grace | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

The Root of Peace (from Brennan Manning’s “Ragamuffin Gospel”)

Philosopher Jacques Maritain once said that the culmination of knowledge is not conceptual but experiential: I feel God. Such is the promise of the Scriptures: Be still and know (experience) that I am God.

My own journey bears witness to that. I mean simply that a living, loving God can and does make his presence felt, can and does speak to us in the silence of our hearts, can does warm and caress us till we no longer doubt that he is near, that he is here.

Such experience is pure grace to the poor, the children, and the sinners, the privileged types in the gospel of grace. It cannot be forced from God. He gives it freely, but he does give it, and has given it to such as Moses and Matthew, to Roslyn and me.

In fact, there is no one to whom God denies it. Ignatius of Loyola said, “The direct experience of God is grace indeed, and basically, there is no one to whom it is refused.”

In essence, there is only one thing God asks of us—that we be men and women of prayer, people who live close to God, people for whom God is everything, and for whom God is enough. That is the root of peace.

When we start seeking something besides him, we lose it. As Thomas Merton said in the last public address before his death, “That is his call to us—simply to be people who are content to live close to him to renew that kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.”

My Train Wreck into Grace

By Anita Mathias

Sometimes, when my tongue runs away with me, and I use my words to express anger rather than bestow grace, and those words steal life and strength and peace rather than lavish them, I see the red flag of Jesus, and am stopped dead in my tracks.

But sometimes, I don’t stop, and don’t listen to Jesus, and feel that I am out of control, a train rushing on…

I might eat whatever is quick and easy or delicious, rather than whatever is a blessing to my body.

Or my marriage might enter a vicious spiral of criticism, resentment, judgement and anger,

And there we go, rushing on, rushing on, knowing that no good can come from expressing runaway emotions, knowing that what one sows, one reaps…

On and on, we rush, speaking carelessly, heading for a train wreck, smashing past the level crossing, towards the other train.

And that’s when I understand grace and the mystery of the cross

What I sow I should reap, right? But that was before Jesus came.

* * *

Our train hurtles on, and Jesus sees that we are going to crash.

He steps in.

And our train still hurtles headlong; we are out of control.

And He absorbs the crash in himself.

And we crash into grace; we crash into Jesus.

I am redeemed.

My marriage is redeemed

Because of the grace Jesus died to bring me.

Because of grace.

* * *

He keeps me on track, he keeps my marriage on track,

Keeping me on the rails

Because he absorbed the impact at Calvary,

Of all this foolish, headlong sin.

Oh, I trust grace

I trust mercy.

* * *

If the world were governed by dreary cause and effect,

And a woman could reap only what she sows,

Lord, who would stand?

But you stand between us and destruction,

For this we revere you.

For it’s not a mere mechanical world of crime and punishment.

It is a world of miracles.

It is the world of Jesus where he lives.

It is a world where Jesus stands in front of us,

Absorbs the impact of our bullet trains

Speeding at a million miles an hour towards self-destruction

Is smashed,

Rises,

And in that resurrection is hope that I, who live in him, shall also rise.

* * *

Lord, sharpen my eyesight

Help me to see your red flags in time,

To repent in time

And when I do not,

When I crash,

Let me crash into grace!

The seventy times seventh chance,

The four hundred and ninetieth chance,

The infinite chances you lavish on me in the land of the living,

Because you love me!

The Worst Evangelism Question Ever, or, When we See Him Face to Face

By Anita Mathias

Pompeo Batoni: The Prodigal Son

The worst evangelism question ever in my opinion is:

“If God were to ask you, “Why should I let you into my Heaven?” what would you say?”

The lovely pastor of our first little church in Williamsburg, Virginia, was all gung-ho about Evangelism Explosion. When we were new, he visited us with a man he was training, and popped the Evangelism Explosion question, “If God were to ask you, ‘Why should I let you into My Heaven?’ what would you say?”

I said, “I know the correct answer, but to be honest, that isn’t what I am going to say.”

Now, 19 years later and even more confident, I would snort and say, “No way is God going to ask silly questions on that emotional and glorious occasion.”

