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The Gift of an English Country Idyll.

By Anita Mathias

The Gift of an English Country Idyll.

 I have thoroughly enjoyed the 5 years we have lived in the English countryside, in Garsington. One of my favourite novels (if it can be called a novel) Naipaul’s “The Enigma of Arrival” deals with a similar idyll. 

“Naipaul’s 19th book yields its pleasures slowly. Its plot is essentially the passage of ten years, during which the writer lives in a cottage on the grounds of a Victorian-Edwardian manor in a Wiltshire valley within easy walking distance of Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain. 
What engages, indeed mesmerizes, his attention is his sojourn in rural England, “this gift of the second life in Wiltshire, the second, happier childhood as it were, the second arrival (but with an adult’s perception) at a knowledge of natural things, together with the fulfillment of the child’s dream of the safe house in the wood.”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,963663,00.html


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Omnibus Review by Anita Mathias of Rushdie, Ishiguro, Lahiri, and Manil Suri

By Anita Mathias

Anita Mathias 
Omnibus Review
Commonweal Magazine.
Salman Rushdie’s dazzling, densely textured maximilist novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Picador USA, $16, 575 pp.) tracks the brilliant rock stars, Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, a contemporary Orpheus and Eurydice, through three great cities, Bombay, London, and, inevitably, New York; and through the familiar story of fame, desperately pursued, turning out to be less delicious than imagined, leading to paranoid, reclusive misery. Though Rushdie’s characters are often mere embodiments of an idea–Vina, like the painter Aurora in The Moor’s Last Sigh (Pantheon), incarnates the destructive concept of the artist as sacred monster, sacrificing morality, decency, and love for art–I found myself moved by the dumb, stoic suffering of Ormus Cama, an immensely gifted musician who wanted nothing more than calm married love, but loved the wrong woman for that life. The Ground offers vintage Rushdie: his erudition and humor; his magpie allusiveness and multicultural jokes; the lyricism, playfulness, and sheer plenitude of his style; and his trademark ricocheting between the sublime and the silly, popular culture and high art, all incarnated in the voice of the narrator, Rai, ostensible friend of Ormus, and Vina’s secret lover. “An everything novel,” Rushdie calls The Ground. Finally, in an uncharacteristic and Shakespearean peaceful conclusion, after the mythic figures of Vina and Ormus vanish–Vina dies in an earthquake, and Ormus is shot dead by Vina’s ghost in a tiresome flash of magical realism I wish Rushdie would abandon–the lesser artists, the photographer, Rai, and the popular singer Mira Celano, settle down to a life of mutual accommodation and domestic happiness.
The Death of Vishnu (W.W. Norton, $24.95, 256 pp.), a first novel by Manil Suri, a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, presents five rambunctious families in an apartment building in Bombay, squabbling over the expenses of the dying (in the cosmos of the novel, reincarnating) janitor, Vishnu. Suri gives us a dead-on and hilarious portrayal of the melodramatic quarrels of the materialistic Asranis and Pathaks, and the simmering pettiness and viciousness engendered by a claustrophobically close society. In a conscious imitation of the progress of the soul in Hindu theology, the higher floors of the apartment building house the more evolved. These include Muslim Mr. Jalal, who desperately seeks the common truth underlying all religions (and, in a chilling scene, is lynched by a Hindu mob when his son elopes with the Asranis’ daughter), and the widower, Vinod Taneja, who has loosened all cords of desire. Though the dying Vishnu’s hallucinatory memories of love and the Hindu myths feel tacked-on and obtrusive, the book is a sprightly, realistic, funny portrait of lower-middle class Indian life and its pretensions.

The polished, elegant surfaces of Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of nine short stories, An Interpreter of Maladies (Houghton Mifflin, $12, 198 pp.) belie the howling emptiness at their depths. In her carefully observed, minimalist tales, Indian immigrants discover the nightmarish price of the American dream of lots of stuff. Strangers in a strange land, imperfectly understanding, imperfectly understood, missing their community-oriented society, they wrestle with unfamiliar New World problems–loneliness, depression, and isolation which destabilize the marriages that, in at least five stories, agonizingly disintegrate. In a savage story, “A Temporary Matter,” a suffering couple, Shoba and Shukumar, tell each other erstwhile secrets, and we watch them steadily, viciously destroy each other as they face the death of their love and marriage. “Mr. Pirzada” and “Mrs. Sen” present Indian faculty couples, alienated and adrift in a foreign world. More restfully, the final story, “The Third and Final Continent,” details the not uncommon odyssey of the restless Indian (like Lahiri’s and my own and, it’s rumored, Rushdie’s) from India through England to America; and the advent of love within the confines of an arranged marriage.

