Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

"Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can"–Wesley. I disagree!!

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 Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can

Now, being a mostly sensible woman, I respect John Wesley, of course. I love reading about him.

Wesley had gone to Georgia with James Oglethorpe to work as a missionary to the Indians. He soon returned to England in despair and wrote, “I went to America to convert the Indians; but O who will convert me!” On the ship going to Georgia, Wesley had met Moravian immigrants and was impressed by their spiritual strength and joy in the Lord. Back in England, as Wesley struggled with his own sinfulness and need of salvation, he received spiritual counsel from the Moravian Peter Boehler. On May 24, 1738, during a meeting at Aldersgate, Wesley experienced God’s saving grace and wrote, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given to me that he had taken away my sins.”
But O who will convert me? Nearly 250 years ago, Wesley realizes that one can be a Christian, even a clergyman, as he was and not yet converted, not yet fully turned to Christ, fully surrendered. What is total conversion? Total surrender to the will of God, beautifully described in a wonderful biography of Oswald Chambers, “Abandoned to God.”  Am I totally converted? I would love to be, but am still in the process of surrendering the nooks and crannies of my mind, emotions and life to God.
However, I strongly disagree with Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can. The statement makes me angry, and if it was not John Wesley who said it, I would have said it was a wicked statement. 

I think of an opposite image from a biography of George Mueller. George Mueller visits the poor in Bristol. He visits a man who works 16 hours a day in a mill, and works on Sundays too at other things. He tells him not to work so hard. The man says he must. He must provide for his wife and children.

And so Mueller decides not to ask any one for money but God alone. “To move man through God by prayer alone,” as Hudson Taylor (whose ministry Mueller supported generously!!) put it. Mueller reasoned that if people saw that God provided for his needs and the needs of his orphans in response to prayer, they would realize that they too did not need to work in such an unhealthy fashion.

Wesley’s dictum is just the opposite–as if man were no more than a machine, wedded to the monotonous treadmill of getting and saving, getting and saving, albeit to give it away. 

I find the saying so outrageous that it makes my blood boil. Why would anyone advocate so unbalanced a life–Make all you can? At present, we own the sort of business where the more you work, the more you make. Because life is so much more than money, we have set limits–both on how much we work (less than half the hours that society considers a normal workday—society’s current work day leaves little time or energy for “living”) and on how much we make. We have set an income cap, which we have shared with others for accountability. When we reach that, we cut back on our already reduced work hours, substituting them even further with reading, gardening, service, thinking and praying. Will we have the resolve to see it through? I don’t doubt it; leisure is more attractive to us than more money.

Giving! Should one work harder just to give it away? I don’t agree. I don’t agree that my only value is my money, or that I should make as much money I can to give it away. If one can live with less money, one can give of oneself and of one’s time to spouse, children, friends, and in ministry.

So many Christians I know are hideously overworking in this current climate of fear of cuts and a double dip recession.  Working long hours, coming home after the children’s dinner and bedtime, marriages are under strain.

How brilliant it would be to scale back, to work humane hours that leave time to see the sun and one’s children, to pray and read and think and garden, and trust God with one’s lifeand wealth—which after all comes from God–though to watch us work, we often forget that!!

The Willingness to Make Mistakes and the Acquisition of Wisdom

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The Willingness to Make Mistakes

As I may have mentioned, I own a publishing company which specializes in reprinting out of print classics.

I became a businesswoman about 4 years ago. I was a poet and writer before that.

Big shift.

And guess what?

I made mistakes.

Some big ones.

For instance, a few months ago, I realized that we made a mistake which cost us several thousands of pounds over the last 2 years. At least.

Am I sad?

You want the honest answer?

The honest answer is NO.

