Archives for 2015

In which the Afflicted are Comforted in Ways We Cannot Guess (In Memory of Kayla Mueller)

Kayla Mueller, an idealistic young American aid worker, was captured by the brutal soldiers of ISIS in 2013. She died 2 years later, images of her bruised face and white-shrouded body released to her parents.

Her fate would echo most people’s categories of the worst thing in the world, as in Orwell’s 1984. There are news reports that she was given as a bride to an ISIS fighter.

* * *

The horror, the horror!–one might say with Conrad’s Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness

But that is not how Kayla experienced it.

Here is what she wrote to her family

“I have felt tenderly cradled in freefall. I have been shown in darkness, light. I learned that even in prison, one can be free. In every sense of the word, I have surrendered myself to our Creator.”
* * *

My heart, my spirit, my vivid imagination feels oppressed when I read of starvation, thirst, imprisonment, slavery, torture, Christian Ethiopians imprisoned for their faith in shipping containers, oh Jesus…the substance of nightmares.

But here was Kayla, comforted, tenderly cradled in freefall; shown in darkness, light; learning that even in prison, one can be free, surrendering herself to God in every sense of the word.

“What is essential is invisible to the eye:” Antoine St-Exupery wrote.

* * *

C. S. Lewis’s Aslan says that we are only told our own story, not anyone else’s.

Because happiness and peace or misery and torment are internal things, and no one can judge another’s joy or grief.

I am thinking of the slave Hagar in Genesis who ran away from her bullying mistress, Sarah.

In the desert Hagar saw God. And God saw her. He spoke to her, comforted her, and made her a secret promise. She goes back, apparently defeated. But only apparently. She has had secret spiritual experience Sarah could never have guessed at. She has seen God; He has comforted her; He has promised her descendants a future and a hope. The way Christ looked at Hagar was obviously so monumental an experience that that became her name for God—“ Lahai Roi. You are the one who sees me.” She is content to return to slavery and abuse because “I have now seen the One who sees me.”

This world!! Americans are so oppressed by their stuff that blogs telling them to buy fewer things are hugely popular. Meanwhile, in Africa, people have so little, and get almost nothing for free, that they make multiple uses of free mosquito nets soaked in toxic chemicals to the detriment of their own health and the environment. They suffer the effects of poverty—hunger, disease, early death, lack of access to opportunity.

And yet everyone who returns from Africa or Asia comments on the big smiles of everyone they met.

* * *

What can be done must be done for the wretched of the earth, in Camus’s phrase.

However, as we trust God’s love in our afflictions, we must trust God’s love in the afflictions of others.

We do not know their stories as Aslan says; we do not know their secret encounters with God; the way he comforts him; the tenderness with which he looks at them; what he promises them in this life, or beyond.

We do not have as many hands as a peacock has eyes. None of us cannot solve all this cracked world’s problems. However, as I type, perhaps the Lord is revealing himself to someone in the misery of solitary confinement. Perhaps he is changing their hearts, changing their perspective. Perhaps he is teaching them that even in prison one can be free, as he taught the former Prime Minster of Ethiopia Tamirat Layne, as he taught Starr Daily, as he taught Kayla Mueller.

Perhaps God comforts them as he comforts me in my darkest moments. Perhaps he is to them as he was to Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Father and fondler of heart Thou has wrung

Hast thy dark descending and most are merciful then,

On Re-Learning the Beautiful Art of Friendship

By Anita Mathias

The rather wonderful Stephen Fry upset the internets by telling Irish television host Gay Byrne what Stephen Fry would say to God when they eventually met up.

How dare you! How dare you create a world in which there is such suffering that is not our fault? It’s not right; it’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god, who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?”

Because the God who created this universe, if it was created by a god, is quite clearly a maniac, an utter maniac, totally selfish.

He is monstrous, utterly monstrous, and deserves no respect whatsoever.

* * *

Yup, Stephen Fry intends to give God a hard time (and I rather hope God would be merciful and perhaps amused enough not to give Stephen Fry a hard time in turn).

What about Jesus? Would Stephen Fry give Jesus a hard time? Would he dare to? I doubt it. Few people are offended by Jesus.

