Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

The Methodist Covenant Prayer

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I am no longer my own but yours.

Put me to what you will,
Rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing, put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you or laid aside for you,
exalted for you or brought low for you;
let me be full, let me be empty,
let me have all things, let me have nothing;
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.

And now, glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours.
So be it.
And the covenant made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.


I love this beautiful prayer, and was trying to pray it this evening. Big fail!! I think if things don’t work out as I hoped, I can honestly pray it. However, in the middle of doing and striving, in the middle of embarking on a challenging and joyful enterprise, it’s hard to even contemplate the possibility of its failure, as the Methodist Covenant Prayer so clear-sightedly does. 

And I think it is fine to ask God to bless and prosper the work of your hands, with the understanding, of course, that you will still love him with all your heart if your plans and enterprises do not succeed.



Why, when you learn to trust God, you smile!

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Irene at 4
I have heard Jack Miller of World Harvest Mission tell this story, and Max Lucado too.

Tom walks down the street and meets Dick, who is grinning from ear to ear.
Tom, “What are you so happy about?”
Dick, “Well, I’ve met a man who promised to do all my worrying for me for $40,000 a year.”
Tom, “40,000 dollars a year! How are you going to get that?”
Dick, grinning, “That’s HIS worry!

 

The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth. A Guest Post by Dr. Kaaren Mathias

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Drs. Kaaren and Jeph Mathias, with their children, Shar, Shanti, Rohan and Jalori
Dr. Kaaren Mathias

Dr. Kaaren Mathias is the Programme Manger for Public Health Training for Emmanuel Hospital Association, an umbrella organization for 22 mission hospitals and 30 development projects in widespread parts of North and East India.  Kaaren is a medical graduate from Auckland School of Medicine. She has worked with NGOs in Cambodia and Colombia with Servants of Asia’s Poor and Doctors without Borders. Over the last few months, she has facilitated a workshop on gender equality, running a course for hospital administrators on social determinants of health and edited Safar magazine; she is now starting a large new project, a two year Fellowship in Community Health and Transformation for 15 to 20 community health project directors.

Kaaren is married to Dr. Jeph Mathias, consultant in Climate Change for EHA, is mum to Shar, Shanti, Rohan and Jalori (and is my sister-in-law!)


              THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH

The meek shall inherit the earth – words  I struggle with and wonder about (along with most of the Beatitudes.)   I desperately want them to be true despite the seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary –  and somehow they resonate deeply inside me as words relevant for here and now. Shall and inherit both are words that carry concepts of future tense. I really hope that the meek will inherit the earth in a glorious new heaven and earth, but I believe they can ring true today too – if keep my eyes peeled…

I think of a group of children I played with by a river ten years ago. They were leaping, splashing, flipping, jubilant, trying new tricks and scheming gleefully to dive bomb me. We were on the edge of a swathe of rainforest in the Amazon basin, just inside the Bolivian border. There were logging trucks plying across the ferry 2km downstream and there was no school, few resources and a deeply uncertain future as their families, land and homes teetered on the edge of vulnerability. Meek and powerless, yet the river was entirely for their joy and delight. They asked no questions about if they were allowed to swim there, when they had to get out or if they could float on downstream. The earth was all theirs.

I think of a friend of mine, Tej Ram who lives in a remote village in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas. We met as he accompanied his brother who was thin as a skeleton at 27 years, riddled with TB and carrying little hope of surviving. Tej Ram meekly served and supported his sick brother. Then he asked if he could help us as we ran busily around with clinic patients, our own children and training nutrition promoters. He turned out to be an excellent carpenter, cleaner, cook and driver.  Tej Ram belongs to a group classified as Dalit – the lowest caste in India’s highly stratified society. In our clinic and home we had to plead with him to sit and eat with us, and even then he kept his eyes averted. But when we trekked together back to his village he stood tall and strode along the high ridge, expansively indicating the forests, fields and deep valleys: “This is our place.”

