Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

The Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald, Colmar, Alsace, France

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I saw this amazing piece of art last week, in Colmar, Alsace. 
It was painted by the German painter, Matthias Grunewald, on the eve of the Reformation.

See the angelic choir glorying in the birth of Christ. The lute of the angel in the foreground has the shape of a human face!!






And here is Lucifer, seemingly unable to resist viewing the incarnation of the Glorious One as a baby.




Monsters seemingly out of Brueghel’s imagination assault St. Anthony.












A beautiful Angel Gabriel

Note the detail of the slumbering soldiers

How to Make Real Friends Rapidly

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I loved this Noel Piper article on friendship.

Some reflections on it
1) One is never to old to make new friends. Noel says she formed her first real friendships at the age of 60.

2) The best way of establishing friendships–be open and honest, undefended.

3) And then, the miraculous counter-intuitive truth: Being open and honest about the very things which we think will repel people in fact attracts people to us.

We might think it’s our shiny, glitzy, perfect exterior which will win us friends and approbation. But it does not–people either do not believe in it, or are intimidated by it. It’s by sharing the real you–failures, faults, fears, weaknesses, and humiliations (along with the peaks) that we attract friends who love and trust us.

My fortnight in Facebook Statuses, and Most Read Blog Posts of the Month

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Strasbourg

 

MOST READ BLOG POSTS OF THE MONTH

1) Bees, Permaculture and Blessing.

2) Yoga and Other Things which Shouldn’t Scare Christians
3) Short term Missions (Thoughts inspired by Jamie, the Very World Missionary)
4) The Third Generation of British Christian Blogging and Sustainability
5)Coffee and Breaking Addictions

Okay, so this week is Zoe’s mandatory work experience. We insisted she work with us in our publishing company, which she pronounced was “lame.” However, Roy kept her nose to her grindstone, and taught her real computer skills (book formatting and other skills) which will be useful to her in life. She also discovered a hack or two he didn’t know. A good day’s work!
Dead silence reigns chez Mathias. I have bought new phones for all 3 other members of my family. A new generation iPhone for Roy (with GPS, and he won’t switch with me!), a pink phone for Irene (which she loves and claims is cooler than my iPhone) and a pink phone for Zoe too, rather to her dismay!! Everyone is fidgeting with numbers, SIM cards and apps, in perfect concentrated silence.
Got a text I never expected to receive from a child of mine. “Selected for ALL my Sports Day events” Hurdles, high jump and running. Irene sure didn’t get the sporty gene from me!!
Me, happily listening to a Matt Redman CD. Irene, 12, contemptuously, “That’s a pretty pointless piece of music.” Errr….. and why exactly?
A really lovely relaxed barbecue with our very large “small group” at St. Andrew’s yesterday. Good good, witty conversation, bonhomie and much laughter beneath the stars. Lovely!
Ah, tickets bought for a short 6 days break while Zoe is at the Arvon Creative Writing course–to Basel en route to Strasbourg. Excited. We saw cheap tickets, and get tempted, though our real family holiday is in August–exploring Sweden in a motorhome. Any “don’t miss” suggestions for either of these are welcome!
So Irene has invited her friends for a camping sleepover in our orchard. It is raining, but they are undeterred as they try to set up three tents. I hear happy excited giggles. Have we grown-ups forgotten the art of happiness? Well, then, we must relearn it. And rain or hail, they insist of sleeping out of doors. It’s fun to be adventurous and impractical–must relearn that too!!
And here we are, trying ever so hard to eat healthily (minus frequent relapses into chocolate) and Irene cooks herself trays of what she calls “a universal meal” which she eats for breakfast, dinner, and lunches at home–pasta, with cheesy mushroom sauce, baked with tuna and sweetcorn, with a topping of grated cheese and crisps. Zoe bakes herself the same, but with chicken breasts. Over-independent children!!

And the next step of the greening of the Mathiases: we have two paper shredders, upstairs and downstairs, and are shredding every scrap of paper as mulch and weed-suppressant for the veggie garden. Roy calls this “Anita economics” and claims he could have got bags of mulch for the £70 I spent on the two shredders. Ah, but I now have a lifetime supply of compost from all the waste paper our family generates!

