In which I celebrate books and film and art | Dreaming Beneath the Spires

When I almost missed the Uffizi Gallery, Florence

The Doni Tondo, a rare canvas painting by Michealangelo. Scroll down for more images.

I spent the first Sunday of January 2106 at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It was free, and advice online, as well as unsolicited advice on Facebook warned me that the lines were horrendous.

But visiting Florence and not spending a few hours at the Uffizi seemed like something I would always think of with sadness. Though I have visited the Uffizi before in the 1986 and 1997, I am a different person now, know more about art, and appreciate it more deeply.

In fact, when everyone cautions me against something, I often wonder if God is saying the opposite. If what “everyone says,” and the beautiful mind which created the Universe were in sync, what a beautiful world it would be!

(Digression. I thought of the time when I wanted to decline chemo after Stage III Bowel Cancer, and attempt a science project on my own body to find natural ways of preventing a recurrence, which would bless my body in the process, not curse it. I was staggered by the volume of unsolicited mocking and even hostile advice I got from people I had never met, people I barely knew, (and well as, of course, well-meaning people who, quite understandably believed I was being stupid). If not for two trusted friends, both women of vision and prayer, who corroborated what I heard God whisper to me, I might have been bullied into a year that would have been a nightmare of illness induced by toxic medication, rather than a peaceful idyll of recovering health. And chemo is not hugely effective for colon cancer. 30% of people who go through it die anyway; it only improves absolute survival by 10%. Digression done.)

When I heard the co-author of Grace and Forgiveness introduce her book on the power of forgiveness as worth a trillion dollars, I laughed but, yes, absolutely. She’s right!! In Grace and Forgiveness the Arnotts quote Mark Virkler: The Holy Spirit is always positive, and Satan is always negative. There is some truth to this. Negative advice from negative people cuts off hope and possibility thinking.

R. T. Kendall in The Anointing, tells of a British couple who sailed from Bombay to Southampton in 1904 to experience the Welsh Revival. When they walked off the docks at Southampton, they bumped into an acquaintance who said, “The Revival? Oh, it’s just Welsh emotionalism.”

Crushed, the couple bought a ticket on the next steamer, and returned to India.

But, as it happened, that foolish nay-sayer was wrong. In Wales, in 1904, people were experiencing God’s “love, vast as the ocean, loving kindness like a flood”. They were surrendering their lives to God, repenting of their sins, forgiving everyone who had sinned against them. They were experiencing spiritual joy, the spiritual life. All of which the couple missed because they listened to the negative words of a negative person!!

A long way to say: I am glad I went. The lines looked horrendous, but my family told me to sit down, and so I did, and brushed up on art history, totally absorbed, and all of a sudden, we were in, and I got to see as much as I had the energy for.

Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael…

I am so grateful to the Medici for collecting these treasures, and to the last of the Medici for gifting them to Florence.

And here are a few of my favourites.

Botticelli, Madonna of Pomegranate

Botticelli’s Nativity

And note the snooty Florentines amid the adoring throngs

Botticelli’s famous La Primavera

Notice the Virgin’s cool infinity scarf

Sandro Botticelli, Madonna of the Pomegranate–beautiful angels, very fashionable virgin with a cool scarf!
Sandro Botticelli, Venus coyly rising from the foam

Botticelli, Man with a coin. Note the self-confidence of his gaze.Botticelli, Pallas (and the Centaur)

Raphael (below). The Pre-Raphaelites, Oxford undergraduates when they banded together, somewhat unfairly decided that true art ended with Raphael!

Raphael’s portrait of Pope Julius II, the tormentor who chivvied, frustrated, angered and drove Michealangelo into genius–the inhuman effort of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and, of course, crafting Julius’s own tomb.
Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation

Angels from Leonardo’s Baptism of Christ

Fra Lippo Lippi–This painting is one of my favourites!
I love the polychromatic angel’s wings in Lorenzo de Credi’s painting

7 things I learned from Simon Vibert’s “Stress: The Path to Peace”

By Anita Mathias

Available on Amazon.com

Available on Amazon.co.uk

Living with high levels of stress can be physically and emotionally dangerous, so much so that stress tests like those by psychiatrists Holmes and Rahe can predict the likelihood of serious illness or an accident in the coming year based an individual’s level of current stress.

1 In his book with Philip Yancey, “Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants,” Dr. Paul Brand describes his work with leprosy patients. The disease attacked their nerves. Unable to feel pain, they cut or burned their feet and hands. The ability to feel pain is a safeguard.

Stress, emotional discomfort, is a similar red light and danger signal— a warning sign that our bodies’ needs must be attended to, a warning to slow down and recalibrate our life, our thinking, and emotions. When heeded, symptoms of stress function as a safeguard.

2 Whereas urbanization, instant communication, and noise pollution are major sources of stress, the best stress-busters, according to a Hoegaarden Beers survey, are contact with nature, the sight of the sea, a walk in the park, hearing birds singing, or smelling freshly cut grass.