I think of a neighbour I often sat with when we lived in a crowded, grimy corner of Delhi. Mariam lives alone. She is a widow. For a living she sells chewing tobacco, a few sweets and tiny packets of salty snacks. Her story of betrayal by relatives who took over her tiny flat when her husband died, her tale of setting up house on the pavement with planks and plastics and her meek existence now on alms and scant sales seems very far from inheriting the earth. Amazingly though, she is thankful for each day, she is quick to share a hot chai cooked over her charcoal burner and she tells proudly how many different people in the neighbourhood share their evening dhal and roti with her. So OK, it’s not inheriting the earth but sitting with Mariam I realise she is more joyful and grateful, more free from rancour and more able to embrace each new morning than many of my neighbours in New Zealand.

If I am honest there are also many, many examples of meek, vulnerable, excluded, poor, disabled, marginalised people I know who aren’t anywhere near inheriting the earth – so maybe that’s where becoming part of the answer to my prayers comes in – looking for places to build justice and bring God’s kingdom on earth….

Kaaren Mathias is a mother and community health doctor living and working in North India.


Do read yesterday’s post on the same theme by Luke Tarassenko.


What do you think? Have you had similar experiences and observations? Tell us your story.

“The Meek Will Inherit the Earth” Guest post by Luke Tarassenko

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This deep and thought-provoking guest post was written by Luke Tarassenko, a doctoral student in theology at the University of Oxford, and, until recently, a youth worker at St. Aldate’s Church, Oxford. Luke worked with Rolland and Heidi Baker’s Iris Ministries in Mozambique this summer.


We’d love to hear your comments and reactions. Tune in tomorrow for Dr. Kaaren Mathias, who has worked with Servants of Asia’s Poor, Doctors Without Borders etc.




“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the Earth.” -Matthew 5:5 by Luke Tarassenko

“Meek” is not a cool word. Rarely, if ever, will you hear someone pay the compliment “You’re really meek,” remark “That was so meek,” or simply exclaim “Wow, meek!”

 In fact, the word is in such infrequent use in our common parlance that it is hard to bring a definition readily to mind. The familiar phrase “gentle Jesus meek and mild” certainly rings a bell, but that is not much help in pinning down its precise meaning. The (Concise) Oxford English Dictionary can lend a hand here. Apparently, meek comes from the Old Norse “mjukr” which means “soft, gentle” and so in English comes across as 1. Humble and submissive and 2. Piously gentle in nature. Similarly, the Greek word PRAEIS, which English translations render “meek”, can equally well be rendered “humble” or “gentle”.

It now becomes a bit clearer why the word isn’t used so much. After all, who wants to be thought of as soft? Who wants to be gentle, humble and submissive? The world mocks such people. On the contrary, the world teaches us to be confident in ourselves, to look out for number one, to take what we can get and to make sure we don’t let people walk all over us. We are to stand up for our rights, and avoid people manipulating us or taking us for a ride at all costs by making sure we’re always in control and in charge of what’s going on. Jesus taught exactly the opposite attitude : he commended meekness. And he lived it too. Of course, he knew there was a right time for getting angry, for passionate confrontation and speaking out (like when he overturned the tables in the temple) but he also knew the value of meekness. He knew that there was actually a gargantuan power in gentleness, because exhibiting it requires faith in God, that he is in control, that he is able to transform humanly pathetic situations with resurrection glory.

Jesus was soft and gentle time and time again with people, even “sinners” who he knew were living wrongly before God (take Zacchaeus, the woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, to name but a few). He was lovingly submissive to his Heavenly Father for his entire life, even to the point of death, when he submitted himself to the Roman authorities and allowed himself to be unfairly tried, horrifically beaten and executed on a cross.

Why on Earth should we copy him? Jesus says the meek are blessed, happy, fortunate. In the Book of Revelation, God promises us that he will one day recreate the Heavens and the Earth anew and that those who follow Jesus will have a place with him in it. Jesus was referring to this Renewal when he promised us that those who exhibit the quality of meekness will one day inherit the Earth. He himself came into a part of the inheritance of his submissive meekness when he rose again from the dead. The beatitudes are all about this “Great Reversal”, the topsy-turvy nature of the Kingdom of Heaven: If we lift ourselves up, God will bring us down; if we lower ourselves, God will lift us up.

