Anita Mathias | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

In Praise of Freecycle: The Kindness of Strangers

A corner of my study. As you can see, I have kept too many books!!

In 2006, when I was establishing our publishing business, I decided not to buy ANYTHING if I could get it on Freecycle. And so, we partly moved out of the cash economy for a while. Here is my account of our adventures.

The Kindness of Strangers

The words flashed greenly.

Free Yamaha PSR. An electric keyboard which simulates a harp… “Let’s get it,” I say.

“The kids aren’t musical,” my true love says to me.

“They might be,” I say. “And it’s free.”

Fatal words.

“I love music,” our seven year old adds brightly.

It’s our first day on Freecycle.org, founded in Tuscon in May 2003 by Deron Beal. However, since it’s slightly déclassé, like E-bay, money, underwear, those on it never mention it. Three years later, three million people are. After some dithering, I join them.

The dithering was prescient. Freecycle feels like a barking carnival, a literal free-for-all. Through the day, e-mails: Offered, going, GONE, and raucous WANTEDS. Whoosh. “Freecycle!” the children say, excitedly, resignedly.

We are offered a pair of seventeen foot kayaks. The idea of young girls handling those monstrosities appealed. We’ve now to get life jackets and paddles—but, hey, it was free.

* * *

A poet’s widow offers bookcases on Freecycle. I describe my plight, boxes of Freecycle books, impulsively garnered, poetry, novels, gardening, chess, art, cookbooks, children’s books, clogging the arteries of our home. Books, books, everywhere, and not a minute to read.

She asks archly, “Do you need more books? Geoffrey left fifty thousand.” Does one need heroin?

My heroine. What books!! Rare first editions, many signed, furred with dust, in every nook of a four storey house. “He didn’t know when to stop,” she explains. “When he wanted me to build an arch over our bed for books, it was a health and safety issue. ‘It’s the books or me,’ I said.”

Three times we fill our people carrier with the fruits of his choice, then stop, weariness prevailing where good sense does not. I think superstitiously of the Hope diamond and heartbreak. Besides, our house is beginning to resemble hers.

* * *

In Sissinghurst, Vita Sackville-West’s romantic English garden, everyone lived and wrote in a house or outbuilding of their own. (Hers was a tower!) That’s what each of us need, we concurred. A house of our own.

Freecycle gave it to us. A garden shed with huge picture windows; a twelve foot conservatory; a hexagonal greenhouse.

Can an acre and a half become cluttered? If one is not careful! If one becomes The Fool who Built Bigger Barns.

We get Duke on Freecycle, “an Alsatian, handsome, good with kids, great guard dog.” Too good to be true? Unfortunately! Handsome, yes, in a wolfish way; his alert eyes and shaggy mane beguile us while his ears jaggedly clipped by his abusive first owners prick up as we are lectured on his neuroses. Once home, he demonstrates them. The tyrant dog rounds up every ball he finds, glaring at us though his sharp aristocratic eyes, and nipping us with his sharp aristocratic teeth if we approach them or him. Back he goes. The kids cry.

* * *

Autumn is the season of mists and rabbits. We acquire timid, sweet-faced Freecycled baby Twilight, who eats and eats and becomes a massive armful of Giant European hare; chipmunk-faced Chippy, a Netherlandish Dwarf; and Starlight, a dull thrice-rescued rabbit.

Freecycle provides hutches and runs for the rabbits, and the Freecycle ducklings and hens. A hermit, courting frugality, once got a free cat to kill the mice, and then a cow for free milk for the cat , and then a field for free green grass for the cow…

* * *

Having just moved from the US, we found ourselves, in mid-life without anything electrical that worked! From those migrating across the ponds, we, perhaps foolishly, acquire booty: a wide-screen TV/VCR, all-region DVD player, a fridge, freezer, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner–stop-gaps until time and money abound. We accept an unwanted inherited Mitsubishi, so no longer have to maneuver our people carrier “the wrong way” on Oxford’s narrow streets. A handmade Edwardian tallboy in beautiful woods. Massive cherry bookcases. Chinese lamps.

