Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Archives for 2012

Is it more important for Christian bloggers to be nice or to be real (if they can’t be both)?

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I read Ann Voskamp a few times a month. What impresses me is that she is so unremittingly inspiring, so high-minded, so noble.
Hmm.  When I began to write a Christian blog, my goal was that every post of mine would be a blessing to my readers. My strapline said something like that.
Within a few months, there was a damaging and public case of spiritual abuse in the Charismatic church I was attending. I satirized this abuse of power and their neurotic high-control strategies in a series of blog-posts called, “The Screwtape Lectures.” The Rector visited, and asked me to take them down. The Warden called and asked me, “How can these posts be a blessing?”
So I was faced with a serious writing question. Should I only write “what is helpful for building people up so that it may edify those who read?” Do I myself want to read a blog written purely to edify me? Well, if it’s John Piper (well, the majority of his posts) okay.  But on the whole, I would avoid such a blog. What I am interested in, you see, is the truth and the whole truth.
I changed my strapline. I don’t want to promise my reader that every post will be a blessing (though that would be nice) but that every post will be honest and truthful (insofar as I can discern truth).
* * *
 I’ve lived in England for 11 years now, and it seems every Christian’s mum used to tell them variations of “If you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all.” Or “Is it kind, is it necessary, is it true?”
Well, take it from me, people who follow this rule may be very nice people, indeed, but it’s unlikely that they are going be very interesting and gripping bloggers.
Why? Well, if I were only to share my inspiring thoughts in my blog, and not my questions; only my heights of faith, and not my fears; only my joys and not my sorrows; only the times when I love church, not the times I am stricken and wounded by it; only the times when I am wide-eyed and optimistic and full of wonder about the nobility and loveliness of Christians, and not the times when I feel very sceptical and cynical indeed—well, that would be like skipping every third or fourth page of the story of my life.
That would make for annoying reading, wouldn’t it? I cannot read blogs which do this. Where everything is upbeat, everything is edifying and preachy, everything has a neat lesson. I feel they are concealing something: the truth.
The truth of what is really like to be them. To be human. To love. But to struggle to forgive hateful behaviour. To love the church, but to be back-stabbed, slandered and betrayed by members of your church. To love Scripture, but struggle with its elementary precepts like love and forgiveness.
As a Christian blogger, we have two gifts to offer people—our real selves, mess and all, and Christ. If you really trust someone, you will follow his treasure map to the buried treasure in Himalayas. If not, not. By being honest about ourselves, our readers grow to trust us.
Yes, one can be unpleasant and use strong, cutting language and yet be a true Christian.  See Paul: Watch out for those dogs, those evildoers, those mutilators of the flesh. Phil 3:2  As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves! (Gal 5:12)
In fact, one can be unpleasant and use strong, vivid, biting, cutting language, and be Christ.  Matt 12: 34 You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? Matthew 23:27 Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.
Jesus and Paul. They didn’t have anything nice to say, or anything kind to say, but they had something necessary to say, and they said it.
If no one speaks out about spiritual abuse, it will continue. If no one speaks out against people who “fleece” God’s sheep for financial gain, that too will continue. Things change because people speak.
I wondered if yesterday’s post was too snarky, and then I thought, “Why should I impose this burden on myself that I be always nice?”  Why, Paul was not always nice, and he was a Christian. And Jesus, our beloved Jesus, was certainly not always nice, and he was, well he was Christ.

Sunday Church Services: The Bread, Roast, Cake or Icing of the Christian Life?

