Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

I am from the Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter Body of Christ

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last_supper_cropped

 

 I am from the Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter Body of Christ

I am from earliest memories of Latin Masses in Jamshedpur, India

not understanding a word, and then, English masses,

I did understand, but was bored by,

and Post-Vatican II vernacular masses,

in Konkani, Kannada, Marathi on our travels,

understanding nothing, but doing our Catholic duty,

and saving our souls from hell.

I am from the painting of the Sacred Heart in the living room,
who followed me with his wistful eyes wherever I hid,
and I somehow knew He liked me, was for me.

And I am from luminous statues of Our Lady,
and Catholicism worn on the body,
scapulars, and medals of the infant Jesus of Prague
and showy rosaries of silver and gold,
and the infinite boredom of the evening family rosary,
and my mother’s eyes growing soulful as she said the “Memorare:” “Never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection,
implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided,”
and me, thinking, “Wow, if that is true,
that is amazing, and there must be a God.”

I am from Bible stories from before I could read
Abraham with his knife to Isaac’s heart,
David and Goliath, Daniel in the lion’s den,
and from the stories of the saints, a second language too,
Francis of Assisi, the Little Flower, and Father Damien.

I am apparitions of  the Virgin: at Lourdes,
and Fatima and Velankanni and Guadalupe;
and from the catechism, duly memorized and duly hated,
from imported Easter bonnets and Easter parasols,
and First Holy Communion with a white veil and white shoes,
and chasing George Kuriakose at communion prep.
singing “Georgie, Porgie, pudding and pie,
kissed the girls and made them cry,”
until, ironically, George cried.

I am from the One Holy Catholic Church,
which made my world more cosmopolitan,
with our Parish Priests, Spanish Fr. Calvo,
and Belgian Fr. Durt and American Fr. O’Leary.

And I am from St. Mary’s Convent, Nainital,

my boarding school in the Himalayas,

and being loved by beautiful Irish Sister Josephine,

a Protestant convert who adored Jesus and the Bible,

and was sceptical of all Catholic add-ons,

and taught me to be the same, in a Convent where

we walked to the nuns’ cemetery on All Saint’s Day

holding candles and praying both to and for the dead

in general confusion, and were sentimentally pious

about “Our Lady,” well, had a devotion to her.

 

And I am from Holy Weeks with the church
shrouded in purple for Maundy Thursday,
and late night prayer vigils because He had said

“Can you not stay awake one hour with me?”
and incense flung in the flames, and following
the Priest and the Paschal candle into the dark church
with our little candles (Careful, don’t burn your hair)
on Easter Saturday as the priest intoned, “Christ our light,”
“Thanks be to God,” we said
and we saved bits of palm as bookmarks
and nervously stuck out our tongue for the host,
sometimes withdrawing it too early,
and, “Oh, you dropped the body and blood of Christ!”

 

And I am from boarding-school Catholicism which made me cry with boredom, and which I recollect as torture—

Mass five days a week at 6.15 a.m.,

weekends devoured with Benediction, Adoration,

Stations of the Cross, Rosary, Blue Army and Choir practices.

 

And if any of us are still Catholics, well, that would be a miracle,

Wouldn’t it? And I am not.

 

And I stopped believing in God for a season,

Of course, I did.

 

But I am also from knowing the Bible, in and out,

fruit of all that enforced church time,

knowing hundreds of hymns by heart,

and Biblical wisdom surfacing from the depths of memory

when I least expect it.

I am from a religious conversion, straight out of school,
while reading Catherine Marshall’s Beyond Ourselves,
and The Cross and the Switchblade,
and straying into a charismatic meeting
and being baptized in the Holy Spirit
which I asked for, and receiving the gift of tongues
which I specifically asked not to receive.
and deciding that the best way to serve Jesus
was to work with the poor.

So I am from Mother Teresa,
entering her convent as an aspirant at 17,
where I enjoyed adoration and meditation,
and spiritual reading (an introvert’s spirituality,)
but struggled through lauds, none, vespers, compline,
vocal prayer, novenas for “a special intention,”
litanies and rosaries recited while you chopped vegetables.
Oh, the religious noise!

I am from Oxford, England,
revelling in English Literature in Somerville College,
listening to a lecture on how Christ
fit all the hero archetypes in Lord Raglan’s “The Hero,”
and deciding that he was a hero, not God,
and suddenly feeling all alone in the world.