Because I have so come to accept that making mistakes is part of being human, part of being limited, is, in fact, the way to high and interesting achievement. In 3 years, I got my publishing business to earn enough that my husband who was a Professor with a Chair in Mathematics, at the top of his pay-band, or whatever they call it, was able to take early retirement this summer. I did that by the willingness to keep the car moving, try things, make mistakes. This particular mistake I mentioned we realized was because I did not take the good advice of a professional, who had repeatedly advised us to take a particular step. I did not take it because of fear. It was an expensive gamble which she had advised. Then we gambled, and it paid off richly. So I just have to forgive myself for not gambling earlier.
* * *
My husband Roy is very clever. When he was 17, he won two scholarships. One was to do his senior year of high school in Japan (and learn Japanese!) One was the Girdlers’ scholarship for 3 years at Cambridge University, all expenses generously paid. There was ONE scholarship for the brightest schoolboy in New Zealand, where Roy grew up. He decided to win it, and did. After Cambridge, he did a Ph.D at Johns Hopkins, postdocs at Cornell and Stanford and Minnesota, won international prizes, won numerous prestigious grants and prizes.

Not a trajectory of someone who would be easy on himself or anyone else who made mistakes and messed up.

While I am too wide-ranging in my interests to be a scholar, I’ve generally done well academically. I went to Oxford.  I have got several big life decisions right operating on a fuel mix of prayer, intuition and thinking. And so, when I get things wrong, I too am hard on myself. When clever people like Roy or my children get things wrong, I am not pleased.

And so when Roy and I started a business, we were very hard on each other. Roy was particularly hard on me when I got things wrong because of the largish sums of money involved.

Now, I must find the exact quote, but something I read in the summer of 2007, just when our publishing business was getting off the ground, set me free. Carol Wimber writes in “The Way it Was” about her life with John Wimber, and how they established The Vineyard Movement at high speed. “Who were we to think that we were so smart that we should never make mistakes?”

Gosh, that idea set me free. Who am I that I shouldn’t make mistakes? All human beings are limited. All human being make mistakes! Who am I to think that I am so smart that I should never get things wrong.

How liberating that willingness to get things wrong is. How fast one can steer one’s car! Think it out, make a decision, act. If it’s wrong, sigh, and drive in the opposite direction. It is easier to steer a moving car than one which never begins its journey.

Why did I write this post now? Because I bought two laptops fairly rapidly last month, one for myself, one for Zoe. Both, according to Roy, were far more expensive than they needed to be.

Yes, probably I made a mistake. Buying laptops is not something I know a lot about, or do every day. I got the information, and made a swift decision. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest decision, but who am I that I should never make a mistake? And think how much time that swift decision saved

That is what I am saying to myself these days as I declutter and deal with things I’ve bought which I haven’t needed or used. Who am I to to expect to be so smart that I should never make mistakes? Everyone makes mistakes. I too!

And the willingness to steer your car fast, to make a decision after absorbing a reasonable amount of data rather than an infinite amount of data liberates an enormous amount of time for more fruitful pursuits.

And here’s something from Thomas Merton. Thank you, Anne Jackson, http://flowerdust.net/category/merton-mondays/page/2/

“We must expect to be making mistakes all the time. We must be content to fail repeatedly and to begin again.
The thing you do, when you have made a mistake, is not to give up doing what you were doing and start something altogether new, but to start over again with the thing you began badly and try, for the love of God, to do it well.
(Merton, Journals, Oct 7, 1949, II.372) 