For the great irony is that those who so un-meekly strive to dominate and possess the material things of this world will one day be robbed of even what little they really have, while those who out of humility submit themselves to Christ Jesus and consider all as loss compared with him will one day join him in the New Creation of Heaven and Earth. In this sense every Christian is someone who has to become meek and so will inherit the Earth. But, as again with the other beatitudes, the promise is not just one for a far-off time at the culmination of history but one which be fulfilled a billion times in miniature before that day comes. Just as we pray “thy Kingdom come on Earth as in Heaven”, there are instances of Heaven breaking into Earth here and now where we see the principle of the inheritance of the meek playing itself out.

Take for example Iris Ministries, a missionary organisation working in Mozambique. When their founders, Heidi and Rolland Baker, initially entered the country, the locals were extremely hostile to them and their white, Western religion. However, over time, as they witnessed the work they did and saw the fruit that it bore morally, socially and even economically, they were won over. Now the Mozambican Government actually GIVES Iris buildings to use as orphanages and development centers! The Bakers could have responded badly to the initial hostility they met with, Instead, they persisted in gently, humbly loving the people of Mozambique, in submission to them and to God. Through their meek and humble attitude, the Bakers have inherited portions of the Earth to use for God’s Kingdom.

So let us be meek. Let us be soft, gentle, humble and submissive in how we relate to God and how we relate to others, and take joy that such people will one day inherit the Earth.

For more information about NGO Iris Ministires, and to donate to them, please see www.irismin.org

Iris ministries is a missionary organization founded by Rolland and Heidi Baker in 1980, dedicated to revival in the Holy Spirit wherever the love and power of God are needed and appreciated, especially among the poor
 

9/11 and Me: How 9/11 Changed my Life

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I guess it’s become the defining moment of a generation. Where were you? people ask today on the 10th anniversary of 9/11

 I was in my bedroom, in Williamsburg, Virginia, in pjs, sipping tea, reading my Bible.  Roy who was about to enter his classroom at William and Mary to teach at 9.30, called me hurriedly on his mobile.  As he was about to enter, a Chinese colleague passed on the news in the corridor, “Palestinians have blown up the World Trade Centre.” “What?” I said, “I have to teach,” he said.
And so I logged on. The news unfolded: 2 planes, hijacked, had flown into the Twin Towers, another into the Pentagon, a fourth crashed. I walked over to visit my neighbour, a pilot. “Did the hijackers force the pilots to fly into the World Trade Centre?” “The terrorists flew the plane,” he said, disgusted. “No American pilot would fly into a building.”
The terrorists flew those planes into buildings. At the cost of their own certain deaths.
                            * * *
                                                                                                         Later that evening, I talked to my younger sister, the director of a Wall Street firm of venture capitalists. She was standing in her office, on her phone, and saw the second plane hit the World Trade Centre. She rushed out, in her heels, frantically trying to locate her husband who worked at Morgan Stanley on her mobile. They walked for hours through the streets of running, crying people, trying to get home to New Jersey. In Holmdel, the affluent commuter suburb in which they lived, many of their children’s classmates had lost parents that day. The school bus didn’t run. There would have been no one at home in too many cases. Parents had to come to school to collect their children.

                         * * *
·                                                                                 
The world changed. My world changed. Xenophobia was in the air. I am Indian. Suddenly, I seemed to be getting second looks, narrowed eyes, even in parks. I began to feel self-conscious. Did my sweet husband resemble an Islamic terrorist? Apparently, some thought so.
 