Ironically, a balanced life with exercise, rest, relaxation, and time with family and friends makes us more productive.

3 “Planning and making lists removes stress. Noting down everything that needs doing brings huge relief.”

(Both Roy and I have always kept mental lists in our heads—of engagements, parties, things to do…and things do get forgotten–particularly from the To Do list). Whenever I note things down however, I do find a sense of relief. I realize that I have a lot less to do than I thought, and it also motivates me to zip through the list.)

4 Anger increases stress by pumping adrenaline and cortisol around our body, robbing us of tranquillity and sleep.

High-adrenaline physical activity helps to bring our anger under control. As does enough sleep, and trying to see it from the other person’s perspective.

The best way to master anger, however, involves mastering the reflex of dealing with our anger vertically, with God. Telling God about it, and seeking his perspective. Learning to forgive.

5 “The God-given rhythm of rest, time away from our work, is necessary for greater productivity.”

James Crichton-Browne, “We doctors, in the treatment of nervous diseases, are now constantly compelled to prescribe periods of rest. Some periods are only Sundays in arrears.”

A “Sabbath” is good for all human beings. French and Soviet attempts to increase the work-week backfired. Accidents increase and productivity diminishes after about eight hours of work a day, or forty hours a week.

Physician Verna Wright writes, “Just as the body requires its 24 hour cycle, so the one in seven rest day fits perfectly the needs of the body and mind, physically, mentally and spiritually.”

The Sabbath was indeed to be a celebration of freedom from slavery, a gift—a time when humans enjoy the fruit of their labour.

Tim Keller, “God ties the Sabbath to freedom from slavery. Anyone who overworks is a slave. Anyone who cannot rest from work is a slave—to a need for success, to a materialistic culture, to exploitative employers. These slave masters will abuse you if you are not disciplined in the practice of Sabbath rest. Sabbath is a declaration of freedom.”

6 Worry increases stress. Jesus quite clearly tells his disciples not to worry about anything. Again, we can train ourselves to refocus our worry into surrender and trust.

And since, apparently, we control only 8% of the things we worry about, it makes good sense to surrender the outcome of things to God, and to trust his goodness, and his creative ability to work all things out for good.

7 Stress is caused as much by one’s attitude and outlook on life as by external pressures and circumstances.

Once we recalibrate our heart in surrender, and remind ourselves of God’s love for us, and power over our circumstances, and ability to work everything together for good, our stress looks after itself.

By letting God be King, and believing in his power to help us and work together the twists and turns of our lives for good, we begin to learn the secret of being content whatever the circumstances.

I found the earlier, practical chapters more helpful than the later theological ones, though, as Simon points out, while practical lifestyle adjustments certainly reduce stress, facing one’s difficulties as a believer, believing in God’s power to help us, and to work all our difficulties together for good is ultimately the best solution to the problem of stress.

I received Simon Vibert’s Stress: The Path to Peace from Intervarsity Press to review. Available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Charles Duhigg’s “The Power of Habit,” on How to Create or Change Habits

By Anita Mathias

Here’s a potted summary of a fascinating, helpful book, Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit.

“All our life is but a mass of habits—practical, emotional and intellectual—systematically organised for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny.” William James.

According to a study by Duke University—40% of the actions people perform each day weren’t decisions, but habits.

Many of these habits are trivial, but “over time the meals we eat, whether we save or spend, how often we exercise, and the way we organise our thoughts and work routines have an enormous impact on our health, productivity, financial security and happiness.”

Duhigg quotes an army major (who might have been a “methamphetamine entrepreneur” if he hadn’t entered the US Army, “one of the biggest habit-formation experiments in history”): “There’s nothing you can’t do if you get the habits right.

* * *

A habit is a choice that we deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about, but continue doing, often every day. It is a formula our brain automatically follows.

There is a three-step loop in our brain.

First, a cue or trigger. Sadness or stress might make you want to eat chocolate. Or perhaps, you happen to see chocolate, or an ad for it. Physical tiredness may be a trigger to exercise—or drink coffee or eat something sugary. Boredom can be a trigger to work on your Big Dream, or mindlessly surf the internet.

“The cues can be almost anything— a certain place, a time of day, an emotion, a sequence of thoughts, or the company of certain people.”

Then is the routine—eat the chocolate. Surf the internet. Grumble at your family, or go for a run.

And then the reward—endorphins from exercise, a serotonin boost from chocolate, adrenaline boost from exercise (or fighting).

Over time this becomes automatic; without thinking, we reach for chocolate when sad (or pray); the internet when bored (or journalling). Nap when depressed (or run). A habit is born.

* * *

Once we associate a cue with a reward, the brain creates a neurological craving for the reward (the chocolate high, let’s say) and creates a routine that satisfies that craving.