A Daughter of the King Declutters

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A Daughter of the King Declutters
My friend Paul Millerwho teaches and writes on love and prayer has this advice for settling in to times of prayer.
Ask, “So, how am I? Am I sad or happy? Anxious? What is the state of my soul? The state of our union? From these answers flows a quiet time which is intimately connected to who and what you really are and what you really care about.” (Sorry missionaries, Aunt Joyce, and my friend’s mother-in-law who’s having surgery, I am afraid you won’t figure!)
So what is the state of my soul, and what am I thinking of today? Well, as I’ve probably blogged about, we finally broke down and decided we needed more help than a cleaner. So we have a young Pole come a couple of times a week, clean, and do various housekeeping chore–he assembled bookshelves today. 
And since, I can’t write particularly well with people around, that is my one day to declutter. Which feels SO good.
Getting rid of things, and having a sparse household is liked to one’s faith in God. I think of a lovely story Jack Miller (father of the Paul I’ve just mentioned) tells. He and his wife Rosemarie founded World Harvest Mission and were visiting Uganda. They come late to a post meeting, and every seat is taken except the ones right in front, next to the President, Idi Amin. Rose Marie nervously tells Jack, “I’ll sit on the grass.” “Jack says, “Rose Marie, no! You are wearing a lovely dress. You are a daughter of the King. Be brave. We will sit in front.” And they go and sit next to Idi Amin, who is gracious to them.
I can’t tell you how often I have said that to myself–when nervous, when beyond my depth, when dealing with rude, overbearing or condescending people, when travelling, when insecure.  “Anita, you are a daughter of the King.” 
And when decluttering.
Because there are two principles at work in decluttering. As Thoreau rightly observes, the true cost of everything is “the life” which goes into earning and replacing it. If I tidy a closet by taking its entire contents to the Charity shop (a solution I’ve contemplated, believe me!) the cost of that will be the time it takes me (or more likely, my long-suffering husband, Roy) to earn the money to replace these things.
Conversely, I am a daughter of the King. I do not need to have clothes which are worn, or ill-fitting or ugly. I do not need to have things which are grotty, ugly, or chipped or broken waiting to be mended in my house. I can throw away lonely things and throw away the missing parts when they surface. 
I have recently been setting aside a day a week to relax and sort through closets and dressers and undersink cabinets. Goodness, the undersink cabinet in our bedroom has had things stuffed in for 4.5 years. It must have been magically expandable. And given that I had only the haziest notion of what I stuffed there, I obviously didn’t need it. Of course, I had some ecstatic reunions with long-long things, but by and large, a lot of it was just tossed into the rubbish, or into the charity donation box.
(Incidentally, one of the best ideas I’ve come across in Oxford are the swap shops. There are several of them every month. We took 4 boxes of stuff to last weeks’, and Irene came back with 1 thing. So we are significantly lighter.)
And why, why, why am I decluttering? Actually, a wise person we sought spiritual advice from a few months ago suggested it. Let’s start establishing the Kingdom of God in your physical surroundings, he said. Which I am doing. An undersink cabinet this week, a dresser and a closet last week, two dressers the week before. (I have obviously accumulated a lot of clothes I never use!)
And order feels so good. For God is not a God of disorder but of peace. 1 Cor 14:33. I have never known how to combine writing and housekeeping. Because the thought of having to do even a little housework so depresses me that I do neither
the writing nor the housekeeping,  So carving out one day a week to just keep up with the house, even in a hazy, dazy state, seems to be working. And hopefully, within a year or so, I will get it all done.
I am a bit cross with myself for having accumulated so much stuff. I had a large house, very large, when I lived in America. We spent 9 years in our last house which had a large attic and garage. So we basically stuffed things there to be dealt with later, which never came. Our bedroom was a suite, with a room-sized walk-in closet, a room sized dressing room, and an attached bath. Our house was in the modern American style–a formal living room, and a family room, a formal dining area, and a family dining area. Stuff, stuff everywhere. 
When we visited England and decided to stay, I did not even go to America to move us. Since the university was paying, we paid movers to pack up our house, lock, stock and barrel, and move it here. Which they did. Unread magazines, trashcans with trash in them, pantries with out of date food, garden compost bins, hoses–no kidding! It was the biggest van the movers had ever seen–and five years later, I am still dealing with it.
But for the last time ever. My grandparents were pack-rats. When my aunt died, my parents inherited a house in which two bachelor brothers, a spinster sister, and their parents had a lifetime of stuff, nothing ever thrown out. The strain of sorting and donating all that literally killed my father who had been superlatively fit before those killing months.
I intend to die with a relatively spare, relatively minimalistic house so that no one else will have to waste their life sorting out what I was too lazy to!
Inside/outside, body/spirit, house/spirit, it’s really all of a piece, isn’t it? 

