In which I shyly share my essays and poetry | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Aliens and Strangers

Here’s an essay I wrote in 1999 in Williamsburg, Virginia, in the fortnight before Irene was born on May 5th, 1999.

When she did not arrive on her due date, after I’d stopped work and waited for her for a month, I started a new essay in despair, finishing it just before she appeared.

She’ll be 12 tomorrow.

The essay is a long meditation on rootlessness and the longing for roots–one of the abiding preoccupations of my life!!

“Aliens and Strangers”

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they may have known from childhood remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent to which they may attach themselves.

The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham, 1919

Sometimes, unexpectedly, you come to a place where your spirit unfurls; it has found its natural topography. I like Rilke’s notion of spiritual homes, “elective homelands,”–for him, Russia, Paris, Switzerland. The Pythagorean and Hindu doctrine of metempsychosis, transmigration of the soul, tries to explain such affinities. Twice or thrice had I loved thee/ Before I knew thy face or name, John Donne expresses this sensation. Hindus say of a preternaturally wise child: she has an old soul. My daughter Zoe is like that, uncannily wise. Just two, going on three, she advised me when I was infuriated, “Just ‘nore him. What matter what he do-es? Jesus loves us, Jesus is everywhere, Jesus can do anything,” repeating in a childish fashion–in the reciprocal teaching that is one of the gifts of having children–the old words of Paul I had taught her, “Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation shall separate us from the love of God.”

My happiest childhood experiences were in books, a contained world of peace, sweeter and more nourishing than the real life around me. Most books I read were set in England, Enid Blyton’s Noddy and the Famous Four, and Malory Towers, and St. Clare’s–and later, the classics: The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights. So when I walked down Broad Street or High Street as an undergraduate at Oxford, amid those medieval stones with their spires, dreaming, it felt strangely familiar. I thought, with some embarrassment, of the Australians, New Zealanders, and Anglo-Indians who still call Englandhome. For Oxford felt like the landscape of my imagination, of literature. Architecture, majestic, yet restrained and elegant. Air breathing history. Hopkins’ lines swelled in memory–Ah! this air I gather and I release/He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what/He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace, he wrote of the medieval theologian, Duns Scotus. How esoteric! The people who I remembered, with a frisson of pleasure, had lived at the Oxford colleges through which I wandered, studied in the Bodleian, matriculated under the gargoyles of the Sheldonian were Gerard Manley Hopkins himself, and Matthew Arnold who first conjured the magic of Oxford for me: And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, she needs not June for beauty’s heightening. That’s where I would have chosen to live–Englandwhere I spent three exuberant years, and, later, three dreamy, beauty-soaked vacations. I feel more of an affinity with it than with my India, the elbowy crowds, the noise and tumult, “the huddled masses.” Coleridge on a Scotsman: “He was geographically slandered by the place of his birth.”

What is home? Familiar earth? Where you grew up? Where people speak your native language? Where those you love live? And a place where you can relax? I no longer, of course, consider my parents’ house, home. It’s now my mother’s domain. I feel out of my element in her home; when I am there, so does she. India no longer feels like home. My parents have moved from Jamshedpur where I grew up to Bangalore, a retiree hub, India’s “garden city,” and its Silicon Valley. Bangalore is Babel: Telegu, Tamil, Kannada, Konkani, English, Hindi–and my Hindi, once fluent, after seventeen years in England and America, is fluttering away, evanescent as languages not used. When I travel overseas, I have the sense of coming home when I reach the United States. When I travel alone, I feel I am at home when my husband and daughters meet me at the airport. And then, the rapture, the sheer sensuous pleasure, the sense of relaxation of inhabiting, once more, 104 Richard’s Patent, Williamsburg, Virginia, the home and garden I have worked–as leisure and money show their fleeting faces–on making beautiful, the garden singing and bright with birds at the feeders, fluttering in season with swallowtail butterflies around our butterfly puddles and sweet flowers.

I suppose the spirit has its deepest roots in the place it returns to in dreams. My dreams are set in two locales: the home I grew up in in Jamshedpur, India–spacious, sixteen rooms, airy, whitewashed, high-ceilinged, with a huge garden, dense with fruit trees, flowers, and vegetables; and my boarding school, St. Mary’s Convent, in Nainital in the Himalayas. My spirit was formed there, rather than in Jamshedpur, which was not beautiful, though it had pretty parks, with lakes and islands, rose gardens, and flood-lit rainbowed fountains. But in Nainital, I became myself, evolved–long quiet hours, much time to read and dream in that valley above the limpid Naini lake, surrounded by towering mountains. The Himalayashave imprinted their topography on my soul. Ever since school, I feel restless for the green sweep of mountains and the music of streams.

Their belief in things invisible, and in a way without guaranteed tangible rewards, made the great men of faith exiles, says a New Testament writer–“aliens and strangers on earth.” Like them, though not with a purposive displacement, I’ve always felt slightly alien, transplanted, “a minority,” a Catholic in Hindu India; an ethnic South Indian growing up in the north; and then, in a further displacement, my boarding school was in the extreme north of India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Strangely, I never felt at home in the North Indian town I grew up in, Jamshedpur in Bihar. My parents were not natives. My mother grew up in Bombay; the family of my father, the son of the first Indian Civil Surgeon in the Empire, was continually transferred all over the South. He moved to Jamshedpur after eight years studying and working in England. My parents looked down on the life around them: Bihari Buddus, idiots, they called the locals in a common alliterative insult (often applying the slur to me, for I was born in Bihar!) They lived in a parallel universe, keeping meticulous notes on the four to five Western movies they watched each week in the three private clubs they belonged to, and of every book they read, English language or in translation, Gide, Camus, Woolf, Huxley, Orwell.

Like them, I grew up with a faint sense of unlikeness, displacement, so much so that to be an amphibian now feels swimming in a native element, half in water, half in the starry air, a stranger in both worlds, never quite belonging anywhere. I read different stuff, and more, often dreaming the day away, my soul immersed in a book, as if I were drifting in a boat in a lazy river, a sense I’ve not often had after abruptly quitting my Ph.D program for marriage and its enforced extroversion. My mother collected fading cloth-bound books for me from well-educated old friends and extended family members who no longer read. I read the classics, again and again, gravitating to the piles of them in the house, appealing to an aimless moment, ignorant yet of Matthew Arnold’s dictum that life is too short to read anything but the best that has been said and thought (a wise statement, though it can paralyze the joyous exploration of reading: perhaps something better has been written). I soon had more books in my room than in the children’s bookcase of the local library, most of which I’d read–except those that seemed meant for boys: adventures around the world; up in the air; under the sea; ships, pirates, coral islands–nah! I invited classmates on pilgrimages to my room to see my shrine of books on hand-built shelves, floor to ceiling, which I read again and again, books in a language not spoken around me in the marketplace, or street, or by the three servants in the house–Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Norse mythology, Greek mythology, poetry… “You are a square peg in a round hole,” my father shook his head.