They’ve come, the long-awaited new members of our menagerie–5 frames of live bees. I can’t wait to see and hear them buzz around our garden. Roy asked Zoe for help to put them in their hive. “They are angry the first day,” he added casually. Zoe put her hand to her heart. “Don’t say the bees are angry,” she said. “My heart starts beating faster; I get so stressed.” We laughed. We think of Zoe as superwoman!

Goodness, I have reached the end of the summer term totally exhausted–as has Roy! And this though we aren’t little school-girls, like the two in residence. Must be late evening light, very early dawns, and a plethora of summer social events. 4 dinners with friends over the last week! So I’m closing my laptop and books, and tuning in to God to discover his plot for my summer/rest of the year/rest of my life.
Grieving for lively, exciting Mumbai–the city in which my grandparents lived, scene of exciting holidays in which I was thoroughly spoiled, city of endless excitement and stimulation. It is better not to hate, and so I won’t! But my first and visceral reaction is: “I hate terrorists!!” Now I understand the reaction of Americans to 9/11 a little bit better.
Irene looked adorable as she donned a bee suit, veil and gloves to help Roy hive our new bees. One stung them, through thick leather, so no harm done. Irene will be the fourth generation of amateur beekeeper (from Roy’s side). We have bought hundreds of Buckfast bees, bred to be gentle and mild by the monks of Buckfast Abbey. Roy and Zoe are also building a duck house. We’re really getting into country life!!
Okay, then, I’m on Google+. Now am I going to find the energy to post on two sites? Think I’ll like it. Visual, intuitive, clean and easy to use–reminds me of Amazon’s website in
many ways.
In Strasbourg, for a week in Alsace-Lorraine. Irene was enchanted by the fact that there were three exits at Basel airport, to go to France, Germany or Switzerland. We made the right choice!

Strasbourg is quite an anomaly–more German than French–the faces are German, though the manners are French. The food and the boulangeries are nowhere as good as the rest of France. We enjoyed the Cathedral–its spire a lacy confection, and wandering around the Ile de France, a network of canals and woodworked fairytale buildings. Definitely a walking city!

We walked over from France to Germany yesterday on the dazzling suspension bridge called the Friendship Bridge. We were as enchated by this as Irene was. The bridge rises out of the peaceful Jardin de Deux Rives, France on one side of the Rhine, Germany on the other. Irene said she saw a black cross in Coventry Cathedral which will be painted white when peace prevails throughout the world, as it now does in Europe.
A perfect travel day. Drove to Colmar and saw the surprisingly realistic, poetic and expressionistic Issenheim Altarpiece painted by Mathias Grunnewald. Lovely! It was in the Musee Unterlinden, a whole museum devoted to bright medieval German oils, still brilliant (and often amusing) 6 centuries later. And the Alsatian specialty tarte flambee for lunch–Irene had a sweet version with red fruits and icecream.

Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer is described as “a Christian fundamentalist with a deep hatred of multiculturalism, of the left and of Muslims.” Interesting then that he chose the terrorist tactics used by Muslims over the last quarter century. Hatred is particularly dangerous because it can contribute to your morphing into the object of
your hatred!
So, yesterday’s highlights, a quick explore of Munster, founded by Irish medieval monks!! There was a stork enclosure with enormous and beautiful storks, 17 of them. The stork is a sort of unofficial mascot of Alsace, as we can testify having consumed chocolate stork eggs, stork pastries, and bought home an enormous stork casserole dish to try to replicate French casseroles!

The Tired and Whiny Blog Update

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I am afraid there is going to be a bit of a blog slowdown until the 25th July.

I suddenly realized a couple of days ago that I was really, really tired–not physically, just mentally.

We had bought tickets and rented a motor home for a holiday exploring Sweden in mid-August. Why Sweden? Because we loved exploring Norway in 2009–one of our favourite family trips–and because I have always been fascinated by Scandinavia (I was obsessed with Norse mythology as a child).

But that’s mid-August, and I am feeling burnt-out now. You know the sort of burn-out, when you wake up tired, when even writing a blog post seems to demand powers of concentration you no longer possess. When your brain feels a bit mushed and compressed, as if a giant has been sitting on it.
                                                * * * 

How does one reset one’s brain? For me, one thing always works, and that is travel. If I am slightly jaded, going away for a day or two refills me with enthusiasm; if really tired, it can take 3-4 days, or longer if I’ve been really overdoing it.