But later, after earning a Masters’ in Creative Writing

in America, I realise that my life, without Christ’s help,

had been pedestrian, uninspired, and unsuccessful

and surely Jesus could have done a better job running it.

At a friend’s suggestion, I systematically try to do what Jesus says,

and faith returns, and how sweet it is.

 

I am from feeling my way into faith again

at a Pentecostal Holiness church in Williamsburg, Virginia,

where the baptiser insisted we destroy my Father’s copy

of the Bhagvad Gita, and Roy’s grandfather’s snake paperweight.

“Thou shalt have no other Gods before me,” he quotes,

And when he tried to baptise me, I was terrified

to have him push my head beneath water,

–loss of control and all that—

and he thought that the fear was of the devil

and halted the baptism for an exorcism!

And I am from two years in Minnesota,
faith still weak, trying out John Piper’s Bethlehem Baptist
which was too heavily theological:
“The pleasures of God are in bruising his son,”
and how does that get one through from Monday to Saturday
which should be one purpose of a sermon?

And then, back to Williamsburg: Grace Presbyterian Church,

and experiencing “Sonship,” brainchild of Jack Miller

and watching how theology made him come alive,

and made his eyes blaze as he talked about Wesley and Whitfield

my eyes filled with tears, for I realized I loved theology,

and there I was, a secular literary writer, and I had realized

that what I really wanted to do was play in the fields of the Lord.

And I committed to studying my Bible daily, and praying daily,
and I learn theology the best way,
from my own direct encounters with scripture,
not mediated through Calvin, Luther or Piper’s encounters.

And I am from being discipled over five years
by Paul Miller of SeeJesus and learning to ensure
that the rubber of faith hits the road of life.

And I am from St. Andrew’s, Oxford, my current church home,
Book of Common Prayer, liturgy, robed clergy, and Taize.

And I am also from the spiritual discipline of blogging,
asking, “What are you saying today, Lord?”
What is scripture saying?”
and writing it down.

And I am from the international body of Christ.
I learn soaking prayer from the Arnotts of the Toronto Blessing,
which has changed me more than anything else,
resting in the presence of God, receiving revelation,
for God speaks constantly, and is never silent,
and when we are still, we hear.

And I belong to the Wild Goose of the Holy Spirit,

whom I chase at Ffald-y-Brenin, at RiverCamp,

and at the Revival Alliance Conferences.

And I am, more recently, from the revival meetings at Cwmbran.

 

I am from the body of Christ,

tasted in three continents in all its wild richness,

all its flavours, sweet, sour, salty, bitter,

making me who I am—

a mere Christian.

 

I am from Christ.

I am in Christ,

a one-finger typist in the body of Christ,

part of it, as it is part of me.

  

The Will of God Always Leads Us to a Larger Place

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Picture

As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen.  “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.” At once they left their nets and followed him. (Matthew 4 18-20) 

So the fishers of fish become halieis anthropon, ἁλιεῖς ἀνθρώπων, fishers of men. The will of God always leads us to a larger place, to an enlarged territory.

Because God’s desire is always for the fullest human flourishing. “The glory of God is man fully alive,” a lovely line credited to St. Irenaeus

And once we have surrendered our lives to him, he keeps moving us, onward and upward to the place where we can both use all our gifts and be a blessing to others. And in general, he takes the moving car of who we are; our gifts, abilities and experience, and steers it higher, stronger, faster.

So Jesus takes physically strong, entrepreneurial fisherman inured to hard work, team work, hardship, disappointment, nights at sea, and gives them the task of fishing men into an eternal kingdom. He applies their natural gifts to eternal, supernatural purposes.

Of course, just as we don’t give our children just one birthday present, once in their lives, so God continually gives us new gifts, abilities, capabilities, insight and new wisdom. But the vocation to which he calls us will be true to who we are, and to our interests and gifts.

* * *

Retreat to advance

In the short run, however, Peter and Andrew, James and John became downwardly mobile. No longer independent businessmen, but vagabonds, with no place to rest their head, dependent on charity.

Their old selves had to be broken, to be reformed like a beautiful mosaic.

