Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Why do I Blog? Reflections and Resolutions.

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Okay, over the last perhaps 2-3 weeks, blogging has almost become an addiction. It took my daughters to point that out to me.

It took me work to be addiction-free (of coffee, chocolate, tea, internet addictions etc.) so I am certainly not going to allow myself to slip into another addiction. Because addictions separate you from what is really going on in your soul, they lull you.

So today, I had a serious conversation with God about my blogging. To summarize,

1) I felt God told me to take up blogging during a long walk on the beach at Royan, France on April 10th, 2010. We were enroute to Calais from Bordeaux, had promised Irene we would stop in at one more beach before we left–and believe it or not, took a 50 mile detour to the closest beach after we promised that–which was Royan.

I felt God blessed my promise-keeping because during that late night walk on the beach, he spoke, and kept speaking through that night. Lots of ideas and directives about my writing.

And one was to take up blogging.  

I had written a handful of blog posts before that, but couldn’t make myself stick to it. Now, I monetized my blog (as you will notice!!) and the little something everyday that I get from Google and ebuzzing reduces some blog-guilt I feel.

So on April 11th I took up blogging.

2a ) Blogging and my spiritual life. 
Blogging actually does wonders for my spiritual life. For starters, it keeps me in touch with it. When I am walking with Christ, and experiencing the river of the Holy Spirit, I have lots of ideas and insights. I could sit down and write six posts at a time (but do not!!)

On the rar-ish occasions when I am in a “What to Write?” mode, I say, “Anita, what’s up with your soul? What’s up with your friendship with Jesus? Has he really said nothing to you all day, taught you nothing?”

Then I know I need to slow down, find out what the impediment might be (frequently sin is the log-jam, but it could also be distraction), remove it, read Scripture, pray, listen to worship music,  get back into the force-field, the waterfall of God’s presence and goodness. 

When I am “running” from a one-on-one confrontation with God, largely because he may ask me to give up an idol, to revise my life, or repent of something I don’t want to repent of right now, I have an early warning system. No ideas for blog posts  which are really close to my heart, or meaty come to me .

2b) Blogging helps me verbalize things. I sometimes discern and apprehend spiritual things wordlessly, as a sense in my spirit. I remember them longer, and they make more of an impression on me if I write them down. And in the process of writing, I think about them, and get new ideas and insight, so that a stray idea is now a full-fledged blog-post/essay.

3 Okay, granted, but why put them on the web?

Because I hope these ideas might be a blessing to other people. Because it is my nature and my calling to communicate my ideas through the medium of writing.

4) Sigh. This takes me to the next subject. If I am writing to be a blessing to people, then I need to find readers.
How? There are two ways of doing this, as there are two ways of doing life. Chariots and horses or the nuclear option

So I need both. I need to pray for God’s blessing on my blog. And I need to do a little every day to increase readership (but not so much that it will encroach on my writing time.)

5) I need to limit my blogging. I am blogging through the Bible, which is a post or two a day, and I also aim to write a general post, on something of interest to Christians. 

So I have set a limit of 1 Scripture post, and 1 general post. What if I have ideas for 5 posts? Well, if they are short posts, and I have the time, I will add an additional one. If not, I will make a note of it, and save it for a desert day.

If I come across stray tidbits in my reading to inspire or amuse, I will post them. 

Wisdom Calls Out, Proverbs 1: 20:23. Day 8, Jan 8

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Wisdom Calls Out

Proverbs 1 20-23


 20 Out in the open, wisdom calls aloud, 
   she raises her voice in the public square; 
21 on top of the wall she cries out, 
   at the city gate she makes her speech:

 22 “How long will you who are simple love your simple ways?
   How long will mockers delight in mockery
   and fools hate knowledge?
23 Repent at my rebuke!
   Then I will pour out my thoughts to you,
   I will make known to you my teachings. 

