Anita Mathias | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Christ, who is Sovereign over all, cries: ‘Mine!’

“What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects – with their Christianity latent.”
C. S.Lewis

Interestingly, that is the calling I have been hearing of late–“little books!”,

Abraham Kuyper, Dutch theologian and politician writes, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which, Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’ ”

Bono, ““If the truth sets us free and it does … Why aren’t Christian singers allowed to ring true?”

“We need more stories and songs that “tell the truth,” as Walker Percy wrote in Signposts in a Strange Land, especially about the human condition. True stories that transform lives and societies. More Uncle Tom’s Cabins and less “little books about Christianity.”

Read the whole of the thought-provoking post from which these thoughts were excerpted.

http://claphamgroup.com/featured/bono-asks-can-christian-artists-ring-true/

Possible Answers to Prayer

By Anita Mathias

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Possible Answers to Prayer

Your petitions – though they continue to bear
just the one signature – have been duly recorded.
Your anxieties – despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value – nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance – all but obscured beneath
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more
concspicuous resentment – is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes
recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you –

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passion.

Scott Cairns, Compass of Affection (Brewster Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2006), p. 91.

Read more: http://theconnexion.net/wp/?p=9324#ixzz1FpLaOtVL
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Time and Money

By Anita Mathias

A very pink Irene and I hiking in the Everglades National Park, Florida

“Time” and “Money.” Titles of two very successful US magazines. And two of most people’s biggest preoccupations.

And that’s not a bad thing, necessarily. I know people who have one –or even both–of these preoccupations removed from their lives–and they are NOT happier for it.

I have friends and relatives who have plenty of money, and so do not work. But are left with a lot of restless, undirected energy.

And worse, and almost unthinkable to me, I have acquaintances and relatives for whom time hangs heavy–who do not have anything pressing, compelling or interesting to do with their time. And who are consequently sad and lethargic.

Not having as much as we might wish of either time or money adds the adrenalin and slight stress to our days which makes them more interesting.
* * *

I really hate the axiom, “Time is money.” Not that I deny it. It’s true in the way the E.M. Forster says, “Yes, oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story.”

And time is partly for taking our five talents and making them ten, as in the Parable of the Talents.

Though the idea that “time is money” adds an element of stress and poison to it. Because time is for so much more than making or saving money. It is for us to love God. To love people. To enjoy nature. To enjoy ourselves. To be happy.
* * *

I discovered the time-money connection again today. Or maybe organization=money.

Somehow, in one of these sexist bastions that persist even in families who pride themselves in thinking for themselves– unconventionally when necessary–the assumption was made that the mother was genetically best suited for mending.

And so, when we moved in to our home almost 5 years ago, and Roy and the girls brought me shirts which needed buttons, or uniform which needed hemming, I pointed to the shower in our bedroom, in which there was a plastic crate, and said “Toss it there.” And so over 5 years, people have kept tossing clothes which needed seams or hems reinforced or buttons sown. As the pile grew and grew, it looked more and more daunting, like more than an hour’s work. I guess I procrastinated stopping everything to make that hour.
* * *

Yesterday, on our weekly home loving and odd job day, Friday I decide to deal with it.

I can say one thing in favour of massive procrastination: It immensely reduces your work load.

Irene was six when she started tossing things into the boxes in the shower. I find all sorts of cute girlie pink dresses. She is now a cool teen, who lives in her Gap skinny jeans, and Zara tops.

Okay, the dresses go into the Oxfam bag. Ethereal little Laura Ashley creations. Her once favourite dresses from Monsoon which have a trailing hem. Lots of bits of school uniform. We evidently had forgotten that they lived in the shower, and had bought more expensive school uniform. Ouch!

5 shirts of Roy’s. “Roy,” I say firmly, “Let’s sort this out once and for all. Women do not have a gene for sewing buttons. It’s not like child-rearing or breast-feeding. Your fingers are as competent as mine.”

