Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Our Failures are the Cracks through which God’s Light Enters

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The Book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible ends on an ecstatic note,

“The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.

Maranatha. Come Lord Jesus.”

Through the day, when you feel distracted, or sense stress rising, or your breathing becoming ragged, try a breathing prayer. Say this ancient Aramaic word to yourself, Maranatha. Four equally stressed syllables which mean Come Lord Jesus.

So as we begin to calm down and enter our bodies, let’s say that, one syllable with each inhale and exhale. Ma-ra-na-tha. Ma-ra-na-tha.  Come Lord Jesus.

And now to today’s meditation on how our very failures are the cracks through which God’s light gets in.

The ancestors of the Lord Jesus Christ

As outlined in the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew:

The deceiving, scheming younger brother Jacob

Who tricked his elder brother out of his inheritance;

Tamar, who tricked her father-in-law into sex.

Rahab the Canaanite prostitute, mother of the honourable Boaz.

Ruth, the determined and destitute Moabite widow

Who, bathed and perfumed, crept in the dead of night,

To lie beside an inebriated Boaz.

Ruth and Boaz, grandparents of King David

Who spotted beautiful Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite,

Bathing on a roof, summoned her to bed,

And when she fell pregnant, had her husband

Uriah, who was off fighting for King David, killed.

Bathsheba, mother of Solomon whose “heart was led astray

by his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines”.

From such, the Lord Jesus Christ came.

 

And who are the descendants of Jesus,

Grafted into his family by the faith

That Christ, who visited us twenty centuries ago,

was God himself, God who can change

the deep structure of our characters,

and the molecules of our heart and spirit?

Those descendants include us

whose failings may be less spectacular,

but as secret, and as sad.

The one who flogs the dying horse of her exhausted mind

with cups of coffee until it burns out;

Who takes on far too much of the insignificant,

putting neither first things nor first people first.

Who is distracted from distraction by distraction,

While her house gets cluttered and overwhelms her;

Who frets when she should be living by faith and prayer.

The world is too much with her.

For such Jesus came all those centuries ago.

To such, he comes today

 

And you, when you say, ah, there goes my temper.

I am being that critical, negative person I did not want to be.

For such he came.

And was it you had resolved just this morning, to run 10,000 steps, to burn 2200 calories, do yoga and lift weights? Flexibility, strength, endurance, perfection.

And time slipped away on your phone, Facebook, the Guardian, the New Yorker.

You look at your browser history and wince.

Your one, wild and precious life slipping away,

surfing news that is none of your business

You feel the sting of regret, irreplaceable time, vanished.

For you, who have failed, he came.

You’ve not read as much as you wanted to,

You have not been kind, or written that long-delayed letter.

You have betrayed your gifts and your calling.

And it was for people who fail, people like you that Christ came.

All your failures provide landing places, entry points,

Cracks through his light gets in.

 

Your pride is cracking, your self-sufficiency is cracking,

And you are ripe for his invasion.

And all you can say is Maranatha. Come Lord Jesus.

And he says,

“I have long stood at your door, and knocked

And now, you hear my voice and open to me,

And so, I will come in and eat with you.”

And you say, again,

“Maranatha.

Come, Lord Jesus.”

 

This meditation was from Matthew 1

If you’d like to read my previous recorded meditations,

2 The World is full of the Glory of God

1 Mindfulness is Remembering the Presence of Christ with us.

And, of course, i would love you to read my memoir, fruit of much “blood, sweat, toil and tears.”

Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India in the UK, and in the US, here, well, and widely available, online, worldwide 🙂

 

 

 

In which God Creates Beauty from My Mistakes

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a-winter-garden

In this season of hibernation, I think… and my remembrance of things past is not unaccompanied by regret.

Mists of sadness rise. I will not enter them for they might drag me into a quagmire.

No, I will not re-read past chapters. Today’s chapter is being written—Jesus dictating, me writing. Or sometimes, me writing fast, impulsively, selfishly, and Jesus overwriting it with gold-dust, producing beauty from ashes.

* * *

But what can be done with regrets for time past?

I reach for another alliterative word…redemption.

I take my regrets, shattered shards of what could have been beautiful, were I wiser, smarter, holier,

And I pour the iridescent fragments of these regrets into the great outstretched hands of God.

* * *

I think of David. He sees a beautiful married woman bathe on a rooftop, sleeps with her, has her husband killed when she falls pregnant, and then marries her.

The prophet Nathan confronts him with a story which helps him see the shamefulness of it all.

David repents, but sin has consequences, that’s the deep magic from the dawn of time. The unnamed baby dies.

But there is also redemption…the deeper magic from before the dawn of time

Bathsheba conceives again…and that child is Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, the reputed author of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

From that union stained by lust and murder came forth exquisite Psalms and wise Proverbs.