* * *

Because you see, in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus has told us what it’s going to be like when we meet his lovely father.

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.”

And because I am God’s prodigal daughter–unbelievably, but definitely, because he is so incredibly good and kind–I believe he will be filled with compassion for me, run to me, throw his arms around me, and kiss me.

And I will say, head bowed, through heartfelt tears, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your daughter.’

And seeing the holiness of his face, and his sheer goodness and loveliness, everything I have ever done will come crashing in, and I will hang my head, overcome and ashamed.

And he will say, “Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on her. Put a ring on her finger and sandals on her feet. ²³Bring the fattened calf for there are no calories or cholesterol in heaven. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. ²⁴For this daughter of mine was dead and is alive again; she was lost and is found.”

* * *

And if this amazing Father could possibly ask that silly imaginary question, “Why should I let you into my heaven?” I would say,

“Because you are my father, and I am your daughter, and your home is mine.”

“Because I have messed up and repented, messed up and repented, again and again, but through it all, through it all, oh I have loved you–oh so very much.”

And he will say “Come,” because that is his nature.

All is Grace. All is Gift. All is Good, despite our Sehnsucht, indefinable longings!

By Anita Mathias

Caption: The Bay Where St Paul was Shipwrecked, Malta

So it’s the last day of this half-term, and I am tired. And my girls who’ve worked hard, and Roy, who’s woken early to drive them to school, are even more tired.

We are looking forward to the nine days of the half-term holiday—to sleeping in, no stress, family movies… And especially a five day trip to glorious Ffald-y-Brenin in Wales.

* * *

Funny thing is, we had all that—sleeping in, staying up late, family movies, luscious meals, creaking family dinner tables, and bits of travel– last summer (when we squeezed in an epic drive to Copenhagen in our motorhome) and for 24 days over the Christmas holidays (home and Malta).

And towards the end of each holiday, let me be honest, I was actually looking forward for school. For a routine. For those rascally teenage girls to get to bed at a half-decent hour, rather than the early hours of the morning and not sleep in till noon. For the house to be tidy and not have bowls, mugs, plates, juice-boxes, and chocolate wrappers, scattered around couches and armchairs and bedrooms. Or coats, scarves and socks kicked off anywhere. For predictable silent undisturbed hours to sink into reading and writing.

* * *

After weeks of them being home 24/7, I look forward to school. After weeks of school, I want them home.

You know why? It’s because both are good. It’s all good.

Life is good because it’s a gift from God.

* * *

I am going away next week, and am longing to do so. Sometimes, I have had very exciting, dream holidays, full of doing and seeing and learning—Istanbul, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and after a week or so there, I am surprised by a yearning to be home, to spend a day in my pyjamas, reading or playing around with words.

What? I had so yearned to see these magical places. On my first trip to Paris, I heard an American say on the phone in a rich resonant voice, “I am travel weary. I am homesick.” Travel-weary and homesick in Paris? I thought. Yeah, it’s all too possible.

It’s all good, it’s all gift, it’s all grace. That’s why at home, we can think of glorious art, architecture, history, gardens, mountains, forests, and the ocean and yearn to be there. And that’s why, in the middle of Rome or Athens or Madrid, I have had a sudden longing to go nowhere, do nothing, just sit with green tea, God, a book and a laptop.

* * *

“Thou hast made us for thyself, Oh Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you,” St. Augustine wrote.

This perpetual restlessness in our hearts is meant to lead us to the one who stills all restlessness.

The Germans (of course!) have a word for this restlessness, this indefinable longing: Sehnsucht.

C.S. Lewis describes sehnsucht as the “inconsolable longing” in the human heart for “we know not what.” That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of “Kubla Khan“, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves. (C. S. Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress).

* * *

The restlessness in your heart is essentially a God-yearning. Don’t confuse it with what you think you desire— finishing and publishing a beautiful book, having a successful blog, travel, stimulating friendships, the holiday cottage on the sea, let’s say.