“Don’t be mean,” he says plaintively. “You know I hate mending. I have so many more interesting things to do.” “Ditto. Ditto,” I say, firmly. And so he sews his own buttons on, and now has 5 additional shirts.

Wow!

And I, I discover at the bottom, clothes I had forgotten I ever owned. Three pairs of favourite cords which lost buttons at the period of stress/comfort eating/weight gain when we moved in here. They are mended, and fit me!! I also now own a refound cloth carry bag, a sweater, and a pj top. However, I had replaced them, forgetting they were in the shower, and now my drawers are bulgy again But that’s tomorrow’s problem, when I might again need to cut off my nose to make more room on my face, in Irene’s phrase.

So, we ask the cleaner to clean out the shower. “Does it work? ” he asks surprised. “Of course, it works,” we say. “We started chucking clothes to mend in there five years ago, and so have never used it. The expression on his face makes us laugh, and he laughs too.
* * *

Last time and money thought, and I think our lives would have been happier if had sorted this out earlier. Time is always more precious than money, because money spent can be earned again, and money earned can be used to buy time (by farming out whatever work can be farmed out, cleaning, housekeeping chores, gardening, business admin).

And I think the best use of time is to ask God what he wants you to do with it–and then go do that.

Is God in Everything? Hannah Whitall Smith. Quote for the Day

By Anita Mathias

Hannah Whitall Smith’s “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life.”

Chapter Twelve: “Is God in Everything?”

“All things work together for the good of them that love the Lord.”

I learned this lesson practically and experimentally long years before I knew the scriptural truth concerning it. I was attending a prayer-meeting, when a strange lady rose to speak, and I looked at her, wondering who she could be, little thinking she was to bring a message to my soul which would teach me a grand practical lesson. She said she had great difficulty in living the life of faith, on account of the second causes that seemed to her to control nearly everything that concerned her. Her perplexity became so great that at last she began to ask God to teach her the truth about it, whether He really was in everything or not.

After praying this for a few days, she had what she described as a vision. She thought she was in a perfectly dark place, and that there advanced toward her, from a distance, a body of light which gradually surrounded and enveloped her and everything around her. As it approached, a voice seemed to say, “This is the presence of God! This is the presence of God!” While surrounded with this presence, all the great and awful things in life seemed to pass before her—fighting armies, wicked men, raging beasts, storms and pestilences, sin and suffering of every kind. She shrank back at first in terror; but she soon saw that the presence of God so surrounded and enveloped herself and each one of these things that not a lion could reach out its paw, nor a bullet fly through the air, except as the presence of God moved out of the way to permit it. And she saw that if there were ever so thin a film, as it were, of this glorious Presence between herself and the most terrible violence, not a hair of her head could be ruffled, nor anything touch her, except as the Presence divided to let the evil through. Then all the small and annoying things of life passed before her; and equally she saw that there also she was so enveloped in this presence of God that not a cross look, nor a harsh word, nor petty trial of any kind could affect her, unless God’s encircling presence moved out of the way to let it.

Her difficulty vanished. Her question was answered forever. God was in everything; and to her henceforth there were no second causes. She saw that her life came to her, day by day and hour by hour, directly from the hand of God, let the agencies which should seem to control it be what they might. And never again had she found any difficulty in an abiding consent to His will and an unwavering trust in His care.

Glory in the heavens and on earth, words. Psalm 19. Blog Through the Bible Project

By Anita Mathias

Psalm 19

For the director of music. A psalm of David.

¹ The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

² Day after day they pour forth speech;
   night after night they reveal knowledge.
³ They have no speech, they use no words;
   no sound is heard from them.
⁴ Yet their voice^[b] goes out into all the earth,
   their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.
⁵ It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
   like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
⁶ It rises at one end of the heavens
   and makes its circuit to the other;
   nothing is deprived of its warmth.

Does your life feel flat? Do you find it hard to glimpse the glory of God.

What is glory anyway? The glory of God?

