In which I explore writing and blogging and creativity | Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Writing with the Wind of the Wild Goose of the Holy Spirit in your Wings

Wild Geese fly in a V formation. The lead goose reduces the wind resistance; the others glide, almost effortlessly, in the currents she has created.

During a storm, the eagle waits perched on the edge of its nest for the wind to gain sufficient velocity. Once she knows the direction in which the wind is roaring, she spreads her wings wide, and effortlessly glides into the winds of the storm.

Have you ever seen hawks or eagles soar, wings outstretched, rising without a single beat of their magnificent wings, soaring, soaring? They are soaring on thermal currents—masses of air that rise when the ground rapidly warms up. Or sometimes, obstruction currents, when wind currents are deflected by mountains, cliffs or tall buildings. The resulting updraft lifts them to high altitudes at which they glide.

* * *

The Wild Goose was an emblem of the Holy Spirit in Celtic tradition.

And the eagle, in Scripture, is a symbol both of God, and God’s people.

Eagles never waste their energy flapping their enormous wings—they wait for, and then use thermal currents and obstruction currents to soar on the wings of the wind…

Flying is so much easier when we sense the direction the wind of the Holy Spirit is blowing in our lives, and in the world, and then open our wings and fly in that direction, using the energy he generates within us, and in circumstances around us.

* * *

I have been reading about “the anointing,” in R. T. Kendall’s splendid, “The Anointing.”

He writes: “The anointing is when our gift functions easily. It comes with ease. It seems natural. No working it up is needed. If one has to work it up, one has probably gone outside one’s anointing. If one goes outside one’s anointing, the result is often fatigue, that is weariness or spiritual lethargy that has been described as ‘dying inside.’”

* * *

I find that with my writing on my blog, and indeed all writing. God is speaking. Not God spoke, but God is speaking. He is by His nature continuously articulate, A. W. Tozer wrote. If I listen to what the Spirit is saying to me through the events of my life, record the mini-revelations or epiphanies given to me each day by the God who speaks continuously and is never silent, then blogging is quick, easy and delightful. And what’s more, it often speaks to people.

It’s when I write to grow my blog, wonder if I should write the topical posts that everyone else is writing, be strategic, capture the zeitgeist– that blogging feels heavy, a chore, work rather than play. Why? Because the wind of the Spirit is not helping me soar; I have to expend scarce energy with a mighty, exhausting flapping of wings.

There is a lightness to God’s work, an amused creativity—we get the impression He tossed off zebras, giraffes, toucans, morpho butterflies and orchids in a massive outburst of creativity. God was at play as these beautiful things came into being, step by step through the mighty forces of evolution. His work was deep play.

* * *

In his book, Homo Ludens, or Man the Player, the Dutch historian and cultural theorist, Johan Huizinga, suggests that culture stems from humans at play, humans playing with words, or music or paint or the sketches of mighty cathedrals.

And when I record the whispers of the spirit, write in the updraft of the wild goose of the Holy Spirit, blogging is easy, light and delightful. It has a bit of the playfulness with which I imagine God made the world. I am playing in the fields of the Lord, playing with God, thinking aloud, probably making all sorts of mistakes–but there is a fun and lightness to it all.

Being Authentic Can Be Tricky, But NOT Being Authentic Can Break Your Heart

By Anita Mathias

I read this entry in Emerson’s journal when I was 21.

Journal, March 29, 1832

I will not live out of me.
I will not see with others’ eyes.
My good is good, my evil ill.
I would be free— I cannot be
While I take things as others please to rate them.
I dare attempt to lay out my own road.
That which myself delights in shall be Good
That which I do not want— indifferent
That which I hate is Bad. That’s flat.
Henceforth, please God, forever I forego
The yoke of men’s opinions. I will be
Lighthearted as a bird & live with God.

I decided to live like that. Not praising what I don’t like. Not pretending to like it. Not making small talk that bores me. Not smiling at what I don’t consider funny. Being myself

And it proved harder than I imagined, especially—oddly–when it came to writing.

***

Thomas Merton observes in his essay “Integrity,”

“Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their lives.

