Anita Mathias | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Images from a Magical Week at the Isle of Man

The Isle of Man is a perfect cross between the glories of Ireland and England. We loved it.

We crossed on the Ben my Chree, which has a dog lounge. Merry loved it.

Here is the Cashtel yn Ard stone circle, facing the ocean. The burial place of Neolithic chieftans in 1800BC (about 400 years before the Book of Genesis was written)

Cashtal yn Ard

Fabulous at sunset.

Merry at the entrance of a Neolithic burial chamber

The enclosures act, and the forced eviction of crofters in the Isle of Man as in the Scottish Highlands has led to many abandoned stone cottages all over the island

We camped out by Glen Willyn on a deserted spot of the Atlantic, Loved sleeping breakers crashing on the shore. Merry adored the beach.

Long walk up Glen Helen.

The islanders were so friendly and helpful. When we asked directions, a cheery helpful elderly gentleman invited us into his house to show us on his map…and then chased after us for we left our guidebook there. Roy said he was like Tolkein’s Tom Bombadil, totally at ease in his landscape.

Wandered around St. Patrick’s Isle, centre of Manx Christianity in the 6^th century, surviving the pagan Viking Invaders at the end of the eight century.

Enjoyed the miniature alpine gardens on the rocks.

Sunset at St. Patrick’s Isle

The famous four horned Manx sheep

A Celtic cross in honour of the dead in the first world war

The Fourteenth century chapel of St. Trinian’s

Truly magical Calf Sound, where calves were taken, wading through the water to be pastured, and then swum back at low tide for milking

There were magical sunsets.

The three-legged runner, emblem of the Isle of Man

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Images from a magical week at the Isle of Man–NEW post from @anitamathias1

At the End of Broken Dreams, an Open Door

By Anita Mathias

About 20 years ago, in Williamsburg, Virginia, we used to sing this in church, “At the end of broken dreams, an open door.”

I sung it because I liked the lyricism, but I had no interest in the open door at the end of broken dreams because then the dreams would have to be broken, right?

* * *

Well, well, well…

My daughters, choosing their own paths, ask me what my goals were when I was their age. I confess–with a wry smile–that my life barely resembles the dreams I had at 21.

Well, hello there, “failure.” Except the word has lost its sting. Sadness has given way to a shrug.

My life hasn’t worked out as I wanted…more dreaming than writing….though I perhaps have some good decades ahead of me.

And had a career worked out as I had wished, there would have been a lot more stress, busyness, pointless work, self-promotion, and exhaustion, and I would have reached middle age substantially more tired. And in worse health!

There are gains to all our losses—and some loss to all our gains.

The best thing we can do then is throw up our hands in acceptance and worship.

Failure. The beautiful thing about achieving failure is that we no longer fear it.

Failure is a re-direction. We have been whisked into a different plot.

* * *

The dreams of 20-30 years ago are not entirely “broken,” though they have morphed.

I wanted to write as beautifully as the writers I then idolised…Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, Annie Dillard, Laurie Lee; to write with that beautiful texture, almost music. Yeah, I’d still like to.

However, that kind of writing comes out of immersion in literature, and the way life has happened…I haven’t read enough.

I took four years out of reading and writing to establish a business. At the end of that four years, I faced my broken dreams. My fingers had got stiff. My writing felt like the flightless cormorant of the Galapagos– bland, music-less, poetry-less compared to what it had been just four years ago. The instinct had gone dormant. That intricate lace-like writing which had once won me a National Endowment of the Arts award of $20,000– I couldn’t do it any more. I had lost the knack.

Broken dreams.

Once the business no longer needed my involvement for my husband is now running it, I wondered what I was going to do, how I was going to wriggle back to writing.

And I did perhaps the only thing I really know how to do… I prayed.

* * *

And, four months in limbo, I heard God suggest blogging…

That sounds like a grand way of putting it, but it’s the only accurate way!

My readers when I started were my Facebook friends…but slowly through the miracle of Google and the web and social sharing, they grew. About 10,000 people read my blogs each month, unique monthly visitors Google calls them.

And, ironically, my blogs may touch more people’s hearts, spirits and lives than the exquisite, artful writing I wanted to create. They may influence people for good on a daily basis. May help shape the way people think and perceive; help shape spirits. Blogging has been an unexpected adventure, and an unexpected gift!

* * *

I want to write beautifully, of course I do, and I will keep trying to write well until I die. Keep practising.

But what I am primarily aiming for in blogging is not a lace-maker’s artistry.

