Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Archives for January 2012

Views from our Garden: From the Rising of the Sun to its Setting, let the Lord be Praised

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The Garden of our Lives
It’s seed-planting season, and we’ve started our basil, parsley and coriander indoors.
There’s a kind of inevitability to it–plant a basil seed, get basil; plant a sunflower seed, well, get sunflowers.
When we look at the garden of our lives, our life as it is, with its components of family, friends, health, wealth, work, community, well, it’s a component of two things
1) The seeds we have sown,
2) Our reaction to the things that have happened to us, the time the dandelions and weeds from the neighbour’s garden blow into ours, and the wild deer eat our roses and the rabbits nibble our brassicas (I am speaking from experience now 🙂
I keep thinking that of late. When I am about to say something sharp, or behave less than kindly, I remind myself, “Oh Anita, do you really want to sow this seed into the garden of your life?”
The world is almost mathematical, but not quite. There’s Pi, a number no one will ever be able to compute, for it is infinite.
Infinity invades our world, full of grace and mercy.
Many of the good and kind and generous things I’ve done, I have not been rewarded for, except that my character became a little bit more good, kind and generous.
But conversely, God has saved me from the visible consequences of so many of the unkind things I have done.
The garden of our lives is not a mathematical garden, thank goodness.
Jesus steps in with grace and mercy, saving us from the mathematical consequences of our darker words and deeds, things we are now ashamed of.
Redeemer, who first appeared in a garden in Genesis, who returned to earth once resurrected greatly resembling a gardener, uproot the weeds I have sown in the garden of my life, and even now, make it beautiful.

Three views of the same sunrise yesterday.  Notice the wide range of colours.

Our garden through our bedroom windows
 
And now a sunset today.
These were not photoshopped (neither I nor Roy know now to do that!!) beyond cropping.

Beautiful Flowers in our Winter Garden, Oxford, Jan 11, 2012

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Here are some flowers in our garden.  
 Helleborus Niger, showing the first caterpillar of the season. 
Hellebores,  are resistant to most pests, being toxic to them.  Perhaps the flowers are not toxic, or this caterpillar could find nothing else.
Also called the Christmas Rose, this plant was in flower on Christmas Day. ‘Niger’ does not refer to the flower, but to the roots.
Helleborus feotidus.  This prolific self seeder has produced row of plants along our graveled drive way.  One of the few green flowers.
 Flowering cherry
 Daphne (I think)
 Primroses, planted last winter, and back in flower.
 Helleborus Winter Moonbean.  
This cultivar has attractive striking foliage, which I should have photographed also.
 Hellebore hybrid
Helleborus Eric Smithii
 Winter jasmine
 
 A final hellebore cultivar
 A stray early pyracantha flower.
 And finally, a couple of hellebores with massive flower buds ready to explode

More hellebores

Choosing Books, Films and Peace: Whatever is True, Noble, Pure, Lovely, Admirable

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In an orgy of decluttering, I am giving all these books away!

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. And the God of peace will be with you. (Phil 4:8).

This is Paul’s prescription for peace. Perhaps these things–whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy–which flow from God, escort us into the presence of God, which is peace.

* * *

I feel ambivalent about that verse. It seems so goody-goody and blinkered, as if one was deliberately ignoring the dark and shadow side of life.

And would one not then be ill-equipped to deal with evil when it confronted you? Bruno Bettelheim’s study of fairy-tales, The Uses of Enchantment argues that fairy tales are a gentle introduction to the darkness the child will definitely face, within herself, probably; outside herself, very likely. (My children, very sadly, found Andersen too heart-breaking, some of Oscar Wilde, too cruel, and Grimm, well, too grim–so I didn’t get to read many fairy tales to them.)

* * *

I am reading One Thousand Gifts, Ann Voskamp’s tribute to positive thinking and gratitude. How does dwelling on the pain and anguished of the world help the anguished? she asks.

But by gratitude for the goodness and joy in the world we help mend one of the cracks in the world: our own hearts, and our own ability to be rejoice and be glad.

And one whole, happy woman overflowing with joy is perhaps of more use to the world than a wide-eyed one, who knows all about all the evil in the world, whose weeping eyes have been pierced by the Ice Queen’s shards.