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File:St Andrews Church Oxford.jpg


I have been wondering about this.  About a year ago, we left a large Anglican Charismatic city centre church where we had been for six and a half years, and after a couple of months of checking out Oxford churches and Christian communities (oh, the tedium of it!!) settled on a very nice North Oxford evangelical church.
Now, geographically, it’s just a couple of miles away, but in human geography, it’s an exploration of England’s famous class system as one moves from a city centre church to North Oxford (which, for my non-Oxford readers, is distinguished by massive, hideously expensive houses occupied by successful academics, writers, journalists, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, venture capitalists and hedge fund traders who retreat here after a day in the City, and of course, many wannabes, mortgaged to the eyeballs, one pay cut away from financial disaster). I know the terrain well, because my girls have gone to private school in the centre of North Oxford for 7 years.
But, it’s not just geography; it’s style.  The Charismatic Church was a bit of circus; well, think of it as Crufts. Bounding golden retrievers, prancing poodles, adorable labradoodles, the odd pit bull terrier or rottweiler thrown in. The worship is loud. The word people use to describe it is “American.”
And the worship leaders, “Look-at-me, yeah-Aren’t-I-cool?” performers, with American names like Martyn or Lauryne scream the lyrics. Flashy videos and slick audio-visuals give you the church news. All very slick, hip. When I was new, an older lady and a younger one, gave me the same tip. Bow your head, press your fingers against your earlobes, and then the noise, oh sorry, music, subsides to quite a pleasant level. You see that gesture rather a lot.
But then, but then, and here’s why I stayed for six and a half years. Suddenly, the spirit descends. And Martyn and Lauryne belting out vacuous, vapid lyrics they’ve penned two days ago, somehow fade away, and the Rector and Parish Vicar and their wives, who, it’s rumoured, bitterly scheme and intrigue against each other like Medici church politicians or characters in Downton Abbey, and bound onto the stage with competing visions and revelations from the Lord, the vision du jour, all that blessedly fades away too, and the music fades, and suddenly, you see Him seated on the throne,
And the circus, the zoo atmosphere melds into the eternal menagerie
Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, saying:
   “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
   be praise and honor and glory and power,
   for ever and ever!”
And you feel the spirit descend, and wash through you, and you are temporarily purified of all your snarkiness, and you are filled and you feel ecstatic.
Worship is the most selfless act there is. It’s not about us; we are totally lost in someone else. We reach the deepest peace in which the self sloughs off and flies away.
                                                   * * *
Well, then I started worshiping in North Oxford. Church here is sedate, refined and sophisticated. It does not feel like a cross between the circus and Crufts. It feels like… like… well, North Oxford!!
The worship leaders are low key, more about the music than themselves. They have normal English names like Phil and Pete. They don’t play repetitive, anemic lyrics they’ve written that week.   They draw from old wells, as well as new. It’s quiet, restrained, and, a word, many refugees from the Charismatic church to this solid evangelical church use  “has integrity.”
But though both churches are Evangelical Anglican, one wildly charismatic, one mildly charismatic, the differences in style are significant. 
Whereas the charismatic church used minimal liturgy, this is liturgical. Having grown up Catholic and been bored in church, a thousand times too often, I hate liturgy. In the charismatic church, the rector’s wife, who rather liked the sound of her own voice, would rush and gush over unending prayers, prophecies, proclamation, declaration, while the congregation grew restive. Here they were prewritten out and read out. How do you pray along with a prayer someone else has written? By the time, you’ve tuned your consciousness to pray for the Queen, they’ve gone through Cameron, Oxford and Missions.  
                                                * * *
Worship has rhythms much as making love does. Detaching from the world, entering into the presence of God, worshipping him. Changing from a bouncy, golden retriever style of worship to a more formal, stately style is proving harder than I imagined.
I am finding it surprisingly hard to sink into worship on Sundays. My most vivid church experience happens in small groups; I like and respect the people in my small groups, one a women’s group, one a couple’s, many of whom have quickly become my friends.  That’s where iron sharpens iron for me,
