Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Writing and Blogging

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I was having lunch with my friend Liz a couple of weeks ago, and she asked me, as one does, what I was writing.
I am on a second draft of my memoir, I said; I am writing poetry, I am writing on the Gospel of John, and I am blogging.
“Blogging?” she said. “Oh yes, blogging is writing. I never thought of that.”
Well, dear Liz, what else is blogging?
In fact, a compact with oneself to write a certain number of blog entries a day (more than one, say) does force you to live a little bit more carefully, on the look-out for subject matter for your voracious and ravenous blog.

Brother Lawrence, Living in Heaven on Earth

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Quotes from Brother Lawrence
“In the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquillity as if I were upon my knees in the Chapel.”
“Make it your study, before taking up any task,” Brother Lawrence advises, “to look to God, be it only for a moment.”

O Lord of pots and pans and things,
Since I have no time to be
a great saint by doing lovely things,
or watching late with Thee,
or dreaming in the dawnlight,
or storming Heaven’s gates,
Make me a saint by getting meals,
and washing up the plates.

Warm all the kitchen with Thy Love,
and light it with Thy peace;
Forgive me all my worrying,
and make my grumbling cease.
Thou who didst love to give men food
in room, or by the sea,
Accept the service that I do-
I do it unto Thee.

Generally attributed to Brother Lawrence
Brother Lawrence, an obscure 17th century French Carmelite monk of little education was assigned to the monastery kitchen where, amidst the tedious chores of cooking and cleaning at the constant bidding of his superiors, he developed his rule of spirituality and work. In his Maxims, Lawrence writes, “Men invent means and methods of coming at God’s love, they learn rules and set up devices to remind them of that love, and it seems like a world of trouble to bring oneself into the consciousness of God’s presence. Yet it might be so simple. Is it not quicker and easier just to do our common business wholly for the love of him?”
 “Nor is it needful that we should have great things to do. . . We can do little things for God; I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for love of him, and that done, if there is nothing else to call me, I prostrate myself in worship before him, who has given me grace to work; afterwards I rise happier than a king. It is enough for me to pick up but a straw from the ground for the love of God.”

“I began to live as if there were no one save God and me in the world.”

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I thought of Brother Lawrence today when I listened to Duncan Smith, a chirpy adorable boyish preacher, who said we could be in heaven while right here on earth, stuck in a traffic jam, for instance. We could be in Jesus, with Jesus in us, wrapped in the Holy Spirit, with the Holy Spirit inside us, in the embrace of the Father, with the God inside us. Cool, huh?

Frank Conroy–Stop Time

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Conroy: Stop-Time
A brilliant and exquisite examination of the tender sensitivities of an adolescent’s psyche.
Summoned to the Dean:
“ How strange that when the summons came I always felt good.  The blood would rush through my body, warming me with its cheerful lively heat.  If there was a slight dryness in my mouth there was also a comfortable tingling of the nerves, a sharpening of hte reflexes, and a sense of heightened awareness.  The call produced a mild euphoria, not out of any perverse desire to be punished but in anticipation of a meeting with fate, in expectation of plunging deeper into life.  The Dean was less the Dean and more my dead father than either of us suspected at the time.  I sustained a fantastic belief that the mechanical cliches of our disciplinary interviews were only the prelude to evenutal mutual recognition.  His threats seemed of no more importance than the how-do-you do’s  and so-nice-to-meet-yous one mouthed to any new person, and in my eagerness to begin a real exchange I hardly heard them.  I misread the boredom and irritation in his face, thinking it came from frustration at the slow pace of love, investing his dry soul with juices that had doubtless drained before I was born.  The truth, that among the thousands of students, I was no more than a number to him, that he was so overworked he couldn’t possibly have remembered me form one time to the next without his records, that in fact everything between us was totally procedural–that truth was unthinkable.

            Getting kicked out of Stuyvesant would be a catastrophe surpassing anything in my experience, perhaps becasue it seemed to eliminate the possibility of turning over a new leaf.  I disbelieved in self-betterment.  By turning over a new leaf, I meant no more than avoiding the more obvious forms of trouble.
            Secretly, I did hope that things would get better.  That I didn’t know how they’d get better was balanced by my inability to to understand why they were bad in the first place.  It was a delicate world in which one had to move carefully, dealing with elements one understood vaguely if at all, knowing only that some elements seemed to sustain life and some to threaten it.  Getting thrown out of school would disrupt things profoundly.  I would no longer be able to experiment with those balanced elements, probing them gingerly here and there, adding some, taking away some, trying, in the least dangerous way, to find out what they were.  In a trade school, my bridges burned behind me, I imagined myself in total isolation and darkness, unable to re-organize, unable to make the slightest adjustments in the course of my life, finally and irrevocably in the hands of a disinterested fate.

Francois Truffaut and the romance of self-education

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I was reading about Francois Truffaut’s determined attempt to self-educate himself after being failed by the French education system. He watch THREE movies a day (often sneaking in for free) and read three books a week.

Which is as good as any education, though learning from others does gives you a framework to organize and make sense of the pieces of knowledge you acquire through the process of self-education. A more sophisticated language to talk about them. A lot of pre-digested knowledge context.

But for most people, for most of their lives, self-education is the only and best way of learning open to them, and thank God for it.

The Secret of Enduring Creativity

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The Secret of Enduring Creativity. is essentially learning to hear God’s voice, to tune into God.

There were fish everywhere. When Peter heard Christ tell him where to cast his nets, he caught 153.

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand. Psalm 139.

God has more thoughts than grains of sand. A handful of grains of sand has thousands of grains. God’s thoughts outnumber all the grains of sand on the beach. If one learns to tune into the thoughts of God, one will never run out of things to write.

I am at a John and Carol Arnott Leadership conference this week. I loved to hear the leader sing, “I have years and years of books of words for you.” Lovely. I took that as a promise to me. Lovely indeed!

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

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“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.

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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

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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.”