John Wimber, founder of the Vineyard Movement, flourished in the music industry. However, on becoming a Christian, he found it incompatible with discipleship. So he left, and found work in a factory. An old colleague came to see him, asking for John Wimber’s office. He found Wimber covered with oil, inside a oil-barrel he was scrubbing out. The musician thought Wimber had gone mad!! (Recounted by Carol Wimber in The Way it Was.)

It required this brokenness for Wimber to be willing to hear when God said, “John, I have seen your work. Now let me show you mine.” And to be open to going with the flow of God’s  eccentric purposes.

And later to be a willing instrument when the Holy Spirit songs kept coming, no longer pop songs popular for a year, but spirit-given songs sung for decades, or longer.

* * *

However, it takes a period of brokenness and withdrawal for a gift to be repurposed, for fishermen to become fishers of men.

He needs our surrender before He can use us to bless others.

And when it happens, it feels like hell.

* * *

I was blocked in 2006 when a literary agent wanted me to make changes in my manuscript. Words dripped like crystallising treacle; I was blocked.

So I took a break, decided to put the kids in private school, founded a small publishing company to pay for that. When Roy could come aboard full time in 2010, and I could “retire,” I felt I no longer knew how to write. I had barely read for 4 years. I had lost writerly confidence.

When I started again, after hearing God suggest blogging, my writing was different. I was singing a new song.

I was more interested in speaking to my readers and blessing them than in a career (though, of course, I still want one) I was more interested in what I said, than in how I said it, which was huge for the girl who had been enamoured with style. I desperate to cut perfectionism off at the neck, and just get my work out there. Ship it! I was writing for the health of my soul, and as an offered gift to my readers, rather than for the glory of a career.

It takes a period of brokenness for the Great Artist to put your gifts together into a glorious mosaic, all hammered gold and gold enamelling, all tesserae and shimmering glass.

* * *

When I first wanted to offer my life to God, I went off to work with Mother Teresa, aged 17. (Having skipped years at school, winning “double promotions,” I was done with Grade 12 by the time I was 16.) I assumed because Jesus said, “Whatever you have done to the least of these…” that surely God’s will for me, and for every Christian was to work with the poor!

However, I am a dreamy and impractical person, and if I were a medieval woman when this was a plausible career choice, I would have become a mystic!

I was no good at Mother Teresa’s, with its packed-like-sardines community life; loud constant, vocal prayer, and lots of practical work. I languished and wilted; I got all sorts of things wrong; life felt like a series of hammer blows to my heart.

But writing–I have always written easily and reasonably well. It has generally been my joy.

Can writing be the way I am to serve God? Can writing be my worship? For years, I didn’t really believe something so lovely could be true

But now I do.

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (Frederick, Buechner, Wishful Thinking)

Because God is good, pouring perfume can be an act of worship, and so can writing (no longer for fame or money, though few are averse to these things!) but as an act of worship, of pure devotion.

“Child, you have written for ambition,” he says. “Come write for me, as your worship of me.

And I will make you… Ah, wait and see.”

In which Driveness & Scarcity Thinking is the Voice of the Oppressor, & the Enemy of the People

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Christ The Good Shepherd

 I am reading Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly. She quotes Global activist Lynne Twist who, in her book The Soul of Money, refers to scarcity as “the great lie”.

Twist writes, “For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is, “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining or worrying about what we don’t have enough of.

Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack.

This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.”

                                                                                                               * * *

And so we go through life, driven, driven, driven. Rushing like the Gadarene swine, driven by demons they could not see over a cliff to their destruction.

Driven by ambition to the detriment of our health, mental health, emotional health, relationships.

Driven for validation. To prove our intelligence, spirituality, talent, worth…

Forgetting that all drivenness comes from Satan, never from God.

Driveneness comes from the Accuser and Oppressor of the Brethren, never from the Good Shepherd who gently leads us.

We are driven by Satan, but Christ, he leads us on minute by minute, through his gentle Spirit. We have but to follow.

* * *

And in our drivenness to grab the life we dream of through our own hard work, we forget that there is a far better way, without bleeding fingertips and hearts and lives.

The way of prayer, and trust, and leaving room for God to work his miracles.

We forget The One who Makes Dreams Come True, the weaver, who can weave a technicolour dreamcoat from scraps of discarded wool

The one who can give us our wild dreams, and add no sorrow to them.

The one who says, “Come ye apart from them and be separate.”

The one who says, “Honey Child, you are enough.

I like you just as you are.

Brilliant success won’t make me like you more.