When I first became a Christian, and was church-shopping, an older Christian magisterially told me, “Find a church at which you can best worship God. Everything else is a fringe benefit.” I have up, till now, followed that advice.
But I now believe he was wrong. A Church is people. A community of people to love, invest in, grow with, grow into friendships with.
If you have been in a church for a while, and given of yourself, and served, and made no or few real friends, should you change churches? It’s a difficult question. I have twice changed churches for this very reason, that I wasn’t real friends with anyone (and, this is an indictment of me: there was no one whom I particularly wanted to be close, deep friends with!)
If you have little with common with the church community, community is harder to find. It may be time to try a fresh church. There is no sense in accepting mediocre, boring or bad situations. Odds are, it will be better. If not, you could always return!!
And so I have chosen my new church for the community, the people, rather than the worship services.
                                                                             * * *
We switch to the evening service, and I realize that more Sundays than not, I am skipping church. Sunday is a non-work, non-adrenaline day, when I suddenly realize that I have been running tired for a while. By 6 o‘clock, I am too tired, too sleepy, haven’t exercised, so feel the depression which exercise normally filters from my body. I wonder if exercise will make me feel happier that going to church. Or a nap. Or personal prayer.
I read and write intensely Monday to Friday. On Saturday, I read and write, but less intensely. And it’s so lovely then to truly, truly rest on Sunday, to not go anywhere, not even to church, which is 20 minutes away.
My husband and daughters go to church, but I stay home often, and pray and read scripture instead. For a few weeks, it works. I have amazing, refreshing, soul-shaking encounters with God, with clear guidance. I hear His voice. It’s praying where it itches, rather than listening to a sermon, hoping it connects with where you are. A targeted encounter like a one on one tutorial, rather than a lecture. It’s reading scripture and letting it speak to you, rather than listen to what Scripture said to someone else. Oh, and it’s perfect for an introvert!!
 Blog posts flow on Sundays while the family is at church. And they are good.
                                                                * * *
But then, I began to feel restless and distracted on those Sunday evening. Ha, that’s what Lewis said what the value of church attendance in Mere Christianity. A single stick fallen out of the fire will blaze brightly for a while, and then burn out. But many sticks together will together blaze brightly!
I am not modelling the value of church attendance (which I do believe in!) for my daughters.
 The thing about communal worship is that when you are bored, the music can lift you into a state of praise and worship far more effectively than you can lift yourself.
We all have poor spiritual peripheral vision. We focus on our current preoccupation, and the aspects of faith which have been most vivid and real to us that week. But there is always so much more about God which we haven’t realized or have forgotten. Going to church reminds us of them. The lyrics of hymns written by those who have experienced God more deeply, more lovingly, more devotedly, lift our tepid spirits.
Similarly, a good preacher can see amazing things which have evaded us in a text we have read dozens of times. Until I moved back to Oxford in my early forties, the preachers were always older than I. Increasingly, that is no longer the case. Sometimes, they were born, when I was in college. Ouch!! Just a little bit harder to take seriously. Just a little bit easier to get bored and restless during their sermons.  And listening intently: ah, a good training in grace and humility. Might as well start practising for the decades when all the preachers will be younger than I am.
Another reason to go is other people.  You both offer and receive social support, warmth and encouragement over coffee.
On Sunday, I feel that rest will be better than dragging my sluggish self to church, but then I land up writing often. On Monday, I am far more tired if I have not gone to church, and feel as I have cheated myself out of the day of rest I looked forward to. I do relax in church! In fact, it’s like going to the gym for me. I’d often rather not go, but then I feel so much better afterwards for having been. And in practice, I am less motivated and more tired on Mondays if I have written on Sundays, and end up taking a half day off.
I was getting a bit worried about how many Sundays I was blowing off church, when I was asked to co-lead my small group, from which I’ve been getting so many of the benefits of Christian community, love, encouragement, spurring on. I sighed with relief when I was asked to lead, as I knew it would solve my blowing off church struggles. I’d feel silly leading a group in a church whose Sunday services I don’t regularly attend.
  