An Artist of the Floating World (Vintage International, $12, 206 pp.), a slender, perfect novel by the British-Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro, explores the stream of consciousness of a self-deceived man in postwar Japan (reminiscent of Stevens, the butler in Ishiguro’s better-known, poignant The Remains of the Day). In fascinating sections, Masuji Ono, an artist dedicated to depicting the ukiyoe, “the floating world” of “the nightless city” of the pleasure district, pours himself into his art, painting fifteen-hour days as a student, and later as a sensei, a master. Later, exposed to Japan’s poverty, he asks the age-old question of the moral artistic spirit: Isn’t making art unconscionable in a world of pain? Consequently, he betrays his gift, and supports the Imperial Japanese armies. After Hiroshima, he faces a Japan craving amnesia, with the militarist faction shunned, and an epidemic of public harakiri, honor suicides. In imagistic dreamy sections, Ono reflects on his life, unable to face the tragedy of betraying his gifts, his promise, his joy for chimerical ideals, yet finding hope in the buoyancy of the young in the new Japan. Part of the novel’s pleasure lies in decoding Ono’s classic unreliable narrative, and the Japanese facade of invincible politeness. Ishiguro is a stunning writer with absolutely perfect pitch. His flawless novel, suffused with sadness and beauty, has the delicacy and restraint of the ukiyoe prints of the moon, cherry blossoms, migrating birds, and dreamy geishas with their admirers, sipping away all sorrow.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

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Review of Ann Hood’s Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles.

By Anita Mathias

Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time Ann Hood Picador, USA, $23, 256 pp. 

Review by Anita Mathias
Commonweal Magazine

Teach us to care and not to care,

Teach us to sit still

Our peace in His will.

In “Ash Wednesday,” T.S. Eliot describes the perfection of faith.

When a loved family member lies dying, that serene relinquishment is not easy to achieve. Faith can then become a kind of wrestling, a desire to wrest Lazarus from the jaws of implacable fate by brute will. Ann Hood’s memoir Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time limns this exhausting odyssey.

When her sixty-seven-year old father is diagnosed with lung cancer, Hood decided “to get him a miracle.” She goes to El Santuario de Chimayo, in New Mexico, to pray that his tumor would vanish. It does, but then, in one of the bewildering twists not unfamiliar in the life of faith, her father dies of fungal pneumonia.

The shock of this apparently divine betrayal is amplified by the earlier death of her only brother who, following arguments with his estranged wife, and then his soon-to-be wife, drowns in a bathtub. When, soon after the death of her father, Hood has a second miscarriage, the powerlessness of sheer grief plunges her into despair. “I became immobilized by my sadness. I believed in absolutely nothing at all.” The loss of faith left her “deadened” by “dark numbness.”

Funded by a book advance and glossy magazine work, Hood travels searching for evidence of miracles that might help her believe in God. She introduces us to much of the colorful efflorescence of Catholicism, including Guadalupe, where she sees the sun’s rays form a cross, and Padre Pio’s tomb. In Worcester, Massachusetts, she visits “Little Audrey,” a teenage “victim’s soul” in a coma, who lies surrounded by osmogenesia, the odor of roses, weeping statues, and Communion hosts flecked with blood. Despite the Catholic church’s protests, thousands of visitors pray to Little Audrey, rather than for her. Seeking to be spiritually moved, Hood visits Joan of Arc’s birthplace; Rocamadour in the Dordogne; and Mont Saint Michel in Normandy. She weeps before a veil of the Virgin in Chartres, “spiritually stirred” at last. Hood’s is not the absolute faith of Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him,” nor the rationalist creed of Thomas, “Unless I see and touch, I will not believe,” but a narcissistic, emotional creed–“Unless I feel and thrill and weep, I will not believe.”

Finally, Hood decides that, since she absorbed her faith unquestioningly from her Italian Catholic family, she might be able to resuscitate her faith by visiting her ancestral village in Italy. She describes her family with a quote from Rudolph Vecoli, “Italian Catholics are only nominally Catholic. Theirs is a folk religion, a fusion of animism, polytheism, and sorcery, with the sacraments of the church thrown in.” (In fact, Hood’s own faith, with its reliance on symbolic dreams, omens, psychics, tarot cards, and healing candles strikes me as positioned somewhere between the Dark Ages and the New Age.) This trip works. When an old relative advises her in cliches–“You have to have faith for prayer and healing to work,” and “Saint Anthony will help you find your way home”–she cries hard, feeling convicted. Soon afterwards, the familiar twentieth-century miracle of finding a lost contact lens restores her longed-for faith.

I remember reading the nucleus of this book as an article in Doubletake magazine. The present narrative is undermined by the attempt to inflate an essay into a book. Do Not Go Gentle evolves into a family memoir, a popular genre in an increasingly rootless and isolated America. Hood gives us the history of each parent’s family, and is especially deft in describing her abusive grandmother, revealing the petty verbal abuse that often lurks beneath the shiny exterior of the large happy family.