* * *

Most people love Jesus for his kindness; from my childhood, however, I have wistfully respected his cleverness. The way he got out of the traps laid for him by the scribes and Pharisees. I sometimes realised that fellow students, teachers, nuns or relatives were trying to trap me with their questions (and often did not!), but was rarely quick-thinking, poised, self-confident, or forthright enough to sidestep traps the way Jesus did.

And Jesus impressively summarised monumental ideas in a “tweet“. A sentence. He summed up the law and the prophets (about 622,000 words: 2500 pages in a standard paperback!!) in a sentence–three imperatives. Love God. Love yourself. Love your neighbour.

* * *

Loving yourself. We hear far less of that than of loving God or loving our neighbour.

It certainly wasn’t taught when I grew up in India in the sixties.

What is loving oneself? Caring for ourselves the way we care for our toddlers. Resting when we need to rest. Giving our bodies and minds the foods we need to perform optimally. Not running on empty spiritually, but refilling in God’s presence. Feeding our hearts with good relationships. Forgiving ourselves for our shortcomings and mistakes. Cutting ourselves slack.

Perhaps this radical self-forgiveness makes it easier to forgive others. Perhaps cutting yourself slack makes it easier to cut others slack.

* * *

I went through my entire Facebook today, following some people, unfollowing others. (I periodically do this, thereby giving myself an entirely different newsfeed!)

People who’ve had a near-death experience say their entire life flashed before them. Well, my entire life flashed before me as I looked at every face on my Facebook friends list.

I saw many lovely faces from my past…from primary school and boarding school, from my university days in England and America, from churches in England and America, from writing, from the school gates, former neighbours… Friendships which have endured.

I am more of an extrovert than an introvert. I feel a lot of warmth and affection towards people. I love hanging out with people. I love friendships. But, alas, I am a bit of a classic A type personality, with high expectations of myself and others. Instead of cutting people slack, I can get really annoyed by what is really annoying about them. I sometimes get so annoyed that I basically sever a friendship.

I scroll through my Facebook friends, and see the faces of former real heart-friends, BFF’s who are now just Facebook friends.

And “stalking” these friends’ pages, I see faces of other people I had been good friends with, but had got annoyed with (sometimes for good reason), fallen out with, and am now no longer friends with, at all.

Some faces: so sweet, so full of light. And seeing those faces, I see I had been too harsh, too negative in my judgments, too focused on their very real weaknesses, instead of the very real goodness and light and sweetness in them.

I am sad.

The wonderful Serenity Prayer asks for strength to accept the things we cannot change. To take this sinful world as it is, not as we would have it. There is a lot of wisdom to doing the same with people.

* * *

When I went to St. Mary’s Convent, Nainital, a hill station boarding school in the Himalayas, aged nine, my father, who had himself been sent to a hill station boarding school, Montfort School, Yercaud, aged 6, advised me, “If you find someone really irritating, ignore them. Stop talking to them. But don’t do that too often, or you’ll soon have no one to talk to.”

I obviously hadn’t considered such a course of action, but it became my survival strategy for decades.

Jesus tuned out the scribes and Pharisees and the hypocrites. I have done that erstwhile friends I have got annoyed with instead of talking things through. Instead of learning how to gently confront.

But no more. I will talk things through. I will relate as an adult, vulnerably sharing what is bugging me, instead of relating as the petulant nine year old who solved relational problems by severing the relationship. I will cut people slack, and instead of expecting perfection will ride through the troughs in friendships, the revelation of the shadow side of my friends, just as I would like them to blow off revelations of the shadow side of me with the breath of kindness.

* * *

Michael Hyatt contrasts a successful friend of his with a writer client who craved success which eluded him (and was, incidentally, not brilliant at relationships.)

That success eluded that writer is not surprising. Creativity thrives in a environment of connections and relationships, as Jonah Lehrer observed in Imagine. People are healthier when they enjoy what Dr. Dean Ornish calls “the healing power of social support.” Bowling Alone estimates that each friendship is worth $1000 through the connections, tips, insights and information it opens up. People who enjoy wide, deep and rich friendships are happier, wealthier and healthier!

