Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Cosmopolitan Oxford

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One of the things I so enjoy about Oxford is how cosmopolitan it is.

Our cleaners are Brazilian, Kenyan and Zimbabawean. I take French conversation classes with a South African doctor and a New Zealander. My small group which meets together to have dinner every two weeks, has Norwegians in it, and had Mexicans.
There are people I know in church from Macedonia, Romania, Italy, France, Pakistan.
My children have classmates whose parents came from South Africa, China, Nigeria.
 I have both American and English friends whom I talk to daily or weekly. I enjoy dealing with people from three or four races on a daily basis.
The population of Oxford is 151,000. It is probably the most cosmopolitan city of 151,000 people in the entire world.

The Stong Taste of Money and Other Tastes

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We had lunch a couple of weeks ago with three other Indian couples.

They were saying that it is fatal to let your children work part-time during A levels and University, because once they get “the taste of money” they lose interest in the slow drag and deferred gratification of study.

We were amused. We never really had “the taste of money” until mid-life. Roy’s an academic and I write, which means we were comfortably middle class.

Then, we founded a small publishing 3 years ago, and were stunned to discover that we were actually good at business. And enjoyed it.

And found that the taste of money can be as ruinous for people in their forties as in their teens and twenties. We were no longer content with the salary cap of being in a profession. We enjoyed the world opening out in exotic travel, Norway, New Zealand, Europe, Europe. Enjoyed the massive new conservatory the business paid for.

“Taste and see that the Lord is Good.”

The one thing, however, that we are determined about is that we should never substitute the taste of money for the sweetness of spiritual tastes, or intellectual or creative or artistic tastes. Or the taste for nature. Or people. Or friendship.

Brutal Economics and Hope for those who Behaved Very Badly

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The Parable of the Talents

Okay, let us not doubt the goodness of the King of the Kingdom. The rewards are, always are, disproportionate! Ten cities given to the one faithful with ten minas. That is the reward of successful stewardship and entrepreneurship

However, the consequences of failure are brutal.  ‘Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents. 29For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.

I, personally, have squandered a talent which was given to me, and it is now taken away and given to someone who was faithful with theirs.

Is it final, Lord? Will it never be returned to me?

I believe it will be, because nothing is impossible with God. God loves restoring the repentant. If you see, the unfaithful servant is defiant and unrepentant.

The Gospel is about nothing more strongly than Hope. Hope even for those who have behaved very badly.

Peter, commits the ultimate betrayal of friendship, not once but three times, by denying he even knew his beautiful friend.

And he is restored, because his friend knows he loves him.

So, for those of us who have blown it, if we love Christ, there is always hope for restoration.

Restoration of the dreadful years the locusts have eaten.

Love is a COMMAND while peace is a gift

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Interesting, Jesus gives us peace as a gift. “Peace I give you, my peace I leave with you.”

He gives us joy as a gift (I have told you these things so that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be full.)

The spectacular gifts are just that, gifts. Tongues, healing, prophecy, teaching, leading.

But the most excellent way, the one thing we are commanded to do, is just that —a command. It is how we are to behave.

And that is LOVE.

What a right-brain word. And so Paul, who I think is both right and left-brained, spells it out for the left-brained.

Love is
Patient

kind

it does not envy

it does not boast

it is not proud

it is not rude

it is not self-seeking

it is not easily angered

it keeps no record of wrongs.

It does not delight in evil

but rejoices in the truth.

Oh Jesus, I read this, and feel overwhelmed.

How does one develop this love. Two ways.

One schools oneself (in the workshop of family, first of all) to be patient, and kind, not proud, not rude, not self-seeking, not easily angered, forgiving.

And then, as with anything in the kingdom, we ask for the spirit of  love.

Romans 5. The love of God is shed into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

So to ask for the Holy Spirit, a prayer Jesus tells us is always answered, is to ask for love.

Also, once the root of the Holy Spirit is firmly planted in our hearts, love is an inevitable fruit.

Come Holy Spirit

Marginalia imbues a book with your own memories.

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Marginalia imbues a book with your own memories.

The Watchman

Marginalia imbues a book with your own memories. Nice piece by Toby Lichtig.

Defacing books: the effluence of engagement

I’m not just talking about ‘marginalia’. My passion for defacing books includes doodles, addresses, recipes, and they all remind me of where I was – and who I was – when I read the work
Toby Lichtig