Parenting a Teen–Not for the faint-hearted!!

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They are omniscient. They are always right. Their parents are always wrong.

Everything that does not work out is their parents’ fault.

And all this will be until the third age.

Age 1–My Dad can beat your Dad.
Age 2–Aw, Mum and Dad, you know nothing!!
Age 3–My Mum used to say.

Can’t wait! But then, I won’t be around, will I?

Hmm. Blogging and Health!

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Hmm. Blogging and Health!


Anne Jackson at  http://flowerdust.net/ writes


“Anne the Social Media Girl” has been trying to make everyone happy and it’s impossible. The guilt complex tells me I have to keep the boat afloat but the rest of my body tells me to stop it or I’m going to end up jumping off a cliff.
I know I’m doing what’s best for me, my faith, my family, my health, and my closest community.
It’s not wise for me to follow everyone. To have several thousand people be able to send you a direct message and assume you can reply is very overwhelming for me.
Lots of other thought-provoking ideas.
                                                                                  * * * 
She’s been blogging for 5 years, I for 7 months. At first I started with a commitment to blog daily, which I’ve had to renege on. http://theoxfordchristian.blogspot.com/2010/09/precious-garden-of-my-home-needs.html
At the moment, I ride my blog; my blog does not ride me. 
And I need to periodically give it back to Christ, so that it is his, not mine, and he can take it where he wishes, and do with it, what he wants. 

 

The Only Thing Which Can Fill Us Completely

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What fills your tank?

Here’s a memorable talk I listened to, at a retreat for leaders of women’s Bible studies in Williamsburg . The speaker, svelte, beautiful, rich, put a crystal water jug in front of us.

Into it, she put the keys of her house (in the best neighbourhood!); her mini-van (a Volvo I’ve long intended to buy, but quail at the cost); her wallet, medals representing her children (riders), a toy golf club representing her husband, lipstick representing herself, a rose for the garden, a chocolate ball for tennis, something for friends, a ticket for travel. On and on, it went.

And guess what, there was still room to spare. Tiny little niches. All that–the money, the beauty, the friends, the house, the trophy husband, trophy kids, the holidays did not fill her heart.

And then she poured water over the lot, and it was filled to overflowing.

By the Holy Spirit of God!
* * *
When my busy thoughts run on their busy tracks, I periodically need to stop, drop, repent.

And pray that one prayer that Jesus said would always be answered. Why always be answered? Because it is not in the Father’s nature to say No to this particular prayer.

The Prayer for the Holy Spirit to fill me.

( If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” Luke 11:13).
* * *

Nothing else can fill me. The editor Ted Solotaroff who graciously read early drafts of my work used to say that a writers’ life is an exchange of one level of anxiety, difficulty and doubt for another. And throughout it, we need the same durability and toughness that got us published in the first place.

And that is the same in every arena of life. Roy and I now own a publishing company which is blooming beyond our wildest expectations.

When I lived in America, I read a psychological study which beeped women every 10 minutes. They texted an anonymous response to what they were thinking of.

What American women think about the most, apparently, was their hair. The second subject was money. And the third was sex. (Now if it were men….).

My hair only crosses my consciousness before I leave the house. The second subject does creep into my consciousness frequently now that I am a businesswoman as well as a blogger and a writer–and one’s continually changing daily pay-cheque can be checked on through the day on the internet.

And that’s when I need to stop and tell myself two things. One is a saying of Thoreau, “I am often reminded that, if I had bestowed on me the wealth of Croesus, my aims must be still the same, and my means essentially the same.”

I think of that most days in this Christmas season, when– thank you, God–people are buying the books we’ve published. No matter how many Santas give our books, my aims and goals for my life will be unchanged.

And I also remember the object lesson with which I opened this post. That only God’s spirit can fill me to overflowing. Not money. Not success in any sphere, even beyond my wildest dreams.

Veni Sancte Spiritus.

