Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

A camel through the eye of a needle/ Rich men in the Kingdom

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23Then Jesus said to his disciples, “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.24Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
 25When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?”

 26Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

This is an interesting passage.

I am not on any conceivable rich list. However, I run a thriving and rapidly-growing publishing company. Which means it makes money.

But what I want more than anything is to know the power of Christ, to know the Holy Spirit flow through me with rivers of life-giving living water.

To dwell always in the sanctuary, eyes on the face of the King.

I also want my writing and my business to be successful. Financially successful, too.

They are both the work the King has given me to do.

And I read, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

And like the disciples, I am astonished. “Who then can be saved?”

And Jesus looks at them, and looks at me, and says, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

All things are possible.

For the driven, the intense, the ambitious; the businessman, the writer: it is possible for all these to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Thank you! And thank you!

Traditional English Edible hedges–Cottage Garden Style

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I tried to build an edible hedge when we lived in Williamsburg, Virginia, without  success. I’m now reading about traditional English hedges, and would love to build one. Traditional English hedges around cottage gardens had a dual purpose–to keep sheep out, and chickens in. The hedge was inter-planted with fruit and roses, so the precious space contributed both food and beauty.

A traditional English hedge had Hawthorn, Blackthorn, Crab apple, Guelder rose, Dog rose, Wild privet, Honeysuckle,  Field maple, Holly, hazelnuts, blackberries, forsythia, quince, and damsons.

A well-laid hedge can be as thick and impenetrable as a wall, quite impossible to see through or get through. One day I will have one!!

Garden news–Queen Anne’s Lace

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One of the wonderful things about my garden is how suddenly things happen. I haven’t walked in my paddock for a few days, and when I go there now, it is a riot of Queen Anne’s Lace. Very beautiful!

“To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life – this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do”. Charles Dudley Warner

Childhood Christian Reading

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I read, rapidly, undiscriminatingly, anything, everything, religious or secular. An extended family of nuns and priests assured us a plentiful supply of moral and religious books, in addition to what our parents bought us, hoping, with the haphazard hope of parents everywhere, that encountering these tales of virtue, heroism and faith would burnish us with a verdigris or patina of goodness, without them having to trouble themselves about it.

The Bible became part of the deep structure of my mind–Abraham, desolate childless man, walking under the starry skies, and then: the unasked for visitation, the great promise of progeny numerous as the stars in the heavens–that yet tarried, and tarried. And then–the Lord demanded Isaac. The knife wavers. Will he love the blessing more than the blesser, the gift more than the giver? Will he, will he? No. It was a different question: Will you love me above all others, will you trust me unflinchingly? And then, the substitutionary ram caught in the thicket, prefiguring, hinting….

And the moving hand writes on. Joseph’s chutes and ladders spirals, techni-color dreamcoat to rags, rags to riches, God’s irepressible providence shaping and fashioning a good story, good news, out of the bleakest plot twists. The mysterious burning bush in the Sinai. Take off your shoes, for the place where you stand is holy ground. “Who are you?” And the august, uncompromising name, “I am who I am.” The pillar of fire by day and the cloud of fire by night. David, with God’s unfathomable power on his side vanquishing Goliath with a well-aimed pebble. Mene, Mene, Thekel, Uparshim. “And the whole earth is full of the glory of God,” who chooses the meek and weak who trust him to write the emerging story of his kingdom.

 

Oh that heady, heady air. Miracles were God’s native language. Faith was the merest commonsense. Not to believe was to live in an underground dungeon suspecting that stars and trees and flowers and birds were mere fantasies. For then came Jesus, majestic one, striding the hills of Galilee, walking on the waves, stilling them, multiplying the loaves to feed our hunger, the wine to quench our thirst. Living Bread. Living Water. Real food. Volunteering to bear the punishment for the sins of the world. Jacob’s ladder between heaven and earth. The way, the truth, the life. Jesus, lamb-like Lion. Lion-like Lamb. Oh how I loved him, true light that came into the world that whoever believed in him should not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.

And those who bathe in his light become incandescent too. The austere conception of God of an embattled desert people glows brighter as the Celts praise him for their God-haunted world, and Francis exults in the world as God’s poem, the golden warmth of the sun, and the mighty winds, the brilliant stars and the melodies of birds. The free saint of poetry made radiant by his love for God. All through the centuries since Jesus visited us, startling us with his might and gentleness, his wisdom and compassion, the Living Word calls out to men to come follow him, and in the process, become poetry too, sloughing off all ugliness, to become like him, pure fire.

Repeatedly, repeatedly, as the poem of Christianity becomes slack and diffuse, losing its rhythm and loveliness, its wonder reduced to flickering embers, people encounter again the risen Christ who stalks the earth. Majestic, indefinable, brilliant, he emerges from the pages of Scripture in the beauty of the lilies, and as they shiver, the inert page turns seismic, twisting their lives upside down. At the sound of his roar, other sounds becomes faint, trivial and discordant, oh irrelevant. People drop their lives and go to monasteries to feast on the Living Word, sweeter than honey to the taste, or to the ends of the earth to urgently tell those who have not heard of this mighty, gentle Lion, and his paradoxical way to permanent joy. Jesus dignifies man when he speaks of slivers of his spirit lodging in every spirit, and so Damien nurses lepers, Mother Teresa cherishes orphans; dreaming lion-sized dreams, they go out into prisons, and slums; they oppose slavery, found orphanages, universities, colonies, countries. Mystics record visions, artists write and compose and paint. Oh surely, the greatest music ever heard, the sweetest romance ever known, a rift of gold coursing through history, changing it.