  
Williamsburg, 8 hours from New York used to be a polite place. Suddenly, it too was frayed, at least where foreigners were concerned. I absent-mindedly drove into the church parking lot, where the lines were being painted, not noticing the cones, the sort of thing that par for the course, for a dreamy woman like me.  The woman painting them swore at me. Rattled, shocked, I reversed rapidly, my new mini-van absurdly big, with poor visibility, driving over her freshly painted lines, driving into her pot of paint. She shook her fist and shrieked at me in rage.
I was so rattled.  After meeting with the pastor, Roy spoke to me in a loud, stressed voice in the lobby as we were leaving. The receptionist whom I’d never seen before was nervous, and asked us a rattled question. She offensively asked a worker we did know, “Who are they? Do you know them?” He smiled and whispered “Yes. I know them.”  Why would we not be okay?  Come on, all brown skinned people aren’t terrorists.                                                                           * * *
         
Our kids were young, 2 and 6, Roy worked intensely, and so to get away from the pressure, we used to go away on many weekends. To Virginia’s beautiful Eastern shore, Chincoteague, Assateague, Massanutten, Virginia Beach,  the Outer Banks, renting a beach house or mountain cabin, enjoying beach walks or mountain hikes.

Virginia was polite. Live and let live land.  Suddenly that changed.  We walked into a homey down-market restaurant in the Eastern Shore, where admittedly, there are few foreigners. Conversation stopped, everyone looked at us. I felt so self-conscious. Should Roy trim his fine terrorist beard? Gosh, but I am rather partial to beards. I could not imagine being married to a clean-shaven one. The beard stayed.

 Another time, when we were weekending in one of those small lily-white Virginian idyllic resorts, we ordered dinner at a restaurant. Our order was taken somewhat snootily.  Several people who came after us were served. The waitress seemed uninterested in explaining why. We got up and left, just as our order apparently was arriving.

I had lived in America for 14 years by then, and barely experienced racism. As I said, the world changed.
 * * *
We used to shop in an “Indian” grocery store, run by Afghans in Virginia Beach, 60 miles away, and chatted to the owners, got to know them. Good groceries, great sweets. When America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world unilaterally declared war on Afghanistan, among the most impoverished and resource-poor nation in the world, I got worried for them. I drove up to see if they were okay. We were relatively well-off, lived in a safe, gated community. They were not, did not. They were not there. Their shop was boarded up. No one seemed to know what had become of them.  
I began to think of the Jews in the thirties in Germany during the Third Reich. The smartest thing for them to do, of course, was to get out. Not all of them saw this, of course.  

We had been long eligible for citizenship; my husband was a tenured Professor. However, he preferred doing his research rather than applying for citizenship. We owned an expensive house. I insisted we get US citizenship just in case a wave of xenophobia became institutionalised, and we had to leave, losing our house. Memories of the Third Reich again.
                  * * *
And so we took the citizenship test, aced the written section, swotty us, failed one question in the interview. “Who had the right to declare war?” The President? I said. Nope, it was Congress. And they did. On Iraq. Despite Hussein’s repeated protests that he did not have weapons of mass destruction. The invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq struck me as profoundly unfair. I felt incoherently angry and upset about it.
I found myself at odds with my church culture, which showed American flags in the sanctuary and tearfully sung “America the Beautiful” in church. I led Beth Moore Bible studies in church in women’s groups, and the Person of Jesus studies for mixed groups. 

Williamsburg is military country, there are army, navy, air force and a famous CIA base (Camp Perry) there or nearby. A large percentage of Christians were in the military, and supportive of Bush’s actions. Politically, ethically, I began to find myself at odds with even American Christian culture, even with my mentor, an older, saintly, wise woman, whom I met with weekly, and loved and adored, but who, though clever, was a product of her time and age, a patriotic American.

A brilliant American Christian friend of mine once told me why she could not worship in sexist churches.” I would bit my tongue so much, I would get an ulcer,” she said. Yeah, I was biting my tongue so much, I was in ulcer territory.
·                                                                                            * * *
·          
I had just one mantra then. I have to leave America. I have to leave America. I had been very happy in Oxford as an undergraduate. I wanted to return. Roy said that British academic salaries were lower than American ones, and house prices higher. Dear reader, I did not care!!

And doors opened.  He won a prize for having written the best paper in his field in the last three years. He was invited as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar to the Manchester University, then spent a year at the Mathematical Institute at Oxford University on another grant, and then was offered a Chair at the University of Birmingham. They asked what his American salary was, and topped it up by ten percent. So there, Roy Mathias, I was right.
 
