In which I am amazed by the love of the Father | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Poor Me and Amazing Me: Which Narrative is Yours?

Sometimes, going through my Facebook newsfeed, I see two narratives: Poor Me and Amazing Me.

Poor Me status updates are largely negative: ill-health, the misadventures of children, looming deadlines, crushing work loads, exhaustion, the intransigence of schools, employers, medical services; the inadequacy of tax-payer money funnelled towards their needs, the anguish of the entitled!

And then, there are Amazing Me status updates. Amazing Me won a prize; travelled to Antarctica; conjured up this gourmet creation; pulled off this domestic Goddess feat; moved mountains today, oh Amazing Me!

* * *

We started playing these roles in our childhoods. In my childhood, Poor Me would have met with no sympathy. I would have been scolded for whatever led to my Poor Me plight. Why did you allow yourself to gain weight? Get sick? Get writers’ block? Fail? Go, do something about it. Run a mile. Eat vegetables. Write a page.

And I too get impatient with Poor Me, and come up with solutions. (Though I am silent, and my tears flow freely when there are no solutions: an incurable illness like motor neurone disease; an inoperable tumour, or the sudden death of a loved one.)

Amazing Me was the script I was expected to follow in childhood. Amazing me, always winning prizes; Amazing Me, dazzling my teachers; Amazing Me, achieving, achieving, achieving.

* * *

Poor Me and Amazing Me have this in common. They are both symptoms of emptiness. They both want something from other people. Poor Me wants attention—and sympathy. Amazing Me wants attention–and praise. Both their cups are half-empty, the one who proclaims the emptiness of her cup, and the one who declares her cup runneth over, but still wants affirmation from other people.

* * *

In middle age, I am less interested in old scripts. I am not interested in Poor Me. When people Poor You me, I hate it. I want to shake off their sympathy, which feels like a clog on my feet (though in the case of tragedy I can do nothing about, yeah, I will accept sympathy, and cry on your shoulder–if I can).

And when I tend to Amazing Me, on the days I am smart, I remind myself of the eternal fountain always flowing, flowing to fill my empty places.

(credit)

And I tell myself, “Anita, you are indeed Amazing Me because you are a child of God. You are Amazing Me because you can climb into his lap and lean on his shoulder. You are Amazing Me because he sings over you; you are Amazing Me because he protects you; you are Amazing Me because no matter what goes wrong, he comforts you.

You are Amazing Me because when you blow it, he puts his arms around you, and blows his spirit into you, fills you with the water of the Holy Spirit to overflowing. You are Amazing Me because he patches you together again, and you are as good as new. You are Amazing Me because he will take you to places you never dreamed you’ll go. You are Amazing Me because he loves you.

Thank you, Kelly, for hosting the first version of this!

Good News for Those who’ve Blown It

By Anita Mathias

Image: Caravaggio

You can live with Christ in the closest possible

Intimacy; have a Spirit-given breakthrough

Understand that he is the Son

Of the Living God, know

He speaks the words of eternal life.

You can see him on the mountain, transfigured.

And then… babble,

Something about building booths,

Because you don’t know what to say

But you must say something.

And so bossily,

Despite having seen him transfigured,

You decide to take charge, and take him aside and rebuke him

When he tells you that suffering was always part of the plan,

And you get called Satan,

Not long after you have been called blessed.

And then…what you can do,

Is declare you will never ever fall away from Jesus,

Even if everyone else does,

And then you do just that….deny him

Three times.

And then, when Jesus gives you another chance,

You blow that too,

And instead of contemplating your fate

Which Christ has just revealed to you.

What you do is competitively obsess over John’s fate!

* * *

You can love Christ for many years,

And be 83 pounds overweight,

You eat in a sloppy, unthinking way; eliminate exercise

Deal with your feeling through food.

You can lose your temper with some regularity; take offence,

Write people off. Of course you can!

* * *

Your vessel of clay may be different,

Alcoholism perhaps; drugs; an abortion; divorce,

A sexual history so chequered you’d rather not think about it,

Or perhaps you been good for so long,

That you feel very bad and angry inside.