I do not hear ancestral voices when I write the language I love–the native language of England imposed on Indiaby conquest. Playing with its plasticity gives a shape and excitement to my days. I revel in its words and their antique history as in an heirloom. I want my daughters, Zoe and Irene, to savor its beauty and sensuous pleasure–then feel a dissonance. Its history is barely allied with those who share my blood; it did not evolve on my native soil; . I speak it because of a legacy of conquest and bitterness. “The Conquistadors took our gold, but they left us their gold: they left us our words,” Carlos Fuentes shrugs. I watched Hermione Lee of the B.B.C. interview R.K. Narayan who looked like a traditional Indian patriarch. “Why do you write in English?” Lee asked, gently. “Because it is the language I know best,” he said, equally simply. “If I knew any language better, I would write in it.”

And, in a double displacement, I believe in a religion forced, nearly 350 years ago, on my ancestors in Mangalore, though I am no longer a Roman Catholic but a mere Christian. All the picturesque trappings of Catholicism have sloughed away. Transubstantiation, saints, purgatory, rosaries, novenas: they no longer figure in my spiritual life. But I still believe in the gorgeous proposition that God entered human history in that zero year. Christ, his teachings: that’s the zigzag that helps me make sense of the jigsaw of life, and find a tranquil joy in it. Oh, lots of things bring me pleasure–my children, my writing, my garden, literature, paintings, film, nature, family life, friendships, travel, thinking–but following Christ unites the disparate chords into a rich and abounding symphony that swirls in the sadness that accompanies joy as moonlight follows the brightest day.

In considering my life a story being written by God, I apprehend, amid the randomness and anguish, a plot. I find in faith what Arnoldfound in love: consolation amid chaos, life’s truest meaning. Ah, love, let us be true/ To one another! for the world, which seems/ To lie before us like a land of dreams,/ So various, so beautiful, so new,/ Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, Arnold cried. I cry, “Ah, love, let us believe, for in itself this world hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…”

I no longer base my identity on my race, or education, or profession: a writer. I attempt to shed my old identity to graft myself into, and orient myself by the majestic, luminous figure of Christ “the radiance of God’s glory,” “in whom all things hang together.” I now define myself by my faith :I am a mere Christian. In the quiet steady light of Christ, I attempt to make sense the sadness of life (“the vale of soul-making,” Keats describes it) I glimpse in the destitute on the streets of Bangalore, and in the strained eyes of faculty at a college garden party in Williamsburg–what Virgil called “the tears of things.”

I settled down, eight years ago, in Williamsburg, Virginia, where I have no roots except–ironically, paradoxically–actual physical roots, for this is where I live. If I were a woman of vast independent income, or an athlete, ballet dancer, ex-dictator, or high-profile victim of an ex-dictator that would enable me to take refuge anywhere I chose, I would have chosen Oxford, England–Towery city and branchy between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded–where I spent three of the most formative, and certainly exhilarated years of my life. Two glorious worlds–Art and nature–within an easy bike ride. Tidewater Virginia does not lack natural beauty, but “high art” entails a long drive.

I feel no affinity with the slave-owning colonists who settled here in Williamsburg–land hunters, tobacco farmers, saturating the soil with blood, tears, sweat and greed, aspiring to transcend their status and become landed gentry. Tobacco planters! What have I in common with them? I inwardly growl. If I had to choose a place to live in America, it might be one of those villages outside Boston with literary associations, Concordor Amherst. I love the heady, pure wintry air of the literature of nineteenth century New England–Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson… And I share religious roots and a sensibility with New England Puritans such as Jonathan Edwards, their fervid faith, their passionate absolutist souls, the poetic intensity with which they saw a black and white universe charged with divine meanings, liber mundi, God’s book of the world, through which He revealed himself in metaphors, spiders suggesting divine allegories.

I did not get to choose; life chose for me. Lacking “five hundred pounds a year,” I could not make my home anywhere I wished, and I didn’t want to work a job–which gives you mobility (assuming you can get one). My husband sent off applications in the scattershot fashion that computers abet. And then because we were young–and when you are young, you are sanguine, for the future stretches infinitely in front of you, and your nerves are as elastic as your body; and the fellowship to Stanford and Cornell Roy had after he graduated from Johns Hopkins was winding down–he accepted the first job he was offered: Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. Where was that? My fingers traced a map. Oh well, we could move.

Except that in Williamsburg, willy-nilly, roots started their secret insistent work. “Roots, roots of remembered greenery, traverse long distances by surmounting some obstacles, penetrating others, and insinuating themselves into narrow cracks,” Nabokov muses. My psychic and emotional roots surmounted some obstacles, penetrated others, and insinuated themselves into narrow cracks. I now feel, more or less, at home–though it’s not the place I have chosen, but the place I have accepted.

Friends came, more slowly than I wished, but eventually, after wrenching growth in solitude. I can now find my friends’ houses without getting lost, a feat for me who invariably got lost, when I left my house in Minneapolis (another place in which I could have joyfully settled) driving the wrong way up a one-way street, exiting a highway at the last moment, cutting recklessly in front of trucks, the upturned wriggling fingers–and it was the wrong exit! I can now get to the library without horns or fingers. Life is slow here, road rage rare. And, gradually, we realized that we had begun to put down roots. We are at home. We do not plan to leave the orchard we have planted, the herb garden, the flower beds, the pond we’ve dug in the backyard which reflects the woods around it, and soothes the eyes and soul, extending an almost irresistible invitation to sit and be still. I have another project. If you cannot make your home in Eden–then in a kind of judo, literally “the gentle way,” turning adversity to your advantage–make your home Eden. Once you cease rebelling against the constrictions of your life, you can use them to grow as an espaliered fruit tree uses walls. There’s a strength in accepting defeat. That’s that. Now let’s see if we can rebound from it. I think of the Greek monster, Antaeus. Pushed to the earth, his mother, he derived strength from that low place, and rose stronger than before.

I felt alien in Williamsburgfor a long time. I’d pray, “Oh Lord, let me bloom where I am planted,” and then cry, for I couldn’t imagine blooming in this little town with little in the way of a literary community, theater, art. After five years in Williamsburg, I met again a well-known essayist I had studied with in Minneapolis, a more literary city. He read my work and said, “What’s happened to you? Your sentences have changed. You’ve become a writer.” In the apparently barren years, without the distraction that so easily distracts, I began to learn, belatedly, to focus. Winter–the lack of abundant sun and water–sends roots down, deep into the soil, seeking nourishment. Similarly, creativity can bloom in winter if you explore the present and its tangles; and the deep past, and taste the pleasures of thinking. Rilke counsels–Even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds–wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention to it. Try to raise up the sunken feeling of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance.

