Anita Mathias | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Goodbye to Everest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everest in a vision once I saw.

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Choosing Happiness Today

By Anita Mathias

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

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

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

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

For the secret seeds of happiness are found within ourselves.

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

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

But the dead know nothing;

they have no further reward,

and even their name is forgotten.

Their love, their hate

and their jealousy have long since vanished;

never again will they have a part

in anything that happens under the sun.

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

* *

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

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

* * *

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

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

I love this George Herbert’s poem “Gratefulnesse”

Thou that hast giv’n so much to me,

Give one thing more, a gratefull heart

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

* * *

Tweetables

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

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

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

One Work Goal for 2105: Focus

By Anita Mathias

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was sad.

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

* * *

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

And that is my work goal for 2015: Focus

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

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

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

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

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

By Anita Mathias

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

On Nourishment for the Soul

By Anita Mathias

Sunset, Calf Sound, Isle of Man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But alignment with God, most of all.

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

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

By Anita Mathias

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