Christian Fiction and Shadowmancer

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Christian Literature, writing which compromises neither its literary quality nor its

message of comfort and edification is a rarity–a holy grail for those
of us who are both Christians and writers.


Lewis created it, and Tolkein, and Bunyan.


I read Shadowmancer by G.P. Taylor to Irene, then 8 and she was
gripped by it. I heard him speak at New Wine, and he is a charming and
hilarious speaker.   It is well-constructed certainly, by the old
rules. Each chapter has a gripping climax, and you end it with your
heart in your throat. Irene can hardly bear for a chapter to end. All
the same, though the blurb calls it children’s fiction, children’s
fiction it most certainly is not.


There is a sense of evil, casual cruelty, menace, and threat that
disturbs my soul and its equilibrium The fate of noble Raphah, the
Christ-figure is almost too painful. What I do like a lot, even though it is
 overt, is the casual quotation from Scripture. Taylor has
evidently immersed himself in it, which not all Anglican vicars, I daresay, have
and it spills forth, soothing the soul.
Good Christian fiction I can recommend includes Marilynne Robinson’s
“Gilead.” She has a good man, a truly good man, as a protagonist,
Reverend Ames. Not an over-wound, passionate Christian, he
is probably a Christian with a small c, but the goodness of the gospel
has soaked through him, He is decent, trustworthy, someone
for whom it would be an effort to behave badly. Christianity is so
woven into the fabric of his life that is what he is– a Christian
almost without any overt effort on his part, an “anima naturaliter
Christiana.” A naturally Christian soul!
“Peace like a River” by Leif Enger has another kind of Christian as a
protagonist. Jeremiah Land, like Reverend Ames is someone whose first
reaction is to pray (as it is increasingly becoming mine). When his
hothead son murders bullies who abused his little sister, we see
Jeremiah deep in prayer. Land is someone who experiences miracles as a
second language. Peace like a River is a startling, and successful
attempt to bring the miraculous into the realm and discourse of
contemporary fiction.

“Free” writing

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“For freedom Christ has set us free.”
And that is the way to write–rapidly, without too much of worry, looking over one’s shoulder, worrying what people think, or trying too hard for perfection, which is not perfectly attainable on this earth.
And just the act of writing, even writing badly, after a writers’ block provides systematic desensitisation, making the act of writing less scary. 

Christian Fiction and “Shadowmancer” by G. P. Taylor

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Christian Literature, writing which compromises neither its literary quality nor its ability to point us Christwards—is a holy grail for those of us who are both Christians and writers.

Lewis created it, and Tolkein, and Bunyan.

I read Shadowmancer by G.P. Taylor to Irene, then 8 and she was gripped by it. I heard him Taylor at New Wine, and he is a charming and hilarious speaker.

Shadowmancer is well-constructed, certainly, by traditional rules. Each chapter has a gripping climax, and you end it with your heart in your throat. Irene can hardly bear for a chapter to end. All the same, though the blurb calls it children’s fiction, children’s fiction it most certainly is not.

There is a sense of evil, casual cruelty, menace, and threat that disturbs me.  The fate of noble Raphah, the Christ-figure is almost too painful. What I do like a lot, even though it is overt, is the casual quotation from Scripture. Taylor has evidently immersed himself in it, which not all Anglican vicars, I daresay, have and it spills forth, soothing the soul.

Good Christian fiction I can recommend includes Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead.” She has a good man, a truly good man, as a protagonist, Reverend Ames. Not an over-wound, passionate Christian, he is probably a Christian with a small c, but the goodness of the gospel has soaked through him, He is decent, trustworthy, someone for whom it would be an effort to behave badly. Christianity is so woven into the fabric of his life that is what he is– a Christian almost without any overt effort on his part, an “anima naturaliter Christiana.” A naturally Christian soul!

“Peace like a River” by Leif Enger has another kind of Christian as a protagonist. Jeremiah Land, like Reverend Ames is someone whose first reaction is to pray (as it is increasingly becoming mine). When his hothead son murders bullies who abused his little sister, we see Jeremiah deep in prayer. Land is someone who experiences miracles as a second language. Peace like a River is a startling, and successful attempt to bring the miraculous into the realm and discourse of contemporary fiction.

Writing Poetry

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Zoe asked me where I had got the title of my first book, “Wandering between Two Worlds” from. I told her it from from a Matthew Arnold poem, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” which I had read when I was 16. I recited bits of it to her

“Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride—
I come to shed them at their side.”

And fragments from another Matthew Arnold poem, his famous Dover Beach.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Isn’t it lovely? I felt so moved reciting the bits I imperfectly remembered. Truly, creating poetry is one of mankind’s greatest achievements.
I wanted to be a poet for 7 or 8 years in my twenties. And then, I showed my poems to John Frederick Nims, then the editor of Poetry Magazine. I asked, “Do you think I will have a career as a poet? Is it worth persisting, and really going for it?”
I don’t remember his exact words. But he pursed his lips, looked dubious, and I read the answer as no.
I was feeling the pull of prose then, of writing a memoir, and so, I went with the energy, and abandoned my first love.
But I still love my first love.
And now, about 19 years after that meeting, I think, I love poetry. I love reading it, I love writing it.
So what if I do not become a great poet?
Most people are not great readers of poetry either.
I will still write poetry, ordinary poetry for ordinary people, to bless, comfort, cheer, and yes, perhaps, delight.