I think instead of a leaf, a kite, a raptor, catching the wings of the wind, flying high and higher as the wind lifts it.

I think of recording what God whispers to my heart.

* * *

I am trying to write–if it’s not too grand a word–“prophetically.” I try to hear what God is saying to me, and write it down. Record what I am struggling with…and the answers I have discovered. Answers which may perhaps help someone else up to the next step of the ladder.

And that’s more satisfying, healing, and enriching for my mind, heart, soul, and body than writing the beautiful literary books I wanted to.

Blogging…the open door at the end of broken dreams.

Will I ever write the books I wanted to? I believe so, though they will be different, more products of Spirit than of blood, sweat, toil and tears.

And that’s all to the good, isn’t it?

* * *
Anyway, it’s become second nature now, when I face the rubble of broken dreams, things not turning out as I had expected, to ask, “So what’s the plot, Lord? Where’s the open door in this rubble? Show me the road I am to take.”

You come to a dead end, and there is hope in the deadness. For nothing in this world truly dies; dead seeds reappear as sheaves of wheat. Every death has some resurrection in it.

This world whispers of infinity. Pi has been computed to 10 trillion digits. 10 trillion of an infinite number of digits? Is that success or failure? It’s interwoven. There’s some failure in our bright successes, and our failures have ironic gains and golden lessons.

* * *

There are no dead ends. The door which seems closed whispers of windows.

And that window swings open….and you see the stars.

Tweetables

For nothing in this world truly dies; dead seeds reappear as sheaves of wheat. From @AnitaMathias1

The best thing then that we can do is throw up our hands in acceptance and worship. From @AnitaMathias1

The beautiful thing about achieving failure is that we no longer fear it. From @AnitaMathias1

Failure is a re-direction. We have been whisked into a different plot. From @AnitaMathias1

Every death has some resurrection in it. From “At the end of broken dreams, an open door.”

On Liturgy (which I Dislike)

By Anita Mathias

I was interested to hear the leader on my silent retreat say that different approaches to prayer or the spiritual life are like food. Different people like different things.

Such a simple way of expressing a new thought for me. (I had a mental gradation of superior and less-evolved spiritual practices.)

* * *

I intensely dislike liturgy. It triggers memories of the boredom-that –made-me-long-to-scream during the Catholic masses of my childhood; the continual looking at my watch; each part, the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Sanctus, the Agnus Dei , being accompanied with precise mental calculations of the number of minutes left before I left church and walked into fresh-aired rosy dawn.

* * *

For me, liturgy is noise and distraction—more noise and distraction in an already noisy, distracting world. I don’t see the point of repetitively reading out words other men and women have written; (I guess liturgy was written by men.)

I would rather express a halting, impoverished sentiment of my own than a fluent, winged thought someone else has penned. Because that emerged from his heart, not mine. Better a heart-felt stutter than lyricism recited from a printed page.

Also, though I think fast, and talk fast and write fast, and sometimes read fast– I am slow spiritually.

The liturgy has raced on and covered paragraphs while I am still meditating on the first sentence, and applying the airy words and ideas to my own earthbound life. Only connecting.

Nah, not for me.

* * *

It has its uses though. I’ve read that the liturgy was composed to provide a way for men and women who were barely literate to rehearse the bases of the faith in every communal encounter with God, and remind the heart of 360 degrees of truth.

And when my heart is bored, sullen, lumpen, or distracted, stray phrases from the liturgy does awaken and tune it. It expands the emotional range of my heart. Reminds it of things it would not have thought of, and rouses slumbering things in it.

And some liturgies are beautiful. I loved the sung liturgy of the Northumbria community. Yeah, sung liturgy is certainly more bearable. Like Gregorian chant. Or Celtic liturgies.

* * *

However, there are people who love liturgy. I have been in small groups with people who wanted to read out pages and pages of Compline. Oh Lord, have mercy on this poor restless woman’s soul. And it’s rude to whip out your iPhone during small group liturgy. Oh yes, it is!

I used to think that the liturgy was for those at a less advanced stage of the spiritual life. Who needed Cyrano de Bergerac to write their love poetry for them.

But no, I realized each heart is tuned in different ways. Different strokes for different folks. Some like turnips; some like chocolate. Me, I love Green and Black’s Chocolate.

And that must explain why something I find so exasperating speaks to other people. Who even love it.

But liturgy or heart-grunts, either way, oh Lord, tune my heart to sing thy praise.

Question

So do you like liturgy? Which spiritual disciplines work for you? And which do not?