Can’t travel next week, as it’s Irene’s last week of school, though I may take some day trips (Wisley, Kew Gardens, National Trust Gardens).

The week after that, Zoe is going to the invitation only Arvon Creative Writing weeks for teens. I would rather have gone as a family, but Zoe, at 16 is doing her own thing more and more (she went to the Lake District with friends last week, is going to Arvon in Shropshire next week, then back to the Lake District for another week, then to India in the last week of August). So we are increasingly travelling without her. For instance, she chose to go to Rome with friends in October, and the three of us went to Prague.

So, with a bit of guilt at 2 holidays in one summer, I’ve bought tickets for Strasbourg week after next, flying in to Basel (for just the three of us, sans Zoe). I’ve long wanted to see Strasbourg–and since’s it’s equidistant from Switzerland, Germany, Italy and the rest of France, might do a bit of cross border hopping. Excited.

Of course, I am not going to leave for 9 days. I think I am going to take life easy, just write for 15 minutes at a time, and catch up with garden chores, and the usual book purging, room decluttering, paperwork sorting activities that are a necessary part of life.

I have a couple of writing projects which I want to wrap up before I go, so this blog is going to go into slow motion for the next couple of weeks. I may not write much, but will share the many links from other blogs which I had bookmarked to share at some point. And why not now?

So truncated service for a while. Regular programming will resume on July 25th. Like a lot of people, I’ve realized that I have been spending too long on my blog, and am going to cut it back to 30 minutes a day, and shorter posts to leave time and mental energy for other writing.

Talking the Talk vs. Walking the Walk

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Don Miller, Blue Like Jazz, writes in his post A Good Reason to Get Real


 Miller writes
Richard Rohr in Everything Belongs talks about using the language of descent to make an ascent. That is, using the language of humility or spirituality to fit in or be accepted in a given culture. 

The Bible contains a recurring phrase that goes something like this: they will get their reward in full…The context changes, of course, but the idea is the same. The idea is that we can really know God and walk with Him in peace, or we can use Him to fit in with a religious social group. The real reward is God, not the group. And besides, when we do things for real, we get both God and connection to the group, so why not be the real thing?

So how do we know if we are really spiritual, if we really love God? The answer lies in our actions. If we are talking one way and living another, we are just using the language of God to manipulate a group of people into affirming us. God says of us, then, that we have our reward in full. And He’s right. I don’t know about you, but I want more. I want the real stuff.
·                                              * * *                                                                                                                                                                                                          
·        Very thought-provoking. Have you ever been in a Christian group in which everything thing everyone said was so shiny, so perfect? If one took everything people said at face value, then beyond doubt we had been with a group of perfectly surrendered Christians, who wanted nothing more than to discern and do God’s will, to reach unbelievers with the Gospel, or whatever the emphases of their particular church was.


    If you say something contrarian, share a real struggle, the whole group looks at you pityingly and prays for you. Not that your struggle was anything out of the ordinary; voicing it however was. In such a group, people don’t explore what they really believe. They seek to give the right answer.


·      So if fake Christianity, sounding like a committed, surrendered Christian, who loves God, loves people and only wants to do God’s will can bring rewards of social acceptance, how much more will the real thing? Don Miller asks. 
                                          * * *


I   Interestingly, the real thing might not necessarily bring social acceptance. People might find someone who honestly follows Christ with all her heart as threatening as they found Christ. The real reveals the fake. 


In a group that have combined to pretend that the Emperor has no clothes, a truth-teller may not be welcome.  In a group playing in the garden, someone who has been out to the holy wilds of following Christ, who has left the shore and paddled out to Aslan’s Own Country, might be very threatening and suspect. 

However, Miller has a point. If the pretence is rewarded, how much greater will the rewards for the real thing be?

However, they may be entirely different. They will be from God, not the group. And they will stagger our imagination.
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Coffee and Breaking Addictions

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I was interested in Rachel Held Evan’s reasons for breaking her coffee addiction (and that she believes she has done it in three days!!).

I had a dreadful coffee addiction as an undergraduate and graduate student. I pretty much had a cup on my desk through the day. One day, I decided to count how many cups I had—and it was 17. And so I tried to reduce it to 16, then, 15, 14, etc. Didn’t work. For me, like Rachel, cold turkey is the way to go.