How long will mockers delight in mockery?
1 Blessed is the one
   who does not sit in the company of mockers
so begins Psalm 1. 
I tend to think that God despises mockery because is it is the opposite of his nature. He is straight-forward, he says what he thinks, and says it straight.
Mockery says what you do not believe, as when Pilate jests to the King of Kings who stands before him  brutalized, bleeding, degraded and dehumanized  “So you are a King?”
There is something a bit evil about it. Is it a refuge of cowards? Or of the stupid and inarticulate who cannot find the right words to express their emotion. I know that when I am so angry that words fail me (!!!) I resort to mockery. 
Irony, satire and allegory are powerful weapons in the writer’s arsenal, so I need to think this out thoroughly. 
 Repent at my rebuke!
   Then I will pour out my thoughts to you,
   I will make known to you my teachings. 

As repentance is a pathway into the Kingdom of God, it is a pathway into wisdom and knowledge. 
God holds mockers in disdain, and will not reveal his thoughts and teachings to them. Repentance, ongoing daily repentance opens the door to knowing God’s thoughts and teachings. 

A Great Light, Matthew 4, Day 8, Jan 8, Read Through the Bible Project

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THE PEOPLE WALKING IN DARKNESS HAVE SEEN A GREAT LIGHT!

 12 When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he withdrew to Galilee.
This is one of the things which has stood out for me in this Gospel. Prudence.

 Somehow, I always thought that fear is the opposite of faith, that fear is from Satan. 
However, God gave us minds to use them, gave us commonsense to use it. 
If Jesus continued preaching the same message as John in this highly charged and dangerous environment, he would, very likely, join John in prison. But his ministry had just begun. He still had to train his disciples, and preach the good news to the poor. 
And so he quietly leaves.

13 Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali— 14 to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah:
 15 “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,
   the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan,
   Galilee of the Gentiles—
16 the people living in darkness
   have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death
   a light has dawned.”

Wonderful words, “The people living in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.”

How is Jesus a great light to me?
* Well, he quite literally often tells me what to do. 
* When I am sad, I remember he loves me.
* I know my life is in his hands, and he can work out all things for good.
* When sad, unjust, unfair things happen, in times of reverses or financial loss, I know my affairs are in his hands, and he can bring good out of these things.
* I can trust my children and husband into his hands.
* I can trust my health, and my house when I travel into his hands.
* He gives me ideas when I have none.
* He gives me direction. 
* Oh, there is so much wisdom in his words. He teaches me how to live my life. 
* I can talk to him during sleepless nights.
* Talking to him calms me down when I am agitated. 
* I love him, and that brings much light into my life. 

17 From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

The first thing Jesus said publicly. 
Repent. Don’t remain stuck in your rut. Search your hearts. Change your life. 
 18 As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 19 “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” 20 At once they left their nets and followed him.

AT ONCE. That is the operative word. Don’t wait too long for Gideon’s fleeces, and “wise” counsel, and the right time and hearing clearly and the children’s education, and paying off the mortgage. You will get distracted. You will think better of it. Your feet will grow cold. 
When you hear him call, “at once” leave your nets, and follow him. 

If fishermen follow him, they become fishers of men. THE WILL OF GOD ALWAYS LEADS YOU TO A BIGGER PLACE. A larger space. A more spacious place. In the words of Jabez, following Christ always leads to him blessing you indeed and keeping his hands upon you, and often leads to him enlarging your territory and keeping you free from pain.

 21 Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets. Jesus called them, 22 and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.
Immediately. One of the great enemies of spiritual growth is procrastination. Obey God when you hear him speak. Otherwise, you will soon be uncertain if what you hear is God’s voice or not. 
 23 Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. 
So this is how Jesus inaugurated his ministry, teaching, proclaiming, and healing every disease and sickness. Our family, in particular Roy and I, but really all of us, through the grace and goodness of God, enjoy robust health, and are not often sick. So I guess I have been less interested in the healing ministry. But it is real, so real, and I have both experienced things leave when I am prayed for, sometimes permanently, and have experienced backaches, emotional pain, colds and coughs leave when I have prayed for other people. 
I think I will do more praying for the sick. If that was what Jesus chose as an integral part of his inaugural ministry, then….


