Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Trust: A Message of Christmas

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He came to earth in a  splash of energy

And gentleness and humility.

 

That homeless baby in the barn

Would be the lynchpin on which history would ever after turn

Who would have thought it?

 

But perhaps those attuned to God’s way of surprises would not be surprised.

 

He was already at the centre of all things, connecting all things.

* * *

Augustus Caesar issued a decree which brought him to Bethlehem,

The oppressions of colonialism and conquest brought the Messiah exactly where he was meant to be, the place prophesied eight hundred years before his birth by the Prophet Micah.

 

And he was already redeeming all things. The shame of unwed motherhood; the powerlessness of poverty.

 

He was born among animals in a barn, animals enjoying the sweetness of life, animals he created, animals precious to him.

For he created all things, and in him all things hold together

Including stars in the sky, of which a new one heralded his birth

 

Drawing astronomers to him.

And drawing him to the attention of an angry King

As angelic song drew shepherds to him.

 

An Emperor, a King, scholars, shepherds, angels, animals, stars, an unwed mother

All things in heaven and earth connected

By a homeless baby

The still point on which the world still turns. The powerful centre. The only true power.

The One who makes connections.

* * *

And there is no end to the wisdom, the crystal glints of the Message that birth brings.

 

To me, today, it says,

“Fear not, trust me, I will make a way.”

 

The baby lay gentle in the barn

And God arranges for new stars, angelic song, wise visitors with needed finances for his sustenance in the swiftly-coming exile, shepherds to underline the anointing and reassure his parents.

 

“Trust me in your dilemmas,” the baby still says,

 

“I will make a way. I will show it to you.”

Happy Christmas everyone.

My Minimalistic and Opted-Out Christmases

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Van Gogh Starry OriginalThere was a time when I did Christmas.

Wrote and addressed a stack of Christmas cards and letters-a depressing, burdensome chore when all I wanted to do was read and write. Made family collages to enclose with them. Made Christmas cake and Christmas cookies. Set up the tree. And lights. And decorations.

Bought the kids 14 presents. I started ordering so they would not be sad at the competitive back to school question, “What did you get for Christmas?” and then went on, and on. Our cheeks ached with smiling as they opened them; perhaps theirs did too. Perhaps they felt like actors—ecstasy expected!—and then, there was a mass of wrapping paper and ribbons, and packaging to clear up, and parts to keep together. And more stuff to nag them about keeping tidy and organizing—and eventually, decluttering!!

We did a turkey, which none of us like, so that if they compared Christmases in school, ours would be the same. Did (other people’s) traditional Christmas dinner with all the fixings–glorious excess that left us in a sluggish overfed torpor even before the Bailey’s Irish Cream and Christmas pudding.

Gone, all gone, gone in incense wisps of peace.

* * *

First went the cards. I am on Facebook, and so are my friends. Cards are no longer necessary. I email the few people who still send me cards, but we don’t send cards, except to our mothers. If I have the energy, I write a Christmas letter and post it on my blog with a link on Facebook for anyone who really, really wants to know what I did all year.

The tree, we still do. But it’s a large beautiful fibre optic tree we bring out every year, with sentimental memories from the Christmas ornaments bought over the years. Irene likes to lie on the carpet and watch red, green, blue lights travel to the tips of the needles and back. And, well, so do I. In America, we had a potted living Christmas tree we brought in every year; I could not bring myself to buy a tree, and then throw it away.

Special treats cooked during the Christmas season—no longer. We have enough of these moment-on-your lips, lifetime-on-your-hips treats at parties.  The kids are getting a lot of chocolate gifts from their friends. Why cook things that are not a blessing to our bodies? I cannot do that to myself anymore. I do adore Christmas cake, but Tesco’s Finest Christmas Cake is better than Anita’s. We do have a traditional roast duck dinner, but that’s because we like it, but we don’t overdo the sides—or dessert.

* * *

Then went presents, and what a joyful goodbye! Roy and I are both trying to be minimalistic, so we tell each other one thing we’d really like, and the gift is in the hunter-gathering. Last year, Roy asked for a fur-lined winter hat. I’ve been borrowing it for weeks, so I’m asking for one this year.

