Archives for 2015

Wriggling towards Shalom

When I find I am stressed, or distressed, I like to pause there and then instead of going through the day with undefined, subterranean unease.

I take the question to which I do not know the answer–how to be more productive perhaps. How to read more. How to help someone. How to get our business to flourish further–and ask Jesus for the answer. And keep asking the question, sort of saturating the question in prayer. If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you (James 1:15). And I keep asking, and keep asking for God’s answer–his surprising out-of-the-box answers, and eventually, as James promises, guidance, answers and wisdom do come.

* * *

Sometimes, I sense a vague fear and unease. Do you? I like to slow down and ask: What is it? What’s bugging me? What is this nebulous dark cloud? Sometimes, the fear, anxiety or annoyance is quite rational, and sometimes not so.

But whether it is a rational fear, or just a vague sense of unease, it does have the same solution.

I mentally put the fear or worry or annoyance into the petri dish of prayer, and invite God’s power to surround, saturate and irradiate it.

I surrender the possible dark outcome I dread to God. Put it in his hands. If it does happen, He will still be there. He will still love me. He will still give me the ability to be happy through it all.

And then I ask him to avert the outcome I dread. Ask him for wisdom for what I am to do today. Ask him for a game plan for the months ahead.

It’s in his hands now, whether things work out just as I prayed for, or just as I dreaded. It’s his worry.

I then just rest in his presence, rest in his love.

It’s not magic, nothing about the spiritual life is …or perhaps everything is!!

But I do get up from the place of prayer so much lighter in my spirit!

Image Credit

On Juggling

By Anita Mathias

Irene, my 15 year old, has decided to become a master juggler. (I blame Baroness Susan Greenfield who told her class that juggling makes you clever).

And now the air is full of the swish-swish-swish of juggling balls.

And as for me, words and ideas which might have been sublime (one can always dream!) slip away with that swish-swish-swish!

“Irene, stop juggling within earshot, or I’ll confiscate those balls.”She looks at me pityingly.

“I am 15, mum. You can’t confiscate things anymore.”

Can’t I? Apparently not.

I return to juggling words.

Juggle. Juggle. Juggle. Coloured balls, words, ideas.

Hopefully something will emerge from all this juggling–cleverness, a blog post, a book…

* * *

And here’s a muscular poem for your Sunday from a master word-juggler

Digging

BY SEAMUS HEANEY

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

Surprised: When Exercise and Prayer Provide Similar Benefits

By Anita Mathias

“I’ve had a good day,” I say to Roy as we drift off to sleep.

“Oh, I thought you said your day wasn’t going well,” he says.

“Well it wasn’t, but then it got all turned around.”

What turned it round? Well, I went on a 3.25 mile walk, walking as fast as I could, and it woke my mind up, and I came back well-exercised and oxygenated, in a great mood, and able to think clearly and concentrate for hours.

* * *

Another thing that turns my day around is to shut my laptop, set my timer for an hour, lie face down in an attitude of surrender (a position, which incidentally clears my mind and spirit), and simply pray. Or even better, kneel and pray.

Often the things that are bugging me are simmering beneath consciousness. A vague sense of unease that I can’t put one’s finger on. The Psalmist David experienced it when he asked, “Why are you sad, oh my soul?”

So then, cancer is gone for good, yes Jesus? (I believe so, intuitively, in my bones and spirit, partly because of my steadily increasing energy.) How do I combine book writing and blogging? Will I finish my memoir? Will it do well? Find readers? Little worries like that, small niggles, can create subterranean unease.

What prayer does then is to take them to God. Cancer, life or death, I leave it in God’s hands. It is no longer my worry. My memoir, I leave it in God’s hands. It is no longer my worry. And so with everything.

And then I seek specific guidance on each thing. Cancer-Bancer. I remember to drink my carrot juice and green smoothies, and try to eat a bit more raw. I ask God for specific guidance on how to maintain the blog/book balance which every blogger struggles with.

And then I get up from the place of prayer at peace, my anxieties, insecurities and worries temporarily clarified and surrendered. I now have a clear map for how I am going to tread the steps ahead of me till the end of the day.

And tomorrow? Tomorrow will worry about itself.

* * *

It’s interesting how vigorous exercise and vigorous prayer give much the same results. Exercise gives us good humour, equanimity, endurance, and endorphins. Intellectual, emotional and physical energy, mental clarity and focus emerge from within the self. With prayer, these are given to us from a source outside ourselves.

