense in the solitude of one’s study than they do in brighter light.

Still, even with the inclusion of a second strand, the book wasn’t right. It refused to shed its aspect of literary exercise. It stubbornly remained an idea for a novel, rather than an actual novel.

At that point, I pretty much decided to let it go, and write another book instead. But one morning, sitting at my computer, I allowed my mind to wander into questions about why Woolf meant so much to me, enough that I’d spent the better part of a year writing a doomed novel about her and her work. OK, sure, I loved Mrs Dalloway, but every novelist has loved any number of books, and few of them have felt the need to write new books about the older ones (the only exception that comes to mind is Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which is, of course, a retelling ofJane Eyre from the point of view of Bertha, Mr Rochester’s first wife).

What, then, was the matter with me? Sitting at my computer, I pictured Clarissa Dalloway, and pictured Woolf, her creator, standing behind her. And then, unbidden, I imagined my mother standing behind Woolf.

As I thought about it, I began to realise that my mother was, in certain ways, the legitimate third party. My mother was a homemaker, the sort of woman Woolf referred to as “the angel of the house”, who, like many such house angels, had given herself over to a life that was too small for her. She had always seemed to me like an Amazon queen, captured and brought to a suburb, where she was forced to live in an enclosure that could not contain her, and yet ineluctably did.

My mother managed her frustrations by obsessing over every conceivable detail. She could spend half a day deciding on cocktail napkins for a party. She planned every meal exquisitely, and still worried that they were failures. Germs decided eventually to cease entering the house entirely, because they knew they’d find no purchase there.

Sitting before my computer, I began to wonder . . . If you removed the ultimate object – for one woman, a novel, for another, a home so perfectly created and maintained that nothing rank or dolorous could ever take root there – you had, essentially, the same effort. That is, the desire to realise an ideal, to touch the supernal, to create something greater than the human hand and mind can create, no matter how gifted those hands and minds might be.

It seemed that in some fundamental way, my mother and Woolf had been engaged in similar enterprises. Both were pursuing impossible ideals. Neither was ever satisfied, because the end result, be it book or cake, did not, could not, match the perfection that seemed to hover just out of reach.

That equivalency felt true to the spirit of Woolf’s legacy. She who had insisted so adamantly that no life could be dismissed, and that the lives of women were more prone to dismissal than were the lives of men.

And so, with my mother renamed Laura Brown (after an essay of Woolf’s entitled “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”), the book became a triptych, and I went on from there.

Although a great writer is always, first and foremost, a great writer, regardless of his or her life or subject matter, Woolf is quite possibly the greatest chronicler of the lives of women. Her women are rarely figures of fame or notoriety. Their skills tend to be the traditional womanly skills. Mrs Dalloway, like Mrs Ramsey in To the Lighthouse, is an immaculate hostess. Both are more than able to manage a dinner party, they are adept at helping everyone feel comfortable and included, they make certain that the food and the centrepieces are exactly right. We have, in the decades since, largely discredited those abilities, and favour – as well we might – women who take on the more global concerns that are still, even in 2011, more generally granted to men.

Part of Woolf’s genius, however, resides in her refusal to condescend to her women, without ever aggrandising them. If anything, it’s the men in her novels who feel ever so slightly ridiculous: Richard Dalloway with his smallish job at court, Mr Ramsey with his constant need for reassurance about his brilliance, his potency, his potential. As the men work and fret and bemoan their places in the world, the women infuse their men, their families, their homes, with life. The women are the electric currents that run through the rooms. The women are the sources not only of comfort but of vigour and amplitude. The women know that in the end, we will still need food and love, after our jobs have been taken over by younger people and our earthly works have been put away on their shelves.

Woolf was, not surprisingly, unsure about all that, even as she wrote so brilliantly about it. She believed that her sister Vanessa, who had children and lovers and a general air of reckless abandon even as she applied herself to her painting, was the truer artist. Woolf acknowledged that her sister was not necessarily the brightest of all intellectual lights, but still felt that Vanessa was the incandescent spirit, and that she, Woolf, was a stick, a barren and gaunt maiden aunt (her marriage to Leonard was companionable but not passionate), who spent her life producing books, an admirable pursuit but ultimately fairly dry when compared to the raising of a family.

She felt that way even as she wrote A Room of One’s Own. The old feminine imperatives, it seems, are harder to shed than one might imagine. You could probably say that one of the measures of greatness is an artist’s ability to transcend his or her personality, insecurities and peccadilloes. Woolf demanded equality for women and, at the same time, worried that her childlessness meant that her life had been a failure.

The Hours (which had been Woolf’s initial title for Mrs Dalloway), to the surprise of its author, agent and editor, somehow escaped what had seemed so clearly to be its destiny – to be read (probably disapprovingly) by a handful of Woolf fans and then march, with whatever dignity it could muster, straight to the remainders table. It sold well (if modestly by bestseller standards), and then – the biggest surprise of all – it was made into a movie. Which proved to be popular. With none other than Nicole Kidman playing Virginia, Meryl Streep as Clarissa, and Julianne Moore as Laura. Any number of people have asked me what I suspect Woolf would have thought of the book and the movie. I feel certain she’d have disliked the book – she was a ferocious critic. She’d probably have had reservations about the film as well, though I like to think that it would have pleased her to see herself played by a beautiful Hollywood movie star.