* * *

We undervalue what is precious; we overvalue what is trivial; we waste our time; we squander our energies; we damage treasured relationships; oh yes, and for all these things, we pay the price, yes we do– the inexorably fair law of sowing and reaping.

Fair and merciless.

But a deep hidden mercy runs through this world, like subterranean gold, like purple amethyst, yellow citrine, and smoky quartz hidden in the dead, fossilised trees in Arizona’s petrified forest, trees which fell two hundred million years ago.

Gradually, each cells of bark and wood is replaced with minerals of every colour, as God shapes my shabby paragraphs into the frame, the outline of a glory story.

* * *

God takes the fragments of my faltering hopes, my missed chances, my foolishness,

And says, “Child, from this, even from this, from this glimmering pile of your mistakes, see what I am fashioning.”

And like a medieval craftsman making stained glass, he fashions glory, stained glass, from glinting heaps of errors.

And I see what he is creating from sins and folly, the stuff I never intended.

It is the life I now have, bursting with potential for joy and beauty and worship. It is good. It is very good.

And through tear-stained eyes, I bow my head in worship.

 

 

Your Trajectory is What Matters, Not Where you Currently Are

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I love King David. Who doesn’t?

I spoke about Saul and David to my small group, five years ago, and loved preparing the talk from Samuel and Kings.  One of the things which struck me was that your trajectory is far more important than where you currently are.

* * *

Saul, to all appearances, was at the top of the heap. He had power, prestige, wealth, good looks, a large family, kingship and a palace.

And yet… and yet. Instead of enjoying what he had, he was, almost incredibly, tormented by jealousy and insecurity, by the fear of losing it, the fear that someone would come up from behind and take what he had.

He could see clearly that God’s favour and blessing was increasingly on David, and not on himself. He could presciently see what God was doing and did not like it one bit. Being aligned with God’s purposes was all very well when it exalted him, but he could not face the fact that his time in the sun was coming to its natural conclusion.

And so he tries to block what God is doing. Saul hounds David, and, in the short run, is triumphant. David is on the run. He hides in caves, afraid, cold and hungry.

While Saul is at the very top of the heap, David, declared the enemy of the King of Israel–and without resources, patrons, wealth, power or position–is at the very bottom of the heap.

As we read Kings, we realise that, in the long run, where Saul and David currently stood meant nothing. What mattered was their trajectory–where they were going.

David: consistently growing in inner strength, as he learns to strengthen himself in the Lord, and eventually in obvious strength.

Saul: consistently losing, first, inner strength, and eventually obvious strength.

* * *

Two phrases often repeated in the Book of Samuel and the Book of Kings give us an insight into why David’s life was successful in the eyes of God and man, and why he eventually was blessed in his military, political, administrative, literary and spiritual endeavours: “God was with David.” ” David walked with the Lord.”

And because of that, we also read this frequently repeated phrase, ”the House of David grew stronger and stronger, and the House of Saul grew weaker and weaker.”

The house of the down and out, the man who had no wealth or  political support, nothing but the Lord, grew stronger and stronger, while the house of the King, with wealth, power,  courtiers, an army, sycophants and tax revenue grows weaker and weaker.

Because David walked with God. Because God was with David.

* * *

I was electrified by the study. I was depressed when I prepared the study, creatively blocked, not writing at all, miserable in the large charismatic, rather toxic, Oxford church I then attended, and overworking at my own business which was suddenly and overwhelmingly taking off.

I wasn’t where I wanted to be in external, visible terms. Inwardly though, I was seeking God, seeking to hear his voice, to rest in his presence and love, to grow fat on his word, and to align my life with him. And I realised forcibly that what matters is your trajectory, where you are going, not where you currently are.    

As long as I was walking with God in humility and repentance, seeking his blessing, trying to do his will, continually revising my life when I realised I was not aligned with him, then, if it pleased him, “my house” like David’s, would “grow stronger and stronger.”

So be it, Lord. Amen.

* * *

When we play the deadly, destructive, dispiriting game of comparisons, we often compare our beginning or mid games, let’s say in blogging or writing, with other people’s end games and feel dissatisfied.

But what we really need to look at is our trajectory. If it’s healthy, we will eventually, inevitably, be okay. And if it is not satisfactory, we need to seek God. Repent where we need to repent, change where we need to change. And walk with God upwards into the light.

Whether we are seeking to lose weight, or to establish a blog, or a business, don’t get discouraged about where you are. Look at your trajectory. It’s that’s good, you’ll be okay. If your trajectory is disheartening, but you are walking with God, you will be okay too.

* * *

Wherever you are today in your life and career, walk with God. Ask him to reveal his ideas, plans and strategy to you, and align your writing, your blogging, your finances and your life with his ideas. And then, as you walk with God, you too will grow stronger and stronger, because you will be walking with God, and God with you.