Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

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Hope for Limping Christians. Changing your Character is both an Act of Will and an Act of Grace

By Anita Mathias

2101-colorful-caterpillar

 

Neuroscientist James Fallon was (interestingly!) studying the brains of murderous psychopaths, using brain scans of his family as a control group of the healthy. He suddenly noticed the unmistakable brain scan of a psychopath among his family’s scans. Puzzled, certain it has been misfiled, he has the technician break the code. The brain of the psychopath? It was his own.

 I found that I happened to have a series of genetic alleles, “warrior genes,” that had to do with serotonin and were thought to be at risk for aggression, violence, and low emotional and interpersonal empathy, Fallon writes.

Can someone whose brain chemistry predisposes them to aggression and low empathy ever change? Fallon decides to try.

“For myself, I decided to try to treat my wife and other loved ones with more care. Each time I’m about to interact with them, I pause for a moment and asked “what would a good person do here?” My wife started noticing this and after two months said “what has come over you?” When I told her that I was trying   against all odds, overcome my psychopathy, she said she appreciated the effort even though I was not sincere…

 Even though my wife, my sister, and my mother have always been close to me, I don’t treat them all that well. They said, “I give you everything. I give you all this love and you really don’t give it back.” They all said it, and that sure bothered me. So I wanted to see if I could change. I don’t believe it, but I’m going to try.

In order to do that, every time I started to do something, I had to think about it, look at it, and go: No. Don’t do the selfish thing or the self-serving thing. Step-by-step, that’s what I’ve been doing for about a year and a half and they all like it. Their basic response is: We know you don’t really mean it, but we still like it.

I told them, “You’ve got to be kidding me. You accept this? It’s phony!” And they said, “No, it’s okay. If you treat people better it means you care enough to try.”

What Fallon is doing is behaving like a Christian, playing the game of “Let’s Pretend,” which C. S. Lewis says is essential to developing the character of Jesus.

* * *

I was mentored by a Christian who taught himself to love. He writes about it in Love Walked Among Us.

I enjoy being cheap. The amount of money is not crucial—it just feels good to save. I am the same with efficiency. I’ve caught myself spending ten minutes figuring out how to do something more efficiently when the task only takes five minutes.

Paul watched his daughter Ashley play hard; she asked for a Coke at half-time. His reaction was “to point her to the free iced water for players. Cheap and efficient.

 “But then I put myself in Ashley’s shoes,” he continues. “She’s tired. She’s played a hard game, and she wants a soda, not a glass of water. I could do that. I have money in my pocket. I could spend that money.” I even stuck a hand in my pocket and felt my change. “I could walk over to the soda machine several hundred yards away and get a soda for Ashley. Paul, this won’t kill you.” This is truly what went through my mind. I envisoned how Ashley’s face would brighten when I handed her the soda.”

* * *

I find this helpful, this left-brain figuring out how to be kind and thoughtful. If I have said something biting, or am planning to say it, it helps me to ask myself how I would feel if that were said to me. If I am annoyed with someone, I try to imaginatively enter their world, and then, usually, I instantly have more empathy.

The core of following Christ, of being a Christian, is love—love for God, Father, Jesus and Spirit; love for our fellow humans.

And yet, unfairly, love is more difficult for some than for others. I am naturally friendly, warm, empathetic and affectionate, for warm relationships come easily to me. Agape love, on the other hand, does not come easily to me. Does it come easily to anyone? I don’t know.

Someone wrapped in love from childhood, with loving parents, supportive teachers, good friends, and a sunny temperament finds being kind and loving easier. Those who have experienced trauma in their nuclear family, at school, in marriage—for them, behaving like a follower of Christ is more difficult.

  • * * *

In a brilliant chapter, “Nice People or New Men,” in Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes,

“If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is. A certain level of good conduct comes fairly easily to you. You are not one of those wretched creatures who are always being tripped up by sex, or dipsomania, or nervousness, or bad temper. Everyone says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you agree with them.

 It is very different for the nasty people, the little, low, timid, warped, thin-blooded, lonely people, or the passionate, sensual, unbalanced people. If they make any attempt at goodness at all, they learn, in double quick time, that they need help. It is Christ or nothing for them.

 But if you are a poor creature, poisoned by a wretched upbringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels, saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion, nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends, do not despair.

 He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day (perhaps in another world, but perhaps far sooner than that) he will fling it on the scrap-heap and give you a new one. And then you may astonish us all, not least yourself: for you have learned your driving in a hard school. (Some of the last will be first and some of the first will be last.)

 It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so: and at that stage the lumps on the shoulders, no one could tell by looking at them that they are going to be wings may even give it an awkward appearance.