More than anything, the book is a testimony to the therapeutic and palliative effects of time and travel. Travel plunges you into a new setting, filling you with fresh ideas. In this new way of existence, the griefs of your old world seem less sharp and poignant. Gradually, time blunts the edge of Hood’s sorrow and she comes to accept a lonelier world “whose common theme is the death of fathers.”

Ann Hood calls this book “a spiritual odyssey.” Unfortunately, her story ends where real spiritual adventure begins: she decides that God exists, that God is benign, that there can be power in prayer. This is tame stuff compared to The Seven Storey Mountain or Surprised by Joy, whose electrifying apprehension of the holy leaves us with a gasping hunger to follow. Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, Pascal, and Augustine dive from Scripture into the deep sea of God. The response of these writers to God is quirky and individual; yet, since their quests begin by grappling with the story that culminates in the radiant figure of Christ, their journeys offer wisdom and illumination to anyone who wants to dive into the same sea. If Ann Hood sought comfort or light in the concentrated wisdom of Scripture at any point along her search, it does not show. With an irritating self-absorption, she seeks to base her faith on “spiritual stirrings,” intuitions, flickers of emotion–private stars with a private light with little general significance.

“Do Not Go Gentle” is a lively, gracefully written memoir, full of vivid descriptions of the beautiful places in which–possibly, not coincidentally–people have experienced miracles. It is a pleasure to read. To my husband’s despair, I took notes for future vacations. But finally I was more amused than inspired by the self-indulgence and emotionalism of this very American spiritual quest. For a guide on my own “spiritual odyssey,” I think I’ll stick with Merton or Thomas a Kempis, and, even better, the Word that was in the beginning.

Anita Mathias wrote “I Was a Teenage Atheist” in Commonweal’s October 8, 1999 issue. It was selected for inclusion in The Best Spiritual Writing, 2000, Philip Zaleski, ed., HarperSanFrancisco.

Filed Under: books_blog, Reviews by Anita Mathias

“White Teeth” by Zadie Smith. A review by Anita Mathias

By Anita Mathias


Here’s an old review I wrote of “White Teeth,” Smith’s first book, for Commonweal Magazine in 2000

White Teeth Zadie Smith Random House, $24.95, 448 pp. A VIEW FROM THE MARGINS.

by Anita Mathias
So-called multicultural literature in many ways extends the enterprise of the early feminist writers: “the custodians of the world’s best-kept secret:/ Merely the private lives of one-half of humanity,” as Carolyn Kizer

puts it. In this first novel, Zadie Smith, the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant to Britain, continues the enterprise of giving us the view from the margins, as she sweeps Jamaican and Bangladeshi immigrants into mainstream literature in English. For a rambunctious and quirky take on our modern cities in their color and diversity, the melting pot simmering and boiling, we could do worse than turn to the dark eyes, pressed against the window, eyeing the party within with wistfulness and scorn.


White Teeth is the saga of World War II buddies, Archibald Jones–a self-effacing Englishman “whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble: Beach. Raindrop: Ocean. Needle: Haystack”–and Samad Iqbal–a Bangladeshi torn between Allah, alcohol, and women. Archie marries Clara, an attractive Jamaican (and as a consequence is no longer invited to company banquets). Samad’s marriage is arranged to Alsana, who can kick and punch her husband with a ferocity that matches his own; her in-laws speculate that her family has “some funny mental history.”

The children of these two couples, Irie Jones, and the twins, Millat and Magid Iqbal, are strangers in a strange land. Irie Jones (whose name means, in patois, “everything OK, cool, peaceful”), battles with “the bird’s nest of her hair,” and her weight: her body has “brown bulges for children, bags of fruit, buckets of water, ledges genetically designed with another country in mind.”

Magid Iqbal, a freak genius, “given a glorious name like Magid Mahfooz Murshed Iqbal,” wants instead to be called Mark Smith, and attend the Harvest Festival at school “like some wood sprite,” instead of accompanying his father to Mecca. “It’s not fair. I can’t go on haj. I’ve got to go to school. I don’t have time to go to Mecca. It’s not fair.” Magid is returned to Bangladesh “to be brought up proper” by his grandparents, where he eerily turns, in a twist of poetic justice, into Macaulay’s “brown-skinned Englishmen, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” He returns seeing God “in the millionth position of pi, in the arguments of the Phaedrus, in a perfect paradox. And what more is God than that?”

Meanwhile Magid’s twin, handsome Millat Iqbal, is trouble, an exemplar of the predicted decline and fall of Western civilization. After continual scrapes with white women and authority, Millat finds his clan in KEVIN, Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, militant immigrants with “an acronym problem,” hate and anger and revenge seething beneath the shibboleths of orthodoxy.