I have begun to relish living in a place for a long time, being rooted and grounded in it, making and leaving my mark on the landscape, greeting each season with bulbs I have planted. I love watching the natural year wheel from the picture window at which I write–the kuk-kuk-kuk of the pileated woodpecker resounding through the woods, tiger swallowtails fluttering in their mating dance, bluebirds on the purple spray of eastern redbud each spring; hummingbirds amid the trumpet vine in the summer; red-bellied woodpeckers alighting on the flaming sweetgum in the fall; the trees alive with migrant birds in the winter. Rooted, you can begin to form long friendships. And small towns offer a sense of community, even if it’s a pseudo-sense. Still, even in Williamsburg, Virginia, dizzily growing, familiar groves cut down by the day for frivolous upscale stores, and gated communities of mansions for retirees, I–almost every time I leave my house to go to the library, gym, store, or to walk in that pleasing fake antique, Colonial Williamsburg–see people I know (by name, face, or intimate detail) through my writing; the college my husband, and, occasionally, I teach at; church, children, the neighborhood; and we feel nebulous goodwill as we meet.

Being settled is a relief. For ten years, my home address metamorphosed: Madras, India; Oxford, England; Columbus, Ohio; Binghamton, New York; Ithaca, New York; Palo Alto, California; Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then, Williamsburg, Virginia. Before our sixth wedding anniversary–those gypsy years of post-doctoral research and early career!–my husband and I made seven homes, in four states. The sound of the list wearies me, all those moves and UPS boxes and change of address forms. Now I wish for us, and for our daughters, what Yeats wished for his daughter,

“Oh, may she live like some green laurel,

Rooted in one dear perpetual place.”

Through luck, or grace unsought, I have quite possibly found this place, a half acre of dear land, a tapestry deep, rich, and green, I gaze at through the large windows facing the woods in the backyard,. I enjoy returning to my home after my eccentric late night rambles to put recalcitrant babies to sleep. It shines like a sanctuary in the woods, warm and welcoming, or conversely, makes me think of a white, airy cabin of a ship, glowing bright on the seas.

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, as the Psalmist says. After I bought a house and planted an orchard around it, in a symbolic gesture of putting down roots, I feel quieter, settled, as if my life has put down roots in my house and garden. Both ground me, sometimes literally. I’ve discovered, after years of believing the fallacy of the bohemian, impulse-driven artist–what I now think of as the wasted years of indiscipline, reading till three or four a.m., waking up at noon or one–the fertility of an orderly, peaceful life, like nature, lovely, and on schedule. The crawling of woolly bears; the migration of monarchs and snow geese; snowflakes and spring blossoms; how predictable–but how shiveringly lovely. “It is good to be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work,” wrote Flaubert, artist of artists. Art from the fecund soil of a disciplined life–keeping my house beautiful and orderly, tending my garden, nurturing children. Such imperatives can function as scaffolding for the artist, roots anchoring the enormous sycamore. They stave off depression and torpor.

The house is ballast, an anchor. After the intensity of writing in which you lose track of everyone and everything around you as you wrestle to the page words and their meanings, you return to the ground base of your home, puttering, cleaning, organizing, and this stabilizing manual work serves as the fixed pole of the compass, a Penelope from which your art journeys, to which it returns. A house, clean, few things in it, everything beautiful and in its place, radiates quietness, an invitation to relax, be still, work, love, be. The tranquil home is the wrist from which the peregrine imagination can soar to return with its prize; the axis from which productivity flows, contentment, and the making and enjoying of beauty.

In addition to the traditional monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, Benedictine monks made a commitment to “stability,” to stay in their chosen monastery, on their elected spot of earth, until death. What a sane idea! When we bought our house, we planted dozens of hostas, hundreds of bulbs and perennials, and espaliered pear trees along the walls, putting down roots with every intention of staying put. Barring biological accidents: more children, paralysis… I cannot conceive why I would want something bigger. Or smaller. It’s probably easier for the spirit to stretch its wings in large airy spaces.

The roots of a mighty oak delve into the soil. The deeper they dive, the higher they can soar. What does the oak sacrifice for the height to which it wanders? Mobility. Traveling out of Concord. I have traded the buzz of intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic stimulation in headier places, Oxford, Cambridge, Minneapolis, Boston to live quietly, acquainting myself with the history, natural history, and joys of the land I’ve found myself in, and to enjoy the settled pleasures of rootedness. It’s a form of scholarship, staying put, “traveling a good deal in Concord,” in Thoreau’s phrase, being a specialist rather than a generalist. For to put down roots–to eliminate the distraction and turbulence of mobility–permits one to grow and flower; to concentrate on yielding creative and spiritual fruit.

A blessing granted to the righteous in the Old Testament was to be rooted “like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season, and whose leaf does not wither” whereas the unrighteous were like chaff that the wind blows away. To be rootless was deemed a curse in that agrarian society. Satan, in Job, was restless, “roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it.” The curse on Cain: “To be a restless wanderer on the earth.”

Rootlessness is like a curse in modern Americawhere people move every three to four years. The consequent uprooting and disorientation, the lack of long, deep friendships, and the loneliness, all precipitate the epidemic of depression psychologists describe. According to psychiatrist Antonio Wood, the mobility of families, coupled with the breakdown of the nuclear family, is predisposing the entire culture to depression. “The most important factor in the growing incidence of depression is social isolation,” Wood suggests. “We’re really social animals. If we are taken out of the pack, we die.”

To be rootless, to have no home except in my writing that travels with me wherever I go, now seems as sad to me as the curse of legend on the Wandering Jew: to roam the world until Christ’s second coming. No, I would like, also, to be rooted in the familiar: in a beloved garden, and a beloved house, lived in, improved, made more beautiful through the years, that–like a fossil, or amber encasing dragonflies–will be a silent record of my life in it.

Transplantation is never an experiment without peril. Transplants need to be performed in a beneficent season, tended carefully, given compost and extra water. Sometimes for a few weeks or months, the tree appears to thrive, or at least survive, and then, inexplicably, the leaves yellow; the trunk browns; you scratch the bark, and nowhere does it show green, and you know it’s lost, like those survivors of the unthinkable, living testaments to the resiliency of the human spirit, who decades later, disappointing their mythologizers, kill themselves when everything is apparently at its best, a straw igniting old fires, until without warning, the spirit and nervous system snap.

Not all trees survive transplantation, or succeed in putting down roots in alien soil to thrive. Immigration–a rude and global transplantation–is a stressor not to be undertaken lightly. For there is no telling which transplants will take.

When I study the faces of immigrants, the lostness, the strain of the attempt to sing an old song in an alien land, I wonder if it was worth it. If immigration opens up a way to taste life in its fullness, perhaps it can be justified. For people whose deepest satisfaction is in their work, immigration works out for good, I guess, if it offers a larger, more fulfilling arena for their lifework. It’s a great trade-in. You trade in your roots–landscape, possessions, family, friends, connections, social standing, all things familiar that made up your world–to heed the siren summons to adventure in fresh woods and pastures new. In a sense, you change your very identity. In India, from my features, my coloring, my clothes, my accent, people could, with uncanny accuracy, surmise much of my identity, and place me as I could place them: could often tell that I was a Catholic, educated, upper-middle class, a Mangalorean or a Goan, communities that were converted to Catholicism in the mid-sixteenth century by the Portuguese, and intermarried with the colonizers. As an immigrant, you lose your old identity. People now suspect me of being from Nicaragua, Granada, Cuba, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Aghanistan, whichever country Americais currently shaking its mighty finger at.