Scientists who have studied the brains of alcoholics, smokers and overeaters have measured how their neurology—the structure of their brains, and the flow of neuro-chemicals inside their skulls—changes as their cravings become ingrained. Particularly strong habits produce the responses of an addict so that “wanting evolves into obsessive craving” that can force our brains into autopilot, “even in the face of strong disincentive.”

Cravings drive habits. To overpower the habit, we must recognise which craving is driving the behaviour–for the sugar high, or the numbing or dopamine of the internet. We must be conscious.

* * *

How to Change Habits

We might not remember the experiences that create our habits, but once they are lodged within our brains, they influence how we act, often without our realisation.” However, just by looking at them become visible again.

“Habits can be deliberately designed. We can choose our habits. Every habit is malleable, and any of them can be changed if you know how they function. They can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts.”

A habit : When I experience CUE, I will do ROUTINE, in order to get a REWARD.

Cues, whether emotional or visual, can’t be changed, Duhigg says. When we are hungry, angry, lonely, sad, tired, stressed, overworked, bored, we will desire a reward. The only thing which can be changed is our response to the cue. HOW we get the reward.

Habits cannot easily be eradicated—they must be replaced. “Habits are most malleable when the Golden Rule of habit change is applied: If we keep the same cue and the same reward, and inset a new more positive and helpful routine to get the reward.”

To change a habit, you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, but shift the routine. It helps if you set up a craving for the pleasurable new routine i.e. focus on the endorphins and energy after the run, and the smoothie you drink. “Almost any behaviour can be transformed if we set up different routines in response to our cues.”

So to change a habit:

Identify the cue: What makes you make to indulge in your bad habit, whether it be chocolate, junk food, or surfing the internet? Is it boredom, low blood sugar, tiredness, stress, sadness or anger?

What is the reward you are seeking? The burst of energy from the chocolate, the distraction and numbing of the internet, and Facebook?

Substitute: You break the bad habit by substituting a different routine to get the rewards. Might decaf work instead of chocolate? Would gardening, or a run, or 15 minute of blog reading work instead? Might a nap work instead of the cookie? Or journaling about the emotions that led to numbing behaviour? Or writing a fun blog? Or prayer as a relaxation activity?

Duhigg: “Habits aren’t destiny. Habits can be ignored, changed, or replaced. Habits (good or bad) never really disappear. Once a habit is formed, the brain does it on auto-pilot. They’re encoded into the structures of our brain. The problem is that once you’ve formed a bad habit, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

Unless you deliberately fight a habit, unless you find new routines, you will automatically do what is habitual.”

This explains why it’s so hard to change our eating habits, or our sedentary habits, or our addictions. Once we develop a routine of surfing the internet when bored, or snacking when sad, those patterns always remain inside our heads.

By the same rule though, if we learn to create new neurological routines that overpower those behaviours—if we take control of the habit loop—we can force those bad habits into the background. And once someone creates a new pattern, studies have demonstrated, going for a jog or ignoring the chocolate becomes as automatic as any other habit. The process of change is accelerated when we form good habits to counteract the bad ones.

The simplest way to begin making choices again is to have a plan. Planning your day in detail—what you will do, when you will exercise, what you will eat, makes sticking to a plan easier.

To create a new habit, you need a trigger: When are you going to run? To do your yoga? To write? To pray? Without creating a specific time when you are going to do it, creating a good habit is but a nice intention.

* * *

Keystone Habits

“Keystone habits” Duhigg says spark a series of changes which ultimately radiate to every part of life. (Brains scans, he says in Chapter 1, show that exercising discipline changes the very structure of the brain; also, the rewards of discipline become addictive.)

Good keystone habits start a chain reaction, a process of change that over time transforms everything.

Keystone habits prove that success does not depend on getting every single thing right, but instead depends on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers.

The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.

When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work; they show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed.

“Exercise spills over. There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.”

Similarly, there is a correlation between eating a family dinner and success at school and work. Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget. Those initial shifts start chain reactions that help other good habits take hold.

* * *

Australian researchers Oaten and Cheng put volunteers onto a two month programme that steadily increased their exercise –weight lifting and aerobics. The more time they spent at the gym, the less alcohol, caffeine and junk food they consumed. They spent more hours on homework and fewer watching TV. They were less depressed.

In the next experiment, they asked people to budget, save, record expenses and deny themselves luxuries such as eating out and movies also drank on average two cups less of caffeine, less alcohol, less junk food, and were more productive at work and school.

Participants in a program on creating study habits showed academic improvement, but also led to students smoking less, drinking less, watching less TV, exercising more and eating healthier.

As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives, the strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.

When you learn to force yourself to go to the gym or start your homework, or eat a salad instead of a burger, you get better at regulating your impulses and distracting yourself from temptations, and focusing on a goal.

Will power becomes a habit when you choose a behaviour ahead of time, and stick to it when you reach an inflection point at which sticking to it is hard.

Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle like the muscles in your arms and legs, and it gets tired as it works harder. So it’s important to do the really important things earlier in the day when your willpower is higher, to put first things first.