* * *

 Some battles are fought where no banners are flying, They are fought within.

 When I was 17, I wanted to join Mother Teresa and become a nun. Not surprisingly, I struggled with the many and varied rules; in its minute control, the convent was a bit like a cult.

And so, each day, I failed, and when I did, I tearfully identified with this Jim Reeves song,

 

“The chimes of time ring out the news,

Another day is through.

Someone slipped and fell

Was that someone you?

Perhaps you longed for added strength

Your courage to renew

Do not be disheartened

I have news for you.

 

It is no secret,

What God can do,

What he’s done for others,

He’ll do for you.”

* * *

We do change. After a year of increasing physical exercise, I am so much more energetic that I often barely recognise myself. So too, spiritually and with our characters… After gradual exposure to the sunshine of God’s love, and to the tonic of God’s word, for years, for decades, we do change so that we barely recognise ourselves.

For some relative virtue comes easily. Others fight for gentleness, kindness, and equanimity.

But God sees; he knows.

A caterpillar may look at a hummingbird and envy her flight. Flight may seem impossible to the caterpillar, but one day, one day, after the trauma, darkness, and near-death of the chrysalis, she too shall fly.

Keep looking at Jesus, you who find following him difficult, keep holding his hand as you walk upon the waters; one day, perhaps sooner than you think, he shall take you to the heights.

 

 Books I’ve referred to

 The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain on Amazon.com and on Amazon.co.uk

Love Walked Among Us on Amazon.com and on Amazon.co.uk

 Mere Christianity on Amazon.com and on Amazon.co.uk

You’ll find my account of working with Mother Teresa in Wandering Between Two Worlds, available on Amazon.com

and on Amazon.co.uk

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: In which I am Amazed by Grace, In which I explore Living as a Christian, In which I resolve to live by faith Tagged With: C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity, Character change, How people change, James Fallon, Love Walked Among Us, Metanoia and metamorphosis, Mother Teresa, Nice Men or New Men, Psychopaths

Analysing my Experience of Prayer over the Last 19 Years

By Anita Mathias

alone on a lakeSo I come to my time of prayer, and I am dry and distracted. My thoughts are whirling; I cannot hear God speak, and I have nothing to say. My spirit feels numb. Prayer?

It’s as if you are having coffee with a friend you haven’t seen for a while, and you are so out of touch with her life, and she with yours, that you don’t know what to ask, don’t know what to tell, don’t know what to talk about. The conversation is leaden; you want to escape.

Keeping in touch is a sure way to better conversation, whether with God or a friend.

I pick up my pen. Since my mind cannot focus on ethereal prayer, I will write my prayers. Write my worries, my plans, and my fears. Check in with Jesus about each of them. That pathway into prayer–writing my prayers–never fails.

* * *

I write. I think. I pray. I sink, absorbed, into the quietness.

I had come to prayer so distracted, so out of touch with God, with nothing to say, my thoughts and emotions whirling restlessly.

But I had forced myself into the boat of prayer, and Christ and I together had pushed far away from shore.

It got quiet. It got peaceful. Long, still sheets of water everywhere. Slowly, a fish plopped up. A worry.

My writing?

I take that worry to God.

I don’t hear anything.

I ask the question again. So Lord, will I have a writing career, of sorts? And wait.

Slowly, clarity emerges.

I go back to my origin story. The clear call of God to write one day in 1983. A call which, for too long a time in my life, I have not been faithful to.

I will return to that. I will be faithful to my call. I will leave success and failure to him. I will keep writing. I will keep reading. I will study the craft as time permits. I will get better, that is certain. He will use my words to reach others, of that too I feel certain. I will run in my lane and leave the results of my race to him.

* * *

Other fish poke their heads out of the temporarily still sea. Our family business, and how to make it grow? My daughters’ future.

Ideas come, reassurance. Some questions remain question marks, of course. Not every answer is given in every session of prayer, but they are now question marks bathed in golden light.

I grow still and quiet. We have rowed so far from shore.

I had 36 minutes free, and so I set a timer.

When the timer goes, it is a wrench.

I have been in another country.

Without being too fanciful, I have felt the heavens part; I have felt grace rain down. I have felt the Spirit. Something has shifted in my soul. Its molecules have changed, its water become wine. I feel an expansive peace. Something of God’s life, of God’s love for me has entered into and enlarged my soul.

* * *

I have been mostly disciplined in prayer since a dark patch of disappointment in late 1996. I had been led on by an editor of a leading publishing company, who I had thought had given me a verbal assurance that he would publish my book. I had a leading agent, I thought–though we hadn’t signed.