So back to church. It’s still a bit sedate for me, compared to the bouncy Charismatic style I had got used to. Nobody belts out the lyrics, waves their hands in air, or dances! But, come on, if I truly believe prayer works, I could pray that it increases its bounciness quotient. I could even pray that on Sunday evening, in church!
* * *
Okay, to answer my question, is going to church on Sunday bread, Sunday roast, cake or icing to the Christian life.
To answer Anglicanly, it depends. For a new convert, bread or roast, I’d say. You only know as much of Christ as he has revealed to you. You need to go to church to absorb more of the concentrated theology in the liturgy (I don’t like liturgy, but that’s what its fans claim), to absorb concentrated theology in good hymns and worship songs, to learn scripture and its interpretations through the readings and sermons. Your faith seems less quixotic in a packed church.
But once you have been a Christian for a while, it’s a relationship. You will still love and rely on Jesus if you haven’t stepped into a church for a month. You will still need his strength and wisdom to get through the day. The church service is encouragement, refreshment, motivation, sweetness. A bit like Christmas cake with marzipan icing. You can do without it, but you and your life-blood are sweeter for the encounter with it.

In Praise of Freecycle: The Kindness of Strangers

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A corner of my study. As you can see, I have kept too many books!!

In 2006, when I was establishing our publishing business, I decided not to buy ANYTHING if I could get it on Freecycle. And so, we partly moved out of the cash economy for a while. Here is my account of our adventures.


                                                         The Kindness of Strangers

The words flashed greenly.
Free Yamaha PSR. An electric keyboard which simulates a harp…  “Let’s get it,” I say.
“The kids aren’t musical,” my true love says to me.
“They might be,” I say.  “And it’s free.”
Fatal words.
“I love music,” our seven year old adds brightly.
It’s our first day on Freecycle.org, founded in Tuscon in May 2003 by Deron Beal. However, since it’s slightly déclassé, like E-bay, money, underwear, those on it never mention it.  Three years later, three million people are. After some dithering, I join them.  
The dithering was prescient. Freecycle feels like a barking carnival, a literal free-for-all.  Through the day,  e-mails: Offered, going, GONE, and raucous WANTEDS.  Whoosh. “Freecycle!” the children say, excitedly, resignedly. 
We are offered a pair of seventeen foot kayaks. The idea of young girls handling those monstrosities appealed.  We’ve now to get life jackets and paddles—but, hey, it was free.  
                                                                               * * *
A poet’s widow offers bookcases on Freecycle. I describe my plight, boxes of Freecycle books, impulsively garnered, poetry, novels, gardening, chess, art, cookbooks, children’s books, clogging the arteries of our home. Books, books, everywhere, and not a minute to read.
She asks archly, “Do you need more books? Geoffrey left fifty thousand.”  Does one need heroin?
My heroine. What books!!  Rare first editions, many signed, furred with dust, in every nook of a four storey house.  “He didn’t know when to stop,” she explains. “When he wanted me to build an arch over our bed for books, it was a health and safety issue.  ‘It’s the books or me,’ I said.”
Three times we fill our people carrier with the fruits of his choice, then stop, weariness prevailing where good sense does not.  I think superstitiously of the Hope diamond and heartbreak. Besides, our house is beginning to resemble hers.  
                                                                                   * * *

In Sissinghurst, Vita Sackville-West’s romantic English garden, everyone lived and wrote in a house or outbuilding of their own. (Hers was a tower!)  That’s what each of us need, we concurred. A house of our own.
Freecycle gave it to us. A garden shed with huge picture windows; a twelve foot conservatory; a hexagonal greenhouse. 
Can an acre and a half become cluttered?  If one is not careful!  If one becomes The Fool who Built Bigger Barns.
We get Duke on Freecycle, “an Alsatian, handsome, good with kids, great guard dog.”  Too good to be true?  Unfortunately!  Handsome, yes, in a wolfish way; his alert eyes and shaggy mane beguile us while his ears jaggedly clipped by his abusive first owners prick up as we are lectured on his neuroses. Once home, he demonstrates them. The tyrant dog rounds up every ball he finds, glaring at us though his sharp aristocratic eyes, and nipping us with his sharp aristocratic teeth if we approach them or him.  Back he goes. The kids cry.
                                                                                       * * *
Autumn is the season of mists and rabbits. We acquire timid, sweet-faced Freecycled baby Twilight, who eats and eats and becomes a massive armful of Giant European hare; chipmunk-faced Chippy, a Netherlandish Dwarf; and Starlight, a dull thrice-rescued rabbit. 
 Freecycle provides hutches and runs for the rabbits, and the Freecycle ducklings and hens.  A hermit, courting frugality, once got a free cat to kill the mice, and then a cow for free milk for the cat , and then a field for free green grass for the cow… 
                                                                                          * * *
Having just moved from the US, we found ourselves, in mid-life without anything electrical that worked! From those migrating across the ponds, we, perhaps foolishly, acquire booty: a wide-screen TV/VCR, all-region DVD player, a fridge, freezer, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner–stop-gaps until time and money abound. We accept an unwanted inherited Mitsubishi, so no longer have to maneuver our people carrier “the wrong way” on Oxford’s narrow streets. A handmade Edwardian tallboy in beautiful woods. Massive cherry bookcases. Chinese lamps.
Organizing our loot frazzles us.
Freecycle. The potlatch of the affluent society. A giving to strangers unprecedented in the history of the world? The kids love it, Christmas through the year. A ten foot trampoline, instant rejuvenation. A portable swimming pool.  An ice-cream maker.  An astronomical telescope.  A microscope.  The dreamy musings of a summer’s day become reality like the three wishes of fairy tale (with their secret caveat: Be careful what you wish for.)
  It’s the biggest, weirdest, funnest catalogue in the world.  You didn’t know these things existed; you didn’t know you needed them; and now, you have to have them!! 
And, in this case, ultimate lure–
It’s Free.
A free lunch, you drive to, store, care for, and maintain. 
                                                                                      * * *
 