Keystone habits are “small wins” that cause widespread shifts and changes. They help other habits flourish by creating new structures. Small wins have enormous power, a disproportionate influence.

“Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage. Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favour another small win. Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.” In other ways, they create momentum, a virtuous circle.

* * *

Big Business and Habits

Hundreds of companies focus on understanding the neurology and psychology of habits. Most people don’t intend to eat fast food, for instance, but they are unconsciously influenced by cues, and seek rewards.

Every McDonalds has standardized its architecture, uniforms, and what employees say to customers to trigger the often unconscious memory of what you ate last time. “The foods are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as soon as possible, casing your pleasure centres to light up, and tighten the habit loop.”

“But since we often don’t recognize these habit loops, we are blind to our ability to control them. But if we observe our cues and rewards we can change our routines.”

* * *

Alcoholics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous and Habit Change

Alcoholics Anonymous is one of the largest and most successful attempts at large scale habit change. It is a giant machine for attacking the habits that surround alcohol use, changing habit loops, and shows how almost any habit, even the most obstinate, can be changed

The Core of AA: “Realise you are licked, admit it, and get willing to turn your life over to God.”

Attacking the behaviours we think of as addictions by modifying the habits surrounding them is one of the most effective means of treatment.

The Golden Rule of Habit change used by AA, use the same triggers or cues, gets the same rewards, but teaches new routines in response to the old triggers to provide a familiar relief.

“Once you recognize how your habit works, once you recognize the cues and the rewards, you are half-way to changing it. The brain can be reprogrammed. You have to be deliberate about it.”

Alcoholics Anonymous also depends on faith. Admitting there is a higher power in one’s life, admitting one’s powerlessness.

For habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible. “You do need to believe that you can cope with the stress without alcohol.” A group teaches individuals how to believe.

“There something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be sceptical about their ability to change if they are by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.”

When people join groups where change seems possible, their odds of success at changing habits go up dramatically

Rick Warren and Saddleback Church

Rick Warren tried to teach people “the habits of faith,” by breaking down discipleship into Christian habits. “Once that happens, people become self-feeders. They follow Christ because that is who they are.”

Everyone in Saddleback belongs to a small group which makes small group attendance and church attendance a habit. Faith becomes an aspect of their social experience and daily lives.

Rick Warren: “If you want to have Christ-like character, then you just develop the habits that Christ had. All of us are simply a bundle of habits. Our goal is to help you replace some bad habits with some good habits that will help you grow in Christ’s likeness.”

Giving everyone new habits has become a focus of the church. Every Saddleback member is asked to sign a “maturity covenant card” promising to adhere to three habits necessary for spiritual growth. 1) daily quiet time for prayer 2) tithing 10% of their income 3) membership in a small group.

* * *

Habits allow us to “do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily and finally do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all.”

They can be designed and changed—and that is the real power of habit.

The Power of Habit available on Amazon.com

The Power of Habit, on Amazon.co.uk

In which Imaginative Literature Stirs the Heart to Conversion (A Guest Post by Holly Ordway)

By Anita Mathias

I am honoured to welcome Dr. Holly Ordway to my blog today.

In which Imaginative Literature Stirs the Heart to Conversion

How could a fierce atheist enter into Christian faith? There are many ways for God’s grace to work; my own story is one that highlights the importance of imaginative literature!

When I was firmly an atheist, I dismissed Christianity as superstitious nonsense, and I simply would not have listened to the arguments that ultimately convinced me that the Christian claim is objectively true. Apologetics arguments were (eventually) vitally important, but as I reflected and wrote about my journey, I recognized the importance of imagination as both the catalyst and the foundation of my rational exploration of the faith.

How did that happen?

Let me give you a little glimpse from my memoir of conversion, Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms.

From my childhood:

Long before I gave any thought about whether Christianity was true, and long before I considered questions of faith and practice, my imagination was being fed Christianly. I delighted in the stories of King Arthur’s knights and the quest for the Holy Grail, without knowing that the Grail was the cup from the Last Supper. I had no idea that the Chronicles of Narnia had anything to do with Jesus, but images from the stories stuck with me, as bright and vivid in my memory as if I had caught sight of a real landscape, had a real encounter, with more significance than I could quite grasp.

And at some point in my childhood, I found J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and that changed everything. Not suddenly. Not even immediately. But slowly, surely. Like light from an invisible lamp, God’s grace was beginning to shine out from Tolkien’s works, illuminating my Godless imagination with a Christian vision.

I don’t remember reading The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit for the first time, only re-reading them again and again… Middle Earth was a world in which there is darkness, but also real light, a light that shines in the darkness and is not extinguished: Galadriel’s light, and the light of the star that Sam sees break through the clouds in Mordor, and the ray of sun that falls on the flower-crowned head of the king’s broken statue at the crossroads… I didn’t know, then, that my imagination had been, as it were, baptized in Middle Earth. But something took root in my reading of Tolkien that would flower many years later.