24 News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them.
And here are two reasons  for a healing ministry–it draws people who will listen to your teaching and proclaiming ministry, and it offers precious and tangible relief and blessing to those suffering severe pain.

25 Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him.
The fruits of a healing ministry.
So Jesus was the most popular preacher is Israel, right? The people loved him, right? He healed the sick, he only did good, right?
They would never allow their leaders to crucify him, right? 
Wrong.

Crowds and popularity need to be taken with a grain of salt. They come quickly. They can vanish quickly.
In seasons of popularity, praise and approbation, it is more important than ever to remain grounded in God, because all this can vanish rapidly. We are reminded of how Jesus handled praise. John 2:24  But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all people. 25 He did not need any testimony about mankind, for he knew what was in each person. 

The Bird I would most like to See: A Puffin

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Atlantic Puffin

A Puffin. That’s the wild bird I most want to see.

Last year, I saw a penguins in the wild, in New Zealand, which I never expected to–indigo penguins, yellow-eyed penguins, and crested penguins. I also saw an albatross, which I never expected to.
Next on my hit-list is a puffin.
Where should I see them?

Wisdom Calls Out, Proverbs 1: 20:23. Day 8, Jan 8

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Wisdom Calls Out

Proverbs 1 20-23


 20 Out in the open, wisdom calls aloud, 
   she raises her voice in the public square; 
21 on top of the wall she cries out, 
   at the city gate she makes her speech:

 22 “How long will you who are simple love your simple ways?
   How long will mockers delight in mockery
   and fools hate knowledge?
23 Repent at my rebuke!
   Then I will pour out my thoughts to you,
   I will make known to you my teachings. 

How long will mockers delight in mockery?
1 Blessed is the one
   who does not sit in the company of mockers
so begins Psalm 1. 
I tend to think that God despises mockery because is it is the opposite of his nature. He is straight-forward, he says what he thinks, and says it straight.
Mockery says what you do not believe, as when Pilate jests to the King of Kings who stands before him  brutalized, bleeding, degraded and dehumanized  “So you are a King?”
There is something a bit evil about it. Is it a refuge of cowards? Or of the stupid and inarticulate who cannot find the right words to express their emotion. I know that when I am so angry that words fail me (!!!) I resort to mockery. 
Irony, satire and allegory are powerful weapons in the writer’s arsenal, so I need to think this out thoroughly. 
 Repent at my rebuke!
   Then I will pour out my thoughts to you,
   I will make known to you my teachings. 

As repentance is a pathway into the Kingdom of God, it is a pathway into wisdom and knowledge. 
God holds mockers in disdain, and will not reveal his thoughts and teachings to them. Repentance, ongoing daily repentance opens the door to knowing God’s thoughts and teachings. 

