random | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

God is Enough–Thought for the Day, Henri Nouwen

“For as long as you can remember, you have been a pleaser, depending on others to give you an identity. You need not look at that only in a negative way. You wanted to give your heart to others, and you did so quickly and easily. But now you are being asked to let go of all these self-made props and trust that God is enough for you. You must stop being a pleaser and reclaim your identity as a free self.

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Shade Gardening and Blooming where One is Planted

By Anita Mathias

Okay, after 5 years of being busy and preoccupied with other things, we are finally taming our garden. I’ve had gardens in India and in America, but this is my first English garden. Steep learning curve.

Speaking of which, please could somebody identify this bush with pink blossoms in our driveway

We’ve got 3 beds planted, and are working on the rest. Specializing in hellebores, and other shade plants.

Funny, when we lived in Virginia, our plot was shaded by massive trees. So, perforce, we had to indulge in shade gardening–hellebores, hostas, cyclamen, bleeding hearts, heuchera, solomon’s seal, arum italicum, orchids, trillium etc.

I wanted the flowers that grew in full sun, and was always sadly writing about making a virtue of necessity, blooming where you are planted, learning to love the hand of cards dealt to you. I bought and studied books on shade gardening, and learnt a lot about woodland, forest and shade plants.

And now, I actually prefer shade plants–their gentleness, mystery, quietness, non-assertiveness, surprises. They are more intriguing to me than their bright, bold cousins. And I am now buying them, though we are not short of sun.

Our plot is an acre and a half. I have been reading a couple of books on the evolution of the English countryside, and about enclosure laws and edible hedges. Our garden was broken down into 6 little bits, each surrounded by a hedge and fence–a huge veg. garden, which we haven’t started using, an orchard, a main garden, divided into two by a fence and hedge, and a little side plot, currently fallow.

Now, this might be heresy to people who like the Sissinghurst and Hidcote style of gardening, but today Roy took his chain saw and sawed down the beech hedges separating them, as I don’t see the point of ruining the perspective with these tiny plots.

I wonder if the land was subdivided into little plots per family with edible hedges in between them. Our hedges have apple trees and pear trees and blackberries interplanted with the hawthorn, and after researching ancient English edible hedges, we planted one in the middle of the paddock in the winter of 2006. Last year it yielded plum cherries, and black, yellow and red plums. Really delicious.

The hedge we planted in our paddock

We only started on March 6th, but we’ve been gardening seriously since then, putting in 2-3 hours of work a day between us.However, the garden ran away with us in America, and we’d spend 3-4 hours there at a stretch in the evenings and weekends. Now I work with a timer, and go in after an hour or so, and if I work longer in the garden, try to put in an equal amount of time on housework and decluttering, so the house does not get out of control.

Beginnings are such hard work, but soon, we will have the pleasure of seeing the plants we’ve planted grow, establish themselves, self-seed and hybridize.

In any endeavour after the beginning, you get ever-increasing pleasure, leverage and return on your investment. However it takes faith to get past the beginning.

Cherry blossom, in a hedge we planted.

hellobores

Close up of cherry blossom.

Our willow tree at sunset

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A cure for too much theologizing!

By Anita Mathias

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

-Walt Whitman

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There’s No One as Irish as Barack Obama

By Anita Mathias

The video reminds me of the wave of euphoria and optimism which swept the globe, when, 40 odd years after institutionalized segregation in the American South–in buses, schools, cafeterias and water fountains–Americans redeemed their dark history of slavery and segregation by electing a black man as their President.

I thought of Wordsworth’s lines on the French Revolution,

          Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
          But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! times,
          In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
          Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
          The attraction of a country in romance!

P.S. I enjoyed this comment on the Youtube video, “I’m not just as Irish as Barack Obama, I’m even more Irish than him, ’cause I’m actually Irish!”

. So on these pews, inside this very church, the president’s antecedents on his Irish side worshipped here on a regular basis.”

Obama’s links to the Church of Ireland also stretch further south to Kilkenny city, where another branch of the family claims a connection to him. Jane de Montmorency Wright said she had traced Obama to the former Anglican bishop of Kilkenny, John Kearney. “The president’s ancestor was a bishop here in Kilkenny city where he is buried in St Canice’s cathedral, so there will be plenty for him to see,” she said.