From my time at college:

The bumper-sticker expressions of Christian affirmation – “I’m not perfect, just forgiven!” “God is my co-pilot!” – and the kitsch art that I saw – a blue-eyed Jesus in drapey robes (polyester?) comforting some repentant hipster, or cuddling impossibly adorable children (none crying or distracted), presented faith as a kind of pious flag-waving. No thanks!

I didn’t know then how to say it, but I was looking for the cosmic Christ, the one by whom all things were made, the risen and glorified Jesus at the right hand of the Father.

The Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins got past my allergic reaction to kitsch because it flowed naturally out of what he saw in the world.

Where his poetry was sweet, it had the sweetness of a perfectly ripe strawberry, or of the very best chocolate, creamy and rich – not the chemical sweetness of a low-fat sugar-free pudding with non-dairy whipped topping.

Where his poetry was bitter, it was bitter with the taste of real misery, the kind that fills up your awareness, squeezes out the memory of better times and draws a blank on tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow – not the faux-sadness of “Jesus died for you!” (so cheer up and get with the program already), the faux-compassion that can’t bear to look at a crucifix (so morbid).

Somehow for Hopkins the sweet and the bitter were not opposed; they were part of the same experience of being in the world, and undergirding all of it was something I didn’t understand at all, never having experienced it or known anyone who had: the reality of God, not as an abstract moral figure or as a name dropped to show off one’s piety, but a dynamic awareness of being in relationship with the Trinitarian God, an experienced reality bigger by far than the words used to point to it.

Years later, struggling with questions of meaning, wrestling with despair, I re-read Hopkins. I had no conscious desire to find God; I thought I knew that He did not exist. And yet something was at work in me, just as Hopkins wrote in “The Windhover”: “My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird. . .” My heart stirred – for what? For something beyond my experience.

Poetry had done its work. I was ready to listen.

Holly Ordway is Professor of English and Director of the MA in Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, and the author of Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms (Ignatius Press, 2014). She holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst; her academic work focuses on imagination in apologetics, with special attention to the writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.

Les Miserables: The Film Akin to a Spiritual Experience

By Anita Mathias

Can watching a film, a mere film, be a spiritual experience?

Well, watching Les Misérables was a spiritual experience for me.

As I watched, I was repenting, recommitting my life to Christ, surrendering to him again, resolving to read the Gospels more, to live by their beautiful way of love and mercy.

* * *

Under the repressive laws of the time, Jean Valjean is sentenced to 19 years rowing in the galleys for stealing bread for his sister’s starving son–5 years for the theft, 14 for escape attempts. Many convicts were essentially worked to death there, but Jean Valjean’s exceptional physical strength enables him to survive.

When he is released, with papers marking him as an ex-convict, he cannot find work or lodging. When Bishop Myriel offers him a night’s lodging and a meal, he escapes with the Bishop’s silver. He is captured, and was to be returned to the galleys, this time for life.

* * *

Incarnating mercy above the letter of the law—and “sinning”– the Bishop lies. He gave Jean Valjean the stolen silver, he claims, adding, “But you forget the candlesticks, my friend,” handing them over. Jean Valjean is released.

A central theme of the novel: there is no law higher than love, and to this law, all others give way–“the right thing,” “justice,” “what people deserve,” “the good of society.”

In the novel, Hugo’s narrator says of Bishop Myriel “The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness. Love each other; he desired nothing further, and that was the whole of his doctrine.”

The Bishop then tells Valjean to use the silver to make himself an honest man. “Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man…. Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!”

* * *

Astonishingly, with a hiccup or two, Jean Valjean makes good, becomes the mayor of a small town and an industrialist. Ironically, a good deed—rescuing a man trapped under a cart—brings him to the attention of the Inspector Javert who could recalls only one other man who had such physical strength—the convict Jean Valjean.

Javert, was born in prison to a galley slave and a gypsy fortune-teller, which left him with a “hatred for the race of bohemians whence he was sprung.” He was certain that following and upholding the law was the better path and does so with fanatical devotion.

Javert is convinced that breaking parole is wrong, that people cannot change, that it is best to return Valjean to the galleys, for he was irredeemably wicked, despite the accumulating evidence to the contrary—Valjean’s new, disciplined life; the way he rescues the trapped man; protects Fantine; adopts Cosette; and his kindness to the poor which led to the nickname, “the beggar who gives alms.”

In Javert, we see rigid morality gone bad. Hugo says he represents, “the evil of the good.” He describes the scene in which Javert arrests Valjean:

Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues which have one vice, – error. The honest, pitiless joy of a fanatic in the full flood of his atrocity preserves a certain lugubriously venerable radiance. Without himself suspecting the fact, Javert in his formidable happiness was to be pitied, as is every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could be so poignant and so terrible as this face, wherein was displayed all that may be designated as the evil of the good.

* * *

In a novelistic twist, Valjean saves Javert’s life in the Paris Uprising of 1832, knowing that Javert would still hunt him down, because such was his nature.