What a mind-boggling uprooting immigration is! Yet even as a teenager, I itched to leave India and strike out for the West. It seemed a larger, freer world, the world of the literature I loved. I wanted to live in England, but my visa forbade work, so to AmericaI drifted. Englandstill seems green and pleasant in contrast to America, a land that works, often soulless in its efficiency, rushed, rushing to the bitter end. To find poetry, mystery, and magic in America, I think one must become a naturalist. That’s where I have found romance and delight–in thermal pools like morning glories in Yellowstone; in shaggy herds of bison shambling across the road in the Badlands; in the intertidal pools of the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve and the seal colonies of the Ano Nuevo State Reserve in the Bay Area; in Arcadia, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Mount Rainier, the Grand Tetons, and Shenandoah. The ancient universe of nature, pristine, magical.

Was immigration worth it for me? Yes. I felt cabined, cribbed, confined in India. My family’s litany was: “What will people think?” “What will people say?” I wanted to be free of that conformist society and its expectations. I wanted to gulp experience, to explore the world like Larry of The Razor’s Edge, a teenage hero. I enjoyed escaping from my family–a great advantage of immigration. I wrenched up my roots for the freedom of anonymity; the latitude offered by the variety of ways to behave and be; for privacy and the quiet to work; and for the facets of Western culture that exhilarate me–art galleries, ballet, film, theater, and, of course, contemporary literature. I am not sorry I have transplanted myself.

Though the perspective with which I think and feel and view the world was formed in India, and when I sit down to write–the immigrant irony!–I draw on its mountains, rivers, and winds. For much that I absorbed as mother’s milk, embers that still glow in my imagination, is, of course, from India–the poetry of Tagore; the great epic, the Ramayana, with the lonely scrupulous figure of Ram, who set aside his blameless wife Sita, after she was abducted by the demon king, Ravana, even though she had not been ravished–an early exemplar of the morality of a society where appearance and reputation count for everything. And the Mahabharatawith its beautiful heroine, Draupadi, common wife of the five Pandava brothers, who gambled her away to their cousins, the Kauravas; when the victors attempt to publicly strip her, Draupadi’s saree magically stretches even as it was unraveled. Avenging her, the hero Arjuna, in a panic attack before the battle of Kurukshetra, lyrically agonizes in the Bhagvad Gita on the stern requirements of duty which required him to kill the kinsman amassed against him. And then, the story of history–Asoka, converted to Buddhism, planting trees along the famous Grand Trunk Road; the Muslim “Slave Dynasty,” slave succeeding slave as King; the fascinating, psychologically complex Mughal Emperors, inventing religions, erecting perennially lovely buildings, the Red Fort, the Moti Masjid, and the elegant Taj Mahal, cool marble inlaid, in ornate pietra dura, with precious stones, in which once as a child, escaping from a guided tour, I got lost. And I think of the Indian freedom movement with fascination, a triumph of character, conviction, and morality over might–or so it appears.

Perhaps because I have mostly been a house mouse, after seventeen years the West retains an aura of strangeness. And I would not trade this shimmering sense of “something rich and strange” to be the bored child of privilege. Cycling on the towpaths by the Isis; walking Oxford streets at night among the Gothic spires, yearning skywards; sauntering dreamily on Addison’s Walk by the Cherwell, that trembled with daffodils: things that might seem a birthright to one more privileged, gave me the sense of living in a beneficent dream. I needed to leave India for the experiences most branded on my memory–pattering water in Bernini’s fountain at the Spanish Steps, near the room in which Keats died, musing, All your better deeds shall lie in water writ; lapping waves near the island graveyard of San Michele, in Venice; strolling beside the canal in Kyoto, bright with cherry blossoms; Botticelli in the Uffizi.

Given hindsight, would I leave Indiaagain? Without a doubt, sooner than I did before. I was chafing to escape my conventional, constrained community in which apparently innocuous words and actions fertilized gossip. Though, of course, there is a cost, a psychic cost. You ponder racism, ugly word; wonder if you are being treated differently because of your honeyed skin. Are the slow waiters inefficient, lazy–or racist? People might assume that you do not know how the system works (and you might not) so you are never sure if you are as well-served as one with whiter skin. Strangers screw their faces in anticipation as you open your mouth. Annoyingly, your accent is not always understood. Your Otherness: a source of stress, and gaffes, for yourself and others.

But returning will be no easier. As a bear tamed by humans cannot survive in the wild, moving back to India would be a culture shock of its own. The skills of swiftly grabbing an empty seat, of jumping lines have faded away. You would wait to be served, futilely, interminably, instead of hollering in the crowd thronging around the counter. How impotent this politeness in a society where only losers stand and wait.

Now, I really feel displaced. I suppose immigration is a way of finding solitude, the solitude of floating away from the anchoring past. You become an alien and a stranger on the earth, like those ancient men and women of faith. In fact, the Biblical writers observe that we are all exiles and strangers on earth where we have no lasting city, restless until we find our rest and completion in the vast sea of God: the deep peace at the heart of the hurricane, the only lasting solace and anchor for our jumpy spirits; our true home, where alone we belong.

And, I must say, exile is good for a writer. Even as her wondering, innocent eyes survey her new land starkly, freshly, all her journeying helps her see her old land clearly, as if for the first time. Its very contrast with the present, so efficient, so mechanized, so fast, gives memories of the past the sharpness of an etching. Its essence is so different that biting into a similarity, a madeleine say, sparks a magic lantern show of remembrance. Like the image that emerges as you trace over metal, the past surfaces in all its sensuousness. In the quiet of the present exile, it floats, a remote mountain castle, brightly silhouetted against the sky.

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The Magic Kingdom-VI. The Ones to whom He Opens the Door

By Anita Mathias

h/t

The Magic Kingdom is a long, very personal essay I wrote in 2003, which I am posting here in installments, without re-reading or editing (because, once I start, I would edit it into a different essay!). This is the final section

I The Magic Kingdom I–The Varieties of Magic

II The Magic Worlds of Art and Nature.

III Deep Magic from Before the Dawn of Time.

IV The Magic Kingdom of Prayer

V The Ones He Calls and the Ones He Chooses

The Ones to Whom He Opens the Door.

And in church, the veil of sin between me and Him hangs heavily, for we had once known sweet fellowship, and I realize my greatest betrayal was that I turned my eyes far from his lovely eyes, and I cry out for forgiveness, and for his life to once more flood me. And I remember that the publican who went home justified before God merely cried, “God have mercy on me, a sinner,” that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one Anita who repents than over the ninety-nine righteous who do not need to repent. “For all the fitness he desireth is to feel thy need of him.”

