Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

The Writing Process

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As humility comes before honour (Book of Proverbs),  the moment of horror and despair in writing, the moment when you feel you know nothing at all, is the precursor to the flood of insight and intuition. That moment of helplessness and dread often precedes light.
You begin with confidence.  You move to a place of blackness, dread, fear, chaos, and despair, and slowly, you write your way out of that place by just putting down the one thing you do know, the one clear thought you do have.
The process of planning a birthday party is a bit like writing,  “I don’t know how to do it, I won’t be able to do it, I don’t want to do it, It may not be any good,” sheer despair, and then as things begin to coalesce one feels better and better, until finally one is confident.

Pray without Ceasing–First Century Multitasking.

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Rejoice always, pray constantly, in everything give thanks (1 Thess 5:17)

Pray constantly. Hmm. Paul’s first century readers were not professional mystics or monks any more than his 21st century readers are.
So, he was obviously talking about prayer interwoven with work, which is actually a lovely form of prayer, a kind of redemption.
I experienced this today as I played worship music (Misty Edwards) while doing yoga. It flowed quite well, until I found the words distracting and then stopped.
I like the worship music of people like Alberto Rivera (and Misty Edwards) because of their conscious attempt to mimic what they call the soundscapes of heaven, and to usher people into the presence of God.
It is certainly blessed (I believe people would call it “anointed”) music, because it really does usher one into God’s presence fairly quickly.

The Wall of Beautiful Manners

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The Wall of Beautiful Manners

I was at at a garden party at Somerville College, Oxford, a week or so ago. I was chatting to a lawyer friend, when a Very Important Person joined us briefly.

I have encountered this person at social events over the last 5 years, and she has always had the most beautiful, impeccable manners.

Manners that are like a wall and shield. That keep people at bay, behind a pretty smile without warmth. And social nothings.

I am someone who likes nothing better than long, deep heart to heart conversations. To engage people. Why do I even go to parties? Because I love people is the short answer!

Do you like her? I asked my friend. She silently wrinkled her nose, as was wise given the company we were keeping.  “You know,” she said, “it’s only in the last year that I had to really encounter her, and I thought, with surprise, “You are a human being, after all!”

Interestingly, in this country, good manners can be reserved for those one deems less important, as a way of keeping them at bay behind a Defence Shield of perfect and lifeless manners

First Drafts like Dough–Get your dough, then shape your cookies.

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The first draft is like dough–Make it first!!
The crucial thing is making it; without the dough, there can be no cookies. Once you have made it, you can shape it into a myriad forms.
 
In my early days as a writer, I would foolishly try to get each paragraph right before going on to the next, believing that once I started writing sloppily, it would prove infectious.
Nope, lay out the plan for the piece of work first! Absolutely. Know where you are going before you try to get there.
However, the same dough, with tweaks, can make muffins, pancakes, breads, cookies. It is important to make your dough, to get what you want to say down. Later it can be shaped into interesting Christmas cookies, and reshaped at will.

Dunamis: Greek word for the power available to us who believe

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The Greek word Dunamis (from which our English word dynamite comes) describes God’s power available for us who believe. In its various meanings, it means
“Power, ability, strength,
a.       inherent power, power residing in a thing by virtue of its nature, or which a person or thing exerts and puts forth
b.      power for performing miracles
c.       moral power and excellence of soul
d.      the power and influence which belong to riches and wealth
e.       power and resources arising from numbers; power consisting in or resting upon armies, forces, hosts.”

Prayer literally is like seeding the clouds over our life with dynamite. And making it rain.

As my friend Paul Miller says, to say, “All I can do now is to pray,” is like saying, “All I can do now is detonate my nuclear bomb!”

So Lord, detonate your nuclear bomb over my life.

And, in advance, thank you. Oh, wonderful God!!