Organizing our loot frazzles us.

Freecycle. The potlatch of the affluent society. A giving to strangers unprecedented in the history of the world? The kids love it, Christmas through the year. A ten foot trampoline, instant rejuvenation. A portable swimming pool. An ice-cream maker. An astronomical telescope. A microscope. The dreamy musings of a summer’s day become reality like the three wishes of fairy tale (with their secret caveat: Be careful what you wish for.)

It’s the biggest, weirdest, funnest catalogue in the world. You didn’t know these things existed; you didn’t know you needed them; and now, you have to have them!!

And, in this case, ultimate lure–

It’s Free.

A free lunch, you drive to, store, care for, and maintain.

* * *

If you wants to be busy, it’s just the thing. Honey Do lists grow. Chandeliers, mirrors, wall-mounted shoe boxes–projects–pile up in the utility room. Inanimate objects, like living things, demand attention: dusting, straightening… If they don’t get it, they too, in code, scream.

My jealously guarded in-box fills. The administrative challenge of pick-ups and deliveries mounts. Distraction! “S.T.U.F.F.–Something That Undermines Family Fun.”

You read your e-mail incredulously. All these people going though their houses, getting rid of all this stuff, and all these people gazing at their computer screens, acquiring this stuff, propelled by the dangerous, contra-spiritual force of greed.

“Things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” Emerson wrote. Still are, still do.

“I was a mathematician,” my husband says wistfully. “I wrote,” I say.

The tenses tense us.

“A good story,” he says, hopefully, “has a beginning, middle, and an end.”

“It used to,” I say.

Ours does. I survive seven weeks on the Freecycle list, seven weeks of details of stuff 15,000 people in Oxford want to (or have) acquired or shed. Too much of good things can also be toxic. Too much water can poison.

Enough! I succumb to quieter lures. A life free from greed. Simple living, high thinking, in the way of ancient sages–or a rough approximation of both.

I now recycle.

The beautiful, broken, yet unbowed Church

By Anita Mathias

A friend of mine who is a social worker was telling me about a woman she worked with, a Kenyan, who had fled a physically abusive marriage to a safe house in Oxford. She had twins: a nine year old daughter, wheel-chair bound with cerebral palsy, and a son who had a physical or psychosomatic eating disorder, which made him grossly obese. The mother herself had continuous, splitting headaches with all the stress.

It transpired that the woman knew no one in the estate in which she was housed. “All she needs is a friend,” my friend said, almost in tears. “Just one friend. It’s not too much to ask, is it?”

But in a world, in which friendship has currency—“What do you have to offer me?—Are you cool, rich, clever, connected, highly-educated, beautiful, successful, lovely?”—what does this woman have to offer? Nothing.

She would have one need after another; anyone could see that immediately. I befriended a Zimbabawean, abandoned by her husband a year or so ago when she cleaned for me, and her needs were bottomless. I gave her my toaster, my computer (and upgraded), stuff from my house, stored her stuff after evictions (it’s still in my garage), got her other cleaning jobs, but there were more needs, and more. She constantly wanted to borrow money (which I did not lend, because that just gets people even deeper into debt). Helping someone whose needs are unlimited is very tiring and draining–and thankless, but eventually one needs to draw the line, and sometimes the last No rankles more than all the previous Yeses. I understand why this desperate woman, who had so little to offer, could not find a single friend.

So is there hope for her? Where can she find kindness? Where can she find a friend?

I can only think of one place. The beautiful, broken, yet unbowed church of Jesus Christ.

A place where people talk to strangers. Where you can appeal to the Vicar, and if he can help or connect you, a good one will. Where there might be a safety net of ministries for such as her, or means to connect her to them. Where there are befriending ministries, and prayer ministries, where people will spend time with you and ask nothing in return.

I am pausing now to pray for this lady, whose name I do not know. She told my friend she did not go to church, unlike many from her nation. May she meet some on-fire African who might invite her to church.

“The local Church is the hope of the world,” Bill Hybels said, in an often-quoted epigram.

He’s right. Nowhere else can we relax so quickly, and so deeply with people so different from us.

