Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Back! And raring to get going!

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Greetings, readers. I’ve been in an Abbey with no wi-fi and no internet for 5 days. No mobile phone signal either.

At first, I felt a bit disoriented, to be honest. We own a business: was is thriving, or were there fires? (It throve in our absence, Someone Else took over.) And when the background noise of social media is turned off–Facebook, and the relationships in it, Blogging, and all the friends and relationships that engenders, Twitter, email, and there is a great silence, it takes a while for your breathing to adjust. To enter long slow time. That’s why I need at least ten days to thoroughly unwind, to hear God’s vision, direction and correction for my life. (But given that I had that in August, I didn’t really need it so soon.)
Believe it or not, I drove to the next towns, Lynton and Lymouth to get online on the first two days. How odd! And when neither my iPad nor my 3 mobile broadband could get a good signal, actually knocked on a guesthouse, and asked to pay and use their Wifi. Yeah, chutzpah! (We do this on our travels in Europe, with great success–as we had with this most charming woman in Lynton. She refused payment, as we suspected, though we left some. The Croft Guesthouse in Lynton, Devon by the way. Beautifully furnished, warm and welcoming.)
By day 3, I thought this was nuts. I could get along just fine without the web and the web without me… And quite enjoyed our separation.
And used it to catch up with a big task which I might have put off for much longer had I the distractions of the internet.
I had been writing a big memoir of an Indian Catholic childhood, time in a boarding school with German and Irish nuns, and work with Mother Teresa off and on from 1991 to 2006. Several chapters have won prizes, including a National Endowment for the Arts Award of $20,000, a State Arts Board award of $6000 and been published in a range of places from national magazines to literary journals, sometimes at $1000 a piece! But when it came to agents and publishers in 2006, I found a famous English agent who wanted changes, and an American agent, who wanted different changes, and didn’t see how to make them, and got depressed, and founded a publishing business instead.
Well, that’s the one piece of unfinished business in my life. I do not want to die without finishing and wrapping up that book: I have poured so much thought and love and passion and beauty into it.
And so at last, I had time to sort out the pieces into chapters, the chapters into sections, and looking at it after 5.5 years, I see to my relief that is a good book. Interesting. Much of it (though not all of course) is well-written.
And so I am going to go back to revising and rewriting it with joy and confidence, without the angst that it might not find a publisher.
Because you see it WILL find a publisher. And that publisher will be me.  I know enough about marketing now to know I can find readers for my book. I will get it professionally edited, of course, but will only accept the suggestions that find an answering echo with me (something one can’t do with professional writing.)
Will it be less good because I plan to get two professional editors, and then accept or reject their suggestions using my own judgement? In some ways, perhaps, and in others, no. It will retain its uniqueness.
It might be, as Touchstone would say, “A poor thing, sir, but mine own.” And there is a great pleasure in having a piece of writing exactly as you wanted it (though as I said, I will of course take advice in what Pope called, “the last, the greatest art, the art to blot.”)
When Milton felt frustrated at the slow pace of his writing, he comforted himself by saying, “All is, if I have grace to use it so.”
Same here. So that is what I need: grace. Grace to focus, grace to prune off distractions. Grace to turn off the pleasant distractions of the internet and focus. Discipline to keep fit so I can write, and discipline to write.
I need to dwell in God’s waterfall, since by myself boiling down and condensing and shaping that massive manuscript (I don’t dare number the pages, but it’s big) in addition to continuing to run this blog may be too difficult a task for me.
In one way, it’s good to have your back against the wall, face to face with a task too great for you, to learn how to rely on grace and God’s power.
And, honestly, I know very little about this in practice 🙂
Open the floodgates of your waterfall of creativity above me, Oh Lord. Let me dwell in it!

poustinia, retreats, and the ocean restoring the soul

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Catherine Doherty, a friend of Thomas Merton, popularized the poustina monastic experience. A little cabin in the woods, where you went off to live simply and be with God.

Roy and I had an experiment of this when we joined a Christian community called Pacem in Terris in Minnesota, oh, I guess 19 years ago, for a brief retreat.

We lived in the snowy woods, in a simple pine heated cabin. The hosts brought us a simple breakfast and lunch in a basket—bread and cheese, as I remember, and we joined them for dinner.

