contemplation | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Making a Difference Through Prayer and Writing: In Praise of Julian of Norwich

I read the papers and stress rises. So much injustice! 21 million people enslaved (14 million of them in India), land-grabbing, starvation, destruction of ecosystems, precious species going extinct, the restavek system in Haiti, slavery in Qatar, and the plight of the Palestinians.

My heart sinks.

I am just one girl of limited energy. I could push against one or two of these things, but it would take all my life, and I might barely dent it.

I do have a handful of causes, which I tweet about and financially support. That’s like returning just one starfish to the sea, but it makes a difference to that starfish as Loren Eiseley wrote.

* * *

The path of an activist, of a world-changer, is admirable, but it is a calling. If you embark on it without being called to it by God, and being continuously renewed by him, you risk burning out and becoming embittered. I know I would.

Fortunately there are other ways of making a difference in the world, which are also callings.

“If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write,” ―Martin Luther.

Can so pleasant a thing be a calling?

I see my calling as “a contemplative in the world” and a writer. When I compare it to real heroes like Simon Guillebaud, this seems like a bit of cop-out call, but it is, none the less, the call to which God has mercifully called me.

* * *

I am today thinking of a real contemplative, Julian of Norwich, who was an anchorite. Anchorites were, on request, formally bricked into their cells by the ecclesiastical authorities. Once walled in, they were no longer permitted to leave.

Julian of Norwich lived bricked into a cell attached to Norwich Cathedral. One window looked onto the Tabernacle of the Cathedral; another window faced the outside world. Through this, servants brought food and removed waste, and people from every level of society, including her fellow mystic Margery Kempe came seeking advice.

And that was Julian of Norwich’s way of making a difference in the world. Read, pray, contemplate, write.

It was arduous. My head would feel ready to explode if all I did was read, think and write, if I could not go on longish walks, putter around my house and garden, see friends, go to a small group, go to church. I love contemplation and writing—but in the context of community and of physical movement.

* * *

There were remarkable medieval Christian women, saints, who played their part in the moving and shifting of Empires, Joan of Arc and Catherine of Siena among them.

But Mother Julian, all she did was think and pray and write, think and pray and write.

What could this woman who lived for decades in a single room possibly have to say to the world?

God gave her things to say.

On the 8^th May 1373, Julian of Norwich experienced a series of fifteen visions from four in the morning, till noon, with a further one that night.

They were “so compelling and so rich in meaning that Julian understood them to come directly from God and to be messages not just to herself but to all Christians.” She spent the rest of her life writing them, and “conveying her sense of their significance as it was revealed over many years of meditation” (A.C. Spearing).

Her book Revelations of Divine Love resonates 600 years later.

* * *

Here are some of her best-known thoughts, rays of light from a distant past, ancient music which still vibrates.

All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

And this:

“He showed me a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand. I thought, ‘What may this be?’

And it was answered thus, ‘It is all that is made. It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it.”

I saw three properties that God made it, that God loves it, that God keeps it. The Creator, the Keeper, the Lover. For until I am substantially “oned” to him, I may never have full rest nor true bliss. That is to say, until I be so fastened to him that there is nothing that is made between my God and me.”

* * *

Here are other insights of this woman bricked into her cell who did nothing but think and pray and write.

“The greatest honor we can give Almighty God is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love.”

“If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”

“Our Savior is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.”

“See that I am God. See that I am in everything. See that I do everything. See that I have never stopped ordering my works, nor ever shall, eternally. See that I lead everything on to the conclusion I ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it. How can anything be amiss?”

“And I saw that truly nothing happens by accident or luck, but everything by God’s wise providence. If it seems to be accident or luck from our point of view, our blindness is the cause; for matters that have been in God’s foreseeing wisdom since before time began befall us suddenly, all unawares; and so in our blindness and ignorance we say that this is accident or luck, but to our Lord God it is not so.”