The book I wrote was a disappointment to both of them, and, if I look at it now, will, almost certainly, be a disappointment to me. But it was written through pregnancy and early motherhood…in blood.

When, after revisions, it was still turned down, I flung myself facedown on the carpet  and thought, “I want to die.”

* * *

“I am sick,” I then said to myself. I am spiritually sick. And Jesus said he was the Physician. I need him.

And having a wee bit of a practical streak, I thought: How much prayer and Bible study do I need to have the life of God course through my soul? And that is a question Scripture is silent on. It can only be answered by trial and error, and the answer can vary. On busy days, Martin Luther said he needed three hours of prayer (rather than his usual two). I needed to find my own answer.

So I set a stopwatch, prayed and read my Bible until I was bored, and then stopped. I was not at peace, but I was growing distracted. I was discovering my baseline for prayer, just as when I began the discipline of exercise, I walked until I was tired, wrote down my distance and speed, and then began to increase both (and am still increasing them, oh yes!)

When I was 17, I wanted to become a nun, and I did for a while, joining Mother Teresa. This was the discipline of prayer there: you didn’t prolong prayer, because you found it sweet, otherwise you would soon burn out. And you do not cut it short, because you were bored, otherwise, you would quit before you got quiet, got still, repented, heard God, tasted the sweetness of it all.

The next day I set a timer for the time I had spent, and just a minute more, and went on, adding a minute a day, dividing my quiet time between prayer and Bible study. I stopped at 90 minutes–45 minutes for prayer, 45 minutes for Bible study (though, in fact, now that the girls are older, I often end up spending even longer than that in spiritual disciplines! My soul needs it!)

Over the years, I found peace. I found serenity. I got to know Jesus a whole lot better. In prayer, God suggested ways to move from Williamsburg, Virginia, where I wasn’t particularly happy, to Oxford, where I am happy. In prayer, I “heard of” a business idea which changed our lives. In prayer, I “heard” God suggest blogging, which I so love. I prayed for my dream house with a very specific wishlist, and I stumbled on an ad, and God revealed ways to just about afford it.

But all these are side effects. My character began to change, molecule by molecule, and that is one of the gratifying side effects of a life of prayer. I became a kinder person, more empathetic.

My life of prayer is not a story of remarkable worldly success. And so I cannot recommend prayer as a way to become rich, become famous, become a great writer. To take up a discipline of prayer for the worldly advantages it might confer is like marrying only for money, or only for sex, and we know all how that works out, don’t we?

T. S. Eliot looking back on the first twenty years of his life as a writer says,

Twenty years largely wasted

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure.

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s how I feel as a writer and as a pray-er.

But then, what Stephen King says about writing is equally true about prayer.

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, or getting laid, or making friends. It’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Writing is magic, the water of life. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

Prayer is everything Stephen King says writing is, and more.

It is not a sure way to worldly reward, though it has brought wealth and success to some, according to the plan of God for their lives

However, though material rewards are not guaranteed, as Jesus said, rewards are guaranteed. We pray for the fun of hanging out with Jesus, to get his take on things, to see life with his eyes, to absorb his wisdom. We pray because with the discipline of prayer comes lightness and joy. With the discipline of prayer and obedience comes peace and calm, wisdom and guidance. Water for a parched soul. Sanity. We pray so we can be enlarged by loving something larger than ourselves, and that is the Lord Jesus himself.

We pray because it is our daily bread. Jesus may choose to give some of us nutella too, and I still pray for metaphorical “nutella”, and grilled cheese and homemade blackberry jam, and according to the lane he has marked for me, the work he has given me to do in the world, and the people he has given me to influence, he may well give me some of these things. Or he may not. But tasting Jesus is fun, and joy and wisdom, and for these gifts from the discipline of prayer, I am grateful.

 

Filed Under: In which I play in the fields of prayer Tagged With: Martin Luther, Mother Teresa, Prayer, rewards of prayer, Stephen King, T.S. Eliot, the discipline of prayer, writing prayers

My Experience of The Baptism in the Holy Spirit and of Speaking in Tongues

By Anita Mathias

So here I am, stressed and anxious. Or happy, at peace and joyful.

And almost without realizing it, I find myself praying. In tongues.

* * *

How do I find myself in Oxford, England, in the 21st century, praying in tongues, this ancient First Century gift vividly described in The Acts of the Apostles?

Well, 30ish years ago, when I was 17, I was visiting my grandmother in Mangalore, a pretty Catholic seacoast town on the west coast of India, where my family was “from.”

And there was a visiting Spanish priest called Marcellino Iragui who was running a Charismatic retreat.