And I cry out, “Oh wretched woman that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? For I am a woman of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips.” And time and time again, in response, the veil which I long to step through is ripped in two from top to bottom, and I step over, and with the eyes of faith, I see the Lord, seated on his throne, high and lifted up, and the whole earth is full of his glory, and I ask him to brand me so deeply that I can never stray, and I feel my heart and lips touched by the burning coal of repentance, and I hear the magical words, “Your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”

And I might be asked to speak at a church function, lead a Bible study, write a spiritual piece, and I think “Who am I?” and I remember another to whom he opened the door, a murderer in hiding who had quite literally broken–not just lamps and mugs–but all the ten commandments in one fell swoop–who had the same reasonable query, and was reassured, “I will help you speak and will teach you what to say;” “My Presence will go with you and I will give you rest.”

This is the deepest magic I know: that God is agape, that he loves the lazy and weak-willed and vacillating, the undisciplined and messy–like me–and though I may slap on a smile and shine my house, and close the windows when I lose my temper, and dangerously shove laundry and secrets and skeletons into closets to molder in the darkness, I am still loved by One from whom no secrets need to be kept, for his serious direct eyes see right through them, and he loves me anyway, the kind of love which, when offered us, however imperfectly, by a father, a husband, a mentor, a friend, a child staggers and transforms us.

Yes, this too is what prayer is like: not being able to meet the eyes of Him my heart loves, for the golden life-line that bound us has been so frayed by rage, hatred, revulsion, fear and frustration; and I feel like stone–cold, hard, dead (and a little crazy); and I realize that I have never known how to love; and my betraying heart says with Enobarbus in Anthony and Cleopatra, “I am alone the villain of the earth.” It is then to discover that when the dead trees of the ice storm snapped all visible cables, the underground cords that bound me to him were not, could not be, severed, for they were secured deep, in the basement of my personality, when I implored him in, and he came and set up his dwelling within me. And though I have filled my mind and days with sin and folly and distraction, in the bunker basement of my being, unscathed by 5000 pound bombs, or the hurricanes and tornadoes of the heart, he remains, the heart of my own heart, a love so extravagant and stunning that I cannot quite get my mind around it.

The magic of the Kingdom is that the imperfect and erratic such as I can enter it, that its doors are always open, that repentance is the key. That I am in the grip of deep grace; that he will not let go; that the days when I run to him, humbled by my failures, are the days when I, in fact, have the most room in my heart for him; when I most resemble the ones he chose. That this is an eclectic sampling of those to whom he opened the door: yes, yes, some of the ninety-nine righteous, but also Augustine, fettered by lust, horrified at the implications of conversion: “Give me chastity, but not yet,’ he famously prays; Colson, feeling furious, framed, shamed by Watergate; Anne Lamott, drunk, doped, hemorrhaging after an abortion, whose audacious sinner’s prayer was, “Fuck it. You can come in.”[1]

Those He Transforms

Samuel tells Saul–“The Spirit of the Lord will come upon you in power and you will be changed into a different person.”[2] Is there anyone so self-satisfied, so smug, for whom this promise holds no magic? Psychotherapy, self-help books–vehicles of hope for modern man–at best help us to bear fortune’s slings and arrows by increasing insight, modifying behavior. To enter the magic kingdom, to become a true Christian, modifies the heart. This is the promise of the new covenant: “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.”[3] “For if any man is in Christ, he is a new creation;” Paul writes. “Very lovely, but not really true,” I thought when first a Christian. I now believe it–and not just because I believe Scripture is inspired. Nobody could talk the blind man of John 9 out of his own experience: “One thing I know. I was blind, but now I see.” I know God can dramatically transform the human personality because I find myself experiencing it with great joy.

For as the yeast of the Kingdom rises through me, everything I consider important or impressive, the eyes with which I see people; the way I live my life–it’s all thoroughly reshuffled. I rapidly change, every few months, so much so that I can read the journals of six months, a year ago, with sadness and bemusement as if they belonged to another woman, and say, like Angelo in Measure for Measure, “but that was in a far country, and the wench is dead.”

A drab brown caterpillar in our garden shriveled into a chrysalis, inconspicuous as a dead twig, before it streaked across the garden, a striking orange and black kite, a startling paraglider, a Viceroy butterfly. The same Ancient of Days who designed those metamorphoses designed ours: that the yeast of ancient words, and a spirit, ancient before there were days, should transform us with ever-increasing glory from lumpen dough to warm, nourishing, golden, glorious bread, until we barely resemble the woman we once were.

This then is the Magic Kingdom: powerfully transforming, but invisible so that its reality can be doubted in my own life, or in other peoples’. When the resplendent streamers of the aurora borealis play on it, it shimmers, solid and immutable, and I am certain that I will never live in any other reality for its joy pulses through my blood and bones. Yet the mists of pressure, foolishness, fury, weariness, or despair can obscure that iridescent castle. I reach out through the fog: Have I lost God, or have I never known him? But the mists lift, and at dawn, I see him, and he is the rising sun from heaven, the bright and morning star, the King of Kings, seated on his throne, and I know that he is my friend, and that he has established his magic kingdom within me, and all around me, and it will never pass away.

[1] Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies, pg. 50, Anchor Books, 1999

[2] 1Kings, 10:6

[3] Ezekiel 11:19

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The First Thing in the Morning!

By Anita Mathias

My preferred First Thing in the Morning activity

I wrote this years ago, when we lived in America and Zoe was a baby. It was published in The Washington Post in 1997! I thought you might enjoy it.

The First Thing in the Morning

Exercise first thing in the morning, my personal trainer says. The discipline will spill over to the rest of the day. It jump-starts your metabolism, so that you burn more calories, whether you read or cook or nap. And if you wake early enough, you can walk on the golf course.

Pray first thing in the morning, the radio preacher thunders. Jesus rose before the dawn to pray to his heavenly father. Pray before phone-calls and mail and frustrations jangle your spirit; pray while your mind is clear and tranquil, and you can hear what the Lord God has to say. The plug of prayer connects you to the power you need for the day.

“Write first in the morning,” my writing teacher advises. The only way to learn to write is by writing. And that way you’re sure you’ve done it. Your unconscious is closer to its dream state early in the morning. It can fly. He quotes Goethe: “Write at dawn, skim the cream of the day, then you can study crystals, intrigue at court, and make love to your kitchen maid.” Trollope rose at 5:30 a.m. to write; he wrote seventy books. Hemingway rose at six, wrote till midday, and then had fun.

But read before you write, the teacher adds. Books come from other books. The rhythms of your favorite writer will throb in your veins; they will pulse through your writing.

Study your dreams which offer you the wisdom of the unconscious, my therapist suggests. Your dream of arriving late to a party you’re hosting, arriving after the glutted guests couldn’t care less about you, is an admonition that you are working too hard. You are missing the party of your life. Record your dreams first thing in the morning. Delay ten minutes and you forget the dream; its details blur.

Do difficult things first thing in the morning, I note at the brown-bag lecture, “Organize Yourself.” The longer you delay, the tireder you grow, the harder seems the task. “Procrastination makes easy things difficult, and difficult things impossible.”

The alarm shrills at five a.m. The dog wants to go out. The coffee must be brewed. I must brush my teeth and wash my face and comb my hair. I must be quiet, or I will wake the baby.