Failure will only make me envelop you more.

In me, you are loved, complete.

In me, child, you are enough!

Turn your gaze to me, and let me fill up the hungry holes in your heart.

Eat me, drink me.

Turn to me when you sense Satan driving,

When you are tempted by striving,

And I will give you rest.”

Julia Cameron’s The Writing Diet

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'The Writing Diet'
I am reading Julia Cameron’s The Writing Diet.

Cameron says we over-eat and gain weight when “something is eating us.” A lot of emotion gets displaced onto food. We use food to feed our emotions and our minds and spirits, instead of our physical bodies.

She suggests simple tools to deal with this.

One is Morning Pages, setting the timer for an hour, and writing about your feelings, emotions, and whatever else—anything and everything—that crosses your mind.

The Morning Pages are thus a form of therapy.

Gradually, one “gets current” with one’s emotional life, frustrations, dreams, aspirations, and current failures, and frequently, she says, people actually do something about them.

Her other suggestion is a food journal: writing down everything one eats. Those who record what they eat lose twice as much as those who do not. I have lost 5.5 pounds this year. So if I had recorded it, I would have lost 11. Wow!

More importantly, Cameron suggests we record what we are feeling (other than true hunger) when we want to snack For instance, I’ve just had dinner, and felt the urge to snack right now. I am clearly not hungry. So? I identified the emotion as stress. Stress about what? The answer did not immediately come to mind. I think it’s about some paperwork I need to finish, and that I haven’t yet done any “real” writing today.

Being more mindful, calmer, more current with one’s inner life, writing yourself to the right size. You wouldn’t think a writer would need such admonitions, but this one does.

A Very Long Pregnancy: Or, How to Live in the Land of Unfulfilled Promises and Deferred Dreams

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The Starry Night - Vincent van Gogh

 The early chapters of Abraham’s story make painful reading.

Again and again, through the decades God promises him a child: At the great oak of Moreh at Shechem, when he was 75; at Bethel, when he lets his nephew Lot have the more fertile land; and near the great trees of Mamre at Hebron, where “Abraham believes God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and God makes his great covenant with him.

And not just one child.

Abraham is promised descendants more numerous than the stars in the sky, and the sand in the seashore. God promises all the land his eyes can see to Abraham’s offspring.

Which for decades number precisely zero!

* * *

How does Abraham hear God’s great promises? In the same way we do. “The word of the Lord came to him” (Gen 15:4). He heard it in the secret places of his heart, a clear word, a clear certainty and surety.

And meanwhile in the “real” world: nothing happened. 

No pregnancy. Sarah and Abraham just grew older and older. Menopause came and went, and still he heard the insistent promise of descendants, as many as the stars in the sky.

* * *

Are you living in the in-between land of a sensed, longed-for, right destiny deferred? What should you do?

1) Remember God. Keep Believing.

Look up, God seemed to be saying, don’t look down.  Don’t look at your withering body, your declining strength. Look up at the skies, at infinity, which mirrors my power. Look up, for with me anything is possible.

2) Remember the world is full of goodness even while your dream gestates

The dream God has given you is just a sliver of the goodness God showers on you in the land of the living.

Even though Isaac was not born, Abraham had a beautiful wife, and success, which is satisfying: “sheep and cattle and male and female donkeys, menservants and maidservants and camels.” “He had become very wealthy in livestock and in silver and gold.”

While waiting for the sky above you to be filled with the promised stars, never fail daily to taste the goodness of the Lord, and thank him for it. The sea remains full. The palette of the sky changes minute by minute. The world bursts with beauty. People are fun! There is work and food and rest and companionship and friendship.

Never shrink your world to Isaac who will come when the time is right and you are right.

3) Prioritise your dream

The dream God has placed in your heart, and confirmed to you repeatedly in prayer, through the months and years…if you are sure it is of God, then step out in it.

Do what you have to do. Arrange your life in accordance with this dream.

The German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke writes “Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. 

 My dream is to write. For me, believing God will mean not looking at my own tiredness, but leaning on him for strength.

Believing God has called me to write, I will need to highly prioritise it, which sadly, I often don’t do.   I will set my face towards my goal.

And this will mean pruning things which are not the work which God has given me to do.

Work on your dreams, believing that you are in the vine, that it sap rushes through you, that God wishes to enlarge your territory.