We went to seek God. I remember reading that when one goes on retreat to seek God, the first thing you become aware of is your overwhelming tiredness. It’s okay then to spend the first day sleeping. You do not realize how tired you are until you give yourself permission to rest.

It astonishes me when we go away to rest and renew to discover how tired I really am. I woke late yesterday, prayed, wanted to study a bit of scripture, but instead felt sleepy, and napped. And I napped in the afternoon too, and briefly before dinner. What? Could I really have been that tired? All the adrenalin has drained out of me, and I am suddenly aware of the physical tiredness, and the sleep lag I have been keeping at bay with thermoses of green tea!!

I slept 12 hours last night. Roy is exhausted too. He sleeps when I do, around midnight, but then wakes the girls up at 7.15. After a whole term of this, he’s tired too.

I am really enjoying being in Lee Abbey. I sat in the sunroom of our cottage today, and watched Red Admiral and Painted Lady butterflies outside in the garden, then walked down to the beach, and sat on the rocks, relaxing.

Never miss a chance to go to the beach: That is one of my life’s resolutions.

Now playing family games–Anagrams, a Victorian word game. Word and knowledge games are my favourite, perhaps because I am not as patient and as good at strategy games as my family (everyone else is brilliant at chess, for instance).

I think going away for a few days gives one a change to take a break from one’s work, and see it in perspective, to have good family time and family bonding, and often to come back with new ideas, new energy, and new perspective on one’s life.


Lee Abbey has a private beach 250 metres from our cottage, and I love sitting on the rocks, and watching the tide come in.

tomorrow to hike on exmoor, amid the sheep, goats and ponies, and walk on some more beaches.

“Mum is Always Right!” or “Give and you shall receive”

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 “Mum is Always Right!”

We brought our Chrysler Town and Country mini-van over from America (incidentally, Americans, it’s called a Voyager people carrier here. Why? Search me!).
And because it drives on the American side of the road, I sit on the right side, and Roy drives. And that’s how the kids learnt right and left. Right is where Mum sits, because Mum is always right; Left is where Dad sits.
Well, I indoctrinated them with that ditty when they were little, and they said it with all seriousness. Now, at 17 and 12, they say it with some irony. Alas.
The mini-van, or people carrier (I write kind mid-Atlantic English as I have lived in America for longer than I’ve lived in England, and my blog readers are evenly balanced between the two countries) has a story.
We bought it right after September 2011, when the economy was low and prices were depressed. We bought it through an incredible windfall. We had been making gift annuities to Samaritan’s Purse of $1000 dollars at a time every now and then, and I think had given $22K. (Gift annuities are an arrangement by which you give money to a charity and they pay you quarterly interest. When you die, they get the money. I like it, and think I would like to die with all my money (such as it is) tied up in gift annuities, apart from what I’m leaving my kids and hopefully grandkids.)
The catch for the charity is that they commit to giving you a fixed percentage a year for life. I think we were getting a 6.5 % interest. And in the investment climate after 2001, the charity, like everyone else, was losing money on their investments.
So they asked if they could return the money we had been giving them over the last few years. A charity return money? Apparently so.
We accepted it. Our Toyota was stalling at lights, and taking a while to restart after it stalled. I was concerned I’d be rear-ended. I won’t drive, and would rather not be in, cars which might be unsafe. I am a nervous enough driver anyway.
So we gratefully accepted the windfall, and bought the mini-van which has proved serviceable for over 10 years now.
Of course, I felt there was a bit of unfinished business. We shouldn’t have accepted back money we had given to the charity (i.e. given to God, as far as I was concerned).
So I privately resolved to return the money with the next cash windfall I got.
The windfall came when we sold our house in Williamsburg. We had bought it in what realtors said was the neighbourhood most likely to appreciate, Kingsmill on the James. And appreciate it did. We bought $30K of gift annuities with Samaritans’ Purse when we sold the house, as a sort of tithe.
When Roy got his Professorship in the UK, they asked him to write down what his previous salary had been. He was offered 10 percent more.
I was very pleased with him, and with the offer, but I had not reckoned on the difference between British taxes and American taxes (ouch), or British property prices and American property prices (ouch, ouch) or the difference in the cost of living in Williamsburg, Virginia and Oxford, England!
And then we bought our dream house. And then we put the girls in the perfect school for them which was private, excellent, but hideously expensive.
And so, I needed to work.
And I sometimes thought crossly of the $30K I had grandly given away. It would have staved off my having to work for a while, or having to work so hard.
I didn’t regret giving it away at all—give and you shall receive is one of my core convictions—but I was most cross at God for not rewarding me for my generosity by returning the money when I needed it.
And as I’ve written elsewhere–for it is one of the miraculous stories of my life, which I still marvel at–I eventually, through trial and error, turned out to be rather good at business, which surprised me, Roy, my children, parents, and perhaps friends. Everyone but God!
The business did okay, we now have 12 people on our payroll, most part-timers, and it soon surpassed my ability to both run it and do anything else. And oh, I so wanted to be Mary, not Martha. I just wanted to read and write.
And so, last June Roy took over, and I am back to full-time reading and writing, though I am finding it hard to get back into the book I was writing which I put on the shelf in 2006, when I became a businesswoman.
I like Roy working from home so much. I like the fact that he cooks, and keeps the house tidy, and keeps up with the laundry, and the children’s homework—all things I found very hard to remember to do. So I have washed my hands of all that, and enjoy guilt-free writing.
But to get to this point, I had to leave my writing on the altar for 4.5 years.
And of course, if I had not given away that $30K perhaps I would not have needed to establish the business which has been such a blessing to us and to others.
Give and you shall receive, full measure, pressed down, flowing over.
It’s true.
But as you might expect, when dealing with God, you may well not receive when you expect to, or quite in the way you expect to.
Because if we did, we would be dealing with a celestial cash machine, and not a person. Not with God!