Interestingly, the dry, crusty, cerebral T. S. Eliot was Dame Julian of Norwich’s most famous reader. He quotes her in his mysterious Four Quartets

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

~~~

TWEETABLES

On making a difference through prayer and writing. In praise of Julian of Norwich. From @anitamathias1

What could solitary Julian of Norwich have to say to the world? God gave her things to say From @anitamathias1

And all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well. From @anitamathias1 via Julian of Norwich

“Useless Prayer” by Henri Nouwen

By Anita Mathias

“WHY should I spend an hour in prayer when I do nothing during that time but think about people I am angry with, people who are angry with me, books I should read and books I should write, and thousands of other silly things that happen to grab my mind for a moment?

The answer is: because God is greater than my mind and my heart, and what is really happening in the house of prayer is not measurable in terms of human success and failure.

What I must do first of all is be faithful. If I believe that the first commandment is to love God with my whole heart, mind, and soul, then I should at least be able to spend one hour a day with nobody else but God. the question as to whether it is helpful, useful, practical, or fruitful is completely irrelevant, since the only reason to love is love itself. Everything else is secondary.

The remarkable thing, however, is that sitting in the presence of God for one hour each morning — day after day, week after week, month after month — in total confusion and with myriad distractions radically changes my life. God, who loves me so much that He sent His only son not to condemn me but to save me, does not leave me waiting in the dark too long.

I might think that each hour is useless, but after thirty or sixty or ninety such useless hours, I gradually realize that I was not as alone as I thought; a very small gentle voice has been speaking to me far beyond my noisy place.

So: Be confident and trust in the Lord.”

From The Road to Daybreak, by Henri Nouwen (New York: Image Books, 1989).

In real life, amusingly, Nouwen was a fidgety pray-er. Michael Andrew Ford writes, “Nouwen could rarely sit still for long. When he was in prayer, he fidgeted, coughed and moved but seemed to have no awareness he was doing it. His apparently restless and distracted prayer nurtured him. While his body was twitching, his spirit could be deeply present to God.”

The writer Parker Palmer describes Nouwen at a Quaker retreat centre where the traditional gathering in silence was practised for 45 minutes every morning:

“I was conscious of being in the company of a world-class contemplative and I was expecting to have an extraordinary experience sitting next to him during worship. But as we sat in this plain, unadorned room and settled into the silence, I realised that the bench was jiggling. I opened my eyes, glanced to my left and saw Henri’s leg working furiously. He was anxiously trying to settle but without much success. As time went on, the fidgeting got worse. I opened my eyes again only to find him checking his watch to see what time it was.”

Ford continues, “Nouwen’s primary need for prayer meant he was completely oblivious to more mundane things. He would dash to the bathroom wherever he was staying and shower without closing the curtain, soaking the place in water. Then, without looking in the mirror, he would shave as quickly as possible, so he could get downstairs and be with God. As a result, he often ended up with a one inch patch of old whiskers on his neck and fresh soap in his ear.

“Contemplation was at the heart of Henri Nouwen’s life. It was a discipline of dwelling in the presence of God. Nouwen was convinced that Christian leaders need to reclaim the mystical so that every word they speak, each suggestion they make and every strategy they develop, will emerge from a heart which knows God intimately.”

Housework as a Pathway to Prayer—with Vermeer’s Women

By Anita Mathias

You can almost hear the silence. The milkmaid is quiet, so quiet, and time is suspended as she pours milk.

The hands work while the mind thinks.

Is it a life of drudgery, or is it a gift–her trivial chore a window into eternity, time to think, to pray, to look out of the window into God?

Vermeer’s women lose themselves in: housework. It glows! Is this domesticity? Can it be? That’s the way I want to live my life, slowly, tranquilly, not fighting the irrelevant relevant, the distracting, trivial and necessary tasks of my days, but embracing them as an oasis of contemplation in which desert flowers may bloom.I gaze at Vermeer’s women. I trust things that help me lose track of time–reading, writing, gardening, hiking, the sea, art galleries, prayer, good movies, good conversation.

Vermeer’s paintings, poems one might say, on the radiance of domesticity are more moving when we learn of the hurly-burly of his household–a wife, eleven children, and a feisty mother-in-law.

Those paintings that could have been called “Shanti, shanti, shanti” or “Tranquility” are probably sighs of yearning, images of an elusive Eden. They hint how manual work–if used as time for contemplation–might be redeemed.

I now view the trivial necessary tasks of life which I used to bitterly resent—as (in small doses) gifts: time to pray, time to seek direction, time to worship, time to sense God’s love.

I am reading Pete Greig’s Red Moon Rising about the birth of 24/7 prayer movement in Britain. “Pray constantly,” the exhortation of the apostle Paul has challenged and puzzled us through the centuries.

As my life grows busier, I relish these accidental windows into prayer: rooms to be tidied, gardens to be weeded, laundry to be sorted, little windy passages into contemplation, to situating myself again in the love of God, and finding peace.