It was a little like the Alpha course. We went through forgiveness, repentance, renouncing occult involvement, and on the last evening, the priest prayed for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Well, I gulped it all up; I drank it all in. Not so my father, who was amused, sceptical, bored—he was 63 and there was no way he was going to take up any new enthusiasms. He flatly refused to take me to the Charismatic Crusade for another day.

* * *

And so I asked a friend who knew the priest to introduce me, and asked him for the Baptism in the Holy Spirit there and then.

(I have an instinctive distaste for rules–Anita Antinomian, my friend Paul called me–and it amuses me that even in this most holy encounter, I sought to jump the queue, and do it my way.)

“Is she hungry?” he asked my friend, Joyce Fernandes, who later became a nun at Mother Teresa’s convent. “ Oh yes!” she assured him, having no idea at all. (Indian women can be very nice!)

And so we went through the theory: forgiveness, gifts of the spirit, fruits of the spirit, and then he laid his hands on me, and prayed for the Baptism of the Spirit, having me repeat the prayers after them after him. He asked for all sorts of wonderful gifts—prophecy, healing, miracles, wisdom, knowledge. All this I was game for.

When he came to, “And Lord, please give me the gift of tongues,” I interrupted him.

“I don’t want that,” I said. “It would be too embarrassing. My family would tease me.”

“You can’t pick and choose among the gifts of God,” he said sternly.

And so we prayed. I felt nothing. I was both disappointed– a  bit “Oh well, it would have been exciting had it worked,”–and relieved.

I re-joined my father. “So are you now a Charismatic?” he said, amused by the whole business. “Have you the gift of tongues?”

“No,” I said.

We returned to my grandmother’s. “Do you have the gift of tongues?” everyone asked.

“No,” I said, with complete truthfulness.

* * *

Well, I spoke too soon. I woke that night with rushing, gushing joy, a river that felt like it would burst my heart. It was overwhelming: joy so ecstatic, so seismic, it was akin to pain.

I knelt by the side of my bed, and prayed, praising God for the beauty of the world, for Himself, for his goodness–strange, barbarous-sounding unintelligible language bursting out of me. I was praying in tongues

I prayed in tongues, and I prayed with my mind, in rapture, with emotions new to me, prayed in English and in my new spirit-language, thanking God for his incomprehensible loveliness, which I suddenly perceived. For himself

“Oh, Lord, I just praise you, I praise you, I praise you.”

* * *

And well, that language never left me. A month later, I was in Mother Teresa’s convent, as an aspirant, training to be a nun.

I asked her in a personal meeting, “Mother, what do you think about speaking in tongues?”

“One tongue is enough for a woman,” she said brusquely.

And that was that!

* * *

Well, but I still prayed in tongues; I couldn’t help it—remember that Anita Antinomian bit?–and have done so for the last 30 years.

Tense: I find myself praying in tongues. Anxious: Are we going to catch that plane?–I find myself praying in tongues.

And when my spirit soars, swells, and for no good reason I am unreasonably happy, I find myself again praying in tongues.

When I am joyful and exhilarated in my garden, or by the seashore, or on a mountain, I find myself praying in ecstatic tongues. And, more restrained but slowly coursing into peace, I pray in tongues when I am miserable

It is the greatest mood-changer, and wisdom-infuser I know. The greatest shortcut to joy.

* * *

And sadly, my spirit-tongue hasn’t changed, and, sadly, it sounds rather ugly to my years, barbaric even. It’s not Greek, or Latin, or French, languages I love. I heard a Vicar in Oxford sing in tongues once, and it sounded like Persian, something vaguely Byzantine, definitely sophisticated.

Mine, it’s a cave man tongue, heavy glottals.

And that’s just as well, for if I spoke Old French or Medieval Latin, I would have been tempted to show off about my lovely spirit language. Instead, I have kept quiet about it, and prayed quietly as God meant, no doubt, for the last thirty years.

Some people say that one’s spirit language develops as we mature. Well, I have matured spiritually (ask Roy what an angel I can be when he is impossible. Well, sometimes!), but my language has basically stayed static.

And isn’t it strange that the one gift I specifically said I didn’t want was the one gift I got? (Though, about 20 years ago, the gift of prophetic knowledge and insight began to manifest itself in me, and be recognised by others, and is now my most treasured spiritual gift.)

* * *

Rejoice always, pray constantly, in everything give thanks. How on earth is that possible?

Well, praying in tongues is one way. I pray when I go on a long walk, and flag. Or do manual work. Or in the winter when the night finds me too tired to read or write, too tired to pray coherently, but not tired enough to fall asleep.

And then the Spirit, left within my spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing my inheritance, prays in rough-hewn sounds without any words I understand, and God hears His intercession, and so I know that all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.