While we give the girls a surprise whimsical gift or two, their Christmas present is one thing they really want—a camera, an iPad, a laptop, a kindle, an iPhone have been recent gifts, and a couple of coveted items of brand name clothing. They are teenagers in an all-girls’ school after all.

When they were young, Christmas was Christmas Day, and being told to wait for the sales on the 26th for their presents would have been a disappointment. And I guess retailers count on this traditional sentimentality. Now that they are older—13 and 18 and savvier, part of their Christmas gift is cash for the year’s clothes shoes, bags, accessories, and so they shop the sales the week after Christmas. They are wiser, and can understand and resist the lure of marketers to spend, spend, spend on the big day to create an illusion of perfection as tenuous and fragile as glass Christmas ornaments, and never mind the fiscal consequences. Spending the way an alcoholic drinks. Crazy!

* * *

Why celebrate the birth of the beautiful person who taught us that the Kingdom of God is within us by giving each other things, stuff, which will become clutter? People ruefully say this every year–and what a relief it is to opt out.

I am me. Why should I celebrate the same Christmas as every other person up and down this land? Why should I adopt other people’s Christmas traditions if they are not nourishing to my soul—and it is not nourishing to put up lights and decorations which will be taken down, to make things with sugar and white flour and chocolate which are not a blessing to my body, to send cards which will be opened, looked at for ten seconds and tossed aside. I will not do it!

It’s all a big consumerist keeping-up with the Joneses conspiracy. A spiritual occasion that has been hijacked by marketers, who sell us food to fatten us, alcohol to inebriate us, presents to choke our houses and wardrobes. Oh, how has the celebration of the birth of the simplest and wisest and most beautiful of men become this Belshazzarian feast of excess which strains bodies, emotions, spirits and finances? Are we celebrating Jesus or our traditions? Oh, I am opting-out!

* * *

We do not need to follow other people’s traditions. If you are young and newly married or a new parent, create your own joyful, restful, peaceful, life-giving, people rather than thing-centred traditions.

If you are not young, it’s not too late to gradually change your celebration so that Christmas is a time of rest, and peace and reading and extra prayer, and extra scripture and family and friends without the additional burden of gifts and cards and trees and cooking and shopping and lights and decoration and expense and maybe debt. Perhaps each year, rule out the least satisfying, most exhausting Christmas tradition, and put in a restful, minimalist one?

Don’t cook what you don’t love even if it’s traditional. Don’t send cards to those you don’t love.  Give home-cooked treats as gifts, and your sister-in-law who gave you the cashmere sweater in the ugly colour will be so cross that she’ll reciprocate with a home-baked cake next year—and you’ll both be released from the treadmill.

The decorated house, the creaking tables, piles of gifts decked in beautiful wrapping paper and ribbons and cards to be ripped apart in seconds– these bring us distraction, and tiredness, rather than serenity of that first night of stars whose eternal silence was shattered by angels singing of the glory of God!

I sometimes use the extra energy not “celebrating,” to serve—join a group singing carols at a retirement home, or serve lunch to homeless, at which my husband was mistaken for one of the homeless men, and asked, “When have you last eaten?” by a rude woman, and with exquisite sensitive manners, he pretended he didn’t remember just to spare her feelings.

* * *

Rather than celebrate Christmas just like everyone else—tree, gifts beneath it, lights, decoration, cooking, dressing up, frivolity, triviality la-di-da—we started, in contrapuntal harmony, a family tradition we really enjoy. We go away.

One of my treasured Christmas memories is walking by La Jolla Cove in San Diego, California, watching the harbour seals lounge and lollygag. People were out, running or walking by the beach. Celebrating the goodness of God out in nature! Other Christmases have seen us in the unspeakably lovely Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica; in magical New Zealand; in Mexico, Granada, Barcelona, Madrid. We are going to Malta this year.

We walk by beaches or in the mountains, sleep in, read, talk, eat out, and come back rich in memories, but with little clutter.

Travel is not necessarily cheap, of course, but then neither is a traditional Christmas–£835 in Britain, while the average American spends $854 on gifts alone.

I am not suggesting Bah-Humbugging everything about Christmas. Keep the parts you love. Keep Christ.

Christmas is for people, Christmas is for peace, Christmas is for rest. Christmas is for quieting the manger of one’s heart and silencing the lowing of consumerism, that there may be more room to welcome and listen to the Beloved One whom we are, after all, celebrating.