My mother, the one living person who appears in the book, was not pleased by it, though she bravely maintained that she was. I, foolish creature, had thought she’d be happy about the fact that I considered her life important enough to portray in a novel. It didn’t quite occur to me that she’d also feel exposed, betrayed and misinterpreted. Mothers, don’t raise your children to be novelists.

Several years after the novel had been published, while the film was in production, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. It had long gone undetected, and by the time it was found, was quite far along. She lived for a little less than a year after the diagnosis.

I was in Los Angeles with her, my father, and my sister during her final days. I called Scott Rudin, the producer of the movie, and said, I don’t think my mother is going to be able to see the movie, could you possibly arrange for her to see whatever you’ve got of it already? Rudin had 20 minutes’ worth of dailies, on video, brought by messenger to my family’s house. I inserted it into the television, as the messenger waited discreetly in another room.

And so I found myself sitting with my mortally ill mother, on the sofa we’d had since I was 15, watching Julianne Moore play her, as if she were being reincarnated while she was still alive.

It was a small enough incident, in the general scheme of things. It was one of the minor mercies. And yet, 10 years later, I’m still struck by the way in which at one end of a time spectrum we have Woolf, starting a new novel, worried that it will prove to be a mere curiosity, another of humankind’s failed experiments, wrought by someone who was more an eccentric than a genius, a writer-manqué who concerned herself with ordinary women’s lives in a world beset by battles and tortures, the murder of entire populations. At the other end of the spectrum, over 70 years later, we have my mother, a woman about whom Woolf might in theory have written, seeing herself portrayed by a brilliant actress, knowing (at least, I hope she knew) that her life had mattered more than she’d allowed herself to imagine.

Michael Cunningham will talk about The Hours at the Guardian book club at Kings Place, London N1 on 5 July at 7pm. Buy tickets online at:guardian.co.uk/books/bookclub For queries only call 020 3353 2881.

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Family and Misc. Catch-Up

By Anita Mathias

Well, Roy and I are in North Wales, enjoying a few days sans children. Immensely quiet. We passed through breaktakingly beautiful countryside on our drive here, through Snowdonia National Park. Lots of impossibly small lambs.

We are here to walk in Bodnant Gardens, and perhaps some other gardens and National Trust Properties here.

Zoe is in the throes of her G.C.S.E’s. Two weeks down, three to go. So far, so good.

Irene had a sleepover for her 12th birthday. In a tent in our orchard. Everyone survived, and we even got a little sleep.

We will have two new additions to our family next month–two new ducklings. Can’t wait. The farmer is going to hand them over when they are six week old. Khaki Campbells. We’ve previously had Aylesbury ducks, which we loved. Let’s hope these are equally wonderful.

We are working very hard restoring our old rambling garden, which has been much neglected. Pictures to follow soon.

It’s half-term for Whitsun in England. We are in a relatively calm, sunny place, in every way–and for that, we are grateful!
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Ten Spiritual Lessons I’ve Learned from Running a Small Business

By Anita Mathias

1) Everything starts with a good idea. And good ideas can be birthed in periods of intensive prayer.

2) There is no area of our lives which God cannot invade.

Interestingly, it was a bit of a cognitive shift for me to realize that God cares about the business I run–about something so mundane as money–and about how I run it because he cares about me.

3 Good ideas are not born in a vacuum. They rise out of the ashes of other things you have tried, and at which you might have failed.

It’s rare that people stumble upon the right thing immediately–the right genre to write in, the right business, even the perfect arrangement of plants in a garden. (Most good gardeners will move a plant 3 or 4 times until they find the right place for it, and most beautiful gardens are the third or fourth ones the owners have planted.)

And so my current business, publishing, was the second I started. The first, selling antiquarian books was interesting but very time-consuming and rather exhausting.

I started crying out to the Lord in my exhaustion (in the words of Psalm 107) to help me find a business which could let me put my kids through private school while still leaving time and energy to write. And in a flash of insight, using little pieces of information, knowledge and experience I had subconsciously stored, the idea and business plan for our current publishing business–which is not particularly time-consuming or exhausting–came to me.

4 Beware of Greed

If a business is more or less successful, then, you will make money–more or less.

All addictions are born and grow in the mind. And so you must try very hard not to get addicted to watching or obsessing over the trajectory of sales, spreadsheets and bank balances.

Because while money is an excellent servant (Somerset Maugham likens it to a sixth sense without which one cannot properly appreciate the other five!!) it is an insatiable master. As it says in Ecclesiastes, he who loves money will never have money enough.