Work like one flowing in the river of God’s presence and power, relying on the power of the river in you and around you for strength. s

4 Conversely, Just Stand There. Quit Striving. Just Rest.

The work Abraham had to do for Isaac to be born was to believe.

To trust and rest in the goodness of God.

To believe God was powerful and could do what he promised.

To believe God was good and would what he promised

Abraham needed the decades of resting and trusting to be able to do what he had to do—to surrender Isaac to God, so that Isaac was wholly God’s, not Abraham’s at all, so that God could enter human history through this family.

Passive faith, just resting, was what God required of Abraham.

Don’t prematurely grab the ball of the dream out of God’s hands, accuse him of not working on it hard enough and fast enough, and go off and do things in your own power, without checking with him.

Doing things he has never told you to do, things he has never authorised: These are always a bad idea, though they may yield short term apparent fruits, like Ishmael. In the long run, they may delay and damage your dream because you are listening to the voices of fear and your own finite wisdom, instead of listening to God’s infinite wisdom.

How about you? Are you living in the in-between land of dreams deferred? Any survival tips? 

 

St. Albans Church, Odense, Funen, Denmark.

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St. Albans Church, Odense, Denmark

St. Albans Church, Odense, Denmark

Well, Roy is working on the gargantuan task of organising 24 years of photographs of our lives together. Here are some images from a cool Church we visited last summer in Denmark. Irene broke her arm, and was shattered not be going to her Adventure camp in Lymington Rushmore, so, at a day’s notice, we decided to drive to magical Copenhagen. We stopped in Odense on the way. Here’s a companion post to the one on Odense Cathedral.

This lovely Neo-Gothic Catholic church built in the early 20th century is overshadowed by the nearby Odense Cathedral.  The exterior looks like a gingerbread castle, while the interior is in the usual simple white Danish style.  There are unusual decorations inside and outside– see below.  The images are presented in galleries.  To see them in greater detail, click, and use the arrow keys to navigate the gallery.

The Exterior

I was intrigued by the carved wooden panels showing the early history of Christianity in Denmark.  Especially the one illustrating the story of St. Boniface.  In Fritlar, Northern Germany, he started felling “Thor’s oak”, perhaps a site of pagan worship, while the towns people cursed him, threatening him with Thor’s vengeance.  However, after a few blows the mighty tree crashed to the ground, and Boniface was unharmed, the townspeople  were converted. (see wiki) for more details.

 

Interior

On entering one is surprised at how small the church is.  Most of the exterior grandeur is a facade, with no church behind it. The interior has an unusual stained glass window, showing a crowned eye, above the ceremonial entryway at the back.  Under the crucifix there is a beam across the nave with the words “Christus Vincit. Christus Regnat. Christus Imperator” from the Gregorian Chant.

 

 

 

On the Cwmbran Outpouring (or the 2013 Welsh Revival), The Wild Goose of the Holy Spirit & Waterfalls

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Peacock: The classic view.

The Celts called the Holy Spirit “Ah Geadh-Glas,” The Wild Goose.

And if you wanted to encounter this wild goose? Well, you absolutely could stay in your living room, leave the windows open, and hope he’ll fly in. The world (and Scripture) is full of miracles.

Or you could weed your garden, and hope he’ll land beside you. Strange things do happen. It’s an amazing world!

But if you’re desperate to see this wild goose, you’ll go where he is rumoured to be found, as we drove around the South Island of New Zealand to see Little Blue Penguins, Yellow-eyed Penguins, and Crested Penguins, and unforgettable albatrosses, soaring on the wings of the wind.

* * *

God is everywhere, omnipresent. And there is water everywhere, in the earth, in the air. But waterfalls—we don’t find them everywhere. To see them requires a long, generally arduous trek.

Yet, on our travels, I’ve gone out of my way to get to the Niagara Falls, the Rhine Falls in Switzerland, or the Voss Waterfall in Norway. As I have gone out of my way to see the paintings at the Louvre, the Prado, the Uffizi, and the Vatican.

* * *

And if I hear rumours of God manifesting himself in spots of earth, (the Greek word emphanisō ἐμφανίσω is also used of a peacock unfurling its feathers, essentially showing off) should I not travel like the Magi, bringing my gifts of worship, hope and humility? And love. Always love.