This edgy, hip, funny novel does for today’s London what Salman Rushdie did for Bombay in Midnight’s Children, or Dickens and Thackeray did for their more homogeneous city. We meet, skewered on Zadie Smith’s Bosch-like canvas, Indian lesbian feminists, topless hippies in a commune, and teenagers wriggling in anomie and angst. Much of the plot hinges on the cultural and generational conflicts that spiral when their school’s at-risk program subjects Millat Iqbal and Irie Jones to being mentored by the third family at the nucleus of the book, the liberal Jewish Chalfens. When Marcus Chalfen, an eminent scientist, seeks to patent his genetically engineered FutureMouse, the many groups on the loony fringe of this panoramic novel–black Jehovah’s Witnesses, Islamic fundamentalists, radical animal rights activists–converge in outrage.

Smith limns the sadness of the immigrant experience in which, for the first generation, dreams steadily shrivel. Samad Iqbal, who becomes a waiter after the war, wants desperately to wear a placard saying, “I am not a waiter. I have been a student, a scientist, a soldier.” And in the background, always, is the mist of racism, overt or covert: “the oldest sentence in the world, ‘if you ask me, they should all go back to their own….'”

Smith attributes the range of her characters to “Books, books, books.” She is certainly familiar with the multicultural canon, the best thing to emerge from the rapacity and crimes of slavery and colonialism. Her characters cut their teeth on The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the books of Alice Walker. They burn Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Samad owes something to Michael Ondaatje’s (The English Patient) Indian soldiers fighting in Europe during World War II. We encounter twins forcibly cleft by the corrupt older generation as in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. The sprawling novel covers Smith’s life, commencing in 1975, the year of her birth, a device borrowed from Rushdie who set Midnight’s Children in 1947, the year of his birth.

White Teeth is technically inventive, a refreshing original. Its exuberant high jinks can remind one of Rushdie’s pyrotechnics. Smith captures the dialogue of London’s contemporary tribes. “The F-word acts like padding to him; he can’t help it; it’s just a filler like beans or peas,” she explains. Her relentless sly wit, however, can be wearing and remind you that Smith is only twenty-five. Many of her characters are flat, one-dimensional, almost caricatures, their inner lives reduced to blurbs. Samad Iqbal: “Can’t say fairer than that. To the pure all things are pure.” Millat Iqbal: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” I think of Hieronymus Bosch again. The novel ends with a bang, the major characters unsatisfyingly and irritatingly freeze-framed in medias res.

In the end, Smith is no Rushdie, or Toni Morrison. Compared to their iridescent prose and inventive, anguished meditations on history, love, evil, and God, White Teeth is slight. Smith, however, is something of a multicultural Garrison Keillor, and her snappy novel is delightful, hilarious, and interesting, a good companion for what remains of these hammock
and deck chair days.

Anita Mathias’s essay, “I Was a Teenage Atheist,” appeared in the October 8, 1999 Commonweal


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Review by Anita Mathias of Sacred Water: A Pilgrimage up the Ganges

By Anita Mathias

Sacred Waters A Pilgrimage up the Ganges River to the Source of Hindu Culture Stephen Alter Harcourt, $25, 368 pp.

A Review by Anita Mathias

Sacred Waters is a lovely, tranquil account of a spiritual journey undertaken by a third-generation missionary kid, born and raised in the Garwhal foothills of the Himalayas, where his parents and grandparents ran Woodstock, the American missionary boarding school. An atheist and a seeker now, Stephen Alter embarks on foot, over ten months, on the traditional Hindu pilgrimage, the Char Dham Yatra, to the four main sources of the Ganges, Yamnotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath in the high Himalayas, a path, according to popular Hindu belief, to moksha or salvation.

Alter’s fellow pilgrims are as diverse as those in The Canterbury Tales. Some are dressed in robes of saffron and ocher, others in jeans or loincloths. There are toddlers, feeble octogenarians walking while reading a prayer book, and even a pilgrim with a brass trumpet who is eager to serenade the company. Alter’s fluency in Hindi allows him to converse with the unusual people he meets: migrant Muslim dairymen, goatherds, grass cutters (gujjars), Nepalese watchmen guarding potato fields, villagers spinning wool as they walk along, an ascetic Dutch holy man (sadhu), a Belgian artist who shoots arrows into the landscape to photograph them later, rabid Hindu fundamentalists, the wildly popular film star Amitabh Bachan carried on the shoulders of Nepalese porters, women planting rice in paddies to the rhythm of a drum. He camps, “the roar of the Ganga as loud as a hurricane,” to listen to a sadhu blow away the darkness, chanting “om” on his conch shell, “clear, musical, like a trombone or a French horn.”

