random | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. Paul Tillich

“Do we know what it means to be struck by grace? It does not mean that we suddenly believe that God exists, or that Jesus is the Saviour, or that the Bible contains the truth. To believe that something is, is almost contrary to the meaning of grace. Furthermore, grace does not mean simply that we are making progress in our moral self-control, in our fight against special faults, and in our relationships to men and to society. Moral progress may be a fruit of grace; but it is not grace itself, and it can even prevent us from receiving grace. For there is too often a graceless acceptance of Christian doctrines and a graceless battle against the structures of evil in our personalities. Such a graceless relation to God may lead us by necessity either to arrogance or to despair. It would be better to refuse God and the Christ and the Bible than to accept them without grace. For if we accept without grace, we do so in the state of separation, and can only succeed in deepening the separation. We cannot transform our lives, unless we allow them to be transformed by that stroke of grace. It happens; or it does not happen. And certainly it does not happen if we try to force it upon ourselves, just as it shall not happen so long as we think, in our self-complacency, that we have no need of it.

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!’ If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance,” – Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations.

The Arithmetic of Counting Blessings

By Anita Mathias

Durer, The Praying Hands

I don’t recall how Selwyn Hughes, “The 7 Laws of Spiritual Success” handed up in our house. A few chapters caught my eye as I was about to put it in the Oxfam box.

Here’s his chapter on Counting Blessings. I have speed-typed bits while reading it

“Thou hast given so much to me

Give me one thing more

A grateful heart.” George Herbert

Sir John Templeton, financier and philanthropist who gives away millions of dollars every year says that when he awakes, he lies quietly on his bed, and thinks of five new ways in which he has been blessed. He belives is this one of the chief reasons why peace and contentment flood his life.

John Templeton-For every problem people have, there are at least 10 blessings.

Charles Spurgeon–“It is a delightful and profitable occupation to mark the hand of God in the lives of His ancient saints and to observe his goodness in delivering them, His mercy in pardoning them, and His faithfulness in keeping his covenant with them. But would it not be more interesting and profitable for us to notice the hand of God in our own lives?”

“Count your blessings.” Impossible advice. Our arithmetic is not good enough.

When we exhort our soul to praise the Lord, our emotions follow. A law of the personality and of life: what we think about will soon affect the way we feel. Rational Emotive Therapy is based on this idea–“Change your thinking, and you change your feelings, and the next consequence is a change in behaviour.”

We would be much calmer and more confident in the presence of new troubles if we remembered vividly the old deliverances; if we had kept them fresh in mind, and been able to say, “The God who delivered me then will not desert me now.”

John Newton, “His love in times past forbids me to think,

He’ll leave me at last in trouble to sink.”

Auden–“Let your last thinks be all thanks.”

William Law, “If anyone would tell you the shortest, surest way to all perfection and happiness, he must tell you to make it a rule to yourself to thank and praise God for everything that happens to you. For it is certain that, whatever seeming calamity happens to you, if you thank and praise God for it, you turn it into a blessing.”

In everything give thanks–for everything works out for good. God can take the worst thing that has happened to you, and turn it into the best thing that has ever happened to you.

The risen Christ is the greatest reminder that even the evil of the cross can be transformed into a new and exalted life.

It is a law of the soul that the more we focus on what we have rather than what we don’t the more the soul begins to thrive.

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The Magic Kingdom–V: The Ones He Calls, and The Ones He Chooses

By Anita Mathias

The Magic Kingdom is a long, very personal essay I wrote in 2003, which I am posting here in installments, without re-reading or editing (because, once I start, I would edit it into a different essay

Part I The Magic Kingdom I–The Varieties of Magic
Part II The Magic Worlds of Art and Nature.

III Deep Magic from Before the Dawn of Time.

IV The Magic Kingdom of Prayer

The Ones He Calls

For the Son of Man has not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (Luke 5:32).

