Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

A City Set on a Hill cannot be Hidden: Focus on Working, not Networking

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The-City-on-a-Hill

So you are going to build a city.

Dig its foundations deep. Pour the concrete. Design your buildings. It’s your city: Put in whatever you like—the Alhambra, the Hagia Sophia, the Sagrada Familia, the Parthenon.  Throw in Notre Dame and Westminster Abbey.

Decorate your buildings as you wish—with the mosaics from Ravenna, or from the Topkapi Palacein Istanbul.

It’s your city. Put in the Pre-Raphaelites, the Impressionists, Botticelli and Raphael. Have your floors inlaid marble from Florence. Have indoor fountains and reflecting pools where goldfish glide.

Throw in chandeliers and floor to ceiling windows. Let your city be full of light.

You are building your city on a hill. It cannot be hidden.

* * *

You will, in moments of lesser faith, read blogs on how to hustle, how to promote your city, how to network, make connections, build a platform.

Oh builder of cities, beware. All these things steal time and focus away from learning the art and craft of city building.

Instead, seek God for the perfect blueprint for your city. Seek his inspiration for each tower and spire, each inlaid marble floor, each wall hung with Persian carpets, and each Tiffany lamp through which light glows.

Unless love runs through your city, and the desire to meet people’s needs for beauty, joy, peace, wisdom or rest, all the promotion and hustling you do will be futile. Nobody will long linger there, buy property there, and stroll through the boulevards under shady lime trees, hand in hand with their lovers.

* * *

There is a kind of networking which is sheer joy—if you connect with people whose work you love, if you praise them honestly, interact with their work whole-heartedly, then you make friends, and this whole city-building business become more joyful.

However, flattering people for their attention; making connections for the good things these connections might bring you; befriending people to use them to promote your work—how can one ask God to bless such endeavours? Oh woman of God, flee these things.

There is a sort of hustling and self-promotion that is practical atheism.  We act as if there is no God who can help people notice our city on a hill. We act as if God does not delight in good work and want people to enjoy it. We act as if God cannot even now give us twelve legions of those who will enjoy our work if we ask him. We forget the power of prayer.

And the worst thing about excessive self-promotion and connection-making? It devours the time and energy that should go into making your rare and beautiful city, set on a hill. So beautiful that at night, when the lights are switched on, and coloured fountains play, people cannot but look up and marvel; their feet itch, they yearn to walk up and explore.

And in spring, they will delight in walking through its gardens of cherry blossoms, and will sit under their shade, and look at the fields of daffodils, stretching as far as the eye can see.

* * *

Besides, the connections which matter will arise organically. Other builders of cities on hills will notice yours, and ask you managed that 150 metre spire without visible support, and you will talk about flying buttresses. And you will ask them what pigments they used for those impossibly large stained glass windows which flood their cathedrals with rainbowed light, and they will tell you.

* * *

God delights in your creativity. Build your city under his eye, as your worship to him, seeking his wisdom, in alignment with his stream of thoughts which outnumber the grains of sand on the seashore.

Let him smile, and say it is very good.

And as for the audience you’d love to have?

Remember, a city on a hill cannot be hidden. It glimmers during the day, and its light shines through the land at night.

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Comments

  1. Thank you, Anita. This is truly a word in due season. The imagery is pure genius, and it delivers your points to perfection. Bravo!

  2. Personally, I hate the promoting business -it is rotten, hollow, stinking and an insatiable time hog. It will certainly chip away your energies and may leave you sapless eventually. But the trouble is, far too many people are building cities on too many hills and they are all dazzling from outside. How do you attract people to the ramparts of your own blood and sweat in this crowd? That said, it is best to focus on the city, just as you say.

    • As you focus on your work, you attract the attention of other people who are doing good work, or appreciate it. It has been so in my experience!

  3. Oh, how easily we forget that we build in vain unless we build on a foundation of love. Wow, what an inspiring and helpful post! It is so needful for all creative work. And the Master Builder, our Chief Architect, will aid us in all the creative endeavours we turn our hands to – if we remember to ask Him. I love this beautiful reminder to build good and strong by making sure our motivations and desires are in line with God’s will for our lives. Thank you, Anita. You just saved me from going off at a tangent in the wrong direction! Blessings 🙂 xx

    • “And the Master Builder, our Chief Architect, will aid us in all the creative endeavours we turn our hands to – if we remember to ask Him.”
      So delighted I “saved you from going off at a tangent in the wrong direction,” Joy. You are doing very well at social media, incidentally, and very quickly too, with a good and supportive network, which is networking at its best!

  4. This is perfect.

    Except:

    What if a publisher at long last picks up my book and wants to do something with it, and then they say, “How are YOU going to promote it?” I daresay that’s not the only basis on which someone would accept or decline to publish a book, but if they’re on the edge about it, it might tip them.

    Also, in defense of those of us who (unnaturally, it might be added–and in my case so far unsuccessfully as well) have allowed ourselves to be suckered into the hustler game, maybe we “cities” like 50 Shades of Grey skyrocket, and so it seems to us that really, it is not by the light and merit of our cities that they thrive, in the real world, after all. I get what you’re saying about practical atheism and I feel convicted by that, but . . . it’s a Psalm 73 thing, I guess . . .

    • Thanks, Jenn.
      Good question. Obviously, I do a little bit of promotion, but I ask myself questions. How can I get exposure for my blog while taking as little time away from my writing? Is there a way of getting my blog known that is joy and might be a mutual blessing? So I do have coffee with other writers who interest me, but that’s fun. I follow writers who interest me on Facebook and Twitter, and they follow me back. I do a bit of email correspondence, but not much. I guess if you had to answer the publisher, you’d use standard promotion techniques, and say that same things other writers do, because promoting the book would then be the final stage of the writing process.
      If you have promoted unsuccessfully (and I have been unsuccessful in my early attempts at connection making) maybe God is calling you to a better way, and you just have to ask him to show you the details of that better way.

  5. “Unless love runs through your city…”
    Loved this, Anita! Your writing is ever nourishing for the spirit.

  6. Thank you so much. You don’t know how much I needed that. I had fallen trap to exactly what you outlined in your post.

    • Thanks Jeff. Yes, so much of all that is joyless and draining, and yet, we panic when our work stagnates, and want to do something, anything!

  7. As a structural draughtsman, this is a theme I can relate to. Fortunately I had the wisdom to trust God to develop my career after I spent about 10 years doing it myself, and now it is taking turns I would never have dared dream of. Thank you for sharing, you are definitely inspiring me more with each post I read

  8. Thanks very much for this, Anita. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of ‘networking’ without checking our motives. A good reminder which I found really helpful.