Voices sound around me, mentors and tormentors. Drink lemon and honey the first thing in the morning; it purifies the blood. Pray, exercise, read, write, record your dreams–the first thing in the morning. The world comes at me. I duck under the comforter.

I wake, much later, to the baby’s first cry. I write this the last thing at night.

“ZIGZAGS” (My “Conversion Narrative”)

By Anita Mathias

This was originally published in Commonweal Magazine (Oct 8, 1999 as “I was aTeenage Atheist”) and reprinted in Philip Zaleski’s “Best Spiritual Writing” anthology

It is included in my book, Wandering Between Two Worlds (Amazon.com) or on Amazon.co.uk

Wandering between two worlds front cover

Zigzags

Flames leaped into the horizon. My parents, my sister, Shalini, and I abandoned our dinner to race up to the terrace and watch the blaze. It was Holi, the Hindu spring festival, an explosion of mischief celebrating the god Krishna’s shenanigans with the cowgirls. Flung water balloons gushed vermilion; water pistols squirted indigo. Stranger smeared stranger with silver paint stolen from construction sites. Buckets—dishwater? urine?—were emptied from high apartment windows onto passersby. Riotousness and devilry burst forth, a ripe sore.

Durga, our tiny, curly-haired cook, cycled into town and returned, panting with news. A procession of Hindus, chanting bhajans, statues of Shiva, god of destruction, hoisted on their shoulders, had marched past the mosque and forced a pig into it. Rumors of Muslim vengeance for this desecration flew round the town. “I won’t tell you in front of the chhota memsahibs,” Durga said. The Hindus retaliated. Jamshedpur, my North Indian home town, was 82 percent Hindu and 11 percent Muslim. The fire engines were silent as Muslim slums, homes, and businesses burned.

Mesmerized by the flames zigzagging into the horizon, I sat on the parapet, my legs dangling over the edge. In the boredom of boarding school, I had read of front-page disasters wistfully—hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, floods, war. But nothing happened, except in the movies. I was seventeen and had just graduated from Saint Mary’s Convent, Nainital, a century-old boarding school in the Himalayas run by German and Irish nuns—staid, staid.

* * *

I gazed down: fire devouring houses, crashing rafters, distant screaming. The effect was hypnotic, as in a cinema rustling with peanut-crunching, betel-nut chewing, enthralled throngs. But these were not sound effects—I snapped out of reverie—these were real people, just like me, burning to death. Suddenly sickened, I ran downstairs and locked myself in my room.

The police slapped a curfew on the town: A glare, a curse, a flung stone could spark a riot. Police stood at every street corner, their rifles cocked. The market shut down. Home deliveries of bread and milk stopped. The cook sifted out insects to make parathas from old whole wheat flour. It was romantic in a way, the Indian Family Robinson.

* * *

The Hindu-Muslim riots held little personal terror: I was Roman Catholic. My forebears from Mangalore on the west coast of India were converted in the mid-sixteenth century by Portuguese missionaries, backed by the Inquisition. It was the prospect of boredom that bothered me. At the first hint of violence, libraries closed their stacks as too-easy targets for arsonists. Though we lived in faculty housing on the campus of Xavier Labor Relations Institute, a business school run by American Jesuits at which my father taught, it was impossible to get books. How would I get through curfew without them? A compulsive reader, I went through our bookshelves: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, I had read them several times. I shrank from rereading The Return of the Native, Far from the Madding Crowd, or The Mill on the Floss, though I loved those “classics.”

I settled down with the books I had not already read: Christian books. My father bought them at parish jumble sales as though there were virtue in the purchase. He never read them. To my surprise, I was fascinated. The Cross and the Switchblade, David Wilkerson’s tale of Christ’s radiance transforming young gangsters and drug addicts in New York City, and Catherine Marshall’s Beyond Ourselves were vivid accounts of Christ bursting into everyday life, setting it to music, making it sweet. This felt very different from the fossilized Catholicism forced on us at boarding school.

My childhood had been totally immersed in Catholicism—saints, angels, rosaries, novenas, litanies. It was punctuated with those rituals—baptism, first confession, first Communion, confirmation-that can so entwine themselves with the fabric of your spirit that to slough off Catholicism is to shiver in uncertainty. It’s like stripping off your skin. As a child, I unquestioningly accepted Catholicism, and believed what I was taught; that it was the only true faith. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus: Outside the church, there is no salvation.

* * *

When I was eleven, I read through a compendium of General Knowledge during the winter school holiday and discovered a new passion: Greek mythology. I abandoned my stamp and postcard collections to read everything I could find on the enchanted universe of Greek gods and goddesses. Then, I chanced upon an idea that shattered my religious complacency.

I read that primitive men and women, often devastated by nature, imagined it was God. They worshiped the sun as Apollo; corn, fickle in blight or plenty, was Ceres; the raging sea, they imagined, was the mighty god Poseidon; the north wind, Boreas. Flabbergasted mortals elevated the forces of erratic, uncontrollable nature into gods to adore and placate. I understood. And was Catholicism any different from this awe-struck, foolish approach to nature? I doubted it.

* * *

I became an atheist and fed off the secret knowledge of intellectual superiority. How benighted they were, these parents, grandparents, priests, and nuns who ran our boarding school-they and their rattling rosary beads and boring Masses, their sprinklings of holy water from Lourdes, their relics, holy pictures, apparitions of the Virgin, prayers both to and for any good soul that left this earth. Just eleven, I knew better. I whispered to cronies, “I am an atheist,” as one might confide, “I am a murderess.”

Sister Hermine, our stern-faced, square-jawed German principal, summoned her rebellious charges to her office and, from her lowest desk drawer, slowly drew forth her strap-a thick strip of leather. She rarely had to use it. At the mere sight, the victim whimpered in terror and repentance. I was the only girl she had ever strapped, Sister Hermine often said, shaking her head. When I was sent to the principal’s office to apologize for calling Miss Fernandes—a teacher who had maliciously and unfairly punished me—a Gorgon and a bitch, I clarified “No, I didn’t call her a bitch. I said a witch,” which seemed worse. Since I refused to recant (I meant what I’d said) I was struck on the calves with the strap and let off apologizing. Sister Hermine was ambivalent about breaking her students’ wills. “What’s the merit in taming lambs?” my father’s brother, Theo Mathias, a Jesuit, asked her when she was close to expelling me. “But if you get a lion cub, and tame it into a lamb, isn’t that something to be proud of?” Sister Hermine agreed.

Still, she would be unimpressed by an eleven-year-old atheist, I thought. Outwardly, I went through enforced Catholicism-daily Mass; Benediction: a cascade of hymns every Sunday evening; adoration: silent prayer before the Blessed Sacrament every first Sunday; confession, rosary, stations of the cross, and choir practices. Inwardly, I scoffed, and as the habit of confidence grew, I rebelled. I got my friends to join me in crawling out of the choir room while Sister Cecilia, behind the organ, warbled in a holy dream. I embedded the altar candles at Mass with the sulfurous heads of match sticks, reducing the girls who strained to catch the hiss, the sputter, the odor, to convulsive giggles.