They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint.

They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavour to write somebody else’s poems or possess someone else’s spirituality.”

There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular—and too lazy to think of anything better.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success and they are in such haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves.

Masks, pretence and imitation: temptations in writing and blogging—areas in which, ironically, one should be most oneself.

“Every original writer must create the taste by which he is to be relished,” Wordsworth observed. Labouring in obscurity, a writer or blogger finds a voice, fashions a unique poetic style. Or perfects an expression of outrage at things rotten in the state of Christendom. And becomes hugely popular.

And then there are myriad imitators. But the flourishes, the pretzel sentences, the circuitous locutions–sound distorted in the echo chamber, obscuring rather than clarifying meaning.

However, “Me Too” books and blogs written in the updraft of a successful writer achieve a more rapid success! Of course, they do

In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Mephistopheles offers Faust all the world at the cost of his soul. Faust thought he had a great deal– until he had to pay the price!

The Mephistophelean bargain which faces writers is compromising our one wild and precious life for success. However, by not writing about what really interests us, in a style we consider beautiful, we, ironically, sacrifice the very joys that attracted us to writing.

And if we write what “the market wants” and get it wrong–ah, the misery!

I was tempted as a younger writer. A memoir of my Indian Catholic childhood was the book I really wanted to write, but the two chapters I had written about volunteering with Mother Teresa won a Minnesota State Arts Board award; a Jerome Foundation award, and fellowships to Writers’ Conferences, and my professor thought I could find an editor and agent, which I did, but I tried to write the book the editor wanted; an elderly distinguished man who’d discovered several famous writers, writing not what interested me but what I thought would interest him, and in the style I thought he would like.

I spun out what I wanted to be two 30-40 page chapters into a whole book–my short cut to success!! Well, the book, written in blood through my pregnancy and two years of my toddler’s life, was rejected. Of course, it was! It was written for a career, not to express my soul’s imperatives.

I lay down on the carpet and wanted to die. Crushed!

I gave up writing for a season, became an entrepreneur, founded a small company I still own.

I eventually returned to writing, of course, sadder, wiser–and, in jerks, to drafting the book I really wanted to write.

But I have learnt from my mistakes, and now hope I will be too smart to expend my one wild and precious life writing on things that do not really interest me.

And if success, consequently, eludes me? Well, the internet and democratization of writing has changed things. Success is now on a continuum, and I am content to take my place on it, be it “high or low or soon or slow” and write for the joy of creating, as birds sing for the joy of singing.

* * *

The first version of this was hosted by Esther Emery on her brilliant blog.

I Said to the Man who Stood at the Gate of the Year

By Anita Mathias

Image credit

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year
‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’

And he replied,

‘Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way!’

* * *

King George VI ended his famous 1939 Christmas message with these words. (Listen here.)

They were written by an unknown poet called Minnie Haskell. She wasn’t credited.

“I read the quotation in a summary of the speech,” she told The Daily Telegraph the following day. “I thought the words sounded familiar and suddenly it dawned on me that they were out of my little book.”

Minnie Haskell published 3 books, none of which were successful. Sadly, even the rest of this poem was not particularly good.

* * *

A lifetime of writing, and you are remembered for 4 lines.

Success or failure?

* * *

If you are a writer or an artist and say, “failure,” well, you are in trouble.

Because there is something mysterious about art.

Art is the spark

From stoniest flint

That sings

In the dark and cold, I’m light.

The craft can be learned by study and practice, but the spark in art which speaks to other people–that is a gift from God. It cannot be learned or simulated.

And we, ultimately, cannot control whether our work has that spark that will live longer than we do.

All we can do is tell the truth, as beautifully as we can.

* * *

And that is why these four lines, which are all that Minnie Haskell is remembered for, are apt as we enter a new year we cannot control.

‘Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way!’

Wandering through a Deserted Garden in Sicily, I Pray to Build Things Which Last

By Anita Mathias

Abandoned garden surround by a wall topped with grotesque sculptures. (Villa Palagonia)

Villa Palagonia, Bagheria, Sicily

I like wandering around the deserted gardens which sometimes surround palaces and stately homes.