Be quiet and still at night, and look up at the heavens. At its infinity, spreading everywhere you look.

See its changing moods, white as I write. Sometimes a glorious blue, sometimes dappled with clouds, red in the morning, rose turning to vermilion in the evening, the most glorious sapphire in the night. Sometimes a Giotto-blue.

The moon, floating in the wide expanses. The silent, eternal stars. “Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis” as Pascal puts it.

The things God made speak of him without words in a way Francis of Assisi who is reputed to have said, “Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary use words,” would have approved of.

⁷ The law of the LORD is perfect,
   refreshing the soul.
The statutes of the LORD are trustworthy,
   making wise the simple.
⁸ The precepts of the LORD are right,
   giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the LORD are radiant,
   giving light to the eyes.
⁹ The fear of the LORD is pure,
   enduring forever.
The decrees of the LORD are firm,
   and all of them are righteous.

¹⁰ They are more precious than gold,
   than much pure gold;
they are sweeter than honey,
   than honey from the honeycomb.
¹¹ By them your servant is warned;
   in keeping them there is great reward.
¹² But who can discern their own errors?
   Forgive my hidden faults.
¹³ Keep your servant also from willful sins;
   may they not rule over me.
Then I will be blameless,
   innocent of great transgression.

¹⁴ May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart
be pleasing in your sight,
LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.

And now David moves to another glory of God: His revealed word. It refreshes the soul, makes wise the simple, brings joy to the heart, and helps one to see clearly.

As such, these words are more precious than much pure gold.

Wow. I come from a culture in which gold is treasured like, well, gold.

And the word of God is more precious than gold.

I have decided to make it more precious to me by increasing the time I spend with it. People who treasure gold and wealth–and the latter has some importance in my life–spend time earning it. So people who truly treasure God’s word as more precious than gold spend time with with it. As I have resolved to do.

It is also sweeter than honey. For much of my life, until the last few months really, I have been addicted to sweet things, chocolate in particular.

God’s word is sweeter than honey.

I am trying to remember to turn to God rather than to the blood sugar and energy rush of sugary things and chocolate when I need a spike in mood.

God’s word warns us of danger.

And there is great reward in obeying it. Reward from God who can more surely give us the best and surest rewards there are.

David asks forgiveness for his hidden faults, the sort of sins of which we may not be fully aware of at the time of commission, and for which we need a Nathan to announce to us, “You are the man.”

He also asks God to preserve him from wilful sins (as opposed to spur of the moment sin).

I love his concluding prayer,
   May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart
   be pleasing in your sight,
   LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.

Okay, so here’s my challenge to myself, and my dear readers (and I am so honoured that you are reading along).

Do we truly believe that God’s word is more precious than gold, sweeter than honey, and provides great rewards to those who keep it.

Then, let’s look at our schedules, and see where we can carve out time to spend more time with it.

Glory in the heavens and on earth, words. Psalm 19. Blog Through the Bible Project

By Anita Mathias

Glory in the heavens and on earth, words. Psalm 19

Psalm 19

For the director of music. A psalm of David.

¹ The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

² Day after day they pour forth speech;
   night after night they reveal knowledge.
³ They have no speech, they use no words;
   no sound is heard from them.
⁴ Yet their voice^b]”>[b] goes out into all the earth,
   their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.
⁵ It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
   like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
⁶ It rises at one end of the heavens
   and makes its circuit to the other;
   nothing is deprived of its warmth.

Does your life feel flat? Do you find it hard to glimpse the glory of God.

What is glory anyway? The glory of God?

Be quiet and still at night, and look up at the heavens. At its infinity, spreading everywhere you look.

¹⁴ May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart
be pleasing in your sight,
LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.

And now David moves to another glory of God: His revealed word. It refreshes the soul, makes wise the simple, brings joy to the heart, and helps one to see clearly.

As such, these words are more precious than much pure gold.

Wow. I come from a culture in which gold is treasured like, well, gold.