When I turned fourteen—no longer one of the “babies,” or the “middle set,” but a “big girl,” especially in my own estimation—I knocked on Sister Hermine’s door and announced that I did not believe in Catholicism, or in God for that matter, so please, please, could I not have to be a Catholic, and—especially—not have to go to church?

“I’d much rather join the non-Catholics at ’silent occupation,’” I protested. The Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were allowed to read, study, paint, or embroider, provided they sat at their desks in perfect silence—oh, oasis!—while we, we went to church.

“Can’t I just obey the Ten Commandments and not go to church?” I asked.

She was amused. “What are the Ten Commandments?”

I rattled them off from years of catechism, but stumbled over “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” “See, you can’t even say the Ten Commandments. How can you obey the Ten Commandments?” Sister Hermine laughed. “You have to be a Catholic now. Wait until you are twenty-one. Then decide.”

And that was that. I got no support from my parents for my desire to officially “lapse.” They detested adverse attention. You are a Catholic, my mother said, whether you like it or not. Seven years to go.

I became openly defiant. As president of the debating club, I chose subjects like “God is dead,” and “religion is the opiate of the people,” speaking for the motion, annoying the nuns. My favorite writers were Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy. (I was not aware that doubt had a more modern face.) I embraced Hardy’s bleak Learian vision—”As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport”—his absent or malign god.

Still, the vanishing of God left a vacuum which was filled by restlessness, unhappiness, and puzzlement about the purpose of life. Like Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, I concluded that if there was no God, there was also no immutable moral law, nothing intrinsically right or wrong. There was no one to reward goodness or punish wrongdoing in this world, and there was no world to come. So one could do whatever one wanted or, at least, whatever one could get away with.

I shared my new philosophy with my friends. We formed a gang, “the bandits,” and our first exploit was our daily raids on Modern Store which catered to rich kids from the four expensive boarding schools in Nainital, and to the tourists and honeymooners who swamped the Himalayan resort. Kaye, Savneet, Bella, and I strolled into the store wearing the baggy sweaters of our convent uniform, designed to disguise nubile figures. We stuffed Cadbury’s chocolate, Mills and Boon romances, stickers, cards, nail polish, and costume jewelry into our sleeves and up our sweaters. When our desks overflowed, the nuns noticed, made inquiries, then pounced on us. We were marched back to the shop with our booty and forced to apologize: “We are sorry, ’Mr. Modern.’”

Furious, I debated with my class teacher, the fiery, Irish Sister Josephine, through a long summer evening. Perched on a piano in the music room (a sacrilege), I argued that if “Mr. Modern” overcharged us all year, it was okay to even things occasionally by “swacking” from him. Her beautiful brown eyes kindled. “The Bible says…” she began. But I did not believe the Bible was “the Word of God,” infallible.

But at the same time—secretly—I began to crave a moral framework. How easy choice can be when there are absolutes, a road map through the maze of decisions. How wearying to thrash out the morality of every case, every time, all by yourself. I wished I could believe.

“You are experiencing an Augustinian restlessness,” Sister Josephine said, quoting the saint: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Pascal, she said, wrote of the “God-shaped vacuum” only God could fill. And I was God-bitten. Atheism is closer to faith than indifference is.

I was nicknamed “the naughtiest girl in school” after an Enid Blyton heroine. But being a rebel wasn’t really fun despite its jaunty aura. If I could have been “good,” I would have. When the nuns predicted a conversion experience for me, I feared it. I wanted it. Their naughtiest girls often become the “holiest,” they claimed. For was not Saint Augustine a rake, and Saint Francis a playboy, and, as for Saint Mary Magdalen…?

When we were to be confirmed, I was eleven. Sister Magdalene, an enormous, squint-eyed British nun, persuaded me to take her name. “Mary Magdalen was a notorious sinner who became very holy. Take her name, and she will ask God to give you the grace of a great conversion,” she said. The old story-flamboyant rebellion later swinging to passionate devotion. I did not ask “Maggie” why she compared me to a supposed prostitute, harbor to seven demons. I composed scandalous poems about the nuns: “Sister Secunda eloped with a gunda,” a bandit. I ran away from school with Micky, the school sheepdog. In revenge for being sent out of class, I locked my teacher and classmates into the classroom throughout an afternoon. Such things were surely wicked. But too awkward, alas, too “nice,” to refuse Sister Magdalene, I became Anita Mary Magdalene Mathias, adopting that stodgy, dated name I hated. The classic coming-to-faith trajectory had its appeal. I wondered if the “Mary Magdalen” might prove prophetic. Would I suddenly turn “good,” perhaps even, in a blaze of glory, become “a great saint”?

I might convert like Paul. A bullet of hatred, galloping to Damascus to kill and destroy, he is struck off his horse and glimpses divinity. “Saul, Saul, it is hard for you to kick against the goad.” “Who are you, Lord?” “I am Jesus whom you persecute.” His life acquires a purpose: “the surpassing greatness of knowing Jesus Christ, my Lord.” “For me to live is Christ, to die is gain,” he writes. How wonderful, I thought, to convert just like that, your life transformed-but I lacked both belief and an object of devotion.

Father Clement Campos and Father Ivo Fernandes, handsome Redemptorist priests with twangy-voiced charm, preached our annual retreats: an aesthetic delight, days of hymns and silences, resounding oratory, and prayer by candlelight led by a luscious male voice. And every year we, who from March to December rarely saw a man except the chaplain, developed monstrous, predictable crushes.

“And is anyone here an atheist?” the priest asked provocatively on the first retreat evening as he polled our group of Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists—and atheists. And every year, I raised my hand.

For the next week, they worked on me—private conferences and counseling, private prayers for healing from whatever trauma brought me, a Catholic girl of good family, to this strange pass. A foot away from the man’s animated brown eyes, how easy conversion seemed; how it would please this appealing priest.

“Get up at 5 a.m. tomorrow,” the priest said, “and sit alone. Watch the sun rise on those snow-tipped mountains and ask yourself, ’Could this grandeur come to be by accident?’” So I raised my eyes to the Himalayas, waiting to be surprised by faith. Gazing up at the mountains, I thought, as I was expected to-“Maybe, maybe….” But back down in the valley, any belief born of eloquence and hormones left with the good-looking priest.

Still, I was fertile soil at seventeen as I read the Bible while confined to the house during those Hindu-Muslim riots. On the patio where I sat reading, the sun, a ball of vermilion fire, sank beneath the emerald fortress of trees, lit by the orange-crimson flowers of the Flame of the Forest and the red and yellow Royal Poinciana. I continued reading after dusk by the glow of a kerosene lamp. Was Jesus Christ who the New Testament claimed he was: the God who made and loves us, the creator of the universe, cornerstone and crux of human history, the zigzag of the jigsaw that makes sense of everything else?

Paul says, “He is the image of the invisible God. All things were created by him and for him… and in him all things hold together.”