Because of the mysterious, undeserved grace of God, my life is indeed rich, full, happy and creative. However, it would have been richer, fuller, happier, and more creative, if I had grappled every friend I’ve ever made to my heart with hoops of steel.

* * *

But we can change. We can change at any time. That is the exciting thing about being a Christian.

The friendships I have invested in, I will invest in maintaining.

Change in mid-life? Yup!

* * *

How do we change?

The Greek New Testament word for repentance is metanoia, “to come to your senses; to come to your right mind; to intelligently understand.” We realise that Jesus taught theology in relationship, that Jesus, in effect, behaved as if relationships, vertical and horizontal, were what life was all about; that the core of a happy, successful life was love–loving relationships, kindness, affection. We decide to re-learn the beautiful art of friendship.

But, of course, since perhaps 90% of our psychological, emotional and spiritual life goes on in the dark subconscious realm of imprinted repressed memories, damaged emotions and Pavlovian reactions, changing is more complex than simply deciding to change.

But we have other resources.

We ask for help from above; we ask God to change our hearts. We claim the promise in Ezekiel: I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh (Ez. 36:26). Wow, God changing the deep structure of our hearts, molecule by molecule. (I have experienced this, this slow subliminal change of my heart through the action of God’s spirit within me–so I know it’s true.)

And then we rely on the filling of the Spirit, the Spirit producing fruit within us that we cannot produce ourselves: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, as Paul writes in Galatians.

And so we row on into a happier future, having learned from our mistakes. Row into, possibly, a richer, happier future, than if we had not messed up, analysed our mistakes, repented, and decided to, with God’s help, change.

The Good Things of January

By Anita Mathias

I’ve adopted Martin Seligman’s recommended habit of recording 3 good things about my day. Apparently, people who do this report being 25% happier within 3 weeks. I think it is true. I’ve often needed to scan my day carefully to see what was golden about it rather than nondescript. After a while looking for gold becomes a habit.

It’s been an extraordinary month in many ways, with many highlights.

We’ve just spent a weekend in Torquay, Devon, walking under blue skies on beaches studded with dramatic rock formations. The mere sight of the sea is meant to reduce stress, I’ve read. It’s true I realized as I sat in front of the picture windows in the villa living room, looking at the sea, with seagulls swooping and dive-bombing into it, and hills with, wow!, palm trees beyond the bay. The English Riviera!!

We walked on the coastal trail as well as on beaches. So grateful for increasing strength and health.

2 Irene and her best friends Hannah and Lisa won the first prize in the National Cipher Challenge–and a prize of £1000. The National Cipher Challenge was an 8 week decoding challenge with tasks of increasing difficulty. The final task took them 21 hours.

2B Irene entered a competition for a free ticket to a TEDx Oxford Conference.

She contrasted Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. An iPhone is extraordinary, giving you access to all the books, information and music in the world in a palm sized gadget. However, Gates will be remembered long after Apple has joined the scrapheap of history for pouring his resources into the developing world, into health, education and women’s rights.
He has started a cascade of generosity through his Billionaires club of 127 billionaires who have pledged at least half their wealth to philanthropy.

Irene came home exhausted on the day it was due, and I had just had surgery. She wanted to blow it off, but I said, “Irene, it’s all in your head; just get it onto paper.” And so she did. And that is an excellent thing for all writers to remember, including, especially, I myself.

3 Zoe is back to the heady whirl which is Theology at Oxford.

She got a first in 2 of 3 papers in her termly exams (Greek and Doctrine of Creation) and got a cheque for £50–£25 for each First!! Imagine being paid for academic excellence—I think it’s a rather good idea.

3B Zoe is one of the three students leading student ministry and student nights at her church, Oxford Community Church. She’s getting to use the ministry skills she honed at the School of Ministry, Catch the Fire, Toronto—which is excellent!

4 After a long discussion with my oncologists, I decided to forego the chemotherapy which is standard for the stage of colon cancer that I was at, and go instead with intensive monitoring—CEA blood tests, CT scans, colonoscopies, the lot) and exercise, an increasingly healthy diet, and some supplementation with aspirin, vitamin D etc.