This dense, multilayered narrative especially fascinated me because I, too, went to boarding school in the Himalayas. Alter interweaves loving accounts of the unique, endangered flora and fauna with tales of swashbuckling figures from colonial history like Frederick Wilson (the inspiration for Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King”), who built the first precarious bridges over Himalayan rivers, and the hunter and naturalist, Jim Corbett, still famous in my girlhood for his books on hunting man-eating leopards and tigers. Garhwal is called Dev Bhoomi, land of the gods, for “every snow peak and glacier, every confluence and village temple is invested with mythology.” Alter enriches the landscape for his readers by narrating the legends associated with each spot he visits, from the Vedas, the Puranas, and the great epics, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. At the same time he meets contemporary activists fighting the indiscriminate logging, motor roads, and dams that threaten the livelihood of the indigenous people, and, sadly, the mountains themselves.

Embarking on his journey as a traditional pilgrim on foot, renouncing tobacco, alcohol, sex, and meat, Alter leaves both maps and camera behind, believing the slow imprinting of experience on memory will be more effective than photographs. Detailed maps, though, would have helped readers track his progress, and photographs would certainly have enhanced his descriptions of historic temples and gorgeous vistas. Nevertheless, Sacred Waters is full of the serendipity and the peace of the wilderness. “I saw an egret flying low above the river, its white wings in sharp contrast to the gathering darkness. A peacock blundered out of a nearby tree, then glided into the valley, its long tail streaming behind it like an iridescent comet.” He wakes to find a multitude of moths cover his tent, “like delicate hand-block images pressed against the light”; he blunders into a black bear, shy barking deer, troops of rhesus and langur monkeys, and even a leopard.

The variety of Hindu worship is very much on display: a drive-by shrine to Hanuman, worshiped from the windows of a bus; a temple (nag mandir), where a cobra was worshiped; and darshan, or homage, paid at the high-altitude temples to the reclusive god Shiva. Alter is sarcastic about the lines of pilgrims five to six hours long. After walking 600 kilometers, they are efficiently herded through the sanctuary in mere seconds by venal, pushy pandits. Still, he provides sensitive and poetic descriptions of evening worship, the temple bells and the moaning of a conch, an oil lamp waved in front of the deities, while sadhus sing Sanskrit hymns, their voices harmonized into a moving tenor chorus. They then clap their hands in unison, and prostrate themselves in front of the idol, kissing the cold stone floor. A sadhu dances in rhythm with his prayers, his right hand holding an oil lamp, his left, a pair of tiny brass cymbals.

Alter, somewhat irritatingly, decries the motor roads, which provide the only way for those who lack his stamina, adventurousness, and leisure to enjoy the remote, beautiful, high mountains. He alerts us, however, to an alarmingly threatened Himalayas: landslides, precipitated by erosion and dynamiting for the motor roads, burying entire villages; and the destruction on a monumental scale of towns and hillsides to build the massive Tehri dam. Leopards are slaughtered for their skins; endangered musk deer for the six-ounce musk gland, used for perfume and medicine. Botanical poachers plunder rare herbs and flowers nearing extinction. Police are rarely seen and susceptible to bribes.

In a coda, our pilgrim visits the magical Valley of Flowers accidentally “discovered” by British mountaineers in 1931, though described in The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. In this natural wonder, like an alpine rock garden, “waterfalls spilled down cliffs, tiny springs seeped out of the ground, water so clear that it was invisible except for the wavering reflection of a profusion of flowers as in an ornate tapestry”–blue irises, primulas, dark purple lupine, fritillaria, delphinium, and columbine. Alter’s spiritual experience here is akin to Wordsworth’s pantheistic vision in his “Lines” composed near Tintern Abbey: “And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts… / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / …and the living air / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man….” This fascinating book concludes on an updraft
of tranquility. “The surrounding aura of sanctity made me bow my head. I was overcome with a sense of wonder and discovery. I felt completely at peace.” One believes him.