At the end, Valjean does indeed fall into Javert’s hands, and Javert– to remain true to the rigid moral code by which he has lived his life, and to his respect for the law, and his belief that in respect for the law is salvation from the depravity, dissolution and fecklessness of his parents—must arrest the now aged Valjean who has done only good for years, and, moreover, has saved his, Javert’s, life. Must return him to the galleys for life—that is certain death.

For the first time, he sees that following the law would be immoral. As would, according to his own value system, disobeying it.

The foundations on which he had built his life are crumbling: honouring the law, determination to capture Jean Valjean. Faced with the fact that man whom he pursued for decades as irredeemably evil might be closer to a saint, Javert cannot obey the law. He is too honest to remain a police officer while not doing his duty. Unable to resolve his cognitive dissonance, he leaps into the Seine.

* * *

Jean Valjean is a Christ figure, who reinvents himself by steadfastly doing the right thing, showing mercy as he has received mercy. His life broadens out. He achieves worldly success. He also finds meaning in loving Cosette, and doing good in the world.

The life of Inspector Javert, his antagonist, on the other hand, steadily narrows. His focus on bringing Valjean to justice narrows his life to an essentially ignoble aim.

While Javert represents, in Hugo’s words, the evil in the good, there is another antagonist, the former innkeeper, Thenardier who is entirely self-seeking and evil—greedy, self-seeking, corrupt, and who steadily sinks into a whirlpool of ever greater evil and depravity. He represent what Hannah Arendt at the Eichmann trial calls “the banality of evil.”

* * *

Interestingly, both Jean Valjean and Javert were modelled on Eugène François Vidocq, an ex-convict who became a police official, noted for his ability and photographic memory and, then later, a successful businessman widely noted for his social engagement and philanthropy.

We have them both within us, the white dog and the black dog. Choosing love and mercy gives us a life which broadens and opens out into sunlit paths. Choosing vindictiveness and vengefulness commits us a narrow, narrowing life.

“Choose you this day whom you will serve.” Like Vidocq, we all have some of both Javert and Valjean in us, but I, oh, I want to feed the white dog. I choose mercy.

Les Misérables on Amazon.co.uk

Les Misérables on Amazon.com

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life: A Visually Splendid, Deeply Philosophical AND Christian film.

By Anita Mathias

I loved Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. It’s the only film that I’ve watched, dazzled—and then immediately watched again.

Terrence Malick, the auteur–who studied Philosophy at Harvard; was a Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford translated Heidegger; taught philosopher at MIT; wrote for the New Yorker; and directed six visionary films–is a modern America genius, apparently as immersed in philosophy as in the Bible.

The Tree of Life is a modern Book of Job, an exploration of why bad things happen to good people, a Miltonic attempt to justify the ways of God to man–and probably the most theological film I’ve seen.

The film explores dualistic ways to live—selfishness and love; “nature” and “grace,” or theologically, as a son of God, entitled to all the goodness of his household, or an orphan who must scavenge, scheme and grab.

* * *

Mrs O’Brien, an ethereal woman,(a luminous Jessica Chastain) opens the film with a close quotation from the Imitation of Christ contrasting the way of nature and the way of love and grace. “We have to choose which we will follow.” The way of “nature” or unredeemed man “finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it, and love is smiling through all things.” “The nuns taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end,” her opening monologue concludes.

This belief is instantly challenged through the death of her youngest son, R.L. who represents the way of grace and goodness, in contrast to his conflicted elder brother Jack, who is singled out for his father’s bullying. R. L., for instance, in a pregnant wordless scene, gently and beautifully forgives Jack, who shot him with a BB gun. “I do not do the good I want, but I do the very thing I hate,” Jack explains in one of the Biblical riffs from Job, or Psalms or Romans which punctuate the film.

* * *

The Tree of Life is the story of a mismatched couple, Mrs O’Brien, committed to love, grace and gentleness, and the unpleasant, extremely hardworking Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt), who gave up his dream of being a musician to become an engineer, but who is dogged by failure: none of his 21 patents he filed for while moonlighting make money; his business schemes fail.

Such a life makes for bitterness, and bitter he is—especially against anyone who has money or success. Men frustrated at work can be splenetic at home, and so he is. In this little sphere in which he can maintain control, he does—a slammed door has to be reclosed quietly 50 times. Jack, his elder son is upbraided for grass which does not grow in dense shade. Jack must spend his evening turning the pages while Dad plays Brahms. Unsurprisingly, Jack grows up hating his father, praying for his death, sorely tempted to bring it about!

* * *

The Tree of Life deflates the American dream which works for some, does not for most, and for pretty much everyone is simply not worth it. It misses the joy and glory of life in the struggle to get ahead in a race which doesn’t matter.