And the word of God is more precious than gold.

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Martin Luther: A Psychological Profile

By Anita Mathias

Martin Luther

Last night, Roy and I watched a PBS DVD on Martin Luther. Excellent.

I don’t know when we have last had to pause a documentary because we were laughing so hard. We found the comments of the scholars hilarious.

The documentary goes through Luther’s childhood with unloving, lower middle class, but ambitious upwardly mobile parents who wanted him to become a lawyer to fulfil their dreams for him.

Portrait of Martin Luther’s parents of Lucas Cranach

After a dramatic conversion, during a lightning storm, he commits his life to God. (Good move!) “My father raged and acted like a fool. How was he to know that one monk in the family would bring him more fame and shame than a thousand advocates.” Luther writes.

Luther then joins one of the strictest monastic orders in Europe, the Eremite Augustinians of Strict Observance.

Luther did whatever he did 110%. (That must be the secret of the people who accomplish several lifetimes’ work in one.)

And so he throws himself in a regimen of praying, fasting, confessions, whippings, watchings. He says, “If ever a man could be saved by monkery, it would have been I. If I had continued any longer, I would have killed myself” He later blamed his ascetic practices for permanently ruining his health.

He is disgusted by the worldliness, extravagance and cynicism, he sees on a trip to Rome as a young monk, and for the first time starts doubting Catholic teachings–in particular, the buying of indulgences to rescue a soul from purgatory.

The floodgates of doubt open. “Who knows if it is really so,” he wonders.
* * *

Excessive introspection and obsession with his own sinfulness was ruining his mental, spiritual and physical health. He heart-breakingly writes, “I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of him the jailor and hangman of my poor soul.”

Luther went to confession to his superior, Von Staupitz as many as twenty times a day, spending up to six hours a day on the practice. He wrote, “I was myself more than once driven to the very depths of despair so that I wished I had never been created. Love God? I hated him!”

Von Staupitz appointed the young monk Professor of Bible Studies in the new university of Wittenberg, hoping it would provide a distraction from Luther’s recurrent theological brooding and devastating introspection.

Johann Von Staupitz

Luther horrified declared that so much work would kill him. To which Von Staupitz replied, “Quite all right, God has plenty of work for clever men in heaven.”

Von Staupitz’s plan, modern scholars say, was that Luther would be so shattered that he would no more time for guilt and introspected, and would collapse and sleep soundly.

Work always operated on Luther as Prozac.

In this case, studying scripture shows Luther that the Catholic church taught much that simply wasn’t so.

* * *

He realized: This whole thing is not about you and the church. It’s about you and God.

Salvation is a gift from God, a gift received through faith. The church has no right to intervene or interfere.

To receive salvation, you simply put out your empty, open hands and receive this gift which God wants you to receive.

Once Luther realized that the spiritual life and salvation is a matter between God and the individual he said, “I felt myself to have been born again, and to have passed through open doors to heaven already.”

We all need to come to this realization, and when we come to it, there is a great revitalization of our spiritual lives, and fresh joy and peace.

The church should never take the place of Christ as the protagonist of the central drama of our spiritual lives. If/when it does, our faith is fair on the way to becoming toxic.

* * *

And so, in accessible language, Luther writes the 95 Theses, the blog posts of the day. He attacks the Church’s excesses, in particular, its greed in the sale of indulgences.

If he had attacked their theology, they may well have ignored him. But he got them where it hurt–he encouraged people not to give it their money.

Big business! A typical market day scene in Germany before the Reformation.

Big Business–The Catholic Church of Luther’s Day.

Rome, predictably, was infuriated.

“I never thought that such a story would rise from Rome over one little scrap of paper! ” Luther wrote.
* * *

For Martin Luther, the mounting fury of the Catholic church inspired not doubt and fear, but an extraordinary courage that would only grow stronger with every attack he faced.

He had the strong idea that if the Christian life was lived authentically, then you must expect to suffer.