Build your church, Lord Jesus.

Maranatha!

Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver

By Anita Mathias

Sunrise in our Garden (taken by Roy Mathias)

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.

Hello, you who made the morning

and spread it over the fields

and into the faces of the tulips

and the nodding morning glories,

and into the windows of, even, the

miserable and the crotchety –

best preacher that ever was,

dear star, that just happens

to be where you are in the universe

to keep us from ever-darkness,

to ease us with warm touching,

to hold us in the great hands of light –

good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day

in happiness, in kindness.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Farewell, Rowan, Great Archbishop of Canterbury!

By Anita Mathias

I heard of the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury with very real sadness. A scholar, a poet, a fine, humble human being.

I feel rather cross with those who made his tenure a cross.

However, the only purpose for this brilliant, imaginative, godly man to remain as Archbishop would be the platform it provides for a public demonstration of how a real Christian should live and behave.

His most lasting contribution to the world no doubt will be through the written word, hopefully through poetry.

* * *

Institutions. They suck your life-blood and spit you out! No institution is worth one’s loyalty, one’s energy, one’s life-blood.

Why? Because they are transient. In heaven, there will be no Anglicans, only Christians. No Anglican Communion, no Anglican Covenant.

Is the Anglican Church worth expending one’s life, time, love, loyalty on?

No, of course not. Only Jesus Christ is worthy of one’s love, loyalty and life-blood. Jesus, and the people we love.

In fact, in my view, even strengthening the local church by working in its power structures, as a member of a PCC, a Warden, a major donor, is a poor investment of time. Leave such things to those who love power and significance, and there will be many. But thou, oh man of God, flee these things.

Investing in individuals– simply, humbly, over cups of tea; simple humble one-on-one ministry—that IS worth it. This will endure; we will meet these people in heaven, when abominations like our church politics and 3 hour PCC meetings are long forgotten!

* * *

The campaigners against the Anglican Covenant, an abstruse, recondite (and I am told boring and unreadable) document which I am not clever enough or interested enough to understand have certainly shortened Rowan’s tenure, for it was his brain and heart child. One needs “the constitution of an ox, and the skin of a rhino” to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, he said on the day he resigned. Ultimately, he had neither.

“What’s so bad about the Anglican Covenant?” I asked a strident campaigner, an older lady. “It puts Englishness at risk,” she said.

Well, if it does, so be it. Englishness is at risk, anyway. It is definitely dated. It dies when the trumpet will sound, and we shall be changed, in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye.

* * *

And we shall enter a new heaven and a new earth, and that, to judge by accounts of visionaries who’ve seen it, will be most Unenglish.

It will be crowded: Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand.

Emotional, noisy and demonstrative, and all this in public

In a loud voice they were saying:

   “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,
   to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength
   and honor and glory and praise!”

And they sang a new song, saying:

   “You are worthy to take the scroll
   and to open its seals,
because you were slain,
   and with your blood you purchased for God
   persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.
¹⁰ You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God,
   and they will reign on the earth.”

Undecorous. Unliturgical, uncontrolled. All sorts of people and animals in the wrong place.

Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, saying:

“To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be praise and honor and glory and power,
for ever and ever!”

And most of all, so very, so very unEnglish

a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. ¹⁰ And they cried out in a loud voice:

“Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.” (Rev. 7:9).

Did he perhaps visualize his Anglican Covenant as paving the way for this great day?

“What’s so Amazing About Grace?” by Philip Yancey (A guestpost by Brian Johnson)

By Anita Mathias

What’s So Amazing About Grace?

“Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less.”

So no amount of religious knowledge or dedication will make one jot of difference to how God loves us; no amount of sin will make a difference either. This is, of course, completely at odds with how the world behaves and how, mostly, we are raised to think. This is also the starting point of Philip Yancey’s book, “What’s So Amazing About Grace?”

As Leslie Keeney said previously, books need to be in the right place at the right time. I was given “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” as a fledgling Christian struggling with my preconceptions (and misconceptions) of faith, and this quote (and the book) dealt with a lot of the baggage I had carried for so long.