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Link to post with podcast link in Bio or https://a Link to post with podcast link in Bio or https://anitamathias.com/2023/09/22/dont-walk-away-from-jesus-but-if-you-do-he-still-looks-at-you-and-loves-you/
Jesus came from a Kingdom of voluntary gentleness, in which
Christ, the Lion of Judah, stands at the centre of the throne in the guise of a lamb, looking as if it had been slain. No wonder his disciples struggled with his counter-cultural values. Oh, and we too!
The mother of the Apostles James and John, asks Jesus for a favour—that once He became King, her sons got the most important, prestigious seats at court, on his right and left. And the other ten, who would have liked the fame, glory, power,limelight and honour themselves are indignant and threatened.
Oh-oh, Jesus says. Who gets five talents, who gets one,
who gets great wealth and success, who doesn’t–that the
Father controls. Don’t waste your one precious and fleeting
life seeking to lord it over others or boss them around.
But, in his wry kindness, he offers the ambitious twelve
and us something better than the second or third place.
He tells us how to actually be the most important person to
others at work, in our friend group, social circle, or church:Use your talents, gifts, and energy to bless others.
And we instinctively know Jesus is right. The greatest people in our lives are the kind people who invested in us, guided us and whose wise, radiant words are engraved on our hearts.
Wanting to sit with the cleverest, most successful, most famous people is the path of restlessness and discontent. The competition is vast. But seek to see people, to listen intently, to be kind, to empathise, and doors fling wide open for you, you rare thing!
The greatest person is the one who serves, Jesus says. Serves by using the one, two, or five talents God has given us to bless others, by finding a place where our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. By writing which is a blessing, hospitality, walking with a sad friend, tidying a house.
And that is the only greatness worth having. That you yourself,your life and your work are a blessing to others. That the love and wisdom God pours into you lives in people’s hearts and minds, a blessing
https://anitamathias.com/.../dont-walk-away-from-j https://anitamathias.com/.../dont-walk-away-from-jesus.../
Sharing this podcast I recorded last week. LINK IN BIO
So Jesus makes a beautiful offer to the earnest, moral young man who came to him, seeking a spiritual life. Remarkably, the young man claims that he has kept all the commandments from his youth, including the command to love one’s neighbour as oneself, a statement Jesus does not challenge.
The challenge Jesus does offers him, however, the man cannot accept—to sell his vast possessions, give the money to the poor, and follow Jesus encumbered.
He leaves, grieving, and Jesus looks at him, loves him, and famously observes that it’s easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to live in the world of wonders which is living under Christ’s kingship, guidance and protection. 
He reassures his dismayed disciples, however, that with God even the treasure-burdened can squeeze into God’s kingdom, “for with God, all things are possible.”
Following him would quite literally mean walking into a world of daily wonders, and immensely rich conversation, walking through Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, quite impossible to do with suitcases and backpacks laden with treasure. 
For what would we reject God’s specific, internally heard whisper or directive, a micro-call? That is the idol which currently grips and possesses us. 
Not all of us have great riches, nor is money everyone’s greatest temptation—it can be success, fame, universal esteem, you name it…
But, since with God all things are possible, even those who waver in their pursuit of God can still experience him in fits and snatches, find our spirits singing on a walk or during worship in church, or find our hearts strangely warmed by Scripture, and, sometimes, even “see” Christ stand before us. 
For Christ looks at us, Christ loves us, and says, “With God, all things are possible,” even we, the flawed, entering his beautiful Kingdom.
https://anitamathias.com/2023/09/07/how-to-find-th https://anitamathias.com/2023/09/07/how-to-find-the-freedom-of-forgiveness/
How to Find the Freedom of Forgiveness
Letting go on anger and forgiving is both an emotional transaction & a decision of the will. We discover we cannot command our emotions to forgive and relinquish anger. So how do we find the space and clarity of forgiveness in our mind, spirit & emotions?
When tormenting memories surface, our cortisol, adrenaline, blood pressure, and heart rate all rise. It’s good to take a literally quick walk with Jesus, to calm this neurological and physiological storm. And then honestly name these emotions… for feelings buried alive never die.
Then, in a process called “the healing of memories,” mentally visualise the painful scene, seeing Christ himself there, his eyes brimming with compassion. Ask Christ to heal the sting, to draw the poison from these memories of experiences. We are caterpillars in a ring of fire, as Martin Luther wrote--unable to rescue ourselves. We need help from above.
Accept what happened. What happened, happened. Then, as the Apostle Paul advises, give thanks in everything, though not for everything. Give thanks because God can bring good out of the swindle and the injustice. Ask him to bring magic and beauty from the ashes.
If, like the persistent widow Jesus spoke of, you want to pray for justice--that the swindler and the abusers’ characters are revealed, so many are protected, then do so--but first, purify your own life.
And now, just forgive. Say aloud, I forgive you for … You are setting a captive free. Yourself. Come alive. Be free. 
