Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

The Wisdom of Irene

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A relative gave us a surprise, a generous cash gift.

I was very pleased, but once we safely invested it, I observed to Irene, “See, I told you money does not make one happy. We now have XX pounds, and are no happier than we were before.”
Irene, 10, “That’s because you have not spent it yet!”
Touche, Rascal!

Irene and salad

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Tried a salad recipe from a book I am reading with much interest and enjoyment–Helen Nearing’s “Simple Food for the Good Life.”

It was lettuce and fresh dandelion leaves salad.

Irene said, “MUM, I am so HUMILIATED! I am not a RABBIT.

The longing to travel

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 I love to travel, and I love to travel to strange mysterious countries, with pristine, old misty towering forests; semi-abandoned wayside stone churches; remote, lonely.

What country am I thinking of, Switzerland, Scotland, or somewhere I have never travelled?

Albania? Slovakia? Slovenia? Russia? Denmark? Macedonia?

Or the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns?

The ultimate land of the heart’s desire!!

Francois Mauriac and Elie Wiesel

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The Mentoring of Elie Wiesel by Francois Mauriac


Our small group is going through Philip Yancey’s DVD series What is so Amazing about Grace? He recounted a lovely story about a meeting between Mauriac and Elie Wiesel. Mauriac was at that time France’s most famous writer, and was and is the greatest Roman Catholic writer of his century.

Wiesel is networking. Using the old man for his connection, to inveigle an interview with the French Prime Minister. But Mauriac wants to talk about Jesus. A little secret, inward smile plays about his face as he talks about Jesus.

I love that, that 20 centuries later, people can be so in love with Jesus, that a secret, inward smile lights their faces when they talk about him.
Read more about the interview here. Mauriac challenged Weisel to write about his experiences, which eventually became the tight Holocaust memoir, Night.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Ym8KcrzUZKYC&pg=PR9&lpg=PR9&dq=meeting+of+Mauriac+and+Wiesel&source=bl&ots=nagKfDmiHy&sig=VVjhZuMNTtQve4ZHTwTPsl4DR4w&hl=en&ei=B6zWS9qDI4

I also LOVE this quote from Dorothy Day, about to write her autobiography. She writes, My Life, opens her book on a new page, “But then I found I could not do it. I just sat thinking of our Lord, and of his visit to us all those centuries ago, and I thought it was my great good fortune to have had him on my mind for so long a time in my life.”

THE LITTLE WORLD OF DON CAMILLO BY GIOVANNI GUARESCHI

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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 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, tenaciously, but didn’t make much of them, and so haven’t read them again.
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 discourses 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.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B000KLJUWS/ref=dp_olp_1/202-4701762-4557449?ie=UTF8&qid=1219523063&sr=1-12
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Don-Camillo-Omnibus-Prodigal-Comrade/dp/0575018445/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219523131&sr=1-2

Scripture–The Psalms as therapy

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A day of minor distraction, and perhaps a faint sense of not all being right with the world, and, of course, it isn’t! Sometimes, I feel very aware of the presence of evil.

Felt jangled and distracted inside. So, instead of writing, I settled down with the Psalms in my lovely new Bible, the ESV, and read it until I felt calm.

Sometimes, it’s as if it’s not I who am praying the Psalms, the Psalms are praying me.

Oh, what do I mean by that? It’s as if a deeper wisdom within my spirit, the same spirit which inspired the Psalms is praying them within me, settling me down.

The Psalms give voice to my deepest fears, and yearnings and reachings towards God. They elevate me. They remind me of who I truly am, and what I truly want and what I truly want to be.

Praying them, I am reminded again that truly is well with the world, for it is in the hands of a very good God, and I leave my life in his hands, and I feel peace.

 

Baisakhi in Oxford

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As we were eating in window seats of the First Floor Restaurant in Oxford yesterday, we saw a very colourful Sikh procession pass.

Irene was beside herself as she saw all the things she had learnt about in her unit on Sikhism. Men holding dashing kirpans (swords). Women with brilliant sarees and shalwars and long hair. No kaccha, underpants, on display though. Men in saffron, women in every shade of the rainbow.

The funniest part was the cops on their bikes behind the procession, regular white Oxford lads, laughing and joking, and looking most out of place in all this exotica.

I love living in a cosmopolitan city!