random | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

The Parable of the Bridge or “When to Say No to Insistent People”

Dante and Beatrice, by Henry Holiday

I once co-led a slightly dysfunctional women’s group which studied The Emotionally Healthy Church by Pete Scazzero recommended to us by an emotionally unhealthy woman leading women’s ministries and the study ended in emotionally unhealthy tears and trauma.

And so, I did not finish reading the book, but this story lingers in my memory.

Rabbi Edwin Friedman tells the story of a man who had given much thought to what he wanted from life. After trying many things, succeeding at some and failing at others, he finally decided what he wanted.

One day the opportunity came for him to experience exactly the way of living that he had dreamed about. But the opportunity would be available only for a short time. It would not wait, and it would not come again.

Eager to take advantage of this open pathway, the man started on his journey. With each step, he moved faster and faster. Each time he thought about his goal, his heart beat quicker; and with each vision of what lay ahead, he found renewed vigor. [Read more…]

The One In/One Out Method of Achieving Goals (and Progress on NY Goals, Week 4)

By Anita Mathias

BEFORE (on Jan 14)

AFTER (Jan 20) — Roy tidied it by removing lots of stuff

So I’ve spent some time browsing around my blogosphere and social media world to ferret out my friends’ most common New Year’s resolutions.

And they are: Exercise more, read more, write more, be more organized.

Hmm. Eerily familiar.

* * *

What’s the common denominator in these?

More.

Exercising more, reading more, writing more, decluttering more will all take MORE time.

But our time remains stuck and unbudging at 168 hours a week.

So for all these excellent habits to come in—exercising, reading, writing, being organized—something has to go.

What?

Every I Will Do resolution must include a I Won’t Do or I Don’t Do resolution or it will be doomed to failure. For every hour we plan to spend reading, writing or exercising, we must subtract an hour from ?? TV, the black hole of the internet? Repetitive home-tidying? [Read more…]

An Immensely Abundant Universe. Seeds as a Solution to World Hunger

By Anita Mathias

Abundance (credit)

Barbara Kingsolver’s describes her marvellously productive garden in her memoir of a gardening year, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

We spent the July 4^th weekend applying rock lime to the beans and eggplants to discourage beetles, and tying up the waist-high tomato vines to four-foot cages and stakes.

In February, each of these plants had been a seed the size of this o.

In Mary, we’d set them into the ground as seedlings smaller than my hand.

In another month, they would be taller than me, doubled back and pouring like Niagara over their cages, loaded down with fifty or more pounds of ripening fruit per plant.

This is why we do it all again every year. It’s the visible daily growth, the marvellous and unaccountable accumulation of biomass that makes for the hallelujah of a July garden.

Fuelled only by the stuff they drink from air and earth, the bush beans full out their rows, the okra booms, the corn stretches eagerly toward the sky like a toddler reaching up to put on a shirt.

Cucumber and melon plants begin their lives with suburban reserve, posted discreetly apart from one another like houses in a new subdivision, but under summer’s heat they sprawl from their foundations into disreputable leafy communes.

The days of plenty suddenly fell upon us.”|

What an amazing description of abundance, fuelled by…nothing really, seed, soil, water, air…

Can anyone read this and doubt we live in an abundant universe, a benevolent universe blessed by God?

* * *

And yet, eighteen people die of starvation each minute, eighteen while I have written and you have read this.

Large-scale systemic failures, war and corruption, environmental plunder, degradation and collapse all play a role in this.

* * *

Our friends who worked with Heidi Baker described the widespread hunger in Mozambique.

Yet Mozambique, according to my research has rich and extensive natural resources, five rivers, heavy rainfall.

My friends described going through the bush with trucks of food, and people fighting like wolves for the food.

Would it not have been more effective to also distribute seeds?

Seeds: would that solve the problem of hunger on the micro-level, despite systemic problems of distribution, environmental degradation and global warming?

“Whoever could make two ears of corn grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together,” Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver’s Travels.

I do believe it.

I believe with Heidi Baker that there is always enough, both for the reasons she gives, and because of the abundance God has encoded in seeds: dozens of tomatoes, thousands of apples over generations from a single seed.

Vegetables can be grown in plastic bags or plastic bottles, or using hydroponics in minimal soil.

Teaching people to grow vegetables: on a micro-level, could this be a simple, overlooked solution to world hunger?

Pareto’s Law, The 80/20 Rule (and My Progress in New Year’s Goals)

By Anita Mathias

AFTER My book shelf, Jan 7, after housework.

BEFORE My bookshelf, Jan 1.

I am reading Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Work Week with absolute fascination, partly because Roy and I have independently stumbled upon and are practicing many of Ferriss’s ideas and principles. (I plan to review the book later.)