If you wants to be busy, it’s just the thing.  Honey Do lists grow. Chandeliers, mirrors, wall-mounted shoe boxes–projects–pile up in the utility room.  Inanimate objects, like living things, demand attention: dusting, straightening…  If they don’t get it, they too, in code, scream.
My jealously guarded in-box fills. The administrative challenge of pick-ups and deliveries mounts.  Distraction!  “S.T.U.F.F.–Something That Undermines Family Fun.”
You read your e-mail incredulously. All these people going though their houses, getting rid of all this stuff, and all these people gazing at their computer screens, acquiring this stuff, propelled by the dangerous, contra-spiritual force of greed.
“Things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” Emerson wrote.  Still are, still do.
“I was a mathematician,” my husband says wistfully.  “I wrote,” I say.
The tenses tense us. 
“A good story,” he says, hopefully, “has a beginning, middle, and an end.” 
“It used to,” I say.
Ours does. I survive seven weeks on the Freecycle list, seven weeks of details of stuff 15,000 people in Oxford want to (or have) acquired or shed.  Too much of good things can also be toxic. Too much water can poison.
Enough! I succumb to quieter lures.  A life free from greed.  Simple living, high thinking, in the way of ancient sages–or a rough approximation of both.
I now recycle. 

The beautiful, broken, yet unbowed Church

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A friend of mine who is a social worker was telling me about a woman she worked with, a Kenyan, who had fled a physically abusive marriage to a safe house in Oxford. She had twins: a nine year old daughter, wheel-chair bound with cerebral palsy, and a son who had a physical or psychosomatic eating disorder, which made him grossly obese. The mother herself had continuous, splitting headaches with all the stress.

It transpired that the woman knew no one in the estate in which she was housed. “All she needs is a friend,” my friend said, almost in tears. “Just one friend. It’s not too much to ask, is it?”

But in a world, in which friendship has currency—“What do you have to offer me?—Are you cool, rich, clever, connected, highly-educated, beautiful, successful, lovely?”—what does this woman have to offer? Nothing.

She would have one need after another; anyone could see that immediately. I befriended a Zimbabawean, abandoned by her husband a year or so ago when she cleaned for me, and her needs were bottomless. I gave her my toaster, my computer (and upgraded), stuff from my house, stored her stuff after evictions (it’s still in my garage), got her other cleaning jobs, but there were more needs, and more.  She constantly wanted to borrow money (which I did not lend, because that just gets people even deeper into debt). Helping someone whose needs are unlimited is very tiring and draining–and thankless, but eventually one needs to draw the line, and sometimes the last No rankles more than all the previous Yeses. I understand why this desperate woman, who had so little to offer, could not find a single friend.

So is there hope for her? Where can she find kindness? Where can she find a friend?

I can only think of one place. The beautiful, broken, yet unbowed church of Jesus Christ.