Philip Yancey sets out by illustrating many examples of grace at work through history, in the Bible and in the present day. Equally, he cites examples of what he terms “ungrace” – mankind’s natural tendency to choose the path lacking grace.

The examples of both ungrace and grace are meaningful and, again in both cases, often harrowing. We are continually challenged in these examples to consider whether we can rise to the level of unconditional forgiveness displayed in the anecdotes and stories.

Yancey goes on to explain than we are grounded in ungrace almost from birth – and that this is reinforced throughout childhood and on into the world of work and elsewhere. We are told by society that we have to do something in order to be accepted; to be wanted; to be loved. We are also told that if we do not do these things, we deserve nothing and should expect punishment.

This ungrace can, and does, perpetuate itself and Yancey gives us several examples of the consequences.

He also takes aim at ungrace within the Christian church itself (quoting Bill Clinton: “Why do Christians hate so much?”) and at the wholesale ungrace between peoples and nations. He is careful to draw parallels between the events described in the gospels and more recent times – and, although written in 1997, the examples of these will be familiar to any casual reader of current affairs.

Grace, Yancey says, is fundamentally unfair, which is why so many of us struggle with it. We are conditioned to seeing rewards matching efforts and punishments fitting the crime. When we are then presented with Jesus’ teachings such as that of the Prodigal Son, our minds struggle.

That parable, and some others, are paraphrased and brought into the modern day brilliantly by the author and make excellent reading material on their own.

Yancey believes that true grace is an all-or-nothing thing: you cannot have half-grace or be partly sympathetic to the idea. Grace is ultimately about forgiving the inexcusable.

He also highlights how the concept of grace defines Christianity from other religions. God’s love, he says, does not have to be earned. We do not have to gain approval in order to receive it: “Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional.”

The books rounds off by coming back to its own title and a stunning example of John Newton’s hymn in action.

Theologians (and I am not one) can and do take issue with some of the stories and examples given in this book – indeed, there are so many varied examples given that it would be surprising if no-one disagreed with at least one. This is also very much a book describing and explaining grace by example, rather than theory,so scholars may well be disappointed by it.

However, for me, Yancey’s triumph with “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” was to take on some of the misconceptions about God’s completely unconditional love for us all, regardless of what we have done.

Helping us on the way to accepting that unconditional love, or grace, is what this book does well – and that to me is what it’s all about. Because while none of us deserve it, we all desperately need it. What’s truly amazing is that we can receive it anyway.

———————-

Brian Johnson is a relatively recent returnee to the faith, a musician and general creative person. Unashamedly a non-theologian; married; two children; one cat. Catch up at @MustardSeedUK.

With the night falling we are saying thank you by W.S. Merwin

By Anita Mathias

My daughter, Irene, as a four year old, thanking God for the Rhine Falls in Switzerland!

Thanks

by W. S. Merwin

Listen 
with the night falling we are saying thank you 
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings 
we are running out of the glass rooms 
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky 
and say thank you 
we are standing by the water thanking it 
smiling by the windows looking out 
in our directions 

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging 
after funerals we are saying thank you 
after the news of the dead 
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you 
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators 
remembering wars and the police at the door 
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you 
in the banks we are saying thank you 
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us 
our lost feelings we are saying thank you 
with the forests falling faster than the minutes 
of our lives we are saying thank you 
with the words going out like cells of a brain 
with the cities growing over us 
we are saying thank you faster and faster 
with nobody listening we are saying thank you 
we are saying thank you and waving 
dark though it is.

Beyond Ourselves by Catherine Marshall (A Guest Post by Alice Allsworth)

By Anita Mathias

(Interestingly, I became a Christian while reading this very book in 1979, Anita http://www.anitamathias.com/teenage-atheist.html)

So many things change our lives: circumstances, the family we’re born into, where we went to school, what career we chose, what jobs we did, how our parents behaved, what heartaches and heartbreaks we’ve faced, sickness, poverty, wealth. The list is endless but books can change our lives too: sometimes, a deep and powerful impact that changes us forever.