Ferris discusses Pareto’s Law or the 80/20 principle.

Pareto, an Italian economist (1848 to 1923), realized that, in virtually every area of life: business, investing, creative work, social life, gardening, 80 % of benefits will come from 20 % of one’s time and efforts.

And conversely, 80% of one’s unhappiness or unproductive activity or self-thwarting will come from 20% of one’s actions.

Some applications of 80/20 or “The Vital Few and The Trivial Many.” [Read more…]

St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valetta, Malta; Caravaggio and the Knights of Malta

By Anita Mathias

Nave, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta. (sorry about photo quality — no flash or tripods allowed.)

St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valetta is impossibly ornate. It was the immensely wealthy Church of the Knights of Malta (chosen from Europe’s leading aristocratic families. Each family had to commit to give the Knights a third of their annual income, and all the Knight’s property upon his death). The Knights of Malta were warrior-medical-monks, originally formed to care for injured crusaders.

The gravestones which form the floor of the church are inlaid in the richest marble and porphyry in pietre dure. The ceiling is covered with frescoes.

It has eight chapels, each belonging to one of the eight “langues” or national groups which made up the Knights of Malta, and of course each tried to outdo the other. These were Provence, Auvergne, France, Castile and Leon, Aragon, Italy, England and Germany, who each lived in separate Auberge, like Oxford Colleges. (This European unity is now mimicked in the European Union, which is a great idea, in my opinion.)

The most moving part of the chapel was Caravaggio’s dynamic, brilliant, moving painting of the beheading of John the Baptist, which bought him membership in the Knights of Malta.

The Beheading of Saint John Caravaggio 1608 ()

However, not long after the induction which brought him delight and pride, his violent, ungovernable temper led him to attack another Knight, which led to imprisonment (without his paints). Being unable to paint led him to desperation and near-madness, and an escape. He was defrocked as a Knight of Malta in front of his masterpiece which he had donated with such pride, signing his name in John’s spilled blood.

He moved to Naples and died young after more trouble and more brawls (perhaps due to his mercurial manic-depressive temperament, perhaps due to the lead in his paints, which causes depression, personality changes and mental illness, such as plagued Goya and Van Gogh

* * *

And now some images, and observations by Roy

Here are some pictures: First, the main altar.

View of the altar from the right, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

Moses with the 10 commandments. St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

View of the altar, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

Any empty spaces on the walls and ceiling are covered with gilt.

Gilded emblems on a wall, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

One of many gilded ceilings in the side chapels, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

A gilded panel fills empty wall space, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

A distant view of Caravaggio’s crucfixition, through the archs of three side chapels, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta. (On the right, one of the very few depictions of women, but note the weapons of war, and reminders of death.)

The floor is literally coverws with tomb slabs, with reminders of mortality. Unfortunately, chairs and carpet runners laid out on the floor on obscure many of them.

One of the many inlaid marble floor panels depicting death, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

Inlaid marble floor panel showing an elephant, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

Floor panel, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

: St. John’s Insignia on the wall. St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

What Christmas Means to Me: By C. S. Lewis

By Anita Mathias

C. S. Lewis (credit)

What CHRISTMAS means to me…

(From God in the dock—Essays on Theology and Ethics by C. S. Lewis)

Three things go by the name of Christmas. One is a religious festival. This is important and obligatory for Christians; but as it can be of no interest to anyone else, I shall naturally say no more about it here. The second (it has complex historical connections with the first, but we needn’t go into them) is a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality. If it were my business too have a ‘view’ on this, I should say that I much approve of merry-making. But what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business. I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their own money in their own leisure among their own friends. It is highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want theirs. But the third thing called Christmas is unfortunately everyone’s business.

I mean of course the commercial racket. The interchange of presents was a very small ingredient in the older English festivity. Mr. Pickwick took a cod with him to Dingley Dell; the reformed Scrooge ordered a turkey for his clerk; lovers sent love gifts; toys and fruit were given to children. But the idea that not only all friends but even all acquaintances should give one another presents, or at least send one another cards, is quite modern and has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers. Neither of these circumstances is in itself a reason for condemning it. I condemn it on the following grounds.

1. It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure. You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to ‘keep’ it (in its third, or commercial, aspect) in order to see that the thing is a nightmare. Long before December 25th everyone is worn out — physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them. They are in no trim for merry-making; much less (if they should want to) to take part in a religious act. They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.

2. Most of it is involuntary. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost a blackmail. Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letter-box, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go?

3. Things are given as presents which no mortal every bought for himself — gaudy and useless gadgets, ‘novelties’ because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before. Have we really no better use for materials and for human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?

4. The nuisance. For after all, during the racket we still have all our ordinary and necessary shopping to do, and the racket trebles the labour of it.

