Anita Mathias | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

“Useless Prayer” by Henri Nouwen

“WHY should I spend an hour in prayer when I do nothing during that time but think about people I am angry with, people who are angry with me, books I should read and books I should write, and thousands of other silly things that happen to grab my mind for a moment?

The answer is: because God is greater than my mind and my heart, and what is really happening in the house of prayer is not measurable in terms of human success and failure.

What I must do first of all is be faithful. If I believe that the first commandment is to love God with my whole heart, mind, and soul, then I should at least be able to spend one hour a day with nobody else but God. the question as to whether it is helpful, useful, practical, or fruitful is completely irrelevant, since the only reason to love is love itself. Everything else is secondary.

The remarkable thing, however, is that sitting in the presence of God for one hour each morning — day after day, week after week, month after month — in total confusion and with myriad distractions radically changes my life. God, who loves me so much that He sent His only son not to condemn me but to save me, does not leave me waiting in the dark too long.

I might think that each hour is useless, but after thirty or sixty or ninety such useless hours, I gradually realize that I was not as alone as I thought; a very small gentle voice has been speaking to me far beyond my noisy place.

So: Be confident and trust in the Lord.”

From The Road to Daybreak, by Henri Nouwen (New York: Image Books, 1989).

In real life, amusingly, Nouwen was a fidgety pray-er. Michael Andrew Ford writes, “Nouwen could rarely sit still for long. When he was in prayer, he fidgeted, coughed and moved but seemed to have no awareness he was doing it. His apparently restless and distracted prayer nurtured him. While his body was twitching, his spirit could be deeply present to God.”

The writer Parker Palmer describes Nouwen at a Quaker retreat centre where the traditional gathering in silence was practised for 45 minutes every morning:

“I was conscious of being in the company of a world-class contemplative and I was expecting to have an extraordinary experience sitting next to him during worship. But as we sat in this plain, unadorned room and settled into the silence, I realised that the bench was jiggling. I opened my eyes, glanced to my left and saw Henri’s leg working furiously. He was anxiously trying to settle but without much success. As time went on, the fidgeting got worse. I opened my eyes again only to find him checking his watch to see what time it was.”

Ford continues, “Nouwen’s primary need for prayer meant he was completely oblivious to more mundane things. He would dash to the bathroom wherever he was staying and shower without closing the curtain, soaking the place in water. Then, without looking in the mirror, he would shave as quickly as possible, so he could get downstairs and be with God. As a result, he often ended up with a one inch patch of old whiskers on his neck and fresh soap in his ear.

“Contemplation was at the heart of Henri Nouwen’s life. It was a discipline of dwelling in the presence of God. Nouwen was convinced that Christian leaders need to reclaim the mystical so that every word they speak, each suggestion they make and every strategy they develop, will emerge from a heart which knows God intimately.”

In Which Drivenness Comes from the Enemy of our Souls, but Christ Gives us Balance

By Anita Mathias

In her book The Soul of Money, global activist Lynne Twist refers to scarcity as “the great lie”.

Twist writes, “For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is, “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of “not enough” occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining or worrying about what we don’t have enough of.

Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack.

This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.”

* * *

And so we go through life, driven. Rushing like the Gadarene swine, driven by demons they could not see over a cliff to their destruction.

Driven by pride or greed or ambition or fear to the detriment of our health, mental health, emotional health, and relationships.

Driven for validation. To prove our intelligence, superiority, spirituality, talent, worth…

Forgetting that all drivenness comes from Satan, never from God. Christ leads; Satan drives.

Driveneness comes from the Accuser and Oppressor of the Brethren, never from the Good Shepherd who gently leads us on, minute by minute, through his gentle Spirit.

At the root of drivenness lie unhealed wounds and conditional love in childhood, which gives us the sense that we need to be spectacular to be okay. That our worth is dependent on how much we produce, how much money we make, how thin and beautiful we are, how large our house and bank balance, how famous and successful we are…pick your idol.