Our family’s off to Lee Abbey, Devon

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We’re off to Lee Abbey, Devon where we’ve rented a beach cottage for the week. No wifi, and if we can’t get 3G on the iPad, I guess I won’t blog.

I look forward to prayer in the chapel, and joining the worship, to long beach walks and walks on Exmoor, and maybe visiting Rosemoor Garden and some National Trust gardens, if practical. Also, some family time, family games, walks, and relaxation.
Mmmm.
I am grateful to our housesitter, who’s going to care for the 7 animals, and also cut down the overgrown hedges, especially around our mammoth vegetable garden.

(Images from Lee Abbey website)




V
And the beach cabin we are renting for the week.The Cabin

Drunk on Grace

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GET DRUNK ON GRACE














The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred-proof grace—of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the gospel—after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about perfection—suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, nor flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter in.
-Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace
Image and post from The Buzzard Blog

Learning to Think “Young,” Flexibly and Accurately

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Have you noticed that, whatever the issue, there’ll be predictable responses from people in their twenties and thirties, let’s say, and from people in their sixties and seventies? People in the forties tend to have more nuanced reactions; some think young and some (generally the richer and more successful) will share the curmudgeonly reactions of those 20 years older.

When there’s controversy to do with politics, immigration, war, first world invasions of the third world, gay rights, women in the church, Palestine, Green issues, climate change, we see the same generational divide: passion on one side; indifference or passionately held, but entirely opposing views on the other.

I see the same in the Christian blogosphere. Some bloggers in their thirties really make me think. These include Rachel Held Evans, Donald Miller, Jamie, the Very Worst Missionary and Anne Marie Miller.

I deliberately read these bloggers who are a decade or so younger than I am because I want my thinking to remain flexible. I do not want my thinking to atrophy and grow flabby anymore more than I want my muscles to atrophy.

Of course, what matters is not thinking like a young radical or old fogey but thinking wisely and correctly.

And since I am a Christian, that would mean somehow overhearing or divining God’s thoughts.

* * *

When the generations fall into predictable positions–iconoclastic young radicals and crustacean old fogeys–one wonders if they are putting their minds on auto-pilot and reflexively adopting the positions of their generation.

However God is always young. He is, as Augustine describes him, “the beauty ever ancient and ever new.” His mercies are new every morning.

What’s more, He himself is new every morning. He is the Ancient of Days, but also blazingly modern. He dwells in the bush that blazes continuously and is never consumed.

He inhabits the present tense: I AM WHO I AM. And that became the name by which he was known: I AM.