Though of course, the intangible benefits of prayer–chatting to our Almighty friend–far transcend those of exercise.

We need both physical fitness (which I am slowly developing) and spiritual fitness. We need to be stretched in our bodies, and stretched in our spirits (as well as stretched in those other dimensions of our being: intellectually, and in our capacity to love–another post for another day).

Goodbye to Everest

By Anita Mathias

When I was six years old, I wanted to be the first woman to climb Everest.

Well, I won’t be. That was Junko Tabei, a Japanese woman–a record which will forever be hers.

And neither will be I be the oldest person to climb Everest. That’s Yuichiro Muira, who climbed Everest aged 80. Nope, not going to train for decades to beat him (though it would guarantee keeping superbly fit!)

Ah, Everest. Shimmering Everest. A savage place, holy and enchanted. You have long inhabited the landscape of my imagination, and that is where you will stay. South Col, the Death Zone, the Khumbu Icefall, a river of ice with frozen cascades and romantic crevasses deep as a fifteen story building which abruptly open or close. Sheer faces of ice to be scaled with axes and ropes. Blizzards and avalanches; seracs: massive tottering blocks of ice; 360 degree views that stagger the mind–it’s all part of the architecture of my soul.

I will never climb Everest. The practicality of middle age forces me to admit this.

Because. I do not really like walking uphill. I am afraid of slipping. And I am afraid of heights! I am nervous on narrow mountain paths with precipitous drops. I do not enjoy extreme cold. And I really like warm clean private toilets and hot baths, and these will be in short supply on Everest.

As though as Jon Krakauer writes, commercial expeditions (in which barely fit socialites like Sandy Pittman are hauled to the summit by hardy sherpas) have made it possible for the just-about-fit to summit, I feel no call to devote two or three years to get fit enough to plausibly think of summiting Everest without dying in the attempt.

Everest in a vision once I saw.

The beautiful dream of climbing Everest, that symphony, that song, was just that, alas: a young girl’s dream.

Some dreams are meant to be dreams, dazzling dreams of the night, but not of the day. You imagine peaks bathed rose and orange by the rising run, and rivers and mountains of ice, and they are glorious. You look at photographs, read accounts of exploration and watch documentaries, and your soul thrills.

Everest has added beauty to your life. You do not need not haul oxygen bottles up to the summit, and stagger up the last few steps in the death zone, behind the long files of those who summit for bragging rights, or take your mandatory selfie where the earth stops and the flags of the nations flutter. You have travelled there in imagination. You have Everest within. There you on honey dew have fed and drunk the wine of paradise

* * *

I have another dream: Antarctica. No–not walking to the South Pole like Scott or Amundsen, just seeing it on a cruise ship. A friend got to do it for free, and write about it for the American Express magazine. I looked up prices.

But school fees, school fees. Antarctica or school fees? I am a good Indian mama, after all. Antarctica must wait.

Wait forever? Perhaps not. But should it wait for the rest of this life, my soul has been enriched by male Emperor penguins waiting out the long sunless winter, guarding their eggs; the great glaciers calving off into massive icebergs; crevasses into which you simply disappear; gleaming snowy expanses in which one could wander directionlessly forever.

I met Geraldine MacCaughrean at a Writers in Oxford /Society of Authors party a few years ago. Our family had listened to her White Darkness in the car, a description of Antarctica so vivid that it makes you shiver, and reach for a sweater. “Have you been to Antarctica?” I asked. “Oh no,” she said, frowning, shaking her head, and laughing.

She was a writer. Imagination and research can make Antarctica as vivid to ourselves and to our readers as if we had actually travelled there.

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or what’s a heaven for? Robert Browning wrote.

Our imagination and longing exceeds what we can do in this life, with its adamantine parameters of strength, time and money. God imposes some limitations on us; others are the fruit of our own imperfect choices.

And though we never grow too old to dream another dream and set another goal–some dreams, most dreams perhaps, will remain dreams. And that’s what a heaven’s for.

In eternity, which will far exceed this life, as this life exceeds the wildest imaginings of a foetus crouched in the dark and wet of the womb, I will fly and soar over Everest and over Antarctica. I will gaze at the views, and shiver with pleasure. And I shall be very warm while doing so.