5 The Pricking of Griefs

Working to keep oneself and one’s family afloat at a standard of living best suited for one’s calling and vocation is one thing.

A business will not be devoid of hassle, no more than any other vocation on earth. In the world you will have trouble, as Jesus forewarned his disciples in his last conversation with them.

However, with a certain detachment, one can conduct it in peace, because one lives in Christ–at a very good address indeed. Definitely, on the right side of the tracks!

There is a fine line between working at a steady, rhythmic measured pace to achieve an interesting, comfortable standard of living, and overworking for the greed of money.

Proverbs again has something to say about this, “Do not wear yourself out to become rich. Have the wisdom to show restraint.” (Proverbs 23:4)

When one overworks–works at the expense of rest, relationships, physical health– driven by greed, one opens oneself up to being pricked by many griefs, because greed is an irrational emotion, and those avaricious for money will never have enough.

So while hassles are an inevitable part of work and life, overworking leads to an accumulation of trouble and hassle, to a piercing with many griefs.

It is very important to set time limits for how much you will work to prevent the scourge and exhaustion of overwork.

6 It’s just money.

That’s a really useful mantra.

You, being human, will make errors, which will lead to financial loss, sometimes trivial, sometimes rather serious.

Few businesses can be conducted single-handedly. Most businesses are like a chain, a complex interlocking of many human units. We have had nine of our friends working with us at various times, and are reliant on printers, distributors, shippers. Lots of people.

People who, being human, might well, on occasion, make errors, mess up. Money has been and may well again be lost, through other people’s errors, as well as my own.

And then, there is no point stewing about it. No point fretting. It’s just money.

Do not fret; it only leads to evil. Psalm 37:8

If however, a work relationship causes consistent stewing, stress, and aggro, and things cannot be resolved, it’s perhaps time to sever the work relationship and move on.

7 Never let money steal your peace. It’s just money

Never get emotionally involved in a transaction to do with money, when, as is inevitable in business, you run up against other people’s greed or dishonesty or aggressiveness. In business as in life, you will run up against people who should really be emailing their therapist, not you.

It’s just money, an inert substance, which can be earned again, or can be given to you again by your heavenly Father.

One’s peace, and mental, emotional and physical health, and relationships and happiness–these on the other hand are precious–priceless!!-– and cannot be as easily recaptured if frivolously squandered by stewing about money.

Think rationally in business conflicts to do with money. What is the outcome you want to achieve? Work towards that, realizing that it may well not be achieved. Either way, be at peace.

I think the non-violence Jesus recommended in the Sermon on the Mount is a risky but sensible business practice. It is better to lose small amounts of money than waste time and peace contending with an aggressive person.

8 Optimism is a lucrative mental and business habit.

While there is some truth to that old statement in the Desiderata, “Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery,”–and one learns the truth of this the hard way–optimism is a great business principle.

Our family business is a publishing company. Though we now have a decent list, we, of course, started with 1 book, then 5, then a dozen… And we used to pack and ship these ourselves, until we grew big enough to use distribution networks, and third party sellers.

So one drops an expensive book into the post with no proof that you have done so, totally reliant on the honesty of people, knowing you will have to replace it if they claim they haven’t received it.

When we first started, it cost £0.75 to get proof of posting, and the time/petrol to the PO. We got proof of posting for a while, then stopped and decided to see if it was cheaper to trust God and people. It was. Just a handful of books each year “did not arrive,” and replacing these or refunding was cheaper than getting proof of posting for everything.

Book buyers, on the whole, are honest, and discovering this was pleasant.

Optimism and trust are good business strategies.

Fear and suspicion on the other hand, are costly emotions–costly in terms of time, peace and mental health–AND financially costly!!

9 Enough

It is vital to learn the meaning of this word.

New technologies, the internet, social media are turning the traditional assumptions of business upside down.

There is a lot of money to be made.

But I don’t need to make all of it. Certainly not now.

Enough.

“To the one who pleases him, God gives wisdom and knowledge and joy, but to the sinner, He gives the task of gathering and heaping, only to give to the one to pleases the Lord.” Ecclesiastes 2:26

God save us from the task of gathering and heaping.

The one who has learnt the meaning of enough can work at a business at a measured pace, consistent with physical, emotional, spiritual and relational health.

10 The Lord is my Pacesetter.

I am naturally a A type personality, and it would come naturally to me to run ahead of the Lord and exhaust myself. To run a business on my own ideas and enthusiasms, and those of my co-workers.

The Lord is a gentle shepherd who goes before us, who walks with us. I remember a sermon which said that a hallmark of Satan is that he drives, that drivenness is used by the evil one to drive one over a Gadarene cliff.

It’s important for me to check-in with Christ, and to run through my ideas with him. What he invariably tells me is to slow down! (Why? Perhaps he has other good plans for me up his sleeve!)

And I do.

Because what I want more than anything is for his blessing to be on my business.

The blessing of the LORD brings wealth, and he adds no

trouble to it. Proverbs 10:22

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