* * *

And in our drivenness to grab the life we dream of through our own hard work, we forget that there is a better way, without bleeding fingertips and hearts and lives.

The way of prayer, and trust, and leaving room for God to work miracles.

That there is One who Makes Dreams Come True, the weaver, who can weave a technicolour dreamcoat from scraps of discarded wool

The one who can give us our wild dreams, and add no sorrow to them.

The one who says, “Honey Child, you are enough.

I like you just as you are.

Success won’t make me like you more.

Failure will only make me envelop you more.

In me, you are loved, complete.

In me, child, you are enough!

Turn your gaze to me, and let me fill up the hungry holes in your heart.

Eat me, drink me.

Turn to me when you sense Satan driving,

When you are tempted by striving,

And I will give you rest.”

* * *

My deepest spiritual experience over the last four months has been joining Overeaters Anonymous, a 12 step programme, modelled on Alcoholics Anonymous.

Step 3: Seek spiritual guidance in every area of life. So over the last few months, I have been praying over my daily schedule, revamping it under God’s direction.

I have been tithing my time to God, fulfilling a vow I made to do so if I received something I really wanted (which I did). So I spend 10% of every 24 hours in prayer, Bible study and spiritual reading. (This is a 2 year commitment, and I am self-employed; this is not a mode of being I am advocating J).

Then I am setting aside an hour a day to work in my large 1.5 acre garden, because I love being out. Working and praying in my garden is a mystical experience for me, and it’s one of the happiest things I do.

I am spending an hour a day working around the house, because that is extremely conducive to my happiness. I have things to declutter, and a library to organize. (This is a short-term project, ending when the decluttering and organizing is done. Let it be soon, Lord!)

And then I walk 10,000 steps a day (including steps gained gardening and tidying). And do 20 minutes of yoga, because it’s great for mental health and serenity, and because I can feel myself getting stiffer.

And I live with three other people, and we have a talky family life.

Prayer, Bible study, housework, walking, yoga, gardening, family life. I am leading a more Benedictine life, balancing prayer, manual work, and intellectual work. Ora et labora.

You may wonder how I’ll ever get any writing done. Well, so do I!

I am giving this worry to God, and writing as he provides me time—which is what I was advised when I had babies, and time and energy were short. I was furious at that advice then. I thought books would never get written with that laissez-faire attitude.

Well, perhaps, they will take longer, perhaps not, but they will be written in peace, in shalom, in harmony with God as he gives time, and energy, and words…

And who knows, perhaps I shall write more. Perhaps even write better. May it be so, Lord.

When the Spirit Comes, Oh, You will be Unworthy

By Anita Mathias

When the Spirit comes, the one sure thing is: You will be unworthy.

You cower in the upper room, quite out of ideas and momentum, and he comes like tongues of fire, and your speech is enabled.

You stray into a Charismatic meeting aged 17, and joke about speaking in tongues–oh aren’t you suave and sophisticated?!– and at night you wake up, and, voila, you are speaking in tongues, which was the one gift you specifically asked not to receive, silly you.

And years later, a Vicar you secretly consider a Machiavellian Macbeth and cold as ice, lays his hands on your head and prays for a revelation of divine love, and oh, it comes, it comes, for keeps, and writer’s block fades, and you write fast, easily and much.

And at a Catch the Fire Conference, you look around, and second-guess and judge, oh you cold of heart and slow to believe, but you do learn soaking prayer, and your prayer life changes. And then your real life.

You arrive late at the worship service, having snapped and snarled at all who made you late—oh yes, you did!!—and you bow your head in shame…and then in worship, and you feel it, waves of mercy, waves of grace, of acceptance. You are loved. You are loved. You are the beloved. That is your new name, and new identity. You will live out of that sacred centre.

The Spirit comes at church when you’ve just fought with your husband. He comes in the watches of the night. He comes when you garden. He comes.

He comes because you need him; he comes because you ask him; He comes because you don’t ask him, but because you need him.

He comes because he is God. He comes because he is good. He comes.

Come, Holy Spirit.