My cancer was not metastatic as far as the oncologists can tell and it’s possible the surgeon has removed every cancer cell… At any rate, I am letting food be my medicine, and my medicine be food as Hippocrates suggested, and am drinking lots of carrot juice, green smoothies, and moving steadily to a largely vegetable-based diet—soups, salads, roast veggies etc.

6-8 glasses of green smoothies and carrot juice can seem a lot—but hey, it sure beats chemo.! Roy calls it my veggie chemo!!

Exercise—I alternate doing two miles in two sessions, trying to walk as fast as I can building up to a 15 minute miles, with walking 2-3 miles the next day, again as fast as I can. My surgical incision has been slow to heal completely (prayers would be appreciated) , and once its completely healed, I hope to take up yoga and resistance exercises.

(PLEASE don’t send me ANY negative feedback, opinions or horror stories on this very personal no-chemo decision. On the other hand, positive feedback, stories, resources and inspiration will be welcome.)

5 I am back to normal, and because of the vegetable based diet and exercise, am more energetic than I was in my thirties. Well, I am weary and bone-tired some days (to be expected because I am writing hard and exercising hard), and bursting with energy on some days. Interestingly, the tired days are the days I have slacked off on my green juices and carrot juice and salads and veggies… I have never felt the connection of food and energy so strongly.

As I told a friend about how surprisingly well I feel, she said, “You know, maybe you have been healed.”

I was silent. Hundreds of people have told me that they’ve been praying for me. And of course, as Biblical and Christian history attests, just one simple heartfelt prayer from one person of faith can work a miracle.

Maybe, just maybe, God has listened–why should he not? Why should I assume he might not?–and arranged for any cancer cells which MAY be left to be killed, or go dormant.

Why not? Prayer works, I know it does, and perhaps, once again, God the great magician who daily pulls sunrises, sunsets and shimmering moons out of his hat, has pulled complete healing too.
May it be so. Amen!

What have been the best things of your month? Tell me!

Linking up with Leigh Kramer

In which God Creates Beauty from My Mistakes

By Anita Mathias

In this season of hibernation, I think… and my remembrance of things past is not unaccompanied by regret.

Mists of sadness rise. I will not enter them for they might drag me into a quagmire.

No, I will not re-read past chapters. Today’s chapter is being written—Jesus dictating, me writing. Or sometimes, me writing fast, impulsively, selfishly, and Jesus overwriting it with gold-dust, producing beauty from ashes.

* * *

But what can be done with regrets for time past?

I reach for another alliterative word…redemption.

I take my regrets, shattered shards of what could have been beautiful, were I wiser, smarter, holier,

And I pour the iridescent fragments of these regrets into the great outstretched hands of God.

* * *

I think of David. He sees a beautiful married woman bathe on a rooftop, sleeps with her, has her husband killed when she falls pregnant, and then marries her.

The prophet Nathan confronts him with a story which helps him see the shamefulness of it all.

David repents, but sin has consequences, that’s the deep magic from the dawn of time. The unnamed baby dies.

But there is also redemption…the deeper magic from before the dawn of time

Bathsheba conceives again…and that child is Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, the reputed author of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

From that union stained by lust and murder came forth exquisite Psalms and wise Proverbs.

* * *

We undervalue what is precious; we overvalue what is trivial; we waste our time; we squander our energies; we damage treasured relationships; oh yes, and for all these things, we pay the price, yes we do– the inexorably fair law of sowing and reaping.

Fair and merciless.

But a deep hidden mercy runs through this world, like subterranean gold, like purple amethyst, yellow citrine, and smoky quartz hidden in the dead, fossilised trees in Arizona’s petrified forest, trees which fell two hundred million years ago.

Gradually, each cells of bark and wood is replaced with minerals of every colour, as God shapes my shabby paragraphs into the frame, the outline of a glory story.

* * *

God takes the fragments of my faltering hopes, my missed chances, my foolishness,

And says, “Child, from this, even from this, from this glimmering pile of your mistakes, see what I am fashioning.”