Image Credit

Filed Under: In which I chase the wild goose of the Holy Spirit Tagged With: glossolalia, Mangalore, Marcellino Iragui, Mother Teresa, Speaking in Tongues, The Baptism in the Holy Spirit

The Holy Ground of Kalighat

By Anita Mathias

Mother-Teresa-Nirmal-Hriday-kolkata-WBnirmal hriday

My brief memoir on volunteering with Mother Teresa is including in Philip Zaleski’s Best Spiritual Writing, and is included in my book, Wandering Between Two Worlds (amazon.com) or on amazon.co.uk

Kalighat, the Home of the Dying Destitute, was the toughest assignment in the Missionaries of Charity convent, reputedly reserved for the mature. But I was greedy for challenge and kept asking for it until I got it. The place glowed in the light of literature, the poetic accounts of Malcolm Muggeridge, Desmond Doig, and Edward Le Joly; I had to work there.

We entered the quietness of Kalighat after a long Jeep trip through Calcutta’s streets, raucous with the honking of buses and cars, the blare of radios, the shouts of vendors. We recited the rosary above the din around the Jeeps as the rule decreed we should, no matter how unpropitious our surroundings. Our voices growing hoarse and our throats parched, we trolled through the fifteen mysteries of the life of Christ.

This chanting was meant to serve as a barricade against distraction and doubt. Just as well perhaps. While we hurtled through the three-wheeled autos called “bone shakers” and snaked amid stray dogs I sometimes saw get run down (willfully? out of fathomable malice?), it was not easy to clasp simple verities: There is a God and God loves me as he loves every human on this crazy street. It was easier to believe in a “watchmaker God,” who hurled the world into motion and then absconded, a notion I had heard denounced from the pulpit as atheistic absurdity.

Hail, Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus, we chanted as our Jeep swerved through street children, trams, lorries, motorcycles, scooters, and dangerously lurching buses with youths leeching onto windows, railings, and roof. I usually kept my eyes closed. Calcutta was unnerving to a small-town girl. To open them was to contemplate the possibility that our driver would collide with rickshaws dragged by scrawny men and crammed with housewives and their purchases or hit a sacred cow or crush a child, and so cause an ugly communal riot for us to sort out. I remembered the time my father had to bail out a Jesuit professor, his colleague, who was nearly lynched when he hit a poor Hindu boy with his posh car.

Entering Kalighat is akin to entering a city church—or, for that matter, our chapel at Mother House in the center of Calcutta. You are stunned into stillness, into a guilty awareness of your racing pulse, your distracted mind. The silence shrouds you until you are aware that it is not silence, not really: There is the rustle of supplicants, the rattle of rosary beads, the breathing from bowed heads. So, in Kalighat, after your jangled spirit laps up the apparent silence, you hear soft sounds—low moaning, a tubercular cough, patients tossing in pain and restlessness.

Still, Kalighat felt like holy ground. I often sensed God in the dimness and hush of that place. Bhogobaan ekane acche, Mother Teresa whispered in Bengali as she went from bed to bed:God is here. Her creased face looked sad and sweet. This is Bhogobaan ki badi, God’s house, the sisters tell new arrivals, believing that Kalighat is sanctified in its very stones by the thousands who have died peaceful deaths there. Perhaps the light created this aura. The light spilled from high windows through a filigreed lattice, spilled into the dim room with a stippled radiance that made working there an epiphany.

In this place Malcolm Muggeridge, curmudgeonly Catholic convert, experienced what he called “the first authentic photographic miracle” as he filmed a BBC documentary on Mother Teresa in 1969. The cameraman insisted that filming was impossible inside Kalighat—dimly lit by small windows high in the walls—but reluctantly tried it. In the processed film, the shots taken inside were bathed in “a soft, exceptionally lovely light,” whereas the rest, taken in the outside courtyard as an insurance, was dim and confused. Muggeridge wrote: “I am absolutely convinced that this technically unaccountable light is Newman’s ‘Kindly Light.’ The love in Kalighat is luminous like the halos artists have seen and made visible around the heads of saints. It is not at all surprising that this exquisite luminosity should register on a photographic film.”

Perhaps Kalighat had that sense of being holy ground because it was an ancient Hindu pilgrimage site, the dormitory for pilgrims to Calcutta’s famed Kali temple. I wondered whether the devotions of generations of Hindus, no less than Catholics, had hallowed the ground. Surely, I reasoned, all kinds of God-hunger are acceptable to Christ, who chose as his symbols bread and wine, who offered his flesh to eat, his blood to drink. Perhaps what happens in a pilgrimage spot is not that God descends to earth in a shower of radiance and the earth ever after exudes his fragrance. Perhaps it is we who make spots of earth sacred when we bring our weary spirits, our thwarted hopes, the whole human freight of grief, and pray—our eyes grown wide and trusting; our being, a concentrated yearning. Perhaps that yearning, that glimpse of better things, makes the spot sacred and lingers in the earth and air and water so that future pilgrims say, “God is here.”