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Housework as a Pathway to Prayer—with Vermeer’s Women

By Anita Mathias

You can almost hear the silence. The milkmaid is quiet, so quiet, and time is suspended as she pours milk.

The hands work while the mind thinks.

Is it a life of drudgery, or is it a gift–her trivial chore a window into eternity, time to think, to pray, to look out of the window into God?

Vermeer’s women lose themselves in: housework. It glows! Is this domesticity? Can it be? That’s the way I want to live my life, slowly, tranquilly, not fighting the irrelevant relevant, the distracting, trivial and necessary tasks of my days, but embracing them as an oasis of contemplation in which desert flowers may bloom.I gaze at Vermeer’s women. I trust things that help me lose track of time–reading, writing, gardening, hiking, the sea, art galleries, prayer, good movies, good conversation.

Vermeer’s paintings, poems one might say, on the radiance of domesticity are more moving when we learn of the hurly-burly of his household–a wife, eleven children, and a feisty mother-in-law.

Those paintings that could have been called “Shanti, shanti, shanti” or “Tranquility” are probably sighs of yearning, images of an elusive Eden. They hint how manual work–if used as time for contemplation–might be redeemed.

I now view the trivial necessary tasks of life which I used to bitterly resent—as (in small doses) gifts: time to pray, time to seek direction, time to worship, time to sense God’s love.

I am reading Pete Greig’s Red Moon Rising about the birth of 24/7 prayer movement in Britain. “Pray constantly,” the exhortation of the apostle Paul has challenged and puzzled us through the centuries.

As my life grows busier, I relish these accidental windows into prayer: rooms to be tidied, gardens to be weeded, laundry to be sorted, little windy passages into contemplation, to situating myself again in the love of God, and finding peace.

As Birds Sing Because They Must, Even So I Write

By Anita Mathias

As long as I have a garden to muck about in, and the health to do it, I shall not mind growing old. My garden is a deep joy at the centre of my life, even though I am making peace with not being able to keep up with it: it’s an acre and a half.

My nerves felt raw today, but then, I went out to the garden, which is bird-loud, and felt peace return.

Listening to birds sing, it’s suggested helps us relax, helps us complete tasks, and even think creatively. For instance, I didn’t have a single fresh idea for a blog post when I went out, and then, the garden gave me this!

* * *

Why do birds sing? Birds sing thousands of times through the day, the red-eyed vireo singing 20,000 songs daily. They sing to mark out their territories, to attract mates, or simply to communicate with other birds. They sing because it is their nature. They sing because they must.

Gerard Manley Hopkins imagines kingfishers catching fire, dragonflies drawing flame, while singing, “What I do is me. For that I came.”

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

* * *

I have at various points considered giving up writing—when I had a miscarriage when Zoe was two; when I was pregnant with Irene; when domestic chaos overwhelmed me.

But each time when I decided to do nothing but housework until our house was orderly—-the last attempt was 7 years ago– I slipped into depression. It was hard to get out of bed, hard to focus on the sorting, organizing, dishes, laundry, the endless domestic routines.

If, however, I gave myself just an hour or two of creating, I had energy for the rest. Because that is what I was made for: to write. And when I am not doing it, I am listless, slightly unhappy, and don’t have energy for anything else.

And so, each time I was tempted to give up writing to be a perfect homemaker, or a perfect mummy, I would return to writing, because it was my calling, my vocation.

* * *

As a bird sings its high, clear note, and as fish splash through the seas of this world, I am made to play with words and ideas, to attempt to recreate beauty out of beauty.

Writing time is slowly opening as I grow more disciplined. What will I write? How much? I don’t know.

But this I do know–as Milton puts it,

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven;
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Taskmaster’s eye.

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Why I have Decided to Follow Jesus

By Anita Mathias

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. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.” At once they left their nets and followed him. (Matthew 4 18-20)

“Come follow me, Anita?”

Yes, I will follow you, because life feels pointless without you.