A place where people talk to strangers. Where you can appeal to the Vicar, and if he can help or connect you, a good one will. Where there might be a safety net of ministries for such as her, or means to connect her to them. Where there are befriending ministries, and prayer ministries, where people will spend time with you and ask nothing in return.

I am pausing now to pray for this lady, whose name I do not know. She told my friend she did not go to church, unlike many from her nation. May she meet some on-fire African who might invite her to church.

“The local Church is the hope of the world,” Bill Hybels said, in an often-quoted epigram.

He’s right. Nowhere else can we relax so quickly, and so deeply with people so different from us.

Build your church, Lord Jesus.

Maranatha!

 

Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver

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Sunrise in our Garden (taken by Roy Mathias)

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.

Hello, you who made the morning

and spread it over the fields

and into the faces of the tulips

and the nodding morning glories,

and into the windows of, even, the

miserable and the crotchety –

best preacher that ever was,

dear star, that just happens

to be where you are in the universe

to keep us from ever-darkness,

to ease us with warm touching,

to hold us in the great hands of light –

good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day

in happiness, in kindness.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Farewell, Rowan, Great Archbishop of Canterbury!

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Archbishop Rowan with Bishop Lee

I heard of the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury with very real sadness.  A scholar, a poet, a fine, humble human being.
 I feel rather cross with those who made his tenure a cross.
However, the only purpose for this brilliant, imaginative, godly man to remain as Archbishop would be the platform it provides for a public demonstration of how a real Christian should live and behave.
His most lasting contribution to the world no doubt will be through the written word, hopefully through poetry.
 * * *
Institutions. They suck your life-blood and spit you out! No institution is worth one’s loyalty, one’s energy, one’s life-blood.
Why? Because they are transient. In heaven, there will be no Anglicans, only Christians. No Anglican Communion, no Anglican Covenant.
Is the Anglican Church worth expending one’s life, time, love, loyalty on?
No, of course not. Only Jesus Christ is worthy of one’s love, loyalty and life-blood. Jesus, and the people we love.
In fact, in my view, even strengthening the local church by working in its power structures, as a member of a PCC, a Warden, a major donor, is a poor investment of time.  Leave such things to those who love power and significance, and there will be many. But thou, oh man of God, flee these things.
Investing in individuals– simply, humbly, over cups of tea; simple humble one-on-one ministry—that IS worth it. This will endure; we will meet these people in heaven, when abominations like our church politics and 3 hour PCC meetings are long forgotten!
               * * *
The campaigners against the Anglican Covenant, an abstruse, recondite (and I am told boring and unreadable) document which I am not clever enough or interested enough to understand have certainly shortened Rowan’s tenure, for it was his brain and heart child. One needs “the constitution of an ox, and the skin of a rhino” to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, he said on the day he resigned. Ultimately, he had neither.
“What’s so bad about the Anglican Covenant?” I asked a strident campaigner, an older lady. “It puts Englishness at risk,” she said.
Well, if it does, so be it. Englishness is at risk, anyway. It is definitely dated. It dies when the trumpet will sound, and we shall be changed, in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye.
  * * *
And we shall enter a new heaven and a new earth, and that, to judge by accounts of visionaries who’ve seen it, will be most Unenglish.
It will be crowded:  Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. 
Emotional, noisy and demonstrative, and all this in public
In a loud voice they were saying:
   “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, 
   to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength 
   and honor and glory and praise!”
And they sang a new song, saying:
   “You are worthy to take the scroll 
   and to open its seals, 
because you were slain, 
   and with your blood you purchased for God 
   persons from every tribe and language and people and nation. 
10 You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, 
   and they will reign on the earth.”


Undecorous. Unliturgical, uncontrolled. All sorts of people and animals in the wrong place.
Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, saying:
   “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb 
   be praise and honor and glory and power, 
for ever and ever!”


And most of all, so very, so very unEnglish
 a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. 10 And they cried out in a loud voice:
   “Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.” (Rev. 7:9).


Did he perhaps visualize his Anglican Covenant as paving the way for this great day?