Drinking coffee to help you concentrate when your concentration is flagging because you need fresh air, a nap, exercise, is like flogging a dying horse. You will get some more action out of the horse, but it will die sooner.

And so it was with me. I think my coffee-fuelled overwork—I could sit and read for 14 hours at a stretch, with breaks only for meals in my twenties—seriously affected my powers of concentration. It set me up for adrenal fatigue which I am only now beginning to shed. It also set me up for crash and bust cycles of work—definitely not sustainable.

In my second year of marriage, I was disgusted with the weight I was gaining with a suddenly sedentary life of reading and reading! So I naively thought I would stop eating till I lost weight. So I tried to fast, and just had water with a twist of lemon, and tried to read Scripture.

I survived for 3 days—and felt ill for most of it as the residual toxins from years of poor eating habits were burned.

And when I gave up—prematurely!!—I found I couldn’t stand the thought of drinking something so toxic as coffee. I hadn’t gone on the fast to kick the coffee addiction—it was a side benefit!! That was 20 years ago, and I haven’t had more than the occasional cup of coffee, generally in coffee shops with friends, since then.

A couple of years ago, though, I grew dependent on green tea to help me stay awake and concentrate. Not sure if I should break that habit too and substitute something with nutritional value which might help me concentrate. Am trying blueberry smoothies, which are meant to enhance memory and concentration.

I haven’t tried a long fast since then, and don’t believe I will. Fasting seriously lowers one’s metabolism—and I desperately want to increase mine. On the other hand, a Daniel fast (eschewing particular “pleasant” food for a season, as described in the Book of Daniel), can only bring physical and spiritual benefits, and I think I will try one this week—avoiding chocolate and white carbs (bread, pasta, rice, potato.)

Chocolate is my last dependency. Not a physical addiction, in that I can go for a couple of weeks without it, but it is my comfort and stress-reduction food of choice.  Can someone invent calorie-free chocolate, please?

The Third Generation of British Christian Blogging and Sustainability

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blogging
Image : Paul Wilkinson


Archdruid Eileen writes, “The Third Generation of British Christian blogging might go in two directions – the “professional” blogs, such as Andrew Brown or His Grace, and the more personal ones with a certain amount of theological reflection – such as Sally’s (which has been around a long, long time) or Catriona’s (likewise) or Anita’s. I realise I’ve just listed three women and maybe that makes them less aggressive, less determined to blog relentlessly, and therefore less likely to tire of it.”

Hmm. Interesting. I disagree—theoretically!!– with the assumption that being a woman might make you less aggressive, and less determined to blog relentlessly.  Practically, however, the average woman does have less physical energy than the average man (certainly the case if I take myself and my husband as a representative sample).

 Also, even in households in which childcare and domestic chores are shared at least equally (as is the case in my household), the weight and distraction of them falls unequally on the woman. If the house is messy, the kids go to school without permission slips, in grubby kit, which could have profited from introductions to the washing machine or a needle, no one is going to say, “Bad house-husband,” “Bad dad.” So the weight of domesticity does fall unequally on women—until you reach the stage at which you don’t care what people think. (Am getting there, but not quite there yet.). The quotidian grind of hassle can militate against blogging relentlessly.