The Holy Spirit, a divine contagion, is often transmitted by the laying on of hands. Why he works in this way, I do not know. He’s like the wind: you don’t know where it’s going to blow. It does what it pleases.

I have been to Cwmbran twice and am delighted I went. I received healing from the mild adrenal fatigue which had plagued me (the consequence of overwork) and am reading rapidly again. And the issue of emotional or comfort eating, which has plagued me for decades—all gone. My weight has begun to drop off, relatively easily (though there are stones more to go 🙂 )

* * *

I had arranged to meet up with a journalist my second time at Cwmbran, and found myself thinking like a journalist. Asking myself, “Is this the real thing?”

I watched people swaying in ecstasy, arms in the air. People slain in the spirit (passing out!) as they were prayed for. People lost to the world amid whiffs of nicotine and well, sweet, heady scents reminiscent of the trains around Amsterdam. Drug addicts and former guests of Her Majesty’s Prisons are entering the Kingdom every day.

Yeah, it’s the real thing. And standing in line for prayer, I feel tearful about my stupidity, my supposition that religious experience familiar to me from experience, reading and church is “real,” and the way I wondered if what is wild, weird and from spiritual realms I know not of is not “real,”—a bit like those disciples from Ephesus who told Paul, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”

One can often find apt metaphors for spiritual experience from another private and secret realm: sexual experience. When Roy and I married, both old-fashionedly virginal, we bought Joy of Sex and More Joy of Sex. Yeah, that’s the kind of people we are: “Want to learn anything, buy a book.” Looking at some images we were: “Can’t imagine anyone being turned on by that!” And some images, well, turned either or both of us on!

It’s the same with spiritual experience—there’s the Book of Common Prayer; liturgy; sermons dripping with research, stupefying us beneath the weight of the word, and crazy charismatics, dancing in the spirit, slain in the spirit, prophesying in other tongues, or prophesying so wildly in your own that you might as well be speaking in other tongues, or producing wild manifestations of diamonds and angel feathers.  Hey, it’s different strokes for different folks. God made us all different, and just as no two couples share the same varieties of sexual experience, no two individuals share the same varieties of religious experience.

It is true that people eat lions and kangaroos and worms and frogs and dogs and snails, whether I have enjoy them or not. People enjoy God in ways we cannot fathom. Never judge someone else’s spiritual experience.

It’s all real; it’s all good. Come, join the feast. All dietary preferences will be catered for.

* * *

A revival is an amazing thing, God manifesting himself with such power that people come in every evening, as they have been doing at Cwmbran, to praise and worship and hear the word preached, the pleasures of worship and the word trumping television, and the internet.

Revivals die out, because who can sustain going to church six days a week? Pastors cannot; people cannot.

But while it lasts, it’s a beautiful thing.

So what Richard Taylor, Clyde Thomas, Kenny Brandie and all the earnest young pastors at Cwmbran will need to do to keep the glory down as long as possible will be two-fold.

Eat the word; keep close to God in humble repentance. Do not neglect private prayer for public worship.

And the second is counter-intuitive. Learning from the lessons of the past, keep grounded. Sleep well. Go on long walks. Keep physically fit. Take your days off. Don’t neglect family life. Beware of coveteousness.

Wild geese like sedge, aquatic roots, succulents and sprouts. However, if you provide them food they particularly enjoy: corn, rice, wheat and barley, you may tempt them to stay around longer. They may even make their home with you.

The Toronto Blessing began in 1994, the year my daughter Zoe was born; the presence of God is still strong there, 18 years later, and Zoe will be interning at Catch the Fire, Toronto, later this year.

I pray that the Wild Goose of the Holy Spirit may linger long in Cwmbran. Especially because it is so much closer than Toronto!

Bodnant Gardens, Wales, on a Perfect Late Spring Day

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Bodnant House reflected in the Large Pool.

Bodnant House reflected in the Large Pool.

(Guest post by Roy Mathias)

We were lucky to have perfect weather on our visit to Bodnant Gardens.  Bodnant Garden is on a hill.  At the top is the house, then on the terrace below is the Italian Garden, below that the large pond,  below that the Pin Mill (a smaller pond), and then there is walk through the woodland garden to the Dell, through which runs the river Hiraethlyn.

Here are some pictures organised into galleries. Click on any of the thumbnails to see a larger version, and use the arrows to see the rest of the gallery.

The Large Reflecting Pool [Read more…]