And when he was incarnated, he was a fearless, outspoken young man who was murdered at 33.

What God thinks about the issues of our church and our day is guaranteed to be new and fresh, startling and challenging. High above our thoughts. Meaty.

Someone who spends enough time with God to feel his pulse and his heartbeat will think young, will become one of those old people with sparkling fresh eyes and a spring in their step.

And spending time with God is one way to bring the new, startling and challenging–so coveted by artists!– into our work.

* * *

I began this post thinking I did not want my thinking to degenerate into predictable generational positions.

But really what is important is that I spend enough time with the great I AM to divine his thoughts, to feel his heartbeat, to sense what he thinks and feels and desires. To begin to see just a little bit with his eyes. And to express this in my work.

In that way, a blogger can exercise a sort of prophetic ministry. (Or, at the very least, will be original).

And it is better to embark on such a quest, and fail, then never to embark on it at all!

The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

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Just watched this in the Oxford Playhouse, which for always carries a sense of deja vu, and memories of enchanted afternoons watching matinees there for ÂŁ2.50 as a student. Inflation has disproportionately affected theatre tickets, alas…

It’s based on a simple conceit. Dorian Gray embarks upon a life of hedonism and sensual indulgence. His face remains that of the beautiful 22 year old boy, while his portrait, painted then, shows the corruption of sin and self-indulgence.
His angelic face belies his reputation, and allows him to continue a career of seduction, blackmail and murder. Had his face betrayed his real nature, people would have shrunk from him, and been on their guard.
Living in a university city makes me wonder if character shows on the face when people are young. Most of the young people I see are fresh-faced and gorgeous! However, after, let’s say, 35, cruelty, petty-mindedness, mean-spiritedness do begin to leave their traces on the face. One’s face at 40, I think, definitely hints of one’s true character. At 60 or 70, it reveals it unsparingly in the eyes, the mouth, the cheeks.
Aristotle, “It is possible to infer character from features, if it is granted that the body and the soul are changed together by the passions and desires.”
Scripture has a tip or two about growing old gracefully, “Wisdom brightens a man’s face and changes its hard appearance.” Ecc 8:1

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

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  Our family listened to Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible on tape on our summer holiday, and were engrossed by it.

It’s the story of an American Baptist family, the Prices, who go out to the Congo to convert “the heathen.”

The father, Nathan, simple-minded and fanatical, is a prototypical “ugly American,” who scarily conflates the American way of doing things and the Christian way. Despite the remonstrances of the local help, he insists on planting his garden in the American way in the soil itself, instead of in the Congolese way, in ridges. The rain washes it all away.

For him, the be-all and end-all of religion is baptism by total immersion. This puts him at odds with the villagers, who are terrified of the river: crocodiles have eaten their children.

Nathan Price browbeats his wife into submission, by tongue-lashings and physical violence. She walks through the Congo in a daze, willing herself forward, one step at a time, dreaming of Georgia. And most of his four daughters, Rachel, Leah, Ada and Ruth-May, would rather be anywhere than in the Congo.

The essential wrongness of transporting unwilling children across the globe to share in their parents’ missionary endeavours is made blindingly obvious. Nothing, I think, can compensate for the trauma and disruption to your own children. They are your primary responsibility.

One of my favourite aphorisms is Mary McCarthy’s “Religion is only good for good people.” Poor Nathan Price is so determined to succeed at converting the Congolese that he is gradually alienated from his wife, his four daughters, the Congolese, of course, and ultimately his own sanity. A tragic anti-hero, he goes on in his own pig-headed way until the book’s searing close, blind to the anguish of those around him while his eyes are fixed on the prize, a converted Congolese village.

Fortunately, Kingsolver creates a foil–Brother Fowles, a non-dogmatic Yankee missionary who respects what there is to respect in Congolese traditions, and quietly helps the Congolese .

As he memorably says, repeatedly, “There are Christians, and Christians.”

The book is written in five voices, that of the five Price women, each of them linguistically differentiated. An epilogue catches up with them, twenty years later. Their characters have proved their destinies.

Barbara Kingsolver herself lived in the Congo as a child with her American parents. She says she has waited 30 years for the wisdom to write this book. And it’s a splendid one!