And when memories of deep injuries arise, say: “No. No. Not going there.” Stop repeating the devastating story to yourself or anyone else. Don’t waste your time & emotional energy, nor let yourself be overwhelmed by anger at someone else’s evil actions. Don’t let the past poison today. Refuse to allow reinjury. Deliberately think instead of things noble, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy.
So keep trying, in obedience, to forgive, to let go of your anger until you suddenly realise that you have forgiven, and can remember past events without agitation. God be with us!
https://anitamathias.com/2023/08/16/the-silver-coi https://anitamathias.com/2023/08/16/the-silver-coin-in-the-mouth-of-a-fish-never-underestimate-god/
I've recorded a podcast on how Jesus guided Peter to find the necessary tax money in a fish.
The Silver Coin in the Mouth of a Fish. Never Underestimate God
So the taxman comes for Peter: Does Jesus pay the voluntary,
but expected tax for the upkeep of the grand temple and its
priests)? And, as he often does, Jesus asks Peter what he thinks because as a friend, he's interested,and as a brilliant teacher, he wants Peter to think for himself..
Sons do not pay tax to their fathers, they both agree. 
Then, Christ,who repeatedly referred to his powerful body
as God’s temple on earth, decides to pay temple tax anyway
to avoid a skandalon, offence.
And Jesus instructs Peter to cast a line and a hook–as amateur
fishermen did–insulting for a professional with boats and nets.
And Christ again demonstrates that he knows best even in Peter’s
one area of professional expertise. And Christ knows best in our
areas of giftedness. His call often involves working just outside
our zone of competence, forcing us to function with the magic of
God’s spirit and energy. The grain of pride must die for resurrection.
And Peter finds silver in a fish. When you lack the money to fulfil
the dream God has placed in your heart, do not rule out His
wonder-working power. Pray for God’s miraculous provision, or
for Christ’s surprising strategies to create wealth, rather than work
yourself to a breakdown, or manipulate or use others to get money.
Will God tell us, on request, which fish in the multitudinous seas
has swallowed silver? He sometimes might, for he hates waste. But
not always. Tim Keller writes, “People think if God has called
you to something, he’s promising you success. But He might be
calling you to fail to prepare you for something else through the failure.
To work all night and catch nothing, as Peter did, strengthens our
character and endurance so that we are capable of becoming fishers of
humans, and, if God pleases, sometimes, perhaps even fishers of money.
Hi, I've recorded a new podcast. Here's the link. Hi, I've recorded a new podcast. Here's the link. https://anitamathias.com/2023/08/06/following-jesus-is-costly-and-the-very-best-thing-we-can-do/
Jesus is blazingly honest about the cost of following him. It’s our most brilliant, golden choice, though it does mean we can no longer follow ourselves. We dance instead to his other-worldly, life-changing music, asking at each transition point of our day or life, “Jesus, what is your assignment? How do I do it your way?” 
For me (descriptive, not prescriptive), shouldering my cross includes eliminating sugar and starchy carbs (to lose excess weight!), not watching TV (extreme!), keep my house and garden organised and pretty enough. And, also, taming anger and outspokenness! And refusing to sing a song of worry, or linger in anger, training myself to sing instead a song of trust, praise, and gratitude. 
While following Jesus is electric, and joyful, following
ourselves could entail ruining our health with addictive foods, caffeine,overwork, or the siren-call of our phones. Following Jesus does not mean relinquishing our goals and ambitions, but surrendering them to Him. We do not own
our work; God does. And so, we must repent when we overwork, get too intense about success, or try to impress others with it. For competitive cravings for success, fame, money,
or popularity wreck relationships, and mental, spiritual, and physical health, and never satisfy, for the ladder of success has no end, and climbing it means exhausting ourselves for nothing. We’re still restless.
You have made us for yourself, Oh Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you, St. Augustine wrote. If we do not try to obey the Great Commandment: to love God, and Christ’s second commandment:  to love our neighbour as ourselves, we could, one day,open the treasure box of our lives and find only ashes. Nothing!
C.S. Lewis: “Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
https://anitamathias.com/2023/07/19/persistent-pra https://anitamathias.com/2023/07/19/persistent-prayer-turns-christs-silence-his-no-and-absolutely-not-to-yes/
So, a Syro-Phoenician woman comes to Jesus, crying out,
“Lord, have mercy on me. My daughter is suffering terribly.” But 
Jesus remains silent. Undeterred, she keeps crying out.
And Jesus snubs her: “I was sent only to the lost
sheep of Israel.” But she can’t believe “No” could be
his final word. “Lord, help me,” she says simply. And
then, a crushing rebuff. “It is not right to take
the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” But hitting
rock bottom makes your prayers strangely powerful. “Yes,
it is right, Lord,” she contradicts him, “Even dogs eat crumbs
that fall.” Dogs, hungry, humble, grateful, happy.
And Jesus praises her dogged faith 
which catalyses the miracle she longs for. 
He says, "Your request is granted.” 
Never passively accept any apparently intractable situations.
Reality is infinitely malleable in the hands of God. We pray,
and people change, circumstances change. We change. So
keep praying until little drops of the kindness of God
soften and change the impossible situation and your heart. 