And like a medieval craftsman making stained glass, he fashions glory, stained glass, from glinting heaps of errors.

And I see what he is creating from sins and folly, the stuff I never intended.

It is the life I now have, bursting with potential for joy and beauty and worship. It is good. It is very good.

And through tear-stained eyes, I bow my head in worship.

My One Word for 2015 : Joy

By Anita Mathias

I had wanted to choose “Accelerate” as my One Word for 2014 but God impressed “Alignment” on my heart, and it proved to have been useful through a tumultuous year—a cancer diagnosis, and surgery, the death of my beloved border collie Jake from cancer, a burglary. And some nice things too… being invited to Cambodia for a week by Tearfund; being the runner up for Tweeter of the Year in the Christian New Media Awards; being interviewed on Premier Radio; publishing a children’s book, Francesco, Artist of Florence.

* * *

That cancer now a past tense occurrence, God willing, all gone.

Because I could not stop for health, health kindly stopped for me. Health will be one of my priorities this year

I will have to be careful about diet and exercise–so as not to have a recurrence. My body will have to change its bioeme to become an ecosystem unfavourable to cancer. I will learn stress management techniques, and practice positive psychology, thinking positively. I am juicing to get my diet more nutrient-dense, and am moving towards a raw and plant-based diet.

I thought of choosing “Focus,” as my word for the year because huge things can be done with focus, but no, I had a greater need.

My word for 2015 will be Joy.

* * *

I am training myself to become conscious of my emotional states, of when joy leaches out of me, and am learning to slow down and ask, “Why are you sad, oh my soul?”

And then, I am learning to accept the things I cannot change, and to change the things I can, as in the brilliant Serenity Prayer used by Alcoholics Anonymous, and to be thankful for the rest, the obviously good things, and the more ambiguous things–for there is a God who is writing straight in crooked lines in my life. Again and again, I see this.

When I notice I am grumpy and low-spirited, I tell myself, “Anita, light the sacred flame of joy.” I visualise myself as a priestess in a temple filling the sacred bowl with incense, the seeds of joy, lighting the flame. I start noticing the good things, thanking God for the good things. I ask the Holy Spirit—who, Jesus says, comes on demand–to fill me with joy, those rivers of living water, and He does.

We can change our emotional states, as blogger Michael Hyatt writes. He calls being able to do this his most important asset.

I shift my emotional state by entering the narrow gates of surrender to God. By deciding to walk in love. By praise and thanksgiving. By worship music. By reading a bit of the Bible or a spiritual book. By physical activity, a walk outdoors, or even just tidying the house. By spending time with my family or seeking out a friend to hang out with.

* * *

19 years ago, I told a good friend Paul Miller (author of A Praying Life, often praised as one of the best books on prayer, for instance by Tim Challies) that I had not experienced joy-as opposed to happiness. He volunteered to disciple me in exchange for editing help, and this discipling relationship lasted for 5 years. Joy, he said, comes from dying, from dying to self.

I did not stumble upon joy through “dying;” that was not my path. (However, I learned other things from Paul, about Jesus–I was an editor for his book Love Walked Among Us–about love, and faith, and prayer).

Nonetheless, I was eventually surprised by joy. Joy and peace crept up on me, as my original ambitions were thwarted, and the fierceness of ambition leached away, leaving more of an openness to what God might be doing in my life, to the plot he was writing. To giving God what he takes, and taking what he gives, with a smile—Mother Teresa’s definition of holiness.

So in 2015, I want to experience joy, by seeking it where it lies in plain sight, and if necessary, hunting it down, looking a little harder, a little deeper. I want to light the flame of joy with the incense of praise, of thanksgiving, of faith, of Scripture, of nature, of friendship, all the good and precious things which come down from the Father of Lights.

And if you’d like to pray for me, please pray for vibrant health and that cancer never returns. Eight weeks after surgery, I am glad to report that I feel full of energy, good spirits, health and…yes…joy!

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One Word for 2015: Joy. On lighting the sacred flame of joy from @anitamathias1

Have you chosen a one word goal for 2015? What is it?

Archives for 2015

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