I wandered through the Baroque Villa Palagonia in Bagheria Sicily yesterday, whose grounds host massive grotesque gnomes, giants, gargoyles, mutants, and anthropomorphized monsters.

The villa was the home of Ferdinand, Prince of Palagonia, a hunchback, who took revenge on his wife’s lovers by cruelly satirizing them—often depicting them as hunchbacks!!

Hunchback (Wall around Villa Palagonia)

* * *

Oh full of passion and pride and ambition, they built these palaces and gardens, how intensely they lived, and now their gardens are just the habitation of stray cats, and the birds which sing sweetly and loud.

Cat on the wall of Villa Palagonia

Cat in the garden of Villa Palagonia

All dead. Him who hated and satirized; him who was hated…

Hating. What a waste of a life!

Walking through the garden, I felt eager to align myself with what matters, for one day through our empty gardens too, stray cats might stroll, and birds sing loud and sweetly, unmindful of all our pride, passion and ambition.

People, despite their wealth, do not endure;
they are like the beasts that perish.

Their forms will decay in the grave,
far from their princely mansions.
¹⁶Do not be overawed when others grow rich,
when the splendour of their houses increases;
¹⁷for they will take nothing with them when they die,
their splendour will not descend with them.
¹⁸Though while they live they count themselves blessed—
and people praise you when you prosper—
¹⁹they will join those who have gone before them,
who will never again see the light of life. Psalm 49

A row of grotesque figures adorns the wall of Villa Palagonia.

Figure on wall of Villa Palagonia.

Crowned figure guarding the gate of Villa Palagonia.

I thought too of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

I am building things. I have built a small business which now solely supports our family. I am building a book. I am building a blog. I am building a platform on Twitter and Facebook so people read my blog. I am building a family life, and friendships, and a network of warm relationships here in Oxford, and with other writers elsewhere.

* * *

Arch crowned with grotesque figures. (Villa Palagonia)

But…

If the Lord does not build the house,

In vain do the builders labour.

In vain is your earlier rising

Your going later to bed. (Psalm 127)

I want to know what the Lord intends me to build with my life, and I want, oh how desperately I want, to build with Christ, to be aligned with his flow of ideas as I build, so what I build, whether books or a family business or blog may last longer and be more life-giving than the deserted books and palaces and gardens which litter our globe.

Hall of Mirrors, Villa Palagonia.

Formal Entrance to Villa Palagonia

In Which We Do not Hear the Cheers of our Invisible Audience

By Anita Mathias

Image by Lize Rixt via stock.xchng

When Beethoven’s Ode to Joy was first performed at the Theater am Karntnertor in Vienna in 1824, Beethoven conducting for tempo, had his back turned to the audience.

There was a standing ovation, the audience tossed their hats into the air; the applause was thunderous, and the aging exhausted composer knew nothing of it.

When the contralto, Caroline Unger, gently turned him around, he saw the ecstatic audience, on their feet, applauding.

* * *

Mr Holland’s Opus tells the story of an American aspiring composer, who marries too young (an accidental pregnancy), and then teaches music at high school for 31 years, all the while longing to complete his opus, his Great American Symphony.

At his forced retirement after music department budget cuts, the students play the glorious symphony on which he had laboured for all those decades. And as he stands, entranced at the music he had never yet heard, and overwhelmed with emotion, they tell him that they, in fact, are his Opus. The lives he poured love and music into were his Opus.

* * *

A writer sows into her little patch of earth, and she does not know who, or how many, her words touch, or how.

We sow, we sow, in our little patch of earth, and we hope our words do some good in the world, touch and change other lives, even a little.

We send our words out into the world, to our invisible audience.

And it’s more than an earthly one.

It is, perhaps, at the end of the performance, at the end of our earthly lives, that God will turn us around and show us how the seeds we have planted have bloomed.

* * *

Always the invisible audience.

The other day, a member of our family got upset with another one, who, though upset too, remained silent, until the angst burned out.