The Only Form of Multitasking that makes you Cleverer

By Anita Mathias

My daughter Irene returned from a talk by neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield informing us that multitasking decreases fluid IQ more than smoking marijuana, or losing a night’s sleep does.

My daughter, as intense as I am, walks around the house with her iPad, watching documentaries or TED talks or AsapScience (when she isn’t reading or studying.) Or sometimes—okay, mum, get real–lighter, less relentlessly educational stuff; she is a teenager, after all.

I keep telling her to do one thing at a time. Whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your might.

Delighted to have Baroness Susan Greenfield’s backing, I advised Irene to use the mundane things of life, waiting for food to reheat in the microwave, waiting for the kettle or the eggs to boil, as pathways into prayer. To ask for God’s wisdom and blessing on the next task, on how to do it best. To do a mid-day course correction if necessary. Repent. Ask God’s blessing, wisdom and guidance on the dreams and visions for which she is striving. Ask him for the big picture blue sky visions for her life, for guidance on her life’s work and for the path she is to tread which will be the precise intersection between her deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger. Thank God for his goodness. Breathe.

She said, “Mum, but praying through the day is multitasking too.”

I guess so. And it’s the only form of multitasking that’s scripturally advised: “Pray continually.”

You tap into the vast resources of a brain greater than yours. And somehow, that great kind brain comes to help you with ideas, wisdom and sometimes concrete external interventions, changing your circumstances from the outside, changing you from within.

And I guess prayer is the only multitasking that makes you cleverer.

Grazie Signore! “Thank you, Lord, for those who have greater gifts.”

By Anita Mathias

In his excellent The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning mentions the limited Antonio Salieri, court composer to the Holy Roman Emperor, who was conscientious, devout, and wildly jealous of the wildly gifted Mozart who–neither conscientious, nor devout–tossed off sublime music in the interludes of a life of “wine, women and song, and he didn’t sing much.”

Nevertheless, at the end of each piece of limited, uninspired music, Salieri added a postscript, “Grazie Signore.” Thank you, Lord.

Manning continues,“Grazie Signore, for other people who have greater gifts than mine.”

And that was a prayer I had never thought of praying.

* * *

Those of us brought up by restless parents with unfulfilled ambitions—and I guess that’s many of us!!—have, from childhood, absorbed ambition and striven to be the best, to win the prize, the first prize, if there are two.

An Oxford undergraduate recently told me that at school, she had to be the thinnest, the cleverest, the best in every field she was interested in, and there were many. At Oxford, however, faced with myriad people just like her, this drive made her ricochet between anorexia and bulimia. And exhaustion. Always exhaustion.

Oh, I know all about burnout and exhaustion (though not about slenderness!)

“If you do one good deed, your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one,” C. S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy. Since success elevates us to a vaster ocean, this drive to be the best will inevitably burn us out and exhaust us, diminishing potential achievement.

And worse, should God ever grant a foolish Salieriesque desire to be the best, some interest and challenge would leach away from our world. It is a blessing I take for granted—that in my social circles, professional circles and online circles, I continually encounter those who are more intellectually gifted, creatively gifted, spiritually gifted, and better read. Always someone to learn from.

We all take that blessing for granted. Even the greatest living scripture expositor, speaker, scholar, writer, prophet or mystic still has much to learn…from the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us, leaving silvery snail trails to inspire…

So that’s it for envy—an occupational hazard of writers, according to Bonnie Friedman in her Writing Past Dark. Let me shed it with unforgiveness, and other cancers of the mind.

Grazie Signore, I resolve to inwardly rejoice whenever I read a writer or a blogger quite obviously better than I am.

Grazie Signore, for all those who write with the pen of angels, for they fill the world with exquisite language.

Grazie Signore, for original thinkers who make me too think.

Grazie Signore for the well-stocked mind of scholars.

Grazie Signore for all those who garden better than I, for in meandering around their gardens, I learn.

Grazie Signore for those read your word more deeply than I do, for they show me new things in it.

Grazie Signore, for those who encounter you more deeply than I do, who see your face more clearly, hear your voice more distinctly, for I learn more about you from them.

Grazie Signore, for those who are spiritually gifted, the speakers who revive my flagging spiritual fervour; the prophets who can tune into your thoughts; the mystics who can see your face and feel your heartbeat.

Grazie Signore, for the world so rich, so full of gifts, which you pour freely on all men and women.

Tweetable

Brennan Manning’s prayer: Grazie Signore, thank you, Lord, for those who have greater gifts.

Wriggling towards Shalom

By Anita Mathias

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).

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