“What’s so Amazing About Grace?” by Philip Yancey (A guestpost by Brian Johnson)

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What’s So Amazing About Grace?

“Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less.”
So no amount of religious knowledge or dedication will make one jot of difference to how God loves us; no amount of sin will make a difference either. This is, of course, completely at odds with how the world behaves and how, mostly, we are raised to think. This is also the starting point of Philip Yancey’s book, “What’s So Amazing About Grace?”
As Leslie Keeney said previously, books need to be in the right place at the right time. I was given “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” as a fledgling Christian struggling with my preconceptions (and misconceptions) of faith, and this quote (and the book) dealt with a lot of the baggage I had carried for so long.
Philip Yancey sets out by illustrating many examples of grace at work through history, in the Bible and in the present day. Equally, he cites examples of what he terms “ungrace” – mankind’s natural tendency to choose the path lacking grace.
The examples of both ungrace and grace are meaningful and, again in both cases, often harrowing. We are continually challenged in these examples to consider whether we can rise to the level of unconditional forgiveness displayed in the anecdotes and stories.
Yancey goes on to explain than we are grounded in ungrace almost from birth – and that this is reinforced throughout childhood and on into the world of work and elsewhere. We are told by society that we have to do something in order to be accepted; to be wanted; to be loved. We are also told that if we do not do these things, we deserve nothing and should expect punishment.
This ungrace can, and does, perpetuate itself and Yancey gives us several examples of the consequences.
He also takes aim at ungrace within the Christian church itself (quoting Bill Clinton: “Why do Christians hate so much?”) and at the wholesale ungrace between peoples and nations. He is careful to draw parallels between the events described in the gospels and more recent times – and, although written in 1997, the examples of these will be familiar to any casual reader of current affairs.
Grace, Yancey says, is fundamentally unfair, which is why so many of us struggle with it. We are conditioned to seeing rewards matching efforts and punishments fitting the crime. When we are then presented with Jesus’ teachings such as that of the Prodigal Son, our minds struggle.
That parable, and some others, are paraphrased and brought into the modern day brilliantly by the author and make excellent reading material on their own.
Yancey believes that true grace is an all-or-nothing thing: you cannot have half-grace or be partly sympathetic to the idea. Grace is ultimately about forgiving the inexcusable.
He also highlights how the concept of grace defines Christianity from other religions. God’s love, he says, does not have to be earned. We do not have to gain approval in order to receive it: “Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional.”
The books rounds off by coming back to its own title and a stunning example of John Newton’s hymn in action.
Theologians (and I am not one) can and do take issue with some of the stories and examples given in this book – indeed, there are so many varied examples given that it would be surprising if no-one disagreed with at least one. This is also very much a book describing and explaining grace by example, rather than theory,so scholars may well be disappointed by it.
However, for me, Yancey’s triumph with “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” was to take on some of the misconceptions about God’s completely unconditional love for us all, regardless of what we have done.
Helping us on the way to accepting that unconditional love, or grace, is what this book does well – and that to me is what it’s all about. Because while none of us deserve it, we all desperately need it. What’s truly amazing is that we can receive it anyway.
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Brian Johnson is a relatively recent returnee to the faith, a musician and general creative person. Unashamedly a non-theologian; married; two children; one cat. Catch up at @MustardSeedUK.

With the night falling we are saying thank you by W.S. Merwin

By

My daughter, Irene, as a four year old, thanking God for the Rhine Falls in Switzerland!

Thanks
by W. S. Merwin 

Listen 
with the night falling we are saying thank you 
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings 
we are running out of the glass rooms 
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky 
and say thank you 
we are standing by the water thanking it 
smiling by the windows looking out 
in our directions 

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging 
after funerals we are saying thank you 
after the news of the dead 
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you 
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators 
remembering wars and the police at the door 
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you 
in the banks we are saying thank you 
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us 
our lost feelings we are saying thank you 
with the forests falling faster than the minutes 
of our lives we are saying thank you 
with the words going out like cells of a brain 
with the cities growing over us 
we are saying thank you faster and faster 
with nobody listening we are saying thank you 
we are saying thank you and waving 
dark though it is.