* * *

It’s not the vessel of clay that counts,

It is the treasure within.

Your simple love for Christ,

Your desire to follow him,

Though you, so often, forget him.

For one day, your vessel, my vessel, Peter’s vessel

Shall all be cast away on the scrap-heap of discarded things,

And what matters shall shine forth: the treasure within:

The heart he always loved; the heart that loved him back,

Though it got side-tracked–so very often.

The Root of Peace (from Brennan Manning’s “Ragamuffin Gospel”)

By Anita Mathias

Philosopher Jacques Maritain once said that the culmination of knowledge is not conceptual but experiential: I feel God. Such is the promise of the Scriptures: Be still and know (experience) that I am God.

My own journey bears witness to that. I mean simply that a living, loving God can and does make his presence felt, can and does speak to us in the silence of our hearts, can does warm and caress us till we no longer doubt that he is near, that he is here.

Such experience is pure grace to the poor, the children, and the sinners, the privileged types in the gospel of grace. It cannot be forced from God. He gives it freely, but he does give it, and has given it to such as Moses and Matthew, to Roslyn and me.

In fact, there is no one to whom God denies it. Ignatius of Loyola said, “The direct experience of God is grace indeed, and basically, there is no one to whom it is refused.”

In essence, there is only one thing God asks of us—that we be men and women of prayer, people who live close to God, people for whom God is everything, and for whom God is enough. That is the root of peace.

When we start seeking something besides him, we lose it. As Thomas Merton said in the last public address before his death, “That is his call to us—simply to be people who are content to live close to him to renew that kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.”

The Worst Evangelism Question Ever, or, When we See Him Face to Face

By Anita Mathias

Pompeo Batoni: The Prodigal Son

The worst evangelism question ever in my opinion is:

“If God were to ask you, “Why should I let you into my Heaven?” what would you say?”

The lovely pastor of our first little church in Williamsburg, Virginia, was all gung-ho about Evangelism Explosion. When we were new, he visited us with a man he was training, and popped the Evangelism Explosion question, “If God were to ask you, ‘Why should I let you into My Heaven?’ what would you say?”

I said, “I know the correct answer, but to be honest, that isn’t what I am going to say.”

Now, 19 years later and even more confident, I would snort and say, “No way is God going to ask silly questions on that emotional and glorious occasion.”

* * *

Because you see, in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus has told us what it’s going to be like when we meet his lovely father.

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.”

And because I am God’s prodigal daughter–unbelievably, but definitely, because he is so incredibly good and kind–I believe he will be filled with compassion for me, run to me, throw his arms around me, and kiss me.

And I will say, head bowed, through heartfelt tears, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your daughter.’

And seeing the holiness of his face, and his sheer goodness and loveliness, everything I have ever done will come crashing in, and I will hang my head, overcome and ashamed.

And he will say, “Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on her. Put a ring on her finger and sandals on her feet. ²³Bring the fattened calf for there are no calories or cholesterol in heaven. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. ²⁴For this daughter of mine was dead and is alive again; she was lost and is found.”

* * *

And if this amazing Father could possibly ask that silly imaginary question, “Why should I let you into my heaven?” I would say,

“Because you are my father, and I am your daughter, and your home is mine.”

“Because I have messed up and repented, messed up and repented, again and again, but through it all, through it all, oh I have loved you–oh so very much.”

And he will say “Come,” because that is his nature.

All is Grace. All is Gift. All is Good, despite our Sehnsucht, indefinable longings!

By Anita Mathias

Caption: The Bay Where St Paul was Shipwrecked, Malta

So it’s the last day of this half-term, and I am tired. And my girls who’ve worked hard, and Roy, who’s woken early to drive them to school, are even more tired.

We are looking forward to the nine days of the half-term holiday—to sleeping in, no stress, family movies… And especially a five day trip to glorious Ffald-y-Brenin in Wales.

* * *

Funny thing is, we had all that—sleeping in, staying up late, family movies, luscious meals, creaking family dinner tables, and bits of travel– last summer (when we squeezed in an epic drive to Copenhagen in our motorhome) and for 24 days over the Christmas holidays (home and Malta).