They shove the abashed woman in front of the rabbi. The cacophony resounds: “Moses,” “law,” “adultery” “stone such women,”“now what do you say?” Her hope fades as, through the disheveled curtain of her hair, she studies his strong, quiet face. Pure goodness. He would not contradict Moses. But, while the questions echo, he is silent. Then, she hears him speak, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” She flinches as she waits. Waits. And hears footsteps like a departing dream. The rabbi had found the one spring which could release the trapped woman. And wouldn’t his words, his forgiveness, the new hope he offered have been to her the sweetest magic she could imagine? She had been a caterpillar in a ring of fire (as Martin Luther described grace). And he was the Siegfried who risked that ring of fire to rescue her.

And isn’t there a wonder and mystery in God’s mercy? That he is more than an equal opportunity lover, but, in fact, “came to seek and to save what was lost:” the cranky, the lazy, the petty, those for whom memories of the past are an embarrassment, the “nasty people,” Lewis calls them. This is the breathtaking good news: that when I know the core of his calling is love, but am so annoyed with Roy that I can barely bear to look at him; when I play truant in the magic kingdom of books and poetry, and my house goes to pieces and I feel I have failed my children; when a tidbit of gossip passes my lips, and I remember I had resolved never to do that again; the moments when I feel that prayer now, opening a Bible now, would be hypocrisy, for I am humbled by an outburst of temper; a hot-headed e-mail; a spontaneous exaggeration reaching off the pages of creative nonfiction (where it is perhaps permissible) to the nonfiction my listeners believe they are listening to (or I hope they do)– it is when I have blown it that I have qualified myself to be the sinner he came to call to repentance, and, so, the Great Physician pays me a house call; the shepherd, leaving the ninety-nine sheep, takes up his staff, and trudges off to find me; a lamp is lit and the house searched for me; the father, forgetting all else, scans the horizon for me; and the man whose gaze I am ashamed to meet offers me a dazzling way to be saved from my enemies and from the hands of all who hate me. A God for the prodigals who have squandered all in foolish living, for the sick in body and mind and soul and spirit, that is indeed good news.

The Ones He Chooses

And when the King, the Lord of glory, came to dwell among us, who was counted worthy to follow him, to be the first Christians?

* he who, with the insight God lavishes on the unworthy, early recognized the Messiah, dominant, cocksure Peter of erratic insight, whom Jesus fiercely rebuked when he recoiled at his friend becoming a paradoxical suffering King whose magic kingdom was not of this world, who was draped in royal robes with mockery and great laughter, whose crown was of thorns, whose throne was the cross, and whose insignia was his nail-scarred hands.

* those who were fiercely competitive in the noble enterprise of establishing the kingdom of whose nature they were uncertain; always enviously trying to identify the favorite, the greatest.

* Those who continually forgot his vivid miracles, and were continually rebuked for their lack of faith. But though they disapproved of his approach to money, power, or people, they loved him. “Let us also go that we may die with him,” Thomas says, though in the hour of terror, not one of them dared to, not yet.

To these men he walked up, looked into their eyes, and said, “Follow me,” and they rose, leaving nets and tax booth, and walked behind him–becoming, by that act, Christians. And he comes up to us, people indubitably in process, amid the muck and misery and marvel of life, looks at us, and says, “Come, follow me.” And as, with an ardent, “Oh yes!” we make our first changes, we become Christians. And are we, by those words, instantly transformed, utterly transfigured? No more than they were, though they were with him all day, all night, loving him despite their ambition, pride, doubt, and impatience. The long years it takes to become a writer, a mathematician, but in the wideness of God’s mercy, all it takes to bear the tremendous badge of a Christian is our “yes,” our tottering steps. And though we may trip and stumble and stray, he steadies us, and leads us on, transforming us by the slow-release seed of his life within us, as potent and generative as that seed too small to be seen by the naked eye, shed in an ecstatic night we cannot identify, that made the children we adore.