On our way to work, we frequently picked people off the pavements where they lay and transported them to Kalighat to die, in Mother Teresa’s phrase, “within sight of a kind face. ” “Stop,” we’d cry to the driver, who helped us carry them into the Jeep. Occasionally we picked up a drunk, who cursed us on his return to consciousness. Most people we picked up were as emaciated as famine victims; they lay limp on the pavements, a feeble hand outstretched for alms. And yet there was no famine in Calcutta; our prime minister protested that nobody, simply nobody, dies of starvation in India.

These people had probably worked all their lives. But in a land where it’s not easy to find work that pays a living wage, to survive is enough. For an illiterate worker, saving money is a nearly impossible dream. “Naked they came into the world, naked they depart,” as Job mourned. Many end their lives destitute on Calcutta’s streets. They waste away as they grow too weak or sick to scavenge for themselves or root for food in the open garbage dumps.

For these people who are kicked aside, cursed, and ignored, Kalighat is an inexplicable miracle, a last-minute respite, a stepping-stone into grace. In her speeches, Mother loved to quote the dying man she brought to Kalighat from Calcutta—”All my life I have lived like a dog, but now I die like an angel”—which was, perhaps, just what he said or, perhaps, a composite of many experiences.

Kalighat consists of two L-shaped wards accommodating about sixty men and women, with rows of low cots snuggled into every cranny. The Missionary Brothers of Charity, the male branch of the order, founded by Brother Andrew, an Australian ex-Jesuit, serve in the male ward; they sponge patients, change soiled clothes, hack off elongated and hardened toenails. When I entered the male ward to dispense medication, I would see these sweet, serious, humble, and hardworking men. Perhaps I perceived them in clichés since I never actually talked to them; a novice does not hobnob with men. We novices mainly worked in the female ward, an oblong room bathed in dim light from the beautiful white-filigreed windows.

Iris, a tubercular Anglo-Indian patient, was Kalighat’s presiding Fury. She hobbled all over the ward on her walking stick, which she thrashed around when enraged. Her puckered brown face was a maze of hate lines, and as she limped, she cursed: “Those bloody Muddses, I hate those swine…”

“What’s the matter, Iris?” people asked, mocking her—for everyone knew her story by heart and was fed up with it. And as if it were new every morning, she’d repeat her tale of the Muddses, her distant relatives who, in her old age, evicted her from her house and pushed her down the stairs, breaking her leg.

“Those bloody Muddses,” she muttered, her rosary of hate. She was fond of me and would stroke me, telling me that I was nice, her smile surprisingly sweet. Everyone had to be very good to me when Iris was around, or she would brandish her stick at them, reprimanding, “No, this is a nice sister.” Poor Iris, balladeer of old grievances, anger always at boiling point for old wrongs. Her grudges had driven her crazy, devastating her long past the original injury. I often talked to her, asking her about her childhood in pre-independence India, to try to divert her mind from the injustices over which it obsessively brooded. I realized how wise Mother Teresa was when she admonished, “Forgive. Never allow yourself to become bitter. Bitterness is like cancer; it feeds on itself. It grows and grows.”

Sadness also grew in Kalighat. One round-faced old lady, too weak to feed herself, kept pushing away my hand that waited with the next spoonful of rice. While I tried vainly to feed her, we talked. Her son had deposited her on the streets, where the sisters had eventually picked her up. “I haven’t seen my three sons in years,” she cried.

I gave up on the rice and fed her the mango. She loved that. She fixed her eyes on the diminishing fruit, then asked for more. There was no more. So I folded the skin in two and drew it between her lips, again and again, until she had sucked the last drops of juice. Suddenly, her eyes lit up with love. Tears streamed down her face. She caught me, pulled me to her, and rocked me in an embrace, crying, “Ma. Ma. Ma,” her mind reverting to childhood, her face grown baby sweet.

I hugged her back, not even trying to remember if she was tubercular, forgetting my mask and mycobacterium tuberculosis spread by the respiratory route. During that insomniac night, I thought of her. The next evening, I sneaked out a mango from the convent kitchen and concealed it in my saree. I went straight to her bed. It was covered with a white sheet. She had died in the night.