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them,” C. S. Lewis says in “The Weight of Glory.”“These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

* * *

So listen to your restlessness. Listen to your longings. You are longing for more than Alaska, or Antarctica or the Amazon (places I would rather like to see before I die). You are longing for more than to write a beautiful book (something else I would like to do before I die).

You are really yearning for the infinite sea of God. For the ocean of God to pour into your spirit, and for your spirit to pour into the ocean of God now and in eternity. You are yearning to abide and dwell in Him, and be filled with his spirit, which Jesus says is possible in this life. The things of this world for which you think you yearn are just signposts to the things which will truly satisfy your soul.

This world, this life, which lies, “before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new,” is a gift, a love-gift from God. Its loveliness is designed to delight, but not entirely satisfy our hearts. Only the Giver can do that.

Brennan Manning on Grace (from The Ragamuffin Gospel)

By Anita Mathias

An excerpt from Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel.

Paul Tillich in The Shaking of the Foundations writes:

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life…

It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.

Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know.

Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything, do not perform anything, do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.”

If that happens to us, we experience grace.

Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (see Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last “trick,” whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school; the deathbed convert who for decades had his cake and ate it, broke every law of God and man, wallowed in lust, and raped the earth.

“But how?” we ask.

Then the voice says, “They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

There they are. There we are—the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life’s tribulations, but through it all clung to the faith.

My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace.

Inspiration from Brennan Manning’s “The Ragamuffin Gospel”

By Anita Mathias

Brennan Manning

I am listening to Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel on my iPod as I walk (on the hottest days of the year to date). And I experience grace. I allowed myself to become overweight through 3 decades of being sedentary, and eating carelessly and unthinkingly. And I get to listen to amazing stuff—the Bible, Blue Like Jazz, and The Ragamuffin Gospel—as I walk to fend off further weight gain, and with grace, burn off some unnecessary pounds.

Anyway, the rest of this post shares some of Brennan Manning’s fabulous insights from Chapter 1 of The Ragamuffin Gospel .

“As we read Psalm 123, “Just as the eyes of slave are on their masters’ hand, or the eyes of a slave-girl on the hand of her mistress,” we experience a vague sense of existential guilt. Our eyes are not on God

Our approach to the Christian life is as absurd as the enthusiastic young man who had just received his plumber’s license and was taken to see Niagara Falls. He studied it for a minute and then said, “I think I can fix this.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky caught the shock and scandal of the gospel of grace when he wrote in Crime and Punishment:

At the last Judgment Christ will say to us, “Come, you also! Come, drunkards! Come, weaklings! Come, children of shame!” And he will say to us: “Vile beings, you who are in the image of the beast and bear his mark, but come all the same, you as well.” And the wise and prudent will say, “Lord, why do you welcome them?”

And he will say: “If I welcome them, you wise men, if I welcome them, you prudent men, it is because not one of them has ever been judged worthy.” And he will stretch out his arms, and we will fall at his feet, and we will cry out sobbing, and then we will understand all, we will understand the Gospel of grace! Lord, your Kingdom come!”

I believe the Reformation actually began the day Martin Luther was praying over the meaning of Paul’s assertion that righteous shall find life through faith (see Romans 1:17). Like many Christians today, Luther wrestled through the night with this core question: How could the gospel of Christ be truly called “good news” if God is a righteous judge who rewards the good and punishes the evil? Did Jesus really have to come to reveal that terrifying message? How could the revelation of God in Christ Jesus be accurately called “news” since the Old Testament carried the same theme, or for that matter, “good” with the threat of punishment hanging like a dark cloud over the valley of history?

But as Jaroslav Pelikan notes: “Luther suddenly broke through to the insight that the “righteousness of God” that Paul spoke of in this passage was the righteousness by which for the sake of Jesus Christ, God made sinners righteous through the forgiveness of sins in justification.

When he discovered that, Luther said it was as though the very gates of Paradise had been opened to him.”

What a stunning truth!

“Justification by grace through faith” is the theologian’s learned phrase for what Chesterton once called “the furious love of God.” He has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us. He is the only God man has ever heard of who loves sinners. False gods—the gods of human manufacturing—despise sinners, but the Father of Jesus loves all, no matter what they do.