And of course, if that prevents burn-out, it is not necessarily a bad thing.
I started blogging in mid-April 2011, and have been surprised at the short life-cycle of many bloggers. How long will mine be? Will I last the course? I would like to.
How does a Christian blogger stay the course?
1)     Make sure it is your calling and vocation.
Of course, it is not necessary for everything one does to be a calling and vocation. I travel a good deal, and garden a good deal. Neither of these are my vocation. (Now I wish I would convince Roy that I had a vocation to travel!!) So, of course, one can blog and enjoy it without it being a calling and vocation.
However, if one does feel it is one’s calling, then continuing becomes non-negotiable.
I do feel blogging is part of my calling to write.
But only a part of it.
2)     If one feels that blogging is part of one’s calling as a writer, how does one sustain it?
Limits and boundaries.  I have over the last 14 months worked out a sustainable schedule. I blog 4-6 days a week, setting the timer on for 30 minutes. If I have a decent post in that time, great. If not, I take another 30 minutes. If it’s still not ready within an hour, I don’t publish that day, but take more time the next day to wrap it up.  So, I never spend more than an hour a day on my posts, and often less.
I spend a dedicated 15 minutes a day reading and commenting on other blogs. (Of course, if posts catch my eye in my Facebook newsfeed, or in my blog roll, I read them, so it’s often more than that.) I keep a balance between reading the posts of my commentators and people on my blogroll (to which I have even-handedly added everyone who’s  added me, and a handful of others besides),  as well as reading edgy Christian blogs which challenge my thinking (Lesley Fellows, Rachel Held Evans, Jamie, the Worst Missionary, The Church of No People, Anne Jackson etc). All these bloggers are younger than I am, and just as I am belatedly trying to get my body more flexible with yoga and body balance classes, I am trying to keep my thinking nimble and agile and not settle into a predictable, atrophied rut of middle-aged thinking. Heaven forbid.
Having a limit for how long you will spend on your blog will help ensure you will continue for the long haul.
3)     Why are you blogging?
A very personal question which it is imperative to answer.
What are the benefits to you of this expenditure of time?
To list some personal benefits to me,
Psychological. It keeps me in touch with the subterranean river of thoughts, emotion and inspiration. The often inchoate is explored and expressed. Hey, it’s cheaper than therapy.
Social and friendships—I have made new friends through my blog, whom I’ve later met in the flesh and liked, and have deepened existing relationships.  Real people write blogs (as I can attest!) and cyber-friendships add interest to my life.
Writing—My books have sold better since I started blogging, and it gave me the confidence to rapidly write and almost finish my third.  
Intellectual—It’s exercise for the mind. Reading other blogs keeps me in touch with the zeitgeist and forces me to formulate my thoughts on issues I had never considered.
               Sharing your thoughts helps you to refine them. My comments often show the embarrassing spectacle of retractions, apologies, belated nuancing, mind-broadening, and general signs of thinking in progress.
4)      Resist blogging on what you are not really interested in. Resist commenting on the controversy du jour unless you feel strongly about it, or your blog will become like everyone else’s. It will first bore you, and then your readers—or vice-versa— in a deadly circle of miserable boredom.
5)      “If poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree, it better not come at all,” Keats wrote. The same with blog posts. Straining to find something to write about is a kiss of death for a blog. Better wait till the inner wells of thought and feeling well up again. Let your blog rest until you have something you feel strongly about that you really want to say. Blogging for the sake of blogging, just for the sake of posting something, is a crime against both yourself and your readers, in my opinion. 
Fortunately, I usually have 5 or 10 ideas I could happily develop. When nothing comes to mind, I scroll my drafts folder for the 100-200 posts  or ideas for posts I have in draft form. Doing that, however, is a sign that there is something, just beneath the surface of consciousness that needs exploring, but which I don’t want to. Hey, exploring one’s inner reservoir of thoughts, motives, fears and emotions can be painful. (Not everything I write lands up on the blog of course; some goes to a journal.)
Just random thoughts. How is one most likely to stay the course and not burn out?
  

Short term Missions (thoughts inspired by Jamie, the Very World Missionary)

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 See this thought-provoking post
And here is the comment I left on her post
Short term missions

Negatives
Churches and individuals spend money that could have gone a loooong way in the third and fourth world on airfare to fly half way across the world to build and paint when local professionals could have done it for a fraction of the cost.A big waste of money!!

Positives
Many career missionaries, whom one hopes are loving and investing in those whom nobody else can or will invest in, start as short-term missionaries.
For children in orphanages, being hugged by a stranger for two weeks is better than not being hugged at all.
I have never been on a short-term mission. If I did, I would like to work with Heidi Baker in Mozambique as much for what I might be able to learn from her as for any benefit her orphans might receive from the love I will undoubtedly lavish on them.

                               ~ ~ ~
There is a certain amount of absurdity to it. 

Middle-class Christians who have invested as much as they can to ensure their kids never have to live as those in Sudan or Chad, let’s say, send their children on mission trips to deprived areas of the world–trips on which they are not willing to accompany them, for the most part–hoping that by seeing poverty they will learn lessons of gratitude which the parents themselves have not learnt.

I have supported short-term missionaries if I have been wowed by their character–as an investment in them–but, on the whole, I believe investing in people who invest in communities for the long haul is far better.