Sort of. Taxes are higher. Property prices are far higher, especially since I bought the house I fell in love with, a 1711 cottage with a little mother in law apartment in the garden and a acre and a half and an orchard, without really, really being able to afford it . Private schools offer SO much more than state schools  do; we put the girls in an academically selective one, where  they learn Mandarin Chinese, Greek, Latin, Philosophy.  I never needed to work in the US. Now, I had to. I am too much of a wild cat to work for someone else, and besides, I didn’t think I’d be paid enough for the school fees and part of the mortgage. 

So I founded a business, a publishing company, in which I worked for 4 years, setting my writing aside. Now however, I no longer work in it, it’s become too big and too complex, and I no longer have the firm grasp of each detail and every bit of minutiae which is necessary to run a small business successfully. Roy is no longer an academic, but runs the company.
As I said, 9/11 profoundly changed our lives in more ways than one.
                                                                                     * **
Decades and centuries later, people will look back on that surreal day, September 11, 2001. One man, Osama Bin Laden, declared war on the most powerful nation in the world. He hatched a scheme, never thought of before, meticulously planned and executed through years of preparation and training. 19 young men willingly went to their deaths, bringing down 3000 innocent men and women with them. It wasn’t as devastating as America’s atomic attacks on Japan, but those 19 lives did exact a staggering death toll.
And all for? Nothing! Two nations, not directly involved in 9/11 as far as I can tell, Afghanistan and Iraq have paid a dreadful price in human grief and misery, and suffered much economic, social and emotional devastation. Osama himself is dead, taken out by his rhyming nemesis, Obama. The world is a more suspicious place, billions spent on airport checks. It’s safe to say that the next terrorist attack will not happen in exactly the same way. But how will it happen? And where? The world is a less safe place.
·                                                                                     * * *
·          
I was praying together with a group of women this Friday. Someone mentioned 9/11 in her prayers. I thought to myself,”Come one, let’s keep this to things close to our hearts.” And then, I thought, “And isn’t it?”

And then, in that group of praying women in North Oxford, I asked myself, “Is there anyone I hate enough that I would fly American Airline Flight 11 into them at the probable cost of my own life?”

And I thought, “No. I hate no one.” And then a quizzical voice within me asked,”Is this really true, Anita. Do you really hate no one? Are you home free?”

Sigh. And then I remembered a couple of people I felt intense anger towards, enough to metaphorically fly American Airlines Flight 11 into them.
Oh dear!
* * *
It’s quiet at home these days. Irene, 12, was blissfully researching the Italian Renaissance for a school project yesterday. Zoe was reading Yeats for school. Roy was bonding with his laptop. So I locked the door, and lay down on my bed praying.

·   The anniversary of the triumph of irrational hatred, even at the cost of one’s own life, was drawing near.
I had to forgive.
I couldn’t.
I had to forgive.
But what happened to me was unfair, unjust. They were callous, uncaring.
                      * * *
There is one sure way I know to get myself over the forgiveness bridge. It was seriously praying for blessing on those people.

Praying for blessing? But you see, God, I want justice. I want you to take up my cause and punish them for what they have done to me.
Pray for blessing on them, and you will forgive. And you will be free, said an insistent voice.
                             * * *

Joseph, thrown into the pit by his brothers. Joseph, sold as a slave. Joseph, who rises to be the head of Potiphar’s house. Joseph, unjustly thrown into a dungeon. Joseph, who rises to be the head of Pharaoh’s administration. Who saves his family, including his beloved father and youngest brother.

He would have been an affluent shepherd, if not for the empty well. He would have run Potiphar’s household, if not for the dungeon. Now, he runs Egypt. He rescues his family.

God had always given him intimations of greatness. The sun and moon and 11 stars bowing to him. His brothers’ sheaves bowing to him. But the way God chose to change him from a shepherd to a prince was the way of pits, dragons and dungeons. The injustices he suffered were part of God’s plan for promotion.
He finally sees it was all God. It was part of God’s plan, God’s drama. His brothers were just bit players in it.