Luther seized the criticism of him almost as a confirmation of his vocation as a reformer. The more the church tried to silence Luther, the more he became convinced that he had a vocation which needed to be seen through.

Despite the Papal Bull of excommunication, despite the fact that his life would be in danger if he fell into the hands of the Catholic Church, Luther continued with his attacks on it.

“I decided to believe freely and to slave to the authority of no one , whether council, university or pope. I was bound not only to assert the truth but to defend it with my blood and death,” he wrote.

He had an extraordinary combination of high idealism, resolve in the single-minded pursuit of an ideal, and naivete!!
* * *

Luther squared up to the church with a style of opposition it had never encountered before, a surprisingly modern style of opposition.

He discovered a new and powerful weapon on his side–the printing press. For movements to spead, their ideas needed to spread.

The printing press invented in Germany by Gutenberg 30 years before the birth of Luther was to Luther’s day what the internet is to our day. It meant that ideas could travel. They could not be stopped.

As the presses spread his 95 Theses throughout Germany, Luther watched and realized that they could provide him with a vast new audience.

He next wrote, “An Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” a devastating attack on the pope and the church.

“German money in violation of nature flies across the Alps.”

He attacked the number of secretaries the pope had provided by German tithes (a criticism which could be levelled at some of the princelings of our modern churches).

Luther wrote, “I was not trying to get praise and fame through my writings and little books for almost everyone I knew condemned my harsh and stinging tone.”
* * *

Alistair Macgrath—”He wrote very well, he wrote very wittily, he wrote very rudely. Many people found themselves fascinated with this man who would use such crude language when arguing with the Pope and with the church.

Luther says, “If Rome is not a brothel above all brothels one can imagine, then I do not know what brothel means.”

“The pope should stand up like the stinking sinner he is.”

“The pope should restrain himself and get his fingers out of the pie.”

The scholars on the programme comment “He’s savvy; he’s grown up among books and writing from a young age; he’s good at instinctively sensing what words and arguments will work best for whom.”

“He is an incredible writer. He uses earthy ordinary language; he’s just fun to read out loud; he’s sarcastic, he’s witty, he’s profound. If you get attacked by Luther, you are just torn up one side, and down the other.”

Luther next writes, “On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” an attack on Catholic sacraments. If you are going to build, you sometimes have to demolish and this was a work of considerable destructive harshnbess

Luther started something that snowballed throughout Germany.
* * *

Luther was summoned before the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V at the famous Diet of Worms. Cardinal Aleander, representing the Pope, showed Luther a pile of his books, and asked him if he wrote them, and was willing to recant. Interestingly, for he was just a human being after all, and one potentially facing death at the hands of an unjust institution, he asks for 24 hours to consider his response. Which is famous.

Luther at the Diet of Worms

“I do not accept the authority of Popes and councils for they have often erred and contradicted themselves. I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive only to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything for to go against my conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.”

One of history’s greatest declarations of exhausted defiance!!

Luther’s statement marks the dawn of a new era, the ordinary person standing up against authority.

It’s a grand moment when an individual ends up standing for something much larger than himself.

He fully expects that the Church will sentence him to death as a heretic, as it did the Czech reformer, Jan Hus (who also appeared at a Council under a guarantee of safe conduct). However, the vote is inconclusive. Luther is free, though his life is in danger from the Catholic church, which combined spiritual, administrative and judicial authority (a dangerous situation).

* * *

Wartburg Castle

Luther’s patron, Elector Friedrich the Wise now “kidnaps” Luther–using masked horseman– and spirits him away to Wartburg Castle, where he lives anonymously and quietly, hidden away from the world.

Going from the peaks of glory, attention and notoriety to anonymity and invisibility is a frequent Christian experience.

So Luther goes from the drama and intense experience, the elation and energy of the Diet of Worms to a solitary existence hidden in the Wartburg Castle. He regresses into depression, despair and anguish, introspection and melancholy, and had a strong sense that the devil was tormenting him.