Take your little mustard seed of mountain-moving faith,
and pray, seeing the kind Jesus in your mind’s eye.
Continue praying, past God’s silence, his “No,” and “Absolutely Not,” 
until Christ, charmed, says, “Yes. It’s time! Go, girl, go. This way.”
Dream big and wide like childless Abraham stepping outside,
dazzled by an immensity of stars, and believing God’s power
could give him as many descendants. But don’t waste your
passion and dream-energy. Pray for things that will bring you
joy, yes, but will also bless myriad others, creating something,
in Milton’s phrase, that the world will not willingly let die.
Each of Jesus’s prayers were not answered affirmatively; neither
will each of our requests be granted. We are not wise enough
to know what best to pray for. But prayer, incredibly, does change
things. So keep praying for the shimmering dream which makes
your heart burn and quiver; pray past apparent impossibility until
the heavens open, the Spirit descends, and you live
and create with God’s spirit energising and filling you.
https://anitamathias.com/2023/07/08/grab-christs-h https://anitamathias.com/2023/07/08/grab-christs-hand-when-you-are-sinking/
LINK in profile
Hi friends, I’ve recorded a podcast meditation. Pls listen should you have time.
Sometimes, the little boat of your life is tossed in the darkness, in a storm-swept lake, far from shore,
And a dark figure looms, walking on water, and you cannot see his face, and you do not know his name, and you are terrified.
And in the encircling gloom, Christ always speaks the same magnificent words, “Take courage. It is I. Do not be afraid.”
He comes to us in the darkness, a future that looks bleak, with unsolvable relational difficulties or financial difficulties, or when intellect, energy, and organisation feel puny, matched with our dreams and calling. But it is Christ. Do not be afraid.
And Peter, the risk-taker, from an overabundance of love and impulsivity, says, “Lord, if it’s you, tell me to come to you on the water.” And Jesus speaks another of his great words, “Come.”
Jesus, the merciful, did not ask Peter to do something that transcended the humanly possible and Peter’s faith, but
since Peter wanted to get to Jesus as quickly as possible, and to do whatever Jesus did, he gives him permission to walk on water.
We sometimes yearn to do things for which we know we don’t have the money, time, abundant gifting, or even the character. Never begin them before you’ve prayed, “Lord, tell me to do it.” And if he says, “Come,” start tackling the impossibility, immediately.
And Peter walks on water, until he sees the almost visible wind, is afraid, and begins to sink. Fear paralyses, sinks, and destroys.
And Peter prays a powerful prayer, “Lord, save me.” And immediately, Jesus reaches out his hand and catches him, scolding, “Oligopistos. You of little faith. Why did you doubt?”
And the wind dies down, and Peter learns to keep his eyes on Jesus and his power when he attempts the impossible, and to cry out for Jesus’s help when he begins to sink.
Help us, Jesus, you who control the wind and waves, and all things, when we are sinking in the darkness, and all seems impossible. Tell the wind to be quiet.
Take my hand, precious Lord. Lead me on. Let me stand. Amen.
https://anitamathias.com/2023/07/01/how-to-find-li https://anitamathias.com/2023/07/01/how-to-find-life-changing-hidden-treasure/
Podcast link in profile
Hi Friends, I've recorded a new podcast meditation on Jesus's statement that following him is like discovering priceless treasure hidden in a field. The finder would joyfully sell everything to buy it, as should we!
Jesus speaks of living in the Kingdom of God, living with him as our High King and Lord, as a treasure, worth selling everything we have to gain.
He describes it as experiencing peace, joy, and operating in the power of the Holy Spirit.
As literally selling everything we have would take time, so too will adjusting our lives to living in Christ's invisible Kingdom.
It requires a slow, steady but definite adjustment of each area of our lives: relationships, what we read and watch, consumption and production of social media, travel, leisure, our spending and giving, time spent on food prep and exercise, on prayer and scripture, on reading and the news, on home and garden maintenance, on church activities and volunteering. Some of us will spend less time on these, others will spend more, for we each have a unique shape and calling.
Entering into the kingdom of God is a very individual pilgrim's progress; we each have a different starting point. Rick Warren of The Purpose Driven Life suggests that those seeking to change anything change their bodies first, by getting their exercise and diet under control... which is where I am starting!!
While following Christ is costly, for sure, it's costlier to follow what Tim Keller called Counterfeit Gods --“money, the seduction of success, the power and the glory,” climbing a cruel ladder which has no end, and never satisfies for long. 
In a remarkable account, Bill Bright, founder of Cru, describes his surrender to God as abandoning his puny little plans for God's magnificent plans. Once done, he said the future seemed brighter than ever before... And it undoubtedly was! Jesus's promise that the things the unbelieving world chases will added to those who seek his Kingdom first came true in Bright’s life, as it will in ours as we pursue Christ.
I’ve seen these Pre-Raphaelite paintings in Tate I’ve seen these Pre-Raphaelite paintings in Tate Britain several times, and they delight me each time. What a gorgeous museum!
And here is this week’s podcast meditation-- https://anitamathias.com/2023/06/18/the-spirit-helps-us-speak-creative-words-of-energy-and-life/ (link in Instagram bio)
On how we need the Spirit’s help to speak creative words of energy and life, not darkness and devastation.
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