But, of course, this is almost too incredible for us to accept.

Nevertheless, the central affirmation of the Reformation stands: Through no merit of ours, but by His mercy, we have been restored to a right relationship with God through the life, and resurrection of His beloved Son. This is the Good News, the gospel of grace.

With his characteristic joie de vivre, Robert Capon puts it this way: The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen hundred-year-old, two-hundred-proof grace—of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly.

The word of the gospel—after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps—suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started… Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, nor the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.

There is always water

By Anita Mathias

Do you remember Joshua’s outrageous prayer, “Sun, stand still.”

On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel:

“O sun, stand still over Gibeon,

O moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.”

So the sun stood still,

and the moon stopped,

till the nation avenged itself on^b its enemies,

as it is written in the Book of Jashar.

The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the Lord listened to a man. Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel! Joshua 10:12

* * *

I once asked my Bible study group if they had ever prayed a huge prayer– and what happened next. And we heard a faith-building flood of stories.

And here was one which struck me. A woman told us of the time she, aged 28, was leading a team of 18 year olds on a gap year at a mission project in at an orphanage in South America. There was a drought, so tap-water was mostly unavailable. And the water ran out in the orphanage.

The 18 year olds freaked out, “What should we do; what should we do?” My friend who had no idea herself, so said, “Let’s pray.” And they did–had a little prayer meeting asking for water.

Even as they were praying, there was a knock on the door, and an old farmer they had never seen before or since, said, in Spanish, “I’ve heard you’ve run out of water. I have a well. I have come in my pick-up truck, and can take you there.” And so they scrambled into the pick-up with every container they had, and there was water.

* * *

Even in times of drought, there is always water. There is 35 times more freshwater underground than in lakes and streams. There is fresh ground water, even in desert regions. (Seriously, perhaps development charities should prioritize digging wells in drought prone regions of the world?).

I thought of Heidi Baker’s transforming vision, “There is always enough.”

And I thought: there is always water when we are sad. We might need to quieten down and dig deep within, or deep into Scripture for the water which Jesus gives, a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:14).

* * *

And as for ideas, there is no writer’s block in heaven. God is always thinking, his thoughts towards us are like the grains of sand on the seashore. Part of our job is to quieten down, get out of the way and listen.

Creative blocks are caused when we don’t tune in to God, when we don’t slow down enough to sense his smile on us and our work. (And often, when there is unforgiveness. Then we need to forgive ourselves, forgive God, and forgive all whom we perceive as contributing to the block.)

We might need to realign ourselves with Jesus for streams of creativity to flow out of us, for Jesus promised, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” (John 7:37).

* * *

We are never without water, spiritually; never without grace. The rain of grace is always available. When things seem dry, and wild fires rage, we need to ask the Holy Spirit to rain down on us, in mixed metaphor tongues of fire. And prayer for the Holy Spirit, according to Jesus, is a prayer which is always answered. (Luke 11:13)

And thanking God for what we have, for the equal opportunity blessings which persist when all seems lost, opens our eyes to the goodness of God. And restores our joy–bringing rain to our parched, ungrateful hearts!

A caterpillar in a ring of fire: Martin Luther on Grace

By Anita Mathias

Brunnhilde in the Ring of Fire, Arthur Rackham

The wonderful seventeenth century theologian, Philip Melanchton and Martin Luther and Philip Melanchton debate grace.

Melanchton says grace is like one parent helping a wobbly toddler across the room to the other parent who crouches down with an apple.

Luther says No, it’s more than that!! We are caterpillars in a ring of fire. Our only hope is that someone from above will rescue us.

So, when you feel there are impassable rings of fire around you, obstacles which seem impossible to overcome, don’t look at them, and be afraid. Look at the hand above, ready to rescue you.

Luther probably got the ring of fire from the Nibelungenlied in which Siegfried leaps over the ring of fire to rescue the beautiful Brunnhilde.

Jesus is our Siegfried.

Redeemer, redeem my heart again.