I will follow you because the world without you—it doesn’t hack it: much labour for things which will not satisfy–without you

I will follow you because I am weary of myself. I want to lose myself in you. In that loss, I feel safe.

I will follow you because I don’t know how to do life. But your version of a God-bathed world, held safe in your Father’s hands, which the meek will inherit, I love it! I believe in it.

I will follow you because in worshipping you is my soul complete.

I will follow you because in you I find love, vast as the ocean.

I will follow you because of your goodness that flows like a waterfall towards me. I need but to kneel and receive.

I will follow you because (sorry, this is silly!) nothing makes me as hyper as your words, and the bubbly Holy Spirit you released through your death. In them is rest for my restlessness.

I will follow you because you promise complete joy. You are the narrow gate which leads to life. I will shrug off all that impedes me so I can enter through it.

* * *

I will follow you because no one ever spoke as you did.

I will follow you, because you are so clever. I love the way you got out of all those tricks and traps—taxes to Caesar and stoning that woman and dividing inheritances–with your cool, collected intellect. You instinctively think outside the box, you clever person. And if I follow you, you will teach me wisdom and to stay cool and calm under pressure. (And forgive, now, this selfish motivation).

Yes, I will follow you because you are brilliant. I love thinking about those wild things you said. “Take the lower place; turn the other cheek; the meek inherit the earth; don’t resist an evil person; give and you shall receive.” I love how obeying them, even in baby steps, turns my life upside down.

I will follow you because I know I will never “get” you fully. You will come to me with fresh challenges as long as I live, drawing me upward and onward. I’ll wrestle with your words till I die. Those Beatitudes! The Sermon on the Mount! A whole life’s worth of meditation and challenge.

I will follow you because you are the Word, and I am a writer. And so you will give me the words I need to speak, and protect me from words I do not need to speak.

I will follow you because He who drinks of the waters you give him will never thirst, but rivers of living water will flow from him. What writer would not want rivers of living water to flow from her?

* * *

I will follow you because you are spectacular. The way you cared for everyone you encountered as you gasped your way through the excruciating crucifixion—Wow, Jesus!

I will follow you because learning to love is important, and you know how, and you will teach me.

I will follow you because you are magnetic. You are good, and you are kind. Nothing else in my world compels me as you do.

I will follow you because you are the Living Bread which came down from heaven. If I eat you, I will not hunger, and so in you is the solution to my food issues and addictions.

I will follow you because, well, what else could I follow? Ambition will exhaust me. Mastery of a craft will not satisfy my heart. Money? I earn enough for my simple-ish tastes.

I will follow you, because as C. S. Lewis said, what you say is so outrageous, it’s either completely nuts. Or true. And to me, it tastes of truth. You are the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

I will follow you, just because…I love you.

Stinging Nettle to Butterfly Wings

By Anita Mathias

And how, and how

Could that prickly caterpillar

–All bristles and danger–

Feeding on the stinging nettle in my garden

Become a peacock butterfly,

Four shimmering iridescent eyes?

My God, my God, redeemer,

Even today, take my life,

The years lost to self-pity, anger and sadness,

False starts, wrong directions, promising trails abandoned

The sin, the exhaustion, the folly, the folly,

Take the stinging nettles of my life, my Lord,

And make of them butterfly wings.

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Does God have Favourites?

By Anita Mathias

When Jesus rose from the dead, whom did he reveal himself to first?

Mary Magdalene.

Why her?

Because she was there.Because she loved him enough to go in search of him, in sheer love, with nothing to gain from the encounter.

* * *

And why was Isaiah granted his precious vision of the Lord, seated on a throne, high and exalted, with the train of his robe, filling the temple, surrounded by winged seraphs flying and calling to one another, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord Almighty, The whole earth is full of his glory.” Because he chose to be quiet and still long enough to see the vision. To overhear the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send?” And so he volunteers, “Here I am. Send me.”

* * *

Those who hang out with God are more likely to hear and overhear what He is saying. To somehow see God’s perfect plan for their lives. To catch his vision and hear his directions. To get in on the secrets of the universe!

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