Anita Mathias | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

“The Little World of Don Camillo” by Giovanni Guareschi

Charles Darwin said that as he aged fewer and fewer things gave him delight. That’s a melancholy reflection which I hope will not be true of me. However, it’s perhaps becoming a rarer experience for me to be totally seized with delight.

That however was my experience on reading The Little World of Don Camillo. I think I had encountered it years ago in my grandfather’s house, when I was around ten, along with Father Brown, and Georges Simenon. I read like a bulldozer then, rapidly, compulsively, but haven’t returned to them–and only rarely to that way of reading.

Until now. With sheer delight. The ingenuity of his imagination! The loveableness of his characters. His understanding of the nature of prayer. His understanding of Christ, severe, with standards, yet willing to indulge and play with his faithful servant. With a sense of humour. Don Camillo chats with Christ much as Peter might have, and Christ’s responses, as unconventional as His were in real life, are wholly believable, though often surprising. I love their conversations.

“Speak Memory” by Vladimir Nabokov

By Anita Mathias

Speak Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov

“Speak Memory” by Vladimir Nabokov is perhaps the most elegant memoir ever written. It is also my favourite memoir,and one of my favourite books.

Nabokov’s prose is so beautiful, that all one can do is sigh. My copy has vanished somewhere in my piles of books in the course of many moves, but when I find it, I will type some sentences out.

Nabokov wrote his book in English, of course, but he was trilingual (Russian, French and English) from an early age, and his English has the sort of contorted, pretzel-like strangeness one frequently finds in the (perfectly correct) English prose of the bi-lingual–I think of the prose of Sara Suleri and Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy.

Nabokov describes, as one of his chapter titles puts it, a “Past Perfect,” a happy Russian boyhood, with books, and governesses, and wealth, and adoration, and time to pursue his many interests–butterflies, chess, books.

He was brilliant, and more importantly, blessed with a relatively easy-going temperament that enabled him to take the massive reverses of the Russian Revolution in his stride without bitterness, but with a philosophic, even amused, equanimity. That same essential stability of temperament enabled a happy and nourishing marriage amid all the vicissitudes of the emigre’s life.

If anything, being forced to produce literature to keep afloat sharpened the saw, but to his credit, did not blunt the oddness in him that gave him the courage to produce that most odd but stylistically and linguistically beautiful and heartbreaking book, “Lolita.”

A wonderful portrait of a vanished world! Full of sunlight and butterfly filled fields, and books and love!

And here, across the Atlantic is a similar childhood, Thomas Merton’s in The Seven Storey Mountain!
http://wanderingbetweentwoworlds.blogspot.com/2010/07/seven-storey-mountain-by-thomas-merton_16.html

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C.H. Spurgeon on Why Jesus is Better than Switzerland, its Alps and chocolate.

By Anita Mathias

“If any of you can save up money to go to Switzerland, you will never regret it, and it need not be expensive to you. If you do not find your head grow on both sides, and have to put your hands up, and say, `I feel as if my brains are straining with their growth,’ I do not think you have many brains to spare.

As I have stood in the midst of those mountains and valleys, I have wished I could carry you all there. I cannot reproduce to you the thoughts that then passed through my mind; I cannot describe the storms we saw below us when we were on the top of the hill; I cannot tell you about the locusts that came in clouds, and devoured everything before them; time would utterly fail me to speak of all the wonders of God which we saw in nature and in providence.

One more remark, and I have done. If you cannot travel, remember that our Lord Jesus Christ is more glorious than all else that you could ever see. Get a view of Christ, and you have seen more than mountains, and cascades, and valleys, and seas can ever show you. Thunders may bring their sublimest uproar, and lightnings their awful glory; earth may give its beauty, and stars their brightness; but all these put together can never rival Him.”
C.H. Spurgeon

Why the Gospel is Good News

By Anita Mathias

The Gospel

In my early years as a Christian, I would financially support those who were engaged in humanitarian work and poverty relief, but not those who were engaged in evangelism. Why? Because I was struggling to live out my Christian faith. I did not experience joy. So I was more confident about donating to World Vision, Compassion or Samaritan’s Purse than to a purely evangelistic ministry like Billy Graham or Ravi Zacharias or World Harvest Mission. (My giving patterns haven’t changed much, though I did donate to Catch the Fire Ministries, since they were about to go to Niger, where, goodness, the Good News is good news, since that’s all the good news they have.)

Etymologically, Gospel means good news. Gospel. O.E. godspel “good news,” from god “good” + spel “story, message,” itself a translation of the Greek word εὐαγγέλιον, euangelion (eu- “good”, -angelion “message”).

So etymologically good news.

Why? Justice demands crime and punishment. God’s father heart cries mercy. So the lovely Son steps in, incredibly and voluntarily, to bear the punishment for our sins. You avail yourself of this “Get Out of Jail Free” card by putting your faith in him.

Good News Power Point 1–“Get out of Jail Free.” Though perhaps because of deficiencies in my imagination, this has never stirred my heart as strongly as, say, it stirred the young James Joyce’s.

Good News Power Point 2–God slowly changes the deep structure of the personality of the Christian.

At the point of faith, or conversion, we request Christ to enter our hearts. Prayer is a serious and holy business, and when we ask him to enter, he does. Instantaneously, dramatically and quite perceptibly into some lives, and as a slow growing seed that slowly changes the very fabric of thought and characters for others, among whom I find myself. That slow process of change, theologically, is called sanctification. And that is good news.

Good News Power Point 3–Jesus Christ himself.