And yet again, he snapped out of depression by using the Prozac which had worked in the past: Work.

He threw himself into one of his greatest enterprises yet–a translation of the Bible into German, thus making scripture accessible to the common man.
* * *

And while he was in the Wartburg, Germany’s Peasant Revolts commenced, sparked by Luther’s ideas and writings. Luther was horrified as he saw the destruction the reformation entailed. His ideas turned out to be more radical than he had realized.

Disappointly, he does not support the revolting peasants, but attacks them in vicious prose.

“I simply taught, preached and wrote God’s word. I opposed indulgences and papists, but never with force,” he wrote.
* * *

Concluding comments from the scholars on the program:

Luther’s story reminds us of the power of individual charisma, charisma which can travel on the written page.

Luther is an elementary force, embodied in language, offering a vision of salvation which is liberating, which resonates, which seems real to so many people. Once you see it that way, you can’t see the world differently.

Luther is irrepressible, he is outrageous, he is witty, and very funny.

He held onto his sense of rage, and his ear for a good phrase. He remained devoted to his principles, and to speaking out.

“When I die, I want to be a ghost, so that I continue to pester the bishops, priests and godless monks so that they can have more trouble with a dead Luther than they had before with a thousand living ones,” Luther wrote.

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Biblical Principles for Confrontation and Social Media. Matthew 18

By Anita Mathias

Matthew 18

¹⁵ “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you.
If they listen to you, you have won them over.
¹⁶ But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’
¹⁷ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

Jesus here spells out the process of confrontation. The Greek for brother or sister is adelphos, fellow disciple.

First, confront the individual directly. This is not something I am good at, but it is necessary for the heart–both for your heart, because feelings repressed fester, and for your sister’s heart, because she may be quite unaware of the offence she has caused.

The individual may see what she has done and repent.

If you are blown off, try again with witnesses.

Then try in the presence of church authorities.

If they refuse to change, ignore them.

This outlines the process of confrontation when a brother or sister–someone you are in relationship with–sins against you.

It is often misused by authoritarian or insecure leaders who are criticized. I have been asked myself by a church leader about a critical blog post I wrote about a church matter which affected many people, “Why didn’t you tell me directly?” His supporters asked, “Did you follow the principles of Matthew 18?”

I did not, because he was not my brother, nor was the issue a personal one. Because an individual would have been blown off. Because the perceived “sin” wasn’t against me, but against many. Because social media is the best way for those with little power to confront those with much power. Because a blog post read by 1500 people, most of whom agreed with it, is not as easily blown off as one woman’s remonstrations.

In the Christian controversy du jour, John Piper tweeted a dismissive, offensive and angry-making comment, “Farewell, Rob Bell,” linking to a review Justin Taylor rashly wrote of a book he had not yet read!!

Some people, somewhat preposterously, said Taylor and Piper should have spoken to Bell privately. If they knew Bell, this would have been the most respectful course, of course.

Taylor today links to a commonsensical post by Kevin DeYoung on the brouhaha.

It needs to be stated again that this is not a Matthew 18 issue. Jesus said, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone” (Matt. 18:15). Rob Bell has not sinned against Justin Taylor or John Piper. This is not a personal offense or an interpersonal squabble that should have been left in private. The general rule of thumb, supported by Matthew 18 and sanctified common sense, is we should not make a matter more public than it has to be. But by definition, YouTube videos and Vimeo clips and books and blogs are meant to be public. That’s the whole point. The Love Wins trailer was not a private email correspondence intercepted by the Reformed Gestapo. It was deliberately made public and can be commented on in public.

Public figures– church leaders, politicians, even authors of successful blogs– I believe, can be confronted publicly. The principles of Matthew 18 do not apply in these instances.

What do you think?

Psalm 19

For the director of music. A psalm of David.

Glory in the heavens and on earth, words. Psalm 19

Psalm 19

For the director of music. A psalm of David.

Matthew 18

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