Review of Ann Hood's Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time

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Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time Ann Hood Picador, USA, $23, 256 pp. 
Review by Anita Mathias
Commonweal Magazine
Teach us to care and not to care,
Teach us to sit still
Our peace in His will.
In “Ash Wednesday,” T.S. Eliot describes the perfection of faith.
When a loved family member lies dying, that serene relinquishment is not easy to achieve. Faith can then become a kind of wrestling, a desire to wrest Lazarus from the jaws of implacable fate by brute will. Ann Hood’s memoir Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time limns this exhausting odyssey.
When her sixty-seven-year old father is diagnosed with lung cancer, Hood decided “to get him a miracle.” She goes to El Santuario de Chimayo, in New Mexico, to pray that his tumor would vanish. It does, but then, in one of the bewildering twists not unfamiliar in the life of faith, her father dies of fungal pneumonia.
The shock of this apparently divine betrayal is amplified by the earlier death of her only brother who, following arguments with his estranged wife, and then his soon-to-be wife, drowns in a bathtub. When, soon after the death of her father, Hood has a second miscarriage, the powerlessness of sheer grief plunges her into despair. “I became immobilized by my sadness. I believed in absolutely nothing at all.” The loss of faith left her “deadened” by “dark numbness.”
Funded by a book advance and glossy magazine work, Hood travels searching for evidence of miracles that might help her believe in God. She introduces us to much of the colorful efflorescence of Catholicism, including Guadalupe, where she sees the sun’s rays form a cross, and Padre Pio’s tomb. In Worcester, Massachusetts, she visits “Little Audrey,” a teenage “victim’s soul” in a coma, who lies surrounded by osmogenesia, the odor of roses, weeping statues, and Communion hosts flecked with blood. Despite the Catholic church’s protests, thousands of visitors pray to Little Audrey, rather than for her. Seeking to be spiritually moved, Hood visits Joan of Arc’s birthplace; Rocamadour in the Dordogne; and Mont Saint Michel in Normandy. She weeps before a veil of the Virgin in Chartres, “spiritually stirred” at last. Hood’s is not the absolute faith of Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him,” nor the rationalist creed of Thomas, “Unless I see and touch, I will not believe,” but a narcissistic, emotional creed–“Unless I feel and thrill and weep, I will not believe.”
Finally, Hood decides that, since she absorbed her faith unquestioningly from her Italian Catholic family, she might be able to resuscitate her faith by visiting her ancestral village in Italy. She describes her family with a quote from Rudolph Vecoli, “Italian Catholics are only nominally Catholic. Theirs is a folk religion, a fusion of animism, polytheism, and sorcery, with the sacraments of the church thrown in.” (In fact, Hood’s own faith, with its reliance on symbolic dreams, omens, psychics, tarot cards, and healing candles strikes me as positioned somewhere between the Dark Ages and the New Age.) This trip works. When an old relative advises her in cliches–“You have to have faith for prayer and healing to work,” and “Saint Anthony will help you find your way home”–she cries hard, feeling convicted. Soon afterwards, the familiar twentieth-century miracle of finding a lost contact lens restores her longed-for faith.
I remember reading the nucleus of this book as an article in Doubletake magazine. The present narrative is undermined by the attempt to inflate an essay into a book. Do Not Go Gentle evolves into a family memoir, a popular genre in an increasingly rootless and isolated America. Hood gives us the history of each parent’s family, and is especially deft in describing her abusive grandmother, revealing the petty verbal abuse that often lurks beneath the shiny exterior of the large happy family.
More than anything, the book is a testimony to the therapeutic and palliative effects of time and travel. Travel plunges you into a new setting, filling you with fresh ideas. In this new way of existence, the griefs of your old world seem less sharp and poignant. Gradually, time blunts the edge of Hood’s sorrow and she comes to accept a lonelier world “whose common theme is the death of fathers.”
Ann Hood calls this book “a spiritual odyssey.” Unfortunately, her story ends where real spiritual adventure begins: she decides that God exists, that God is benign, that there can be power in prayer. This is tame stuff compared to The Seven Storey Mountain or Surprised by Joy, whose electrifying apprehension of the holy leaves us with a gasping hunger to follow. Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, Pascal, and Augustine dive from Scripture into the deep sea of God. The response of these writers to God is quirky and individual; yet, since their quests begin by grappling with the story that culminates in the radiant figure of Christ, their journeys offer wisdom and illumination to anyone who wants to dive into the same sea. If Ann Hood sought comfort or light in the concentrated wisdom of Scripture at any point along her search, it does not show. With an irritating self-absorption, she seeks to base her faith on “spiritual stirrings,” intuitions, flickers of emotion–private stars with a private light with little general significance.
“Do Not Go Gentle” is a lively, gracefully written memoir, full of vivid descriptions of the beautiful places in which–possibly, not coincidentally–people have experienced miracles. It is a pleasure to read. To my husband’s despair, I took notes for future vacations. But finally I was more amused than inspired by the self-indulgence and emotionalism of this very American spiritual quest. For a guide on my own “spiritual odyssey,” I think I’ll stick with Merton or Thomas a Kempis, and, even better, the Word that was in the beginning.
Anita Mathias wrote “I Was a Teenage Atheist” in Commonweal’s October 8, 1999 issue. It was selected for inclusion in The Best Spiritual Writing, 2000, Philip Zaleski, ed., HarperSanFrancisco.

Today's party at the remodelled Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

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 Roy and I went to an after-hours party at the Ashmolean today. The hostess rented the entire museum –all 4 floors–for her party. Canapes and champagne in close proximity with priceless art!! 


It was the sort of party at which you were guaranteed to feel under-dressed and under-jewelled, but I had some congenial and convivial conversations–and the remodelled museum provided an incomparable setting!!


I like it more now than during my student days–it is bright, airy and full of light, very modern, but my favourite paintings, especially the Pre-Raphaelites still have precious memories for me!!

Reading Wright

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Reading Wright
                                                 
  I’ve just read Richard Wright’s memoir, Black Boy, about how discovering books changed his life in oppressive Mississippi.    “I hungered for books,” he writes, “new ways of looking and seeing.  Reading grew into a passion.  It had been only through books–vicarious cultural transfusions–that I had managed to keep myself alive.  From them, I felt touching my face a tinge of warmth from an unseen light.”
     It reminded me of my own discovery of the excitement of literature as a teenager in India, of how books were a drug, an enchantment , a dream I could live in for days.  Like an oyster cleaver, they opened up the world, its strangeness and richness.
   I was carefree then.   Today literature offers not only the gift of enlargement, but of self-forgetfulness–leaving behind the world of chores, bills, and careers to enter another mind, another universe, to leave enlarged.  Especially when we practice what Emerson calls creative reading: a margin-scribbling, feisty , mental dialogue with the writer.   
   And yet when I walk around the neighbourhood at evening, I notice neighbors–who sigh they have no time to read–sit mesmerized by a flickering  screen.  Why?