Anita Mathias | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

We dream, but we must plan and focus, because we are not God

“The heart of focusing is humility. In other words, we are limited people with limited resources, so what do we do with what God has given us? We dream big, but plan realistically. We dream because Scripture says, “nothing is impossible with God”, but we plan carefully because we are not God.”

Paul Miller

A dramatic first paragraph. Salman Rushdie The Moor's Last Sigh.

By Anita Mathias

Scene is seen. Here’s a maximilist and visual opening paragraph.

The Moor’s Last Sigh Pg. 138

”Once a year, my mother Aurora Zogoiby liked to dance higher than the Gods. Her white hair flying around her in long loose exclamations, her exposed belly not old-bat-fat but fit-cat-flat, her bare feet stamping, her ankles a-jingle with silver jhunjhunna bell-bracelets, snapping her neck from side to side, speaking incomphrehensible volumes with her hands, the great painter danced her defiance, she danced her contempt, for the perversity of mankind.
Salman Rushdie

Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night. A description of breaking out of writer’s block

By Anita Mathias

Harriet Vane in the silence of Oxford. Something comes “back to her that had lain dumb and dead ever since the old, innocent undergraduate days. The singing voice, stifled long ago by the presence of the struggle for existence…began to stammer a few uncertain notes. Great golden phrases, like the great carp from the depths of the pool, swam up out of her dreaming mind.”

Lovely prose–Patricia Hampl on the lure of Catholicism. Virgin Time

By Anita Mathias

And hadn’t everybody else escaped? Was I the only diehard left, like one of those aged and confused Japanese soldiers who periodically emerge from some island jungle, bristling with loyalty everyone supposes is for the divine emperor but which might more truly be passion for the war itself.

Let it go, the battle is over–and we won. Nobody is making you fight anymore. There’s nothing to be loyal to do, and nothing to desert from. Nobody cares if you’ve fallen away or not. You’re free to make the usual jokes about the nuns, to take your stand on abortion, to roll your eyes at the latest word from Rome on women and gays.

At intervals during the day, from the cloister side of the second-floor chapel, the choir nuns reeled out a taut line of Gregorian chant into the school corridors as they sang the Divine Office, trolling by hour and season back and forth over the fathomless pools of the Psalms.

I doubt that I was the only one, pausing in study hall over the memorization of irregular French verbs, who heard the music and took the bait, going deep with the beauty of it, seeking whatever lagoon a creature dives for with the lure still bright in the imagination, though the hook has already imbedded itself and any chance of escape is lost.

Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night. A description of breaking out of writer’s block

By Anita Mathias

Harriet Vane in the silence of Oxford. Something comes “back to her that had lain dumb and dead ever since the old, innocent undergraduate days.

The singing voice, stifled long ago by the presence of the struggle for existence…began to stammer a few uncertain notes. Great golden phrases, like the great carp from the depths of the pool, swam up out of her dreaming mind.”

Worship

By Anita Mathias

Worship is one of the best things in life–turning your eyes upon Jesus, looking full in his wonderful face. Seeing the Lord high and lifted up, with the train of his robe filling the temple with glory. Forgetting yourself in focusing on him.

Characterization which somehow gets the essence of a person.

By Anita Mathias

Look at this passage from A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

“There was undeniably a feline quality to my mother–never in the sly or stealthy sense of the word, but in the word’s other catlike qualities:a clean, sleek, self-possessed, strokable quality. In quite a different way from Owen Meany, my mother looked touchable; I was always aware of how much people wanted, or needed, to touch her. I’m not talking only about men, although–even at my age–I was aware of how restlessly men moved their hands in her company. I mean that everyone liked to touch her–and depending on her attitude toward her toucher, my mother’s responses to being touched were feline, too. She could be so chillingly indifferent that the touching would instantly stop; she was well-coordinated and surprisingly quick and, like a cat, she could retreat from being touched–she could duck under or dart away from someone’s hand as instinctively as the rest of us can shiver. And she could respond in that other way that cats can respond, too; she could luxuriate in being touched–she could contort her body quite shamelessly, putting more and more pressure against the toucher’s hand, until (I used to imagine) anyone near enough to her could hear her purr.”