The third reason the Gospel is good news is Christ himself. Lovely, many-sided, always challenging, a fresh thinker, a well of wisdom, a well for those who are weary and heavy-laden, a well which refreshes our tired spirits. A friend. In him, the weary and bored and fed-up find fresh ideas, re-creation, renewal and wisdom. In our world in which abundance jades, to know Christ, to commune with him through his words in the Gospels, to access his perspective and allow it to transform you, is indeed good news.

Today, my biggest power point would be the living relationship we can have with Jesus Christ!

“Speak Memory” by Vladimir Nabokov

By Anita Mathias

“Speak Memory” by Vladimir Nabokov is perhaps the most elegant memoir ever written. It is my favourite memoir, and one of my favourite books.Nabokov’s prose is so beautiful that all one can do is sigh.

If anything, being forced to produce literature to keep afloat increased his productivity, but to his credit, did not blunt the strangeness in him that gave him the courage to produce that most odd but stylistically and linguistically beautiful and heartbreaking book, “Lolita.”

A wonderful portrait of a vanished world! Full of sunlight and butterfly filled fields, and books and love!

On Friday night prayer, and the deeper fairness of God

By Anita Mathias

We have gone three times over the last 6 weeks to the Friday evening soaking prayer sessions in Oxford, sponsored by the Toronto Airport Fellowship Catch the Fire Ministries.

What an unusual group of people gather! Each time, I see them, I think of Paul’s comment in 1 Corinthians 1, “For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; 27 but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

It is on Friday, remember. We are usually the only married couple who show up. Most people are single. Only one of them is beautiful, in the eyes of the world. Many are decidedly ordinary looking and not attractively kitted out. Beauty is a double-edged sword, I often think. The beautiful and attractive have a power that they are often unaware of. Things go more easily for them. They get what they want more. They may well have had dates or parties on Friday night.

A date with someone you truly love might satisfy one’s soul, but on the whole, two hours with God, soaking in his presence, listening to heavenly music, receiving his wisdom, direction, comfort and love does so much for your soul. Your life may take on different directions; you might become a different person.

In Christ’s parable of the banquet, the original invitees were too busy to come. And so, his servants scour the highways and byways for the poor, the blind, the lame to enjoy free food and a generous host.

I often think nowadays of the deeper fairness of God, of what Hopkins meant when he wrote, “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend with thee.” For those who have no dates or parties on Friday nights, a Lover waits, and he waits with more wisdom, comfort, love and guidance that one could possibly receive in any other way.

Ernesto and Kimberly Rivera–The Soundscape of Heaven

By Anita Mathias

I have over the last couple of months discovered the gorgeous haunting music of Ernesto and Kimberly Rivera, an attempt to recreate the soundscape of heaven, they say. What a project! The Riveras say their music comes out of their communion with God. It is spontaneous, unrehearsed and lovely. I highly recommend it for entering the presence of God.

Though I believe Heaven will have several soundscapes. Heaven to a Cistercian monk and a contemporary Nigerian or Indian, let’s say, will sound very different. Please, please let it have some Gregorian and Taize chant, and some Matt Redman and Michael Card and Celtic hymns.

What interests me is that they say these songs are unscripted, sung as the spirit moves. They are beautiful, saturated in Scripture, which they sometimes express in a new way.
Today is your Coronation Day.
What do you decree?
What would you like to see?

It’s a riff on Jesus’s statement, “Ask the Father whatever you will…”

Interestingly, I often ask Christ what he would like to me to write, or to do with my day. It’s sweet to think of Christ asking us that.

Listen to the Riveras:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Siukm_FNG4

The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry

By Anita Mathias

THE GIFT OF THE MAGI

by O. Henry

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della coThis is an exquisite, perfect short story. I love the ending. It often makes me cry!

unted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.

In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name “Mr. James Dillingham Young.”

The “Dillingham” had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called “Jim” and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.

Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling–something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.

There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.

Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.

Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim’s gold watch that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other was Della’s hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.

So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.

On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.

Where she stopped the sign read: “Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds.” One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the “Sofronie.”

“Will you buy my hair?” asked Della.

“I buy hair,” said Madame. “Take yer hat off and let’s have a sight at the looks of it.”

Down rippled the brown cascade.

“Twenty dollars,” said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.

“Give it to me quick,” said Della.

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.

She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation–as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim’s. It was like him. Quietness and value–the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.

When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends–a mammoth task.

Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.

“If Jim doesn’t kill me,” she said to herself, “before he takes a second look at me, he’ll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do–oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty- seven cents?”

At 7 o’clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.

Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: “Please God, make him think I am still pretty.”

The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two–and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.

Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.

Della wriggled off the table and went for him.

“Jim, darling,” she cried, “don’t look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn’t have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It’ll grow out again–you won’t mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say `Merry Christmas!’ Jim, and let’s be happy. You don’t know what a nice– what a beautiful, nice gift I’ve got for you.”

“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.

“Cut it off and sold it,” said Della. “Don’t you like me just as well, anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?”

Jim looked about the room curiously.

“You say your hair is gone?” he said, with an air almost of idiocy.

“You needn’t look for it,” said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you–sold and gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,” she went on with sudden serious sweetness, “but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?”

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year–what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.

Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.

“Don’t make any mistake, Dell,” he said, “about me. I don’t think there’s anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first.”

White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.

For there lay The Combs–the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims–just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.

But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: “My hair grows so fast, Jim!”

And them Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, “Oh, oh!”

Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.

“Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it.”

Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.

“Dell,” said he, “let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em a while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.”

The magi, as you know, were wise men–wonderfully wise men–who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

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