How to get more Readers for your blog

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Thank you, Seth Godin

How to get traffic for your blog

  1. Use lists.
  2. Be topical… write posts that need to be read right now.
  3. Learn enough to become the expert in your field.
  4. Break news.
  5. Be timeless… write posts that will be readable in a year.
  6. Be among the first with a great blog on your topic, then encourage others to blog on the same topic.
  7. Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you.
  8. Announce news.
  9. Write short, pithy posts.
  10. Encourage your readers to help you manipulate the technorati top blog list.
  11. Don’t write about your cat, your boyfriend or your kids.
  12. Write long, definitive posts.
  13. Write about your kids.
  14. Be snarky. Write nearly libelous things about fellow bloggers, daring them to respond (with links back to you) on their blog.
  15. Be sycophantic. Share linklove and expect some back.
  16. Include polls, meters and other eye candy.
  17. Tag your posts. Use del.ico.us.
  18. Coin a term or two.
  19. Do email interviews with the well-known.
  20. Answer your email.
  21. Use photos. Salacious ones are best.
  22. Be anonymous.
  23. Encourage your readers to digg your posts. (and to use furl and reddit).Do it with every post.
  24. Post your photos on flickr.
  25. Encourage your readers to subscribe by RSS.
  26. Start at the beginning and take your readers through a months-long education.
  27. Include comments so your blog becomes a virtual water cooler that feeds itself.
  28. Assume that every day is the beginning, because you always have new readers.
  29. Highlight your best posts on your Squidoo lens.
  30. Point to useful but little-known resources.
  31. Write about stuff that appeals to the majority of current blog readers–like gadgets and web 2.0.
  32. Write about Google.
  33. Have relevant ads that are even better than your content.
  34. Don’t include comments, people will cross post their responses.
  35. Write posts that each include dozens of trackbacks to dozens of blog posts so that people will notice you.
  36. Run no ads.
  37. Keep tweaking your template to make it include every conceivable bell or whistle.
  38. Write about blogging.
  39. Digest the good ideas of other people, all day, every day.
  40. Invent a whole new kind of art or interaction.
  41. Post on weekdays, because there are more readers.
  42. Write about a never-ending parade of different topics so you don’t bore your readers.
  43. Post on weekends, because there are fewer new posts.
  44. Don’t interrupt your writing with a lot of links.
  45. Dress your blog (fonts and design) as well as you would dress yourself for a meeting with a stranger.
  46. Edit yourself. Ruthlessly.
  47. Don’t promote yourself and your business or your books or your projects at the expense of the reader’s attention.
  48. Be patient.
  49. Give credit to those that inspired, it makes your writing more useful.
  50. Ping technorati. Or have someone smarter than me tell you how to do it automatically.
  51. Write about only one thing, in ever-deepening detail, so you become definitive.
  52. Write in English.
  53. Better, write in Chinese.
  54. Write about obscure stuff that appeals to an obsessed minority.
  55. Don’t be boring.
  56. Write stuff that people want to read and share.

Wikio

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Jules et Jim by Francois Truffaut

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Jules et Jim by Francois Truffaut

Jules et Jim


A bitter-sweet film directed by Francois Truffaut based on an autobiographical novel by Henri-Pierre Roche. 


Two sweet spirited friends, a German, Jules and a Frenchman Jim become inseparable friends, sharing everything in common.


They meet a woman who embodies their shared fantasies. Jules marries Catherine, though Jim too loves her.


The marriage does not work. Catherine flirts with Jim, gets pregnant by him, while they both still live in Jules’ house. And so the cycle continues, she summons him, sends him back, summons him again.


He takes up with the woman who has faithfully loved him and waited for him for 20 years, experiencing some settled domestic happiness.


A man who resists and discards her is too much for Catherine to swallow. Her power lay in enchanting people, and dangling them like puppets on a string. 


Her life anyway lacks strong purpose or joy. She invites Jules on a joy-ride into the Seine–where they drown!


Jules, at the crematorium experiences a surge of relief.


The film is sensitively done with narration and voice-overs from the book.


Because of the unusual sweetness of spirit of the protagonists, it has a child-like wistfulness and gaiety to it.
* * * 


And here’s an account of the book on which the film was based


Jules and Jim

Jules and Jim
An Amorous Cyclone
Sex, art, and romance — some notes on the sources of Truffaut’s famous film
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Daria Galateria