Death was a constant in Kalighat, that home in the temple of the goddess of death. Only the ostensibly dying were admitted. About half recovered with rest, medication, and nourishing food. For the rest, this was the end. When we entered the ward, stark white sheets, the color of mourning in India, covered the beds of those who had died the previous night. In the face of death, its inevitability, how trivial much of life seemed. “Teach us to number our days,” the psalmist cried, “that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” I realized why the novice-mistresses preached detachment to us. Guard your heart, I admonished to myself, chary of emotional involvement with one who might soon be a corpse in the morgue or burnt to ashes on the shore of the River Ganges.

In a place like Kalighat, perspective is everything. My parents, on their monthly visits, complained that it was a grim place, daunting and unpleasant—and so it is until its strange charm, its eerie radiance, works on you. I loved Kalighat for its tiny miracles. An old, almost bald woman with a shriveled face occupied a bed in a corner. When she could sit up, she’d curse all within earshot. She spat gobs of yellow phlegm all over the floor, perversely ignoring her spittoon. Once, as I tried to feed her, she lost her temper and slapped me, sending my glasses flying across the ward.

Dealing with her was not a pleasure. So the other patients had often eaten their dinners and fallen asleep before she was brought her tray of gruel and boiled vegetables. One evening, chiding myself for my fastidiousness, I braced myself and took her tray to her. As I approached, she smiled, and her face glowed. No one had ever seen her smile. I hugged the memory to myself as a shaft of grace—though perhaps it was a trick of the light.

But I remembered Gerard Manley Hopkins, my favorite poet:

Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Most patients in Kalighat, too old or too weak to walk, crept around the ward or to the bathroom while squatting on their haunches, slowly moving one tired leg after the other. Since their diseases were highly infectious—cholera, typhoid, and especially tuberculosis—we had to be vigilant. Sister Luke, the stern-faced nurse who ran Kalighat, ordered us to use masks all the time we were in the ward. These we sewed ourselves, a double strip of thick cotton cloth that covered the nose and mouth. I often disobeyed orders and dispensed with my mask, partly because my smile helped in this difficult work with difficult people. (Months later at home, when I grew too weak to get out of bed and coughed blood, dread symptom, and X rays revealed a shadow on the lungs, first sign of TB, I looked back on those days of idiotic, uncalled-for faith with bemusement. I then had a sense of inviolability, common to children and puppies, a half-conscious sense that providence would protect the simple-hearted—and the foolish.)

The actual work dispelled any vestigial illusions of the glamour of being a Florence Nightingale of light and mercy. I often forced myself through the chores by sheer willpower. I reminded myself that I had decided to imitate Christ, and to be a saint in the tradition of Francis, Damien, Schweitzer, and Dooley, as I fought nausea and changed sheets fouled by the stools of those with cholera or dysentery.

Why do you do it? Monica, an intense, curly-headed, West German volunteer—an atheist—asked. No one assigned me this chore. (On the contrary, as one of the better-educated sisters, I was allotted the more “prestigious” jobs, which required some expertise: to give the patients their daily medications and injections, to set up and administer an intravenous drip when a patient was admitted delirious with typhoid or with the withered skin, sunken eyes, and icy hands of the cholera victim.) No, I chose. I was struck by the paradigm of Christ, “who, though he was rich, yet he became poor.” Born amid a stable’s dung, as literally as we cleaned feces; homeless during his ministry; dying naked on the cross. Come follow me. “One must go down, as low down as possible to find God, ” I reasoned with an eighteen-year-old’s intensity. And to what did I equate God? Joy. Certainty. Peace.

The romance of the spiritual life, its pilgrim’s progress through internal hills and valleys, shed a gleam on everyday chores—washing clothes and windows or scrubbing the stainless steel plates left pyramided on the courtyard floor after the patients’ evening meal. We hoisted up our sarees (a rare glimpse of legs) and squatted on our haunches to scrub the endless pile of plates with a piece of coconut husk and our homemade detergent, ashes and soap shavings. Western volunteers helped, professing amazement at our primitive methods of washing clothes and dishes. “Mother Teresa has been offered dishwashers and washing machines many times and has refused. Mother says that we should live just like the poorest of the poor to be able to understand them.” I’d parrot this explanation, smugly and self-righteously—repressing my annoyance at her rigidity on the many days that I was exhausted.

The new admission was brought in on a stretcher—a young girl with a prematurely haggard face, her hair an uncombed matted mass that I could see we’d have to cut off. How to unravel it? When I undressed her to bathe her, I saw that her thighs were bloodstained, her vulva a raw, feces-encrusted sore. I involuntarily moved back at the stench. A group of men had slashed her crotch with blades, she said.

“Why did they do that?” I asked, ignorant of perversion. I gathered from her faltering reply in Bengali that she had been forced into prostitution, and that there were all sorts….