The Radical One who shocked everyone by shaking up their ideas and has shaken up our family’s Christmas, and returned it to us as a sheer gift.

Christmas, for us, with the girls at home for three weeks, has become nine days in the sun on holiday, and then fifteen days at home, watching dvds, reading, playing family games, sleeping in, resting up, glorious lazy peace and winter walks observing unusual understated glory.

And just a little bit of Christmas music in the background:

“Glory to God in the highest

And on earth, peace to those of good will.”

 

What Christmas Means to Me: By C. S. Lewis

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lewis life

C. S. Lewis (credit)

What CHRISTMAS means to me…

(From God in the dock—Essays on Theology and Ethics by C. S. Lewis)

Three things go by the name of Christmas. One is a religious festival. This is important and obligatory for Christians; but as it can be of no interest to anyone else, I shall naturally say no more about it here. The second (it has complex historical connections with the first, but we needn’t go into them) is a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality. If it were my business too have a ‘view’ on this, I should say that I much approve of merry-making. But what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business. I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their own money in their own leisure among their own friends. It is highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want theirs. But the third thing called Christmas is unfortunately everyone’s business.

I mean of course the commercial racket. The interchange of presents was a very small ingredient in the older English festivity. Mr. Pickwick took a cod with him to Dingley Dell; the reformed Scrooge ordered a turkey for his clerk; lovers sent love gifts; toys and fruit were given to children. But the idea that not only all friends but even all acquaintances should give one another presents, or at least send one another cards, is quite modern and has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers. Neither of these circumstances is in itself a reason for condemning it. I condemn it on the following grounds.

1. It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure. You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to ‘keep’ it (in its third, or commercial, aspect) in order to see that the thing is a nightmare. Long before December 25th everyone is worn out — physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them. They are in no trim for merry-making; much less (if they should want to) to take part in a religious act. They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.

2. Most of it is involuntary. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost a blackmail. Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letter-box, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go?

3. Things are given as presents which no mortal every bought for himself — gaudy and useless gadgets, ‘novelties’ because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before. Have we really no better use for materials and for human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?

4. The nuisance. For after all, during the racket we still have all our ordinary and necessary shopping to do, and the racket trebles the labour of it.

We are told that the whole dreary business must go on because it is good for trade. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country, and indeed of the world, in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I don’t know the way out. But can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers? If the worst comes to the worst I’d sooner give them money for nothing and write if off as a charity. For nothing? Why, better for nothing than for a nuisance.

 

 

“The Nativity” by C.S. Lewis

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 Image
The Nativity

by C.S. LewisAmong the oxen (like an ox I’m slow)
I see a glory in the stable grow
Which, with the ox’s dullness might at length
Give me an ox’s strength.

Among the asses (stubborn I as they)
I see my Savior where I looked for hay;
So may my beast like folly learn at least
The patience of a beast.

Among the sheep (I like a sheep have strayed)
I watch the manger where my Lord is laid;
Oh that my baaing nature would win thence
Some woolly innocence!

Plucked, dazzling, from the eternal heavens into time… Luci Shaw, “One”

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 http://www.abrahampiper.com/

One by Luci Shaw
Winter, and very cold,
and the night at
its deepest. The politicians,
as usual, double-tongued.
The town chaotic, teeming
with strangers.
And tonight, as often
in winter, in Bethlehem,
snow is falling.I always love how each flake,

torn from the sky,

arrives separately,

without sound, almost

unnoticed in

a flurry of others. How

each one (on a clear

night) lies there glittering

on the swelling breast

of snow, crisp

and intact, as wholly itself

as every radiant star

in a sky sparkling

with galaxies.

 

How many new

babies tonight

in Judea, coming

like snowflakes?

 

But plucked,

dazzling, from the

eternal heavens,

into time,

tonight is born

The One.

 

“The Mother of God,” William Butler Yeats

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The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare
Through the hollow of an ear;
Wings beating about the room;
The terror of all terrors that I bore
The Heavens in my womb.

Had I not found content among the shows
Every common woman knows,
Chimney corner, garden walk,
Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes
And gather all the talk?

What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart’s blood stop
Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?