Trans. A. K. Bierman

It is 1935. (Theodore) Adorno writes to Walter Benjamin, “With regard to your remark on fashion, the concept of the changeant (the changeable), of iridescent material, came to mind, surely tied to industrial practices. Perhaps you will dig into this problem.” Adorno urges Benjamin on, referring him to articles by Helen Hessel in theFrankfurter Zeitung, “whom we always follow with great interest.”
Helen Hessel is the woman in Jules and Jim, the 1953 novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, and of Truffaut’s 1956 film. “I am the girl who leaped into the Seine out of spite, who married his dear, generous Jules, and who, yes, shot Jim,” confesses Helen, after having attended, incognito, the film’s premiere.
She, with her mantle of blond hair often dangling like a helmet’s crest on a soldier’s coarse coat, is more athletic than the two other protagonists of this delicate, passionate triangle. Even if Roche once boxed in the ring with Braque, he was a tall, slim dandy, with “something languid about him.” Franz Hessel, the son of Jewish bankers, is small and rotund. He meets Roche in Montparnasse in 1906 and they became inseparable. One evening when Franz is describing the women in Munich to his friend, he excitedly sketches their profile on a small coffee table. Roche wanted to buy the table. He will, in fact, concentrate on art and earn a living as an art consultant to opulent collectors such as the astonishing Raj of Indor.
Jules and JimWhen the painter Marie Laurenen illustrates Hessel’s poetry, Roche edges into their intimacy; the two friends share women without rivalry. But when Hessel meets Helen Grund, a painter of Prussian origins, Franz advises Roche, “Not this one.”
World War I disperses the trio. But at the end of the conflict, Roche rushes to Helen and Franz, who have been married and live in a forest near Munich. Roche and Franz kiss each other on the mouth and immediately pick up their pre-war conversations; Helen is slightly embarrassed, which is the prelude to passion. The unusual knit of love and friendship prospers. Roche confides this story with meticulous shamelessness to his Notebooks during 1920-21, which will be immortalized in Jules and Jim.
The diary is Roche’s literary monument; he records his encounters, especially the amorous ones, from the first up to mid-century — all the copulations, told with endless wonder for the pleasure and gratitude for the inimitable women. From the first love for two English sisters — which will become the novel Two English Women and the Continent — to the period of relative normality when three substantial stories form the stable background of new incursions, Roche draws out the enigma of his buoyant and eternal availability on the superb pages of 346 notebooks.
On a New Year’s eve with the director Abel Gance, the writer (Blaise) Cendrars, who was left with but one arm after the war, engaged him in a tennis game with a blue ball; then under the shooting stars, invited him to dance; Roche is ready. He never refused anything. He writes with amiable impartiality about James Joyce, Picasso, Duchamp, Satie, Matisse, Picabia, Leger, Colette, and Truffaut, who met Roche when the latter was seventy-eight, and noted his pliant passion for the sweet life. Roche knew everybody and introduced everyone to everybody, according to Gertrude Stein. Roche is engaging, raged Picasso, but he’s only a translation.
The secretary Truffaut hired to transcribe the diary quit, scandalized by that sweet polygamy, which she thought was simply cruelty.
Jules and JimMeanwhile, Roche wants to stabilize his passion for Helen: he wants a child and a book from her. He wants Helen to write a diary; he wants a love described for the first time from two viewpoints. Helen’s Diary is a marvel of harshness, violent, a profusion of senses. Roche addresses the principles of amorous gestures, Helen the heat. “I clearly felt the margins of my heart,” she writes. In pain after discovering that Roche had just possessed her sister, Helen notes the need “to touch something I love with my finger. The letters of Rilke,” whom she knew. Then Roche violates her, and love is rekindled. To read both diaries together is a revelation, like the 1933 love stories by Leautaud and Marie Dormoy, orderly divided between bookkeeping and the maudlin.
In 1955, Francois Truffaut discovered Jules and Jim among a stall’s used books, and noticed that it was the first novel of a seventy-year-old. He understood that the lightness and grace of that burning story could have come only after a very long decanting, one that went on for half a century, and from the magic of the “telegraphic style of a poet who forgot his culture and lined up the words like a laconic, stolid peasant,” from whence the serial, limpid rhythm of the film. But at times Truffaut stopped a frame, transforming it into a photograph, to show that for all that vitality and spicy dash, we’re seeing memories. As happens to Truffaut at other times, he begins a film believing that it will be amusing, “and along the way I notice that only sadness can save it.”
Helen’s love ends when Roche reveals that he is married, and has children from two other women. Helen shoots him; but both will live very long lives; Hessel dies earlier, in 1941, in a French concentration camp. Perhaps because of this, in the novel and the film, we watch Helen and Franz die in a plunging automobile. Out of tenderness, Roche wanted, perhaps, to offer them revenge.
Actually, we possess a third point of view of the twentieth century’s most famous triangle, that of the distraught Pierrot, Franz Hessel. At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre went to America to weave his artistic and amatory dramas, while Franz, although exempt, volunteered in the German army. In the midst of the Great War’s massacres, he dreams of Paris, his elected city and country, which is the contemptuous object of war propaganda. His short novel (96 pages) is a romance (Paris Romance); it’s a rapt, gentle evocation that transforms the indomitable Helen into a quiet, swelling dissolve.
Whoever reads it — Roche will be astonished — can’t count how many kisses there are. Helen appears miraculously as a masked man at a festival, and when, at the end, she leaves, her face is marked with a smile that “is conventionally called archaic,” a smile that is imprinted on the face of the first Greek divinities, and on Leonardo’s Beato Angelico. In the novel — in the form of a letter to a friend, who is always Pierre — life dissolves into the memory of a dream; happiness is at a remove. Franz talks of Helen and Paris as if he must not see either again, although Helen is his wife and he will see her again in Paris in 1933 when he is forced to leave Germany.
In fact, he will write another book about his beloved city, about the years in which he translates Proust with Benjamin, who is writing about Paris in his Parisian (Passages, Alleys). Franz, too, writes about Paris (Parisian Diary), but in this love for the city, as for Helen, he writes as a distinterested observer, as a flaneur, a strolling idler, who gets lost in the modern city’s streets. It is Franz who spots the flaneur’s secret: “We see only what observes us. We become acquainted only with what we haven’t tried to know.”
The last Jules and Jim was not rediscovered: Le dernier voyage (The Last Tour). Franz Hessel wrote it during his years in exile and in the concentration camp. He is aged, light years away by now, recalling the cyclone of that mythical love triangle that “expanded the habitual scope of friendship and love.”
When, as giddy precursors, even before the ‘twenties, Hessel’s friends were “doing Freud” (merciless sets of questions, which were answered with an association of ideas), Helen objected: “But does everything lead back to sex?”
Note
Reprinted from la Repubblica, July 9, 1997. Translation copyright © A. K. Bierman. 