And towards the end of each holiday, let me be honest, I was actually looking forward for school. For a routine. For those rascally teenage girls to get to bed at a half-decent hour, rather than the early hours of the morning and not sleep in till noon. For the house to be tidy and not have bowls, mugs, plates, juice-boxes, and chocolate wrappers, scattered around couches and armchairs and bedrooms. Or coats, scarves and socks kicked off anywhere. For predictable silent undisturbed hours to sink into reading and writing.

* * *

After weeks of them being home 24/7, I look forward to school. After weeks of school, I want them home.

You know why? It’s because both are good. It’s all good.

Life is good because it’s a gift from God.

* * *

I am going away next week, and am longing to do so. Sometimes, I have had very exciting, dream holidays, full of doing and seeing and learning—Istanbul, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and after a week or so there, I am surprised by a yearning to be home, to spend a day in my pyjamas, reading or playing around with words.

What? I had so yearned to see these magical places. On my first trip to Paris, I heard an American say on the phone in a rich resonant voice, “I am travel weary. I am homesick.” Travel-weary and homesick in Paris? I thought. Yeah, it’s all too possible.

It’s all good, it’s all gift, it’s all grace. That’s why at home, we can think of glorious art, architecture, history, gardens, mountains, forests, and the ocean and yearn to be there. And that’s why, in the middle of Rome or Athens or Madrid, I have had a sudden longing to go nowhere, do nothing, just sit with green tea, God, a book and a laptop.

* * *

“Thou hast made us for thyself, Oh Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you,” St. Augustine wrote.

This perpetual restlessness in our hearts is meant to lead us to the one who stills all restlessness.

The Germans (of course!) have a word for this restlessness, this indefinable longing: Sehnsucht.

C.S. Lewis describes sehnsucht as the “inconsolable longing” in the human heart for “we know not what.” That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of “Kubla Khan“, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves. (C. S. Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress).

* * *

The restlessness in your heart is essentially a God-yearning. Don’t confuse it with what you think you desire— finishing and publishing a beautiful book, having a successful blog, travel, stimulating friendships, the holiday cottage on the sea, let’s say.

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them,” C. S. Lewis says in “The Weight of Glory.”“These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

* * *

So listen to your restlessness. Listen to your longings. You are longing for more than Alaska, or Antarctica or the Amazon (places I would rather like to see before I die). You are longing for more than to write a beautiful book (something else I would like to do before I die).

You are really yearning for the infinite sea of God. For the ocean of God to pour into your spirit, and for your spirit to pour into the ocean of God now and in eternity. You are yearning to abide and dwell in Him, and be filled with his spirit, which Jesus says is possible in this life. The things of this world for which you think you yearn are just signposts to the things which will truly satisfy your soul.

This world, this life, which lies, “before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new,” is a gift, a love-gift from God. Its loveliness is designed to delight, but not entirely satisfy our hearts. Only the Giver can do that.

Dreaming in Malta’s Neolithic Temples: Hagar Qim and Mnajdra

By Anita Mathias

The garrigue, as the sun sets.

We hiked today to the Hagar Qim and Mnajdra Temples in Malta, through picturesque garigue, covered with fragrant thyme, wild fennel, and stunted rosemary.

It reminded me of Provence, and the landscape of Marcel Pagnol’s marvellous films, La Gloire de Mon Pere et Le Chateau de Ma Mere. A wild rabbit, a pot full of rosemary, thyme, wild fennel, wild onions and wild garlic—you see how cuisine evolves from landscape. Rabbit, incidentally, is Malta’s national dish, and we had some superb rabbit yesterday, with Maltese ftira, bread smeared with olive oil, baked with a stuffing of roast chicken, tomatoes, garlic and onions.

I like Malta. I love their food, and their immense tenderness to children, a trait they share with other Mediterranean cultures like Spain and Italy. And perhaps having lived through a magical period of being a bambino or nina, smiled at and petted by all, contributes to a warm, friendly, good-natured society, as these petted children expect the best of the world, and, in general, the world and people and life correspond to our expectations. [Read more…]

anita.mathias