Mark Twain loved it, Virginia Woolf despised it and Barbara Kingsolver feels so strongly about the subject that she won’t do it to her own. Henry VIII deemed it a vital part of the experience (but, then, he could get away it), while Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell were once arrested for it.
I am, of course, talking about defacing books – a much maligned practice of which I am a passionate disciple. My flirtation with textual mutilation started off at school with primly creased corners and pencilled underlinings, but I soon progressed to cocksure highlighting and full-blown ink-on-paper action – the effluence of engagement, the living, livid trace of dialogue. If, as the poststructuralists have suggested, the act of reading is an act of violence, then scrawling across the page in cheap biro must be its logical corollary.
I’m not just talking about highbrow jottings: notes and queries, references and witticisms, the literary art of “marginalia” (a term coined in 1832 by that keenest of annotators, Samuel Taylor Coleridge). No, in my library anything goes: doodles, numbers, addresses, lists, recipes and the ensuing food stains. Personalising my books is an intrinsic part of the interaction (which is why I tend to be neurotic about holding on to what I’ve read). Perhaps it’s the fault of my somewhat sluggish memory: the marks and scrawls help me to recall the text – and, crucially, the person I was when reading it: how I was feeling, where I was sitting, whom I was with. The smears on my copy of The Scarlet and the Black (coffee certainly; jam I think) take me back to the cafe in Rovereto in northern Italy, where I read it over the course of a week in 2002. When I look at my edition of Dracula, with half of its cover torn away, I’m reminded of that night at university when we ran out of Rizla packets and were too lazy to look for more orthodox material.
Then there are the intrigues. A passage of particularly illegible scribbling might indicate I was reading while standing up on the tube, but how to explain the frantic-looking “phone Luca!!” on page108 of Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy? I no longer even know who Luca is, let alone what possibilities his being contacted might have brought. Such randomness adds heft and colour to the afterlife of my relationship with a given tome. A drawing by an old friend lies in my copy of The Great Gatsby – and for that reason I will always associate it with him. The Age of Extremes is in my mind an even fatter book than Eric Hobsbawm intended, thanks to the time I dropped it in the bath.
“I’m afraid I could never trust someone who would make irremovable marks in a library book,” says Desmond Bates in David Lodge’s novel,Deaf Sentence. But while I wouldn’t advocate defacing books that aren’t your own (like all violation, textual disfigurement should be by invitation only), there’s a prudishness to our reverence that I cannot get along with. Marking books is not heresy because literature does not happen in a vacuum. So you can keep your priggish white spaces, your stiff spines and spotless jackets. I prefer my pages with a little knowledge and experience; books with a back story, some miles on the clock. 
 
And perhaps this is why I just can’t get excited about recent technological developments in the way we approach, and respond to, literature. While corporate giants clash over the pricing of ebooks, and readers of the world go delirious at the thought of accessing the sum total of history’s writing via their Kindle, nook or iPad, I intend to carry on reading as I always have: with an object I can physically alter; something I can damage with impunity. Ever-primed for action, my pen hovers restlessly just above the page.

Faith grows through testing

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Everything, whether the purity of gold, the tensile strength of steel, the strength of friendship, the power of blow-out preventers in underwater drilling equipment, is stronger and better for testing.

Faith is one of our greatest tools and strengths as we live our life in this world.

And so, one should not be sad that it is strengthened through testing.

I have 2 desires, one a strong one, which have not been granted for a long time.

And as I persevere in asking, faith will grow and be strengthened.

And the prize, the stronger faith, is worth the suffering as I wait for the answer to my prayers.

What I do is me; For that I came.

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What I do is me; For that I came.
The wandering liquid notes
Of cuckoo, and mourning dove
Echo through our garden
High and full of happiness.
Why do they sing?
They sing because they can,
They sing because they must.
On Milford Sound, I saw dolphins
Leap high through the fjord
Delighted to be alive
Like lambs at dusk in the Lakes
Frisking because they must
They cannot contain their joy.
As you made the cuckoo carol
Its high happy song
As you made dolphins frolic
Smiling in the seas of the world
You gave me words as a gift
And the joy of using them.
Help me to make them shine and sing
Let me use them to praise and play.
Let me rejoice like a bird in the gardens of your world,
Swish like a fish through your seas of mystery.
Let me dance in words
Through this world which sings with wonder
For that is what you have made me to do,
To create loveliness from loveliness.

The Most Challenging Passage of Scripture

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1 Corinthians 13 4-6

Love is patient,
love is kind.
It does not envy, 
it does not boast,
it is not proud. 
5It is not rude,
it is not self-seeking,
it is not easily angered, 
it keeps no record of wrongs. 
6Love does not delight in evil
but rejoices with the truth.
7It always protects,
always trusts,
always hopes,
always perseveres.
Love never fails.

Wow. How on earth does one become like this? Patient, kind, without envy or boastfulness. Not acting in pride, not rude, not self-seeking, not easily angered, maintaining no record of wrongs.

All I can think of is to ask God to make us like this. And to ask the Holy Spirit to fill us.

But if I didn’t love others, I would be of no value whatsoever.2
4 Love is patient and kind.
Love is not jealous or boastful or proud
5 or rude.
Love does not demand its own way.
Love is not irritable,
and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged.
6 It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.
7 Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
8 Love will last forever, New Living Translation

1 Corinthians 13 (The Message)

The Way of Love

1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. 2If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. 3-7If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. 
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end. 8-10Love never dies.