And I said gently, “You thought your self-restraint passed unnoticed. But I am sure Someone was very proud of you, and said to the closest bystander, “Do you see my servant? Did you note the overwhelming temptation to yell back and sin? Did you note the self-restraint?”

* * *

While we live our lives, intensely absorbed in the tempo, we sometimes miss the music our work creates, the reverberations through other people’s lives.

However, when we turn around and see with eternal eyes, we will see our invisible audience, Christ Jesus himself; and the angels among whom there is joy when we repent; joy when we win the little victories no one else notices; joy at what Wordsworth called, “the best portion of a good man’s life, his little nameless, unremembered deeds of kindness and of love.”

Thank you Kelly Belmonte at , All Nine Muses for hosting me.

Writing in the Cold by Ted Solotaroff, a Brilliant Essay on the Psychology of Writing

By Anita Mathias

“Writing in the Cold,” by Ted Solotaroff from The Pushcart Prize is absolutely the very best and most inspiring essay for late bloomer writers. It’s also the most insightful on the emotional and psychological struggles that are part of becoming a writer.

I met Ted at the Squaw Valley Writers Conference in 1993, and he read my early work, and was most encouraging—which is another reason I love this essay!

Here’s a link to it.

Where Good Stories are to be Found

By Anita Mathias

: Image Credit

My tender-hearted children hated sad stories. Neither would let me read Oscar Wilde’s exquisite short stories to them, or even Hans Christian Andersen’s because they were too sad.

When I recommended a book or movie, they wanted to know if it was sad, and especially if it had a sad ending.

But there is no story without sadness, I keep telling them. It’s an old creative writing maxim: No story without conflict.

* * *

Who needs the stress and emotional trauma of conflict with others? And who needs internal conflict—when the self is at war with itself, knowing what is good to do, but doing the very things it hates, punishing itself by over-eating, or over-working, or under-sleeping? By psycho-somatic illness?

But without this internal conflict–this struggle against our very selves: to corral ourselves to rise early, work hard, stay focused, self-educate, eat healthily, exercise, read, write–our lives would be flaccid and formless, with the structure of obstacles, both within and without, to overcome.

And, as Donald Miller writes in A Thousand Miles in a Million Years, dealing with these obstacles head-on (losing 150 pounds in his case, and tracking down the father who abandoned him) gives our lives a shapely story.

Because stories and blogs come out of sadness, and struggle, and failure, and eventual triumph over Resistance.

* * *

And ironically, each failure, and sadness and step backwards gives us more of a story than our successes.

Where are stories found? Not in quiet times, not in scripture study, not in money you gave away, not in fasts, not in the meals you took around, or your turn in the coffee rota, these good, shiny things, which, anyway, by the strictest Scriptural injunction we are commanded to keep secret.

Where are our stories found?

In the places where you learn about yourself, and you learn about God, and you learn about shame and grace and self-forgiveness and God’s forgiveness in the crucible of failure.

When your daughter says, “I don’t want to play scrabble today, Mum, because you get snooty about my words,” and you say “Oh no, of course I won’t get snooty about your words!” and then you do indeed get so snooty!

When the house could so do with some loving up, and indeed, so could those who dwell in it, and you’ve resolved to do both, but words are flowing, and you dance in the flow.

When you had solemnly resolved on that run today and yoga, and weights—you know, flexibility, strength, cardio-vascular, the three elements of fitness!–but an idea presents itself, and you want to explore it, express it,

And the word count may be good at the end of the day, but your Pilgrim’s Progress….well, it hasn’t progressed.

And you wonder why today joy doesn’t throb,

Or peace flow like a river.

And you remember: He who loves his blog more than me is not worthy of me.

She who loves her writing more than me is not worthy of me.

And all you can say is Kyrie Eleison.
Lord, have mercy.

And you kneel down and repent

Till peace flows again.

And you say, “Lord, I am not worthy of you.
But say but the Word
and I shall be healed.”

And he says the Word.

The word like manna,
The word like honey
Coursing through your brain.

And you, the unworthy, are healed