Strictly Come Dancing, Chez Mathias

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Strictly Come Dancing, Chez Mathias

We are a TV free family, though we do buy DVDS of BBC documentaries, and feature films, of course. So Irene has never seen Strictly Come Dancing, or X Factor (neither have I!). I was playing something rowdy by Hillsong today, and said, “Irene come, dance. It’s Strictly.” We danced happily for 6 minutes till she caught the word, Cross.

“It’s not Strictly. It’s Christian,” she said with extreme disgust, and stalked off.

 

Church: A Place of Pain–and Healing.

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Church: A Place of Pain–and Healing

I spent a wonderful and healing couple of hours at a friends’ house over pots of tea recently. 

She said that there was not a Sunday over the last few years when she did not leave church in tears, and sob on the way home. I was astonished. Partly because this friend is a warm, loving, much-loved, highly gifted woman. Partly because it has also been my experience–though not over the last year, and not floods of tears, because I don’t cry particularly easily and besides I have young daughters whom I don’t want to upset–but the experience of leaving church very sad is a familiar one.

For me, for my friend, for many of my friends whom I have talked to. Probably many of your friends too.

Why? Well, we come into church with overly high expectations. We forget that everyone else is also a flawed sinner, just like us–though in the nature of things, some will be far wicker, some far holier. We forget that the church is a conglomeration of interlinking social circles, and the snobbery, social climbing, cruelty and exclusivism that are part of social life can and does migrate to the church.  That churches are full of people who have forgotten their first love of Christ, and view it as club to make friends and influence people.

Well, in the case of my friend–she is a very gifted woman, who had won acclaim, prizes, reviews, recognition in her field (a field which I have no giftedness or even competence to judge, so I am wowed by the external worldly corroboration of her talent). However, much younger people ran the ministry in which she had ministered for years–and she was not allowed to exercise her gift. 

This being forced into apparent unfruitfulness is a familiar source of grief to many of my women friends. 

My friend said that her days in the church are numbered.
                                                                               * * * 

Oh no! I thought. 

How does one know when to run, and when to stand still?

In our early years of marriage, we moved enormously with my husband’s post-docs, jobs, and plush visiting positions (no teaching, just research). Let’s see– from 1989 when we married, to 2006 when we bought our current (and please God, last house), we lived in Binghamton, New York; Cornell, Ithaca, New York; Stanford, Palo Alto, California; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Williamsburg, Virginia; Manchester, England, and then Oxford, England. 

And went to at least one church in each of these cities in which we were aliens and strangers.

How pick the church in which you want to put down roots for a season? When early on, I complained that the people of a particular church were not particularly friendly, an older Christian said dismissively, “You don’t go to church for friendships; you go to church to worship God.”

So that’s one test of whether a church is for me. Can I worship God well in the worship? Do the sermons speak to and minister to my spirit? Fortunately, for me, the answer is yes in the church I currently belong to, and so I stay. And I think as long as I encountered God in the worship and in the word, I would stay in a church.

But a church is also a community. I use the blessing test. Am I  being a blessing to people in the church? Sadly, at the moment, an out of church ministry is absorbing much of my time, so it is not clear whether I am indirectly being a blessing to people. I sincerely hope I am. I would so love to be blessed like God blessed Abraham, “I will bless you, and you will be a blessing.” To be a blessing in and of yourself, so that people are blessed just by being with you. A mentor of mine, Lolly Dunlap was like that. I recently had coffee with an Anglican priest and writer, Michael Wenham, who was also like that. I would like to be sweetened and gentled by the spirit of God to become like that too.

So I guess, if one can worship God, and bless people, one should stay in a church, even if it is a place of pain.
                                                                             * * * 

A few days ago, I had one of those tear-filled conversations which are trademarks of churches which are places of pain with someone who had significantly wronged and injured me. And not even with significant malice–just carelessly, not knowing the full extent of the hurt she caused me. Jesus says of the Jews, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And we never know the full extent of how we injure others. Or vice-versa. As a character in Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree explains, “What took up one degree of your circumference took up 360 degrees of mine.” And that’s the way it goes. 