Beth Moore, wonderful Bible teacher: “God has me on a Keychain”

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I love Beth Moore. I have led at least a half dozen of her studies, and recommend them for keeping your spiritual intensity at fever-pitch!

Oddly enough, I often think of her saying, “God has me on a keychain,” partly because I don’t really understand it.

I think she meant that her life put so many demands on her, and she found it so intense, that she could never stray far from God, far from being on God’s keychain.

Beth Moore, for you English people who have no idea whom I am talking about, is a tall, slim, beautiful, blonde Texan, and the leading women’s Bible teacher in the US. She is sincere, passionate, and has an amazing gift for bringing the Bible to life, for relating it to life, for making the spiritual life EXCITING!!  Amazingly, this vibrant, passionate, fully alive woman was sexually abused over a long period in her childhood—and was put together by God.

Her ministry has been scandal-free–no sexual scandal, no financial scandal, no heresy scandal, no accounts of bullying, manipulation or spiritual abuse–scandals which have beset other American male and female preachers.

I think this is partly because Moore has taken extraordinary steps to keep her mind and emotions pure and focused on Christ. She says she plays worship music when she drives long hours with her employees to speak around the country–to safeguard against idle chatter and gossip. She has worship music in her house through the day, again to focus her thoughts. “Do you always live in God’s presence like this?” she was asked. Her answer, “I don’t dare not to.”

I would recommend her studies of David, Kings, Moses, John and Paul. Some may permanently change your life. All will give you much spiritual joy and pleasure while you are doing them.