Mr O’Brien’s rage and bafflement at how his own life turned out morphs into a determination that his boys will be tough, will persist, will win. “It takes fierce will to get ahead in this world,” he says. “If you are good, people will take advantage of you.” “The world lives by trickery. If you want to succeed, you can’t be too good.” “You make yourself what you are; you can take control of your own destiny. “Don’t say ‘I can’t.’ Say I am having trouble; I am not done yet.”

Eventually, Mr. O’Brien loses his job. Broken and heartbroken, in a scene which must speak to many in the Great Recession, he muses, “I wanted to be loved because I was great, a big man, but I am nothing. The glory around us, the trees, the birds: I dishonoured it all & didn’t notice the glory. I am a foolish man. I wanted so much, and what have I got for my life’s work? Zero. Zilch. You boys are all I have. All I want.” He laments, in anguish, the simply glory of the three childhoods which passed him by while he chased chimeral success. Mr. O’Brien has his own Jobian question of the universe: Why? “I never missed a day of work, tithed every Sunday?”

* * *

“What are we to you?” the grieving mother asks at the start of the film when a telegram announces the death of her son. “Do you even care what happens to us?” This is the central question of the film.

When Job questions God, God silences him with his questions, one of which is the epigraph of The Tree of Life.

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?

while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?

And God’s “show-don’t-tell” answer in the film, as in the Book of Job is a stunning peacock-display of the wonders of creation. Like the ways of God. Fittingly, a sermon from Job provides a lengthy voice-over.

We see as Anthony Lane writes in the New Yorker, “glimmers of unfathomable light, vast interstellar conflagrations, drifting throngs of stars, planets in their formless infancy, sun and moon occluded by dark storms, energizing jolts of lightning, gulping primordial pools, early plants, early creatures, slow-dancing jellyfish, hammerhead sharks, a dinosaur lounging on the shore, an embryo’s eye.”

The film’s title refers to Darwin’s Tree of Life, of course, to a relentless, but mainly benevolent and beautiful evolution, not accomplished without tears. In a surreal sequence, a dinosaur dispassionately places his mighty paw on a wounded dinosaur’s neck—and then darts off. A meteor eliminates them all. R.L. dies. The ways of God transcend our understanding.

* * *

The Tree of Life is a cinematic Ulysses, ethereal, beautiful, bewildering, using a Joycean stream of consciousness, interior monologues, or whispered prayers, as a broken-hearted, now middle-aged Jack (Sean Penn) and his mother contend with God.

I have never seen a movie in which the characters pray quite so much, except the sublime Des Hommes et Des Dieux, Of Gods and Men. “Mother, brother, it was they who led me to your door. You spoke to me though her. You spoke to me from the sky, the trees before I knew I loved you, believed in you,” Jack says. The film, a passionate dialogue with God, is reminiscent too of Augustine’s Confessions, also a love letter to God.

* * *

The motifs in this allusory film are literary and Biblical, as well as autobiographical. Characters walk through a succession of open doors set in barren landscapes. There are Narnia-reminiscent lampposts. There are many motifs of transition—bridges, corridors–and ascent: elevators, stairways, ladders, domes, spirals. Venetian masks drift away as we will know fully as we are fully known. Oh and the landscapes!–Moab, Yellowstone, Iceland, Antarctica, Niagara, The Great Barrier Reef and its jellyfish: all the gorgeousness of the world compacted into one film.

* * *

The Tree of Life is set in a Fifties America, in Waco, Texas, where Malick grew up, “idyllic” some reviewers say, but in which I am glad I did not live. Boys on the loose during the long summer vacation behave, unfortunately, like boys—frogs are let loose in rockets; bloodied dogs creep away; houses are vandalized and broken into; the crippled are mimicked. Neighbourhood boys follow trucks spraying DDT, dancing in the fumes.

It’s a deeply autobiographical film. The gentle brother who plays guitar recalls Malick’s youngest brother Larry, who went to Spain to study with Andres Segovia, but frustrated with his lack of progress deliberately broke both his hands, and later committed suicide. The boy who dies in a burning house, and the scarred friend represent coded memories of Malick’s middle brother Chris, who was badly burned in a car accident which killed his wife and left him scarred for life.

* * *

The lyrical final sequence takes place on the far shore of the world beyond ours. The middle-aged Jack, stumbles through a lunar landscape of weird rock formations and infinite oceans in which he is reconciled to all those he has loved, adored, contended with and lost—his beautiful mother and brothers, his hurt, baffled father, and even the lost angry boy he once was!

On and on, he sleepwalks through open doors, and bridges, through a landscape a bit like a Greek underworld, through a wandering crowd of familiar people looking for and finding all they have loved and lost. His family discover each other, embrace ecstatically, and walk together through the sea, in “reconciliation, word over all, beautiful as the sky” as every tear is wiped away. And, in the background, glorious Gregorian chant: Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus. Amen.

The mother has the last word, “The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.”

Amen.