And, phew, I forgave this person whom I had wrestled to forgive. (http://theoxfordchristian.blogspot.com/2010/11/forgiveness-weight-off-your-shoulders.html). For I was able to see standing behind the small her, the big Christ. The big Christ watching with concern as I shoved into a dark pit. Watching me there with concern. Waiting till things shifted in my spirit. Giving me a hand out. Leading me out of the pit into a place I would not have had time for if I had stayed in the busy place before-pit.Unbelievably using the pit experience to upgrade me. To release me into a ministry I LOVE and am rather good at (IMO) which I would not have had time for before my sojourn in the pit.

Small enemies; big Jesus. 

When church is a place of pain that is one reason to stay. Nothing can happen to you unless God permits it. God can use a wilderness experience to show you his love.  God can use the inevitable suffering when conceited and arrogant sinners rub up against each other to prune you, so that you are a better person after it. The pain of rubbing up against others (whether we were the sinners or sinned-against) is a part of pruning –so we may come forth as gold.

                                                                               * * * 
The Trappists added a fourth vow to the traditional three–poverty, chastity and obedience. This was the vow of stability. To stay in one place.

Why is it good to stand still? (I am an ex-Catholic, and as I may have said somewhere in this blog, in fact, wanted to be a nun as a teenager, and joined Mother Teresa’s convent. Hence my quotes from Catholics, in whose thinking I was immersed for so long a time). Thomas a Kempis writes in The Imitation of Christ, that wherever one goes, one takes oneself, and one will find oneself.

So, if the reason church has become a place of pain is partly one’s own sin, there is no sense in running. You will take yourself–and find yourself. Painful circumstances will repeat themselves with dreary monotony u
ntil have become the New Creation Christ intends to make you.

Here’s a favourite quote from Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision,http://theoxfordchristian.blogspot.com/2010/04/bob-pierce-founder-of-world-vision-on.html
“God answers all prayer.  He does not answer our selfish, materialistic begging. He does not move into our sinful situation.  He moves us out of our sinful situation into Himself.  God sometimes moves slowly.  Sometimes we don’t lack faith, but patience.  Wait patiently for HIm, and He will give you your heart’s desire.
1) if the request is not right, He will answer, “No.”
2) If the time is not right, He will answer, “Slow.”
3) When you are not right, He will answer, “Grow.”
4) When the request, the time and you are right, God will say, “Go.”
That’s when miracles happen.”

So, when there is suffering because of rubbing up against other people,don’t run. Because God has us repeat each class until we have learnt the lesson.  How much better then to grow?
                                                                           * * * 

And when one is innocent, like the friend whose story led me to write this. She is lovely. She just happened to be far more gifted in what she wanted to do in church than the younger mediocre people who ran that ministry. Who were threatened and jealous. Should she stay? 

Hard to say. I think of Milton plaintively writing of 
That one talent which is death to hide,
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide.

And the answer he received from God,
God doth not need
Either man’s work, or how own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest.
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

So whatever gifts we have are from God. They are HIS. He can use them or not as he pleases. He can put one on the shelf, and present us with another (which to my surprise he has done with me, in recent years.) It is more important to learn to surrender our will and our spirits to him, and to learn to love people than to use gifts. For when the time is right, and God says GO, it is true, (though sometimes hard to  believe this) NO ONE can say No.
                                                                      * * * 
Butterflies are beautiful. Bees give us honey. So, if God has led us to a place, and has not told us to move, it is good to stay. And make honey there.

In one of most beautiful tales of redemption in American literature, (in literature?), The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne stays in the judgmental, bleak, cruel church and town which had judged and condemned her for her sin. She wears the scarlet letter A for adulteress. Through her humble acts of love and mercy, the letter A changes its meaning. Most people now assume it means A for angel!


So, until God tells us to move, it is, in my opinion, good to stay rooted in Christ, and grow and be fruitful like trees planted by streams of living water, which will bear their fruit in due season, and whose leaves shall not wither.