Aside from the Bible one of the books I credit for changing my life as is “Beyond Ourselves” by the renowned American author Catherine Marshall. Her inspirational writing has touched the lives of millions and continues to do so even now, although she died in 1983.

As a very new Christian, I was thankfully led to read this book when I needed feeding all the time. I was reading the Word but I needed something that related to everyday life and situations. This was where this book had such an impact. I hadn’t read much Christian literature at that time but was so thirsty to know more about this new life I had chosen. I remember feeling like a sponge, just soaking everything in, the good, the bad and the mediocre.

I needed to see how you could live your life as a Christian and what it actually meant to face the challenges life threw at you. Probably one of the most profound topics was that of forgiveness. Catherine gave such personal testimony of how she had been enabled to forgive and I was very quickly convicted that I needed to forgive someone who had hurt me very deeply.

So strong was this conviction that I didn’t wait long to obey the inner nudges, or shoves. The person I was struggling to forgive had caused me to lose my job and had taken my role on when I left. That event had caused chaos in my life. As a newly single parent unemployment was the last thing I needed. Encouraged by Catherine’s book I came before the Lord and made my peace with Him and released my forgiveness towards this lady.

Sometimes God wants to check we’ve done it for real, meant what we said. Only a few weeks later I found myself sitting behind this lady at a seminar. Had I not forgiven her she would probably have withered under the force of my feelings. But the Lord wasn’t done with me; He convicted me again that I should speak to her and apologise for my part in what had gone on. That was hard. I was shaking but knew I couldn’t duck this one.

As I spoke to her I could feel the grace and peace of the Lord flood through me and although our paths were unlikely to cross again, I knew I could face her any time. The real blessing was that she apologised too. Light as air and free as a bird at that moment, I left knowing that something very powerful had taken place. The Divine exchange.

I read as many of Catherine Marshall’s books as I could; they were sustenance and I devoured them all. She was so honest and real about the life situations that she encountered and didn’t shirk away from the tough stuff like suffering and healing. You almost feel like you really know her by the time you finish.

So often we’re afraid to be real with each other, wear a mask and smile hoping no one will find out what’s going on inside. But the shallowness brings no relief and until we face up to our truth we cannot know peace, healing, forgiveness and grace.

It’s more than twenty years since I first read this book and I was inspired to read it again. Unable to find my copy, which I probably lent to someone else who’d just entered the Kingdom, I have purchased another copy and am savouring it all over again.

My life has had many twists and turns over these last twenty four years, some of which I would never have wanted to experience but the simple message and power of encouraging and inspirational writers like Catherine Marshall gave me hope, increased my faith and afforded me the courage to be real about my life.

I love the way she never thought too highly of herself, asked the difficult questions of God and praised Him for the answers. Amply demonstrating that nothing is wasted in the divine economy, she found a new purpose after the devastating,untimely death of her husband. She poured out her pain through her pen and allowed the Lord to turn her sorrow into joy, helping us all to realise that there is always hope.

I will still happily place this book in the hands of a new believer as a guide and help. I have always aspired to write and offer something meaningful. Catherine’s writing and her journey as a writer were a touchstone for the journals I have kept for more than two decades and the literary journey I am on now. I do wonder what she would have made of blogging. I’m sure she’d have been out there with the others offering her warmth, wisdom and intimate insights of the Lord to the 21^st century.

*******

Alice Allsworth

Alice Allsworth (alicesapplesofgold.wordpress.com)

Alice’s Bio: I’m a mother of two beautiful daughters and a grandmother to three enchanting grandchildren. I live in one of the most beautiful places in the country, Cornwall. Fortunate enough to live by the sea, I never want to be too far away from its sight and sound.

I love music, words, painting, life, my family, my friends and most of all my faith. I live on the same roller coaster as everyone else but love to encourage others, support them when they’re struggling and most of all want to have made a difference to the world by the time I leave it.

I believe faith is an intimate part of everyday life and seek to relate the ordinary to the divine. It is the encouragement of others and the amazing love and grace of God that has brought me to this point.