* * *

 Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy…

I have unconsciously adopted some of this as my mantra for some years. For instance, I resist seeing movies or reading books about the Nazi concentration camps; pogroms, Soviet Gulags, or the horrors of Communist regimes; anything to do with sadism or torture; the suffering of animals; or movies or books with too much violence, war, human degradation, or violent and degrading sex (as opposed to eroticism). Or, mostly, thrillers as I get too stressed watching them.

My children haven’t watched such films either, and are extraordinarily sensitive as a result. We’ve been a no-TV household, which means we are very intentional about what we watch (though we have box sets of Downton Abbey; ssshh Game of Thrones and documentaries).

We decided not to have TV when we got married since watching the news is more time-consuming  than skimming the papers, besides, we could always watch DVDs of the best programs. (Andrew Weil says watching the news increases one’s stress, anxiety and depression; the news is structured to make you feel all is wrong with the world.) Also, we wanted to have more family time, to have quietness in the house, to resist the pressures of consumerism caused by subliminal advertising, and to have children who would read because the atmosphere was relatively distraction-free.

* * *

I am sifting through thousands of books, deciding which ones to keep.

The verse helped me—books which deal with evil, suffering, ugliness, “perversion” are chucked, unless they have extreme redeeming literary merit. I am not interested in bleak, dystopian views of the world.

Because, you see, I know I am acting in a comedy. I know how it is going to end. I have read Revelation. The world ends with a return to order, with a wedding, with dancing, feasting and merriment.

* * *

So as I sift through thousands of books, I am using two yardsticks

1) One is Matthew Arnold’s famous dictum, “Life is too short to read anything but the best which has been thought and said.” I probably will not get to read everything which interests me among “the best that has been thought and said.”  Why waste time with inferior stuff? So, if the book has little literary merit, off it goes.

(In my teens, I read everything, thrillers, mysteries, romances… I have been a bit of a purist since then. I have barely read a thriller, a mystery or a romance since my late teens!!  Yeah, rarefied reading habits!)

2) And the second yardstick I’ve used, very roughly, is Philippians. Does it deal with what is true, right, noble, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy?

And if it doesn’t, is it really, really well-written?– I’ve real almost all of Rushdie’s novels, and listened to almost all of Toni Morrison’s on tape. Or am I very interested in the subject matter? Or the author’s style

There are bleak, brutal, scarifying novels, like Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, which are exquisitely written and constructed. I have read it twice, both because it was set in the India of my childhood, an intimately familiar setting, and because I was interested in her experiments with language, and the structure of her plot.

But if a book fails both tests—it’s neither well-written, nor interesting and edifying– what conceivable good is reading it going to do me?

Reading about evil weakens the spirit. It clouds it with fear. It shakes and depresses you. There is little good which can come of it.

But I am not going to content myself with a diet of Pollyanna either.

Thankfully, there is a huge middle ground between the Nazi concentration camps and Pollyanna.

G.K. Chesterton on Joy (from Orthodoxy)

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It is said that Paganism is a religion of joy and Christianity of sorrow; it would be just as easy to prove that Paganism is pure sorrow and Christianity pure joy.
Such conflicts mean nothing and lead nowhere. Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or divided.
And the really interesting thing is this, that the pagan was (in the main) happier and happier as he approached the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the heavens. The gaiety of the best Paganism, as in the playfulness of Catullus or Theocritus, is, indeed, an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten by a grateful humanity.
But it is all a gaiety about the facts of life, not about its origin. To the pagan the small things are as sweet as the small brooks breaking out of the mountain; but the broad things are as bitter as the sea. When the pagan looks at the very core of the cosmos he is struck cold. Behind the gods, who are merely despotic, sit the fates, who are deadly. Nay, the fates are worse than deadly; they are dead.
 And when rationalists say that the ancient world was more enlightened than the Christian, from their point of view they are right. For when they say “enlightened” they mean darkened with incurable despair.
It is profoundly true that the ancient world was more modern than the Christian. The common bond is in the fact that ancients and moderns have both been miserable about existence, about everything, while mediaevals were happy about that at least. I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only miserable about everything — they were quite jolly about everything else. I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at peace about everything — they were at war about everything else.
But if the question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos, then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody streets of Florence than in the theatre of Athens or the open garden of Epicurus. Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides, but he lived in a gayer universe.
* * *
The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so.
Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.
Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live.
Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This is what I call being born upside down.
The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstasies, while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again he knows it.
Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small.
The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation.
The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something.
Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell.
Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness.
There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
–Orthodoxy

Changing the Story: Seeing the Pain of Life Through a Filter of Thanksgiving

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Image Credit
 I was suddenly reminded today of a painful episode of my life, and shed a few tearsAnd then I thought of something else, and felt overwhelmingly grateful.