We are told that the whole dreary business must go on because it is good for trade. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country, and indeed of the world, in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I don’t know the way out. But can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers? If the worst comes to the worst I’d sooner give them money for nothing and write if off as a charity. For nothing? Why, better for nothing than for a nuisance.

In Which I Boast of my Weaknesses

By Anita Mathias

Summer (Archimboldo, 1573, from the Louvre, via wikipedia)

Paul describes “a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me.” Three times he pleaded with the Lord to take it away from him, but Christ simply says, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Perhaps Christ said: If you were never weak, my Paul, you who speak in the tongues of men or of angels; you who have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and have a faith that can move mountains; who possess nothing and give over your body to hardship–where would be my entry point? How would you ever feel the need of me? What would remind you to call out for me?

* * *

I have steadily gained weight since I left school which means I am now 115 pounds heavier than I was then! I have been tempted to consider my tendency to gain weight as a thorn in my (literal) flesh, a weakness. You know, bad metabolism, low thyroid, la-di-da. [Read more…]

Giving Thanks at Thanksgiving

By Anita Mathias

Thanksgiving is a beautiful and psychologically healthy holiday. Imagine, a whole day devoted to thanksgiving. And here’s my grateful list for the year:

1 Roy who is thoroughly enjoying his early retirement, and finding an outlet for his mathematical orderliness in running our house in an orderly fashion, and for his creativity in very creative vegan cooking. Yay for role reversals.

2 Zoe—Who did brilliantly in her A-S’s including getting 100% in Religious Studies, and has got her first University offers. She is enjoying her last year in school, running Crossfire, the school’s Christian Union, and is the form leader.

3 Irene—is thoroughly enjoying school, has a hyper group of 7 friends called “The Motley Crew” and won an Achievement award for outstanding performance in her year-end exams in July.

Jake in the buttercups

4 Pets—Jake, my dog, who is with me almost 24/7, and teaches me why dog is such a good anagram for God. My four sweet, friendly rabbits, Empress, Bandit, Sunshine and Lightning. My ducks, who faithfully lay, Buttercup and Daisy, an Aylesbury and an Indian Runner, who are immensely comical and amusing

DSCN2014 ducks

5 Health—In particular, going vegan on the 4^thof November, and losing 8 pounds since then!!

Taking up running. I’m don’t go terribly fast, or terribly far, but I still find it exhilarating.

“Early” rising–I’ve always wanted to be a lark, but the trouble is I love being a night owl too. Have begun to wake up at 7.35 a.m., which, while not terribly early, is, believe me, earlier that I used to wake up.

I am also going to sleep earlier, and cutting out caffeine after 4 p.m. “Mum, you’ve become so virtuous,” Zoe says.

6 Gardening–Getting back into it. We had let our garden get shaggy and overgrown, but now with the help of Daniel who comes once or twice a week, we are beginning to tame it. Resolution: I shall not let my garden go. Just grow!

7 Reading—I realized last year that I had begun to speed-read and tear the heart out of books rather than reading them, and basically, like many people, was doing most of my reading online; So decided that I was going to finish a book in 30 days in January, 29 days in Feb, 28 in March to get back into the habit of reading. It’s worked. I am now finishing a book in 17 days (though I still have several on the go), and will, God willing, be back to finishing a book a week by April :))

8 Writing has been a deep joy—both this blog, and the memoir I have slowly eased back into writing.

9 Travel—lots of it this year. Ffald-y-Brenin in Wales, the New Forest, magical Istanbul in April, Ireland in June, Denmark in August, and equally magical Luxembourg and Germany in October. (And I’ve worked hard between trips, I promise!!). I love travel!!

10A St. Andrew’s Church—Love my new church, and love the women’s group I’ve been co-leading this year, though I have just stepped down from leading it as writing is becoming more consuming.

10B Spiritual Adventures–But the most significant things that happened to me this year have been spiritual—and many have happened on our travels.

Receiving healing from adrenal fatigue at Ffald-y-Brenin last December. The prophecy of Patricia Bootsma from Catch the Fire, Toronto (the Toronto blessing church) about Zoe, which changed her outlook and ours in April. Encountering the angel of writing at River Camp in August. Learning about a praise timer, and being filled with the Holy Spirit to bouncing point at a Revival Alliance Conference in September (John Arnott, Heidi Baker, Bill Johnson, Che Ahn). Chatting to Wayne Negrini in Germany in November, who suggested the vegan diet which has helped me sleep 95 minutes less at night, and lose 8 pounds in less than 3 weeks.

Of course, I took the trouble to chase the wild goose of the Holy Spirit, and put myself in the likely force field of God’s presence and power. Ah, intersecting with God—for that I am so grateful.

anita.mathias