Tweetable
Some dreams must be abandoned, like some writing projects. Nonetheless, they have enriched your life. From @anitamathias1

On Choosing Happiness Today

By Anita Mathias

The three legged runner is the symbol of the beautiful Isle of Man which I loved exploring.

Ah, that’s me. One foot in the past—well, naturally, I am writing a memoir. One foot in the present, trying to live each day well. One restless foot leaping into the future, planning, dreaming.

But perhaps the most important talent we can cultivate is to be happy in the present moment. To mine and celebrate the gold in it. To choose happiness in it.

For if we do not learn to be happy in our present, such as it is, it is highly unlikely that we will be happy in our future, such as it will be.

For the secret seeds of happiness are found within ourselves.

If all the stuff we have, all the money we earn has not made us happy, it is unlikely that having more of the above will make us happy. If our garden, as it is now, is not a deep joy, the perfect garden will not be a deep joy either. Our restlessness will persist. If the success we have found in our work, such as it is, has not made us happy, odds are, more success will not make us happy either. For apparently success does not contain it itself the seeds of happiness, and we have not yet found a way for our work itself to make us happy.

That is one summary of the Book of Ecclesiastes: Rejoice in your work, in your spouse, in your everyday life, for life is short

But the dead know nothing;

they have no further reward,

and even their name is forgotten.

Their love, their hate

and their jealousy have long since vanished;

never again will they have a part

in anything that happens under the sun.

So go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

* *

However, this earth was never designed to entirely satisfy us. God withholds just enough of bliss so that our appetite for our true home, in him, remains.

“The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.” C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

* * *

How do we find joy and happiness in our daily life in this world which is our temporary home?

Cultivating a habit of gratitude, thanking God for the goodness of the day changes the flow of my inner life to gratitude. Recording three good things helps. Or using a 10 minute repeating timer on my phone, and thanking God for something glorious when it buzzes: the ever-changing panorama of the skies, the people who love me, the house and garden I live in, the books and art which have enriched my life; the places I have travelled to, the beautiful things I have seen.

I love this George Herbert’s poem “Gratefulnesse”

Thou that hast giv’n so much to me,

Give one thing more, a gratefull heart

Without that grateful heart, we will not fully appreciate what we already have, or what is yet to come.

* * *

Tweetables

Perhaps the most important talent we can cultivate is to be happy in the present moment. From @AnitaMathias1

Without that grateful heart, we will not fully appreciate what we already have, or what is yet to come. From @anitamathias1

For if we do not learn to be happy in our present, we may not be happy in our future we dream of, for happiness lies within us. From @anitamathias1

One Work Goal for 2105: Focus

By Anita Mathias

I enjoy the One Word project. Instead of a resolution, one asks God for a prophetic word as a guide for the year.

My word for 2014 was alignment. I have chosen Joy as the word to return to this year. When I find myself stressed, distressed, angry, worried or simply sad, I am learning to stop what I am doing, and pray until peace and clarity returns, accepting the things I cannot change, changing the things I can…

One word, alas, can be constraining for a woman whose work is words…

* * *

My biggest trauma of 2014 was colon cancer. It was not metastatic, thankfully, but because lymph nodes were involved, I was given an estimate of my chances of being alive in 5 years!!

Anyway, fortunately, the median is not the message as Stephen Jay Gould wrote in this popular essay. He was given 8 months to live aged 40, and lived for 20 years, dying at 60 of an unrelated cancer. He writes

Attitude clearly matters in fighting cancer. We don’t know why (from my old-style materialistic perspective, I suspect that mental states feed back upon the immune system). But match people with the same cancer for age, class, health, socioeconomic status, and, in general, those with positive attitudes, with a strong will and purpose for living, with commitment to struggle, with an active response to aiding their own treatment and not just a passive acceptance of anything doctors say, tend to live longer. A few months later I asked Sir Peter Medawar, my personal scientific guru and a Nobelist in immunology, what the best prescription for success against cancer might be. “A sanguine personality,” he replied.

And God, the great mathematician, is known to upset human stats. (Consider Janet Walton given 104 billion to 1 odds of bearing healthy sextuplets. Which was exactly what she did.)

However, estimates of your chances of being alive—even decent odds, as in my case–focuses the mind. “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Dr. Johnson wrote.

In the first shock and sadness after the diagnosis, I wandered through the house, looking at the books I had not yet read, but really wanted to; the documentaries I had not watched, but really wanted to; the books I had not written, but really wanted to; thinking of the places to which I had never travelled, but rather wanted to. I did not want to die. I was in love with life.