Some DVDs I’ve enjoyed: The King’s Speech, Life of Pi, and The Hobbit

By Anita Mathias

The King’s Speech—I loved it. Partly because my father had immigrated to England in the forties and fifties when George VI was King. My father was imaginative, and read the newspapers like a novel, and made the events of the forties as real to us as the plot of any story he told us.

After many abortive attempts at therapy with high-society therapists, the Duke of York forges a relationship of trust and affection with Lionel Logue, an Australian, and in this context, overcomes his debilitating stammer.

Logue, a failed actor, drifted into speech therapy as he dealt with the shell-shocked victims of the First World War who returned to Australia barely able to speak.

“My job was to give them faith in their own voice,” Logue says. And that involved revisiting the scene of the trauma, bringing it to the light where all the darkness, spider-webs and bats-wings associated with it lost their terror.

* * *

Going back to the great theme of love, what separates one professional from another is his ability to “love” his clients. I wonder if it is this quality more than skill that makes a superb psychotherapist, hair-dresser, speech-therapist, life-coach, writing teacher, Oxbridge don…

In fact, I am so convinced of it that I will not closely work with anyone, a personal trainer, say, a therapist, an agent, an editor, a spiritual director, or even a regular hair-dresser unless I like them and they like me.

It was the personal affection between the men, and Logue’s insistence on uncovering the roots of the stammer in fear, dread and trauma that ultimately enabled George VI’s stammer to virtually disappear.

The King’s Speech on Amazon.com and The King’s Speech on Amazon.co.uk

* * *

As a writer, I loved this film about finding your own voice. You find your own voice when you face the fears which make you “stammer”. You find your own voice when you stop worrying about what your voice sounds like. You find your voice when you write about what was taboo. You find your voice when you just speak, and let the chips fall as they may. You find your voice when you are willing to fail.

* * *

The Life of Pi—Stunning cinematography again. I first watched it in 3D like the Hobbit. I think the temptation of 3D is to overemphasize visual special effects to the detriment of the old-fashioned movie elements—the screenplay, the acting, you know…

The Indian scenes were absolutely charming, and the scenes in the lifeboat anguished, especially when the dying tiger, Richard Parker, permits Pi to place its noble head on his lap.

What struck me: Caring for the tiger, Richard Parker kept Pi alive. Love kept him alive.

Pi proved unable to resist the appeal in the tiger’s eyes as he tried to clamber onto the life-boat, and being busy about finding food and water for Richard Parker saves him from succumbing to despair.

Was the fanciful story of the tiger, the hyena, the baboon and the zebra true, or the story of the cook, the sailor and his mother? The insurance adjusters chose the former because it was a better story.

And that is why one might choose to believe in God, Pi says.

The Life of Pi on Amazon.com and Life of Pi on Amazon.co.uk

* * *

The Hobbit: The cinematography was stunning, and I enjoyed re-meeting Tolkien’s characters: Bilbo Baggins, the honourable and blinkered Thorin Oakenshield, quirky Gandalf, the ethereal Lady of Lorien, and the beautiful, noble elves.

So Bilbo leaves the comforts of his cosy hobbit hole, cluttered with the accretions of sentimental inheritances (much like many Oxford homes) for the wild and adventure.

A crazy choice—and the right one. Had he not journeyed, he would have been the same content Hobbit all his life. Circumscribed by his small comfortable pleasures. Stuck.

By accepting challenge and journeying, he changes, becomes wiser, more open-eyed, more experienced, different.

Sacrificing comfort, safety and the predictable is the price he pays for experience, maturity and hard-won wisdom.

We encounter the choice all too often. A spirit-breathed challenge and adventure is probably the better choice. After all, your hobbit hole will still be waiting for you when you return.

The Hobbit on Amazon.com and The Hobbit on Amazon.co.uk

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. And a Musing on what the Arts are Good for

By Anita Mathias

I had a magical Sunday morning in Oxford, watching Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. I bought the DVD, because it was Woody Allen, without having read reviews.

And so I was particularly enchanted. Here was Zelda, as edgy and high-energy and fragile as Scott Fitzgerald depicts her in Tender is the Night. And charming Scott himself. Hemingway, talking in complex, monosyllabic sentences. Gertrude Stein, a brash, rich, arty lesbian who berates the artists and writers in her circle, comes across just as she does in the oddest autobiography/biography ever written, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” which Stein kindly wrote for her lover and companion, Alice!

T.S. Eliot appears, measuring out his life with coffee spoons. And artists—Dali, Picasso, Degas, Gaugin, and Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and Luis Bunuel. The magic of a late-career director, free, liberated, confident and playful. Loved it!

* * *

There were years in my twenties and thirties in which I immersed myself in the arts obsessively—in reading poetry, and novels, and essays, in haunting art galleries, and watching good films and now that my daughters are older and self-reliant I am so enjoying soaking up the arts again.

That’s one of the great gifts of the arts: Lethe. Forgetting everything. Forgetting time, sorrow, failure, undone tasks.

And that’s a great gift, isn’t it? [Read more…]