He turned his focus from his brothers to God. And then he was able to forgive his brothers, just bit players in God’s great plan.
·                              * * *

And so I did that. Turned my focus from those who had hurt me to God. Immense good had come to me on of the different paths I took because of the injustice I had suffered (something I have not written about yet) and the metaphorical pit I was thrown into. I was able to find my path in writing and my creative life. In business and my financial life. Was able to make real money to bless my family, and others. All because the path I had initially chosen, which I now see was not in God’s plan for me, was closed off to me by other people’s scheming, competitiveness, lies, injustice and insecurity.
I am not going to tell the story of the injustice I suffered here, because heck, this blog post is already far too long.
But stories need to be told. That is in their very nature. A story not told is like a light hidden under a bushel.
And so I will tell it, when my own wounds have totally healed and my words might bring light, rather than a sword, because using a sword is God’s prerogative, not mine, and he will use it.
                                                                                                      * * *

And I forgave. Again. And felt the familiar release of joy and creativity.  You see for me , forgiveness is intimately aligned with creativity. When I forgive, I feel joy, and creative ideas flow. When I do not, I feel blocked, creatively, and my joy is blocked.
         * * *
I have learnt another thing in my battles with forgiveness. It is two steps forward, one step backward. Two steps forward, one step backward. Slow, faltering, in zigzags.
So because I have forgiven them yesterday does not mean that the emotions of anger will not return. The sense of injustice. Of impotence and humiliation.
I have forgiven far greater wrongs that this one which is still raw. And I will forgive this. In time. With the grace of God which falls like rain on the rocky soil of our hard hearts.
Keep them soft, oh Lord. Deliver us from evil. Deliver us from all the Flights 77 and 11 which our enemies may fly into us. And, guard our hearts, oh Lord. May we never pilot them. 

When Poems are Handed to You Ready Made : The Mysteries of Inspiration

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I love “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” by Julia Ward Howe. It has a mysterious perfection: the rhythm, the evocative words, the allusions, the beautiful language create a loveliness  greater than the sum of its parts.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
(Chorus)
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
(Chorus)
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”
(Chorus)
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
(Chorus)
 In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
(Chorus)
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on.
(Chorus)
 On the night of November 18, 1861, Julia Ward Howe awoke with the words of the song in her mind and in near darkness wrote the verses to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” 

Of the writing of the lyrics, Howe remembers, “I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, ‘I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.’ So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.”
                                                      * * * 
Wow! To whom are these mysterious gifts of creativity handed out? 
Generally to those who have long trained themselves waiting for the angel. “If the angel comes, it will be because you have wooed him by your grim resolve to be always a beginner,” Rainer Maria Rilke muses. Rilke suffered for most of his life from torturing writers’ block. Beauty, images, art, ideas, poetry filled his mind; he was, however, unable to express them in poetry.
Rilke said that as he was walking, depressed, by the cliffs near Duino Castle, he heard a voice call out to him, “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?” which became his famous Duino Elegy,
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?
And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.

His writers’ block was broken, and The Duino Elegies flowed forth in a torrent.
                                                        * * *
Milton claimed that he was visited nightly by an angel or muse who dictated cantos of Paradise Lost to him. In the morning, his daughters found the blind poet, already up, neatly dressed, and waiting to be “milked” of his verses, which he dictated to them.
Milton however, at the age of 14, had decided to become one of the great poets in English. His goal: “To write something which the world would not willingly let die.” He spent his youth in arduous preparation, so much so that by the time he began writing Paradise Lost at the age of 50, he was blind (the result of the years from his early teens spent reading late into the night by candlelight); had an brain incomparably stocked with poetry and learning, but had written nothing substantial.
But the angel came, and he did indeed write something that the world would not willingly let die. 