I was sad.

Then, who knows how, I snapped out of sadness.

* * *

I had prayed with faith for healing. Why should I proceed as if God was definitely ignore my prayers? That’s crazy behaviour for a believer. God is my Father; why should I hurt his feelings by doubting his goodness.

Fifty springs are little room to look at things in bloom, the poet A. C. Housman wrote. So since, in the Upper Room discourse at the Last Supper, Jesus repeatedly urges us to ask for anything we wish, I asked, playfully, for 50 additional years of life, which would get me to the age at which my great-grandmother Julianna died. (I come from a line of long-lived woman on both sides of the family, thriving into their nineties, often living past a hundred, women who lived on ancestral diets–not the Western diet I have indulged in for the last 30 years.)

And so, while I am steadily changing my diet in the direction of optimum nutrition, and steadily increasing my exercise, I decided to plunge back into work I really wanted to do. Work one loves–a great and mysterious extender of life.

* * *

I started work on a memoir in 1991—an account of a Catholic childhood in Jamshedpur, a Zoroashtrian company town; rebellious years in a boarding school in Nainital, in the foothills of the Himalayas, run by German and Irish nuns; and then working with Mother Teresa at Calcutta.

However, I shelved it numerous times: to write essays; to teach Creative Writing at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg; for four years to establish a business; and then for another five years, I barely worked on it while I blogged.

Chapters have met with success. They have won a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; a Minnesota State Arts Board fellowship; a Jerome Fellowship: have won “Writer of Unusual Promise” awards to writing conferences, have been published in Best Spiritual Writing, Commonweal, London Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Notre Dame Magazine. I am certain that it will be a good book–though a long one in the first draft (which will definitely need a good editor).

I realized that if I died without finishing it, and publishing it (I am thinking of indie publishing the first longer version) I would feel enormous, almost unbearable sadness and regret, because it took me time and sacrifice to get a good first draft.

But if I died without developing my blog to dizzy heights, so be it. C’est la vie. Blogging has been enormously rewarding in psychological, spiritual, creative, personal growth, social and career ways…a trip to Cambodia, for instance… Who would have guessed? It has brought me nearly 10,000 readers a month, some of whom have become real life friends. The confidence and support a large and steady readership brings cannot be underestimated.

* * *

So I will work on the memoir first, writing 500 words a day. A long memoir averages 120,000 words, which means I could be done with it in less than 8 months; much has already been written, and I already have a first draft. Sounds good, huh?

I will shoot for 500 words rather than 1000, for that will leave time for walking, gardening, housework, prayer, family life, friendships as well as gas in the tank for another day’s writing.

500 words… I might be able to write that in an hour if I focus. Perhaps two hours if I shoot for beautiful words. In a widely shared piece, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet attributed their success to that fact that they knew how to focus.

And that is my work goal for 2015: Focus

I am using an app called Freedom to turn off the internet when I write. I really enjoy the quiet and concentration of being in the zone, and get so much done when the internet is off.

So I will write my 500 words, and then blog–a blog or two or three a week as the Lord gives me strength and energy.

I had a mentor, whose book I edited. He said he would write as the Lord provided time. I thought privately, “One can’t write like that!” But both his books are still read in a world in which bloggers publish books to a three week buzz, books which are often dead in six months, and forgotten in a year.

Apparently relying on the Lord for words and time is a very good work strategy indeed!

In Which–Fortunately–Our Progress in the Spiritual Life Is Dependent on Grace and the Spirit, Not Our Hard Work

By Anita Mathias

I often think of this sermon illustration from my time in Williamsburg, VA: You cannot knock on the door of Buckingham Palace, or the White House and enter. You need an invitation, or you will be firmly ushered out (at best!).

God, creator of the cosmos, 70 thousand million million million (70 sextillion) stars in 100 thousand million (100 billion) galaxies is an ontologically different being. As high as the heavens are above the earth is He above us.

If we are to dialogue with him, person to Being, he must take the initiative, enlarge our spiritual senses, and provide revelation. He must lean down to us, condescend to us. Our spiritual adventure with him begins through his grace, and continues through his grace.

* * *

I am tired. It’s a time when spiritual disciplines–my prayer, my Bible Study, my spiritual reading–slip. It helps then to remember that just as I cannot jump to the moon, I cannot hustle my way into intimacy with God. I depend on his mercy to know him.