In moments of total surrender and loving trust, I have decided to follow Jesus 100%. And between commitments, how much has my commitment actually grown? A percentage point, perhaps more, if it was a major renunciation. How disastrous in the world’s eyes! I see these cruel graphs in stores–Employee goals: a minimum of a hundred percent efficiency and I think of the ones he chose: Peter who declared, “I will go to the death with you” and believed it too, but who, in the darkness, by a coal fire, in a chiaroscuro scene that Rembrandt and Caravaggio loved, “never knew” the Jesus being degraded by his enemies–but whose bitter tears led to a bitter-sweet reconciliation at dawn, by another coal fire. The Lord of Glory accepts us just as we are, even as he molds us into what he (and between gasps, we) wants us to be.

I read of Francis Schaeffer’s “plant-throwing, pot-smashing temper” in a profile in Christianity Today.[1] And he was one of the most influential Christians of the twentieth century. Had he crossed over into Christ’s magic Kingdom? I don’t doubt it–for that is the magic of the Magic Kingdom. It deigns to reign in jars of clay. In his son Franky Schaeffer’s autobiographical novel, Portofino, the evangelical leader growls dangerously, “Elsa, I wish you wouldn’t interrupt my quiet time with the Lord.” “You’ve just had your quiet time, and you are still so irritable with me,” my husband observes plaintively. I have made similar observations of his spiritual life, less temperately.

In the early years of our marriage, we knew the wild fire of sin when our inherited tempers were activated and the air was alive with identified flying objects–a camera, a vase–yes, still nonfiction, unfortunately, and the next morning the shame of trying not to meet the neighbors’ eyes (they heard, they didn’t hear, they heard, they…) as, embarrassed at the incongruity, we got into the van to go to church, knowing what we would think if we had heard what they heard (oh please, didn’t hear!) and then saw them go to church.

[1] “The Dissatisfaction of Francis Schaeffer, Christianity Today, March 3rd, 1997

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Hosanna to the Son of David, Matthew 21 1-11

By Anita Mathias

Oberammergau Passion Play

Jesus Comes to Jerusalem as King

¹ As they approached Jerusalem

The centre of Israel’s religious life and messianic expectations

and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, ² saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. ³ If anyone says anything to you, say that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.”

Jesus refers to himself as the Lord, the sovereign orchestrator of these events.

⁴ This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet:

⁵ “Say to Daughter Zion,

‘See, your king comes to you,

gentle and riding on a donkey,

and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’”

The inexorable and uncanny fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.

A donkey was an animal symbolic of humility, peace and Davidic royalty.

ESV–Matthew specifies that Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem upon a colt fulfills the prophecy of Zech 9:9. Jesus’ action is an open declaration that he is the righteous Davidic Messiah.

⁶ The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them. ⁷ They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on. ⁸ A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road,

An act of royal homage; it symbolized the crowd’s submission to Jesus as King.

while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. ⁹ The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,

“Hosanna^[b] to the Son of David!”

Hosanna means O Save. It expresses both prayer and praise.

Son of David, an acknowledgment that Jesus is the Davidic Messiah.

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”^[c]

“Hosanna^[d] in the highest heaven!”

This means “May those in heaven sing Hosanna.”

¹⁰ When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred

The religious establishment is stirred up, fearing that Jesus may usurp their power. Much opposition comes from fear and jealous.

and asked, “Who is this?”

Because of Jesus’s dramatic entry into Jerusalem.

¹¹ The crowds answered, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.”

Hosanna to the Son of David, Matthew 21 1-11

By Anita Mathias

Oberammergau Passion Play

Jesus Comes to Jerusalem as King

¹ As they approached Jerusalem

The centre of Israel’s religious life and messianic expectations

Jesus refers to himself as the Lord, the sovereign orchestrator of these events.

⁴ This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet:

⁵ “Say to Daughter Zion,

‘See, your king comes to you,

gentle and riding on a donkey,

and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’”

The inexorable and uncanny fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.

A donkey was an animal symbolic of humility, peace and Davidic royalty.

ESV–Matthew specifies that Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem upon a colt fulfills the prophecy of Zech 9:9. Jesus’ action is an open declaration that he is the righteous Davidic Messiah.

An act of royal homage; it symbolized the crowd’s submission to Jesus as King.

while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. ⁹ The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,

“Hosanna^c]’>[c]

“Hosanna