My father had memorized the opening of Paradise Lost, and I remember the opening sentence with a thrill of pleasure. It’s so beautiful, so majestic, that reading it now, after some years, I almost cry with pleasure,
    
    Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
    Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
    Brought death into the world and all our woe,
    With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
    Restore us and regain the blissful seat,
    Sing, Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
    Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
    That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
    In the beginning how the heav’ns and earth
    Rose out of Chaos; or if Sion hill
   Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d
   Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
   Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song,
   That with no middle flight intends to soar
   Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues
   Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
   And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
    Before all temples th’ upright heart and pure,
  Instruct me, for thou know’st; thou from the first
  Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
   Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss
   And mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark
   Illumine, what is low raise and support,
    That to the highth of this great argument
   I may assert Eternal Providence
    And justify the ways of God to men.
Wow! What a long amazing sentence!
Paradise Lost comes, it comes as if dictated by an angel, but it comes to the blind poet who had spent his life preparing to write it. The Duino  Elegies were “overheard” by the poet who also spent a life of sacrifice in preparation.
Poetic inspiration comes suddenly, as if the unconsciously suddenly ripens, to those who had laboured long  and hard,
 for much of their lives to receive it.
                                                   * * *
In contrast is William Blake, an untaught visionary poet 
who was more in touch with Heaven than with our world.  At
 the age of four, the young artist “saw God” when God “put
 his head to the window.”
At the age of eight or ten in Peckham, Blake claimed to have seen “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” Do I believe him? Yes, as it happens.
“I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I 
lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly
 in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the region
 of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write
 from his dictate.” Blake wrote.
Blake writes “Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it 
is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides
 her golden Gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours;
 voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, & 
their forms more distinctly seen.”
  
It was while he lived in Felpham, Sussex, that Blake wrote
 the perfect Jerusalem.

The Martyr’s Memorial to Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer, St. Giles, Oxford

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This beautiful building celebrates the 16th century Oxford Martyrs, Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer. The Victorian Gothic building resembles the spire of a sunken cathedral, doesn’t it?
At this spot, the English Reformers, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, the great preacher and theologian of the English Reformation were burnt at the stake in the middle of cobble stoned Broad Street Oxford.
Cuthbert Bede (in his novel The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green) wrote,
“He who enters the city from the Woodstock Road, and rolls down the shady avenue of St Giles’, between St John’s College and the Taylor Buildings, and past the graceful Martyrs’ Memorial, will receive impressions such as probably no other city in the world could convey.” 
After the accession of Mary I, Cranmer boldly said, “… all the doctrine and religion, by our said sovereign lord king Edward VI is more pure and according to God’s word, than any that hath been used in England these thousand years.” Not surprisingly, the government regarded Cranmer’s declaration as tantamount to sedition. He was sent straight to the Tower to join Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, tried for treason, found guilty, and condemned to death.
Latimer famously comforted Ridley, “Be of good cheer, Master Ridley play the man. We shall this day by God’s grace light such a candle in England as shall never be put out.”
(Though I am quite content to live in 21st century Oxford, they did speak the most gorgeous English in Renaissance England, didn’t they?).
Cranmer was a serious reformer with a mild and peaceful and timid disposition. Imprisoned by Queen Mary, he signed various recantationa of his Protestant beliefs, stating his support of the Catholic Church. However, she, rightly, doubted that he really meant them.  He was told that he would be able to make a final recantation but this time in public during a service at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin. He wrote and submitted the speech in advance. At the pulpit on the day of his execution, he opened with a prayer and an exhortation to obey the king and queen, but he ended his sermon totally unexpectedly, deviating from the prepared script.
He renounced the recantations that he had written or signed with his own hand since his degradation and imprisonment, and stated that he would punish his right hand by burning it first.
He was pulled from the pulpit and taken to where Latimer and Ridley had been burnt.  As the flames drew around him, he fulfilled his promise by placing his right hand into the heart of the fire and his dying words were, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit… I see the heavens open and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.”
Interestingly, the same vision the first martyr Stephen saw! Men do not lie at their hour of their deaths, I believe. How wonderful to imagine Jesus standing in encouragement to receive them!!

Things are not what they seem (Thought for the Day)

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” There are many different reasons for the changes, upheavals, revolutions of history.  One of the biggest reasons is the prayers of the followers of the Lamb.  Things are not what they seem.”

Darrell Johnson’s book on Revelation.
On Pg 169 he continues

“It is just that in praying for Jesus Christ–the reigning Lamb–to fully establish His kingdom things start happening.  The kingdom breaks in, changing things, upsetting the status quo, unmasking idols, flushing out evil–and meeting resistance. (pg. 169)