The spiritual life was never about me scaling the Tower of Babel, reaching up to God by my Bible Study, my prayer, my giving, my fasting, the intensity and teeth-grittedness of my disciplines.

It was always about his father-heart reaching out to me in kindness and in mercy.

I sometimes worry that my spiritual life is growing anaemic—more spiritual blogging than Bible study, more worrying and thinking than prayer.

And then I remember that heck, my spiritual life is not the product of my discipline. Faith is a gift from the God who is looking out for me.

The spiritual life is always about God looking out for the lost sheep, the father on the battlements looking for the prodigal son, Jesus reaching out to me when I look at the wind and waves instead of him–and fear rises, and faith flickers, and I sink beneath the waves.

He reached out to me and gave me the grace to become a Christian. I will trust that outstretched hand for grace to continue, walking on the waters, dancing on the waters, hand in hand with him.

* * *

Besides, besides, in just a moment, one’s entire spiritual life can be transformed.

D. L. Moody writes, “I was crying all the time that God would fill me with His Spirit. Well, one day, in the city of New York — oh, what a day! — I cannot describe it, I seldom refer to it; it is almost too sacred an experience to name. Paul had an experience of which he never spoke for fourteen years. I can only say that God revealed Himself to me, and I had such an experience of His love that I had to ask Him to stay His hand. I went to preaching again. The sermons were not different; I did not present any new truths; and yet hundreds were converted. I would not now be placed back where I was before that blessed experience if you should give me all the world.”

Moody’s ministry was transformed in a minute though the filling of the Holy Spirit, though God graciousness.

The spiritual life is not a matter of our striving. It is a matter of waiting with outstretched hands for the power from on high.

On Nourishment for the Soul

By Anita Mathias

Sunset, Calf Sound, Isle of Man.

I love beaches. There was a five year period in which I did not see the sea–my three years reading English in Oxford, and two years at Ohio State getting a Masters in Creative Writing.

And then I saw a lot of the sea, when we lived in Stanford, Palo Alto, in Northern California while Roy was doing a postdoc in Computer Science. It was the first time I had been on a Pacific Beach.

Roy keeps reminding me of how I ran in joy on the beach, saying, “See, Roysie,” as I scooped up Pacific Ocean treasures, sea urchins, scallop shells, sand dollars, and knelt beside tidal pools with sea anemones, sea stars, sea turbans, barnacles, and hermit crabs.

I collected handfuls of beautiful pebbles, purple, pink, green, variegated, veined, and was incredulous when Roy said that they would turn dull and uninteresting once they dried.

I collected them anyway. And, unbelievably, the pebbles that shone rose, amethyst, and sea-green, indeed turned lifeless and uninviting.

Away from their natural habitat, away from the sea bathing them twice a day, sea pebbles are dull and unremarkable.

When the Holy Spirit bathes our heart, we come to life in our native colour and glory. Our sluggish dull thinking comes to life.

What is seawater for our souls? Their natural habitat? What makes us feel as if we are flying, swimming, running, instead of limping along in the daily trudge and grind?

* * *

For me, honestly, God is the sea in which I am most at home. When I am in alignment with God, when I can sense his compass, when I sense his guidance for the next stretch of the road, feel under his secret service protection, I feel as if I’m flying. I am at peace.

I am more stressed when I am trying to choose my own path. When I have not sensed God’s finger pointing to the road I am to take, I vacillate between one course of action and another. I see the pros of one, decide to adopt it, then remember the negatives.

When I flip-flop like this, one thing’s for sure: I am not hearing God’s voice. I am relying on human intelligence under pressure, an imperfect instrument at best. My vacillation means I have not heard God, and so I need to stop and pray until I have.

So what makes my soul feel verdant, cleansed, washed, as if by the sea? The presence of the Holy Spirit does.

Scripture does; it has a purifying effect, which is why Paul in Ephesians talks of being cleansed by the washing of water by the word.

Doing things slowly, in touch with God’ rhythms, in step with God does.

Rest does, adequate sleep, long country walks, solitude, the sea.

But alignment with God, most of all.

How about you? What does it take for your spirit to feel moist and cleansed, glistening and beautiful?

Archives for 2015

Without that grateful heart, we will not fully appreciate what we already have, or what is yet to come.

* * *

anita.mathias