And Jesus asked them, “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the son of the Living God. “

Who do you say that I am? Who do you say that I am? Driven by an inchoate hunger, I read and reread the New Testament, my thirst growing even as it was quenched. Gradually, my cherished objections-the lack of scientific proof; the myth-like aspects of virgin birth and a Christ resurrected from the dead; that Christianity was the credulity of fishermen given form and credibility by Paul’s sophisticated intellect—crumbled like clay gods. No, this was not mythology. It differed from the tales of Mount Kailash, Mount Olympus, and Asgard that I had devoured. It differed in the sense of, well, holiness. It had the taste of truth. Jesus’ words sang in me like music, like poetry. I found myself praying, “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.”

I gradually surrendered the intellectual high ground of cold reason: What I do not see with my eyes, or feel with my hands, I will not believe. I could not spar against the Christ I apprehended dimly—I who did not understand cars, or logarithms, or tides, or love. It’s possible the Gospels are true, I conceded. It’s plausible. Intellect can bring you to the brink of belief. Faith is the missing link. I believed: in a leap of the heart as rationally inexplicable as the leap from affection to love. For like love, faith is the heart’s knowledge. “Lord,” I prayed. “I believe. You are the living God. I will follow you, wherever you lead. I will do your will insofar as you make it clear to me what it is.” I did not quail at this largesse, this scattering of blank checks. I did not add, “but be merciful, Lord. Be sensible.” With an air of adventure, of rusty doors wrenched from their sockets, revealing fresh vistas, I prayed: “Show me, Lord. What should I do?”

I would dedicate my life to Christ, I decided. How then should I live? “A life of love!” How exactly, I did not know, but, being seventeen, I wanted to do something dramatic and do it swiftly. “I want to be a pen in God’s hands,” I wrote in my journal, “picked up and used, leaving light where I have written.”

My first impulse, to fly off from Jamshedpur to help David Wilkerson of The Cross and the Switchblade in his work with teen drug addicts and gangsters in Harlem, wasn’t exactly practical. While casting about for a vocation, I volunteered in the Cheshire Home for physically handicapped and mentally retarded children, on the outskirts of Jamshedpur. Here, in the postage stamp of my world, I tried to practice the kindness at the heart of Christianity, without which words are noisy gongs, ardor and alms worth little. I lived with the Vincent de Paul nuns and was captivated by their life of prayer, quiet work, and silences. “How beautiful this serene life is, governed by the pealing of bells,” I wrote in my journal. “Scaling inward mountains—lovelier by far than a life of distraction, worries, gossip, and moneymaking, a life inimical to the spirit.”

Catholic children brought up by nuns or priests brace themselves against a vocation: a tap on the shoulder, inward marching orders, an imperative you can ignore, but at the cost of your soul. At some time, we all think we’ve caught it: That’s it, we are the chosen of God, chosen for a lonely, lovely way, another bride of Christ.

Now, I began, obsessively, to wonder if I had a religious vocation. God was the only thing that was real, I kept reminding myself, and all else—college, marriage, career, social life, money-was vanity. I wanted to find a way to live, always, close to Christ, tasting his joy and peace. Surely leaving “the world,” becoming a nun, was the only way to do that.

While at the Cheshire Home, I read Edward Le Joly’s Servant of Love about Mother Teresa’s congregation, the Missionaries of Charity. How utterly radical they were in their following of Christ, I thought, as I read of their austere life, stripped down to essentials. They owned but two saris, a Bible, and no more than could fit into a bucket—their “suitcase” when they traveled. How seductive to slough off everything, to live deep in the embrace of Christ, the creator of the universe, friend sufficient for every need. Wow! Without training, with impetuosity, they plunged into all manner of human misery, their reach widening year by year, their mandate simply to serve “the poorest of the poor,” defined broadly: lepers in Yemen, shut-ins in Melbourne, crazed drug addicts in New York, freezing homeless people in London, orphans in Peru, tramps near the Vatican, the dying destitute in Calcutta. The energy of it all and, unconsciously, I guess, the prospect of adventure dazzled me. They did just what Christ commanded, I thought, impressed: I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was sick and you looked after me. Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, that you do unto me. I felt an inner push, a shove toward this congregation, so literal in its imitation of Christ.

In a burst of lucidity, I sloughed off the destiny my parents had mapped for me: college, followed by (an arranged) marriage. No, I would become a Missionary of Charity. I would help those unable to help themselves. I would feed constantly off the light and joy of Jesus. The notion glowed.

Minutes after I’d returned from the Cheshire Home, full of bright decision, I announced it to my parents. I left the room swiftly as I saw my father’s face freeze. My mother followed me. “Go and see your father.” The muscles of his face worked. There were tears on his cheeks. “Why must you bounce from one extreme to another?” he asked. “You’ve always found it impossible to conform. In the convent, ’It’s yours not to reason why.’ It will be a life of exhausting manual work. Mother Teresa recruits simple women from the villages and you’re an intellectual snob. You’ll have nothing in common with them. Your mind will atrophy. You will be bored!

“However, if you are sure that God is calling you to this…” he acquiesced eventually. “But go slow. Be sure. Wait.” Wait! “I will not wait,” I said. “I will call them today. I have heard my vocation.”

I left for the convent that August, feeling, with the naiveté of late adolescence, holier already, as if the Christian’s life task of “being conformed to the image of Christ” could be accomplished in a dramatic grab for holiness, and showy, though worthy, doing would speed the slow, almost imperceptible process of transformation called sanctification. I grew. I grew through the next two years, through the aspirancy, postulancy, and novitiate. I grew through work in the orphanage, with the mentally retarded and the dying destitute; through prayer and Scripture study; through friendships and conflicts and the “testing of vocations,” and through the tears and humiliation. And I grew through sickness and exhaustion that never let up, and eventually made the whole enterprise untenable, and which, after I left, was diagnosed as tuberculosis.

I left the convent sadly, with a sense of falling off, to study English as an undergraduate at Oxford University, to go to graduate school in creative writing in America, and later to forge myself into a writer and a faculty wife in suburban America-the less poetic path. I still see Christ as the wisdom that created the universe. I still see following him as the sanest way to live, a way I am committed to. The Christian imperatives which Jesus with his Gordian-knot-slashing directness reduced to two-to love God mightily and to love your neighbor as yourself-remain the same. There is just more distraction. The traditional monastic disciplines-prayer, meditation, adoration, the beautiful liturgy of the hours, and “spiritual reading”-served to draw one’s thoughts back to Christ, the breadth and depth of his love, and his enabling grace. It now takes ingenuity to carve for myself a circle of silence to feed on Scripture and the transforming presence of Christ it houses, and to live contemplatively, mindful of Jesus not only amid the beauty and tranquillity of my garden, my writing, and my books, but amid a child’s cries and crankiness, the crucible of marriage, and the haste and busyness which haunts America as poverty haunts India. Nurturing two young children, creating a loving family life, running a peaceful household—the demands to give of oneself are constant, without the convent’s periodic sanctioned escape into the sacred ivory spaces of psalmody and song. In fact, I now consider domesticity, marriage, and motherhood a smithy in which the soul can be forged as painfully, as beautifully, as amid the splendid virginal solitudes of the convent.

anita.mathias