Hayes and Moneygall’s other 299 residents are expecting droves of other Americans to follow in the president’s footsteps. A few hours earlier two couples from Chicago, the base from which Obama launched his presidential bid, turned up to have their pictures taken outside the bar.

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The Annunciation

By Anita Mathias

Waterhouse, Annunciation

“Be it done to me according to thy will.”

That is secret of peace, isn’t it?–being able to say that.

That sort of surrender is beautifully expressed in The Imitation of Christ, a classic I came to somewhat circuitously through Maggie Tulliver of The Mill on the Floss. The quietist, pietistic spirituality of The Imitation brings her a kind of peace and radiance when a reverse in her family’s fortunes leaves her life narrow, circumscribed and cut off from all literary or intellectual pursuits.

I used to pray this at 17, little knowing of what I spake!!

Imitation of Christ, Book III, Chapter 17

ALL OUR CARE IS TO BE PLACED IN GOD

THE VOICE OF CHRIST

MY CHILD, allow me to do what I will with you. I know what is best for you. You think as a man; you feel in many things as human affection persuades.

THE DISCIPLE

Lord, what You say is true. Your care for me is greater than all the care I can take of myself. For he who does not cast all his care upon You stands very unsafely. If only my will remain right and firm toward You, Lord, do with me whatever pleases You. For whatever You shall do with me can only be good.
If You wish me to be in darkness, I shall bless You. And if You wish me to be in light, again I shall bless You. If You stoop down to comfort me, I shall bless You, and if You wish me to be afflicted, I shall bless You forever.

THE VOICE OF CHRIST

My child, this is the disposition which you should have if you wish to walk with Me. You should be as ready to suffer as to enjoy. You should as willingly be destitute and poor as rich and satisfied.

THE DISCIPLE

O Lord, I shall suffer willingly for Your sake whatever You wish to send me. I am ready to accept from Your hand both good and evil alike, the sweet and the bitter together, sorrow with joy; and for all that happens to me I am grateful. Keep me from all sin and I will fear neither death nor hell. Do not cast me out forever nor blot me out of the Book of Life, and whatever tribulation befalls will not harm me.

And here is the same chapter in the older translation in which I first read it,

CHAPTER XVIIThat all care is to be cast upon God

1. “My Son, suffer me to do with thee what I will; I know what is expedient for thee. Thou thinkest as a man, in many things thou judgest as human affection persuadeth thee.”

2. Lord, what Thou sayest is true. Greater is Thy care for me than all the care which I am able to take for myself. For too insecurely doth he stand who casteth not all his care upon Thee. Lord, so long as my will standeth right and firm in Thee, do with me what Thou wilt, for whatsoever Thou shalt do with me cannot be aught but good. Blessed be Thou is Thou wilt leave me in darkness: blessed also be Thou if Thou wilt leave me in light. Blessed be Thou if Thou vouchsafe to comfort me, and always blessed be Thou if Thou cause me to be troubled.

3. “My Son! even thus thou must stand if thou desirest to walk with Me. Thou must be ready alike for suffering or rejoicing. Thou must be poor and needy as willingly as full and rich.”

4. Lord, I will willingly bear for Thee whatsoever Thou wilt have to come upon me. Without choice I will receive from Thy hand good and evil, sweet and bitter, joy and sadness, and will give Thee thanks for all things which shall happen to me. Keep me from all sin, and I will not fear death nor hell. Only cast me not away for ever, nor blot me out of the book of life. Then no tribulation which shall come upon me shall do me hurt.

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A New Name

By Anita Mathias

To the one who is victorious, I will also give a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it. Revelation 2:17

And so we fight the good fight,

And we overcome temptations and trials we never dreamed we could.

And somehow we change.

We are different.

And Jesus sees,

though no one else might.

Though everyone else may see the failures,

Jesus sees the hidden victories.

And he gently opens our palms,

and places in them a stone,

which has engraved upon it a new name.

And that new name, I believe,

will astound the one who receives it.

“Moi?” we’ll say in astonishment.

And Jesus will smile, and say,

“Yes, you!”

What will be written on your stone?

It will surprise you.

It will name the victories you have won,

the way your name has changed

without your even being aware of it.

What would I like to be written on mine?

The Loving One, perhaps.

The Gentle One.

Steady, Strong, Unshakable.

Names which would surprise me now.
* * *

Thank you to Emma Scrivener for her meditations on A New Name.

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

By Anita Mathias

“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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