* * *

When I was a young girl and then a young woman, I had an older mentor who invested a lot in me—telling me about books, encouraging me to  read. He invested a lot of hope in my writing, and desperately wanted me to be successful, perhaps, I now see, to somehow compensate for his own sense of failure.

Well, I was a disappointment to him. I did read English at Oxford, but he expected me to publish a dazzling book in my twenties. I didn’t. And then in my early thirties, a leading American editor, Ted Solataroff of Harper and Row expressed interest in a book from me.

I wrote one in blood through my first pregnancy, and the first year of my baby’s life, sent it to my childhood mentor, who got it bound, and to Ted, who rejected it. When he did so, I remember lying on my carpet, thinking, “I want to die.”

Well, I did not. Instead I visited my childhood friend and mentor. I had gained weight through my pregnancy, and had clawed 22 pounds off through walking 4 miles a day, and studiously avoiding fat. I was on an upswing, reading again, enjoying writing.

* * *

Mentors and tormentors. Be careful who you choose as a mentor, for there can be a thin line between them.

This man was bitterly disappointed in me, and let me know it. “You gained so much weight; it’s repulsive.” “I read your book, it’s piffle. And you thought Harper and Row would publish that.”

Gosh, just what I needed with a one year old daughter, a marriage under strain from our new daughter and both our fierce ambition for our own work.

I crumbled. I lost the plot. Gained back those twenty-two pounds, and another twenty-two. Slipped into a bleak, bad negative mood. Over-worked, and overworked myself into depression.

* * *

And my friend? Well, four days after my visit, he had a heart attack. He lived for another 9 years, and we resumed a friendly relationship through letters and phone-calls.

But I never visited him again.

When he died, I cried and cried for a few days. Partly, that I had never visited him again. I felt that I had been a poor return on investment. I felt guilty. I thought about the love that had been between us, and forgot that, because of that, he felt free to speak to me with such vitriol.

He was depressed and downcast towards the end of his life. In fact, with some trepidation, I had been considering visiting him around the time he died.

* * *

He died about 8 years ago, and I have always regretted that I didn’t see for the last 9 years of his life.

And today, I am letting that regret go.

Why should another visit have been any different? He was depressed, and dissatisfied, and so would have been even more likely to lash out at anyone who would take it.

To try to feel alive through rage. To feel powerful by trampling someone else down. To channel  uncomfortable emotions about the frustrations of his life into a rage-filled demolition job.

But could I have stood it? No, it would have been very hard to deal with it. The last visit took me back several steps. Why do that to myself?

Why put myself into the path of a volcano of someone’s negativity and dissatisfaction, knowing I would have to put myself together again, once more?

Interestingly, I had known this intuitively. When I felt perhaps I should go and visit him, I didn’t because I didn’t want to.

For the last eight years, off and on, I have scolded and castigated myself for ingratitude, for not wanting to go and visit him one last time.

* * *

And today, I actually feel thankful I did not go. The visit could have been like the former one, tears, drama, and exhaustion. I have children. I cannot afford emotional setbacks.

And so I cast out remorse, and was thankful that I was spared more misery, more emotional turmoil, more tears!

When such as I cast out remorse

So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest. 

W.B. Yeats

 

My Four Rabbits, from R. Lightning, Empress, Sunlight and Bandit

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These are four of my dear friends. The second and fourth rabbits from R. are the mum and dad. The other two are the offspring. They get on well, and are very endearing, gentle, affectionate pets.
They are indoor and outdoor pets, playful and frisky.
When I work, I hear Roy’s fast, heavy footsteps; Jake, the Collie’s equally fast footsteps, which sometimes sound like Roy’s because he has 4 feet to Roy’s two; Irene’s light, fleet of foot, always running footsteps; and Zoe’s slower, more deliberate ones.
And then rabbit footsteps, soft, gentle, like the wind, coming to visit me.
They always make me happy.