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

She was my age. I stood, staring at the raw flesh, wondering what to do first, when Sister Luke appeared. She pushed me aside, her long serious face grim. “Go away, child, go away,” she growled, as she bent her lank body down to the patient, sponging her down swiftly. Sister Luke later explained that the girl had venereal disease, something I’d never encountered before.

Sister Luke was good-hearted, but her volatile temper and gruff, no-nonsense manners scared patients, novices, and volunteers alike. My parents, visiting, were shocked and upset to hear her scream at the patients. Indeed, her manner was far from the ideal for workers in the Home of Dying Destitute that Mother Teresa recommended in the Constitution: We train ourselves to be extremely kind and gentle in touch of hand, tone of voice, and in our smile so as to make the mercy of God very real and to induce the dying person to turn to God with filial confidence.

Since she perceived me as responsible, Sister Luke, a trained nurse, entrusted me with deciphering the doctor’s scribbled prescriptions and doling out the evening medication. I also gave the injections and intravenous drips when I came on duty. In the absence of professionals, we picked up the elements of nursing from one another. I am sometimes appalled remembering our amateurishness, but then I recall that we looked after people we carried in from the streets, whom no one else cared about, and that we did alleviate their pain.

One evening, I balanced a tray of medicine—chloramphenicol, ampicillin, streptomycin, para-aminoslicyclic acid, isonazid—sorted out in little cups, in one hand as I rushed from the office to begin my rounds. I tripped. Hundreds of pink, white, and parti-colored pills raced over the floor. Sister Luke had locked the medicine cupboard. Too terrified to ask her for a fresh dose for the 120 patients, I began to pick the pills off the floor, intending to use them anyway. The colored or unusually shaped pills were easy to separate. I slowed down at the homogenized mass of white pills, fond hope and guesswork intermingling as I sorted, when Nemesis descended.

“What are you doing?” Sister Luke stood over me, her hands on her hips.

I told her.

“You blessed child. You stupid child,” she shrieked, throwing the tray into the trash, cups and all, tossing me her keys to get a fresh dose.

Sister Luke had probably sworn freely before she became a nun. Now, she ingeniously transmuted worldly expletives into heavenly ones. “Get the blessed bedpan to that blessed patient,” she’d scream. Sister Luke was admired, almost hero-worshiped, by all who worked in Kalighat—she was dedicated, efficient, and unpretentious—so “blessed” became a common expletive for all “Lukies.”

For the first few weeks, I scrupulously followed the doctor’s charts as I gave the patients their medication. But as the medicine and dosages grew familiar, I began to trust my memory. Teachers and friends had often commented on my “photographic memory,” and I was proud of it. I made a point of smiling at Krishna, an emaciated, pale-skinned teenager with close-cropped hair, as I gave her medicine. (“Smile five times a day at people you do not feel like smiling at. Do it for world peace, “Mother Teresa said. I’d cheat, though, selecting targets whom I liked, at least a little.)

Too frail to sit up, Krishna lay on propped-up pillows, a faint smile on her face, her eyes huge and haunted. She looked classically tubercular, like Severn’s portrait of the dying Keats.

One evening, Krishna shivered feverishly, face flushed, eyes streaming. Her forehead burned. The thermometer read 106, the highest I’d ever recorded.

I went to Sister Luke. “Sister, the girl with TB has a very high temperature.”

“Which girl?”

“Krishna.”

“Krishna!” she laughed. “You know, Krishna was severely malnourished when she was brought to us. She looked as gaunt as a TB patient. We thought she was going to die. But she is recovering nicely. I think we will be able to discharge her soon. You say she is sick?”

Malnutrition! I flushed. Krishna was not sick. She had starved. And I had given her the dosage of isoniazid for a severely tubercular patient. Sister Luke had urged restraint with these potent drugs, cautioning us of the side effects.

“Krishna is feverish,” I mumbled, and slunk away, stunned, too cowardly to tell her what I’d done. If I have to confess, I will, but please, oh, God, oh, God, heal her.

A Calcutta volunteer doctor was at work. I feigned jocularity. “So Doctor, what happens if you take drugs for TB when you don’t have TB?”

“You want to kill yourself, Sister? You could pop off. That’s potent stuff.”

I had guessed that already; why did I ask? Miserable, remorseful about my hubris, I dashed to Krishna’s bedside with paracetamol for her fever and laid my hands on the surprised girl’s head. “Now, Krishna, listen. You are not feeling well, right? I’m going to pray for you. Right now.” I prayed desperately, imploring for her life.

No result. I had other duties, but every few minutes I stole to Krishna’s bedside, praying for her, for a miracle. Gradually Krishna’s fever subsided.

I felt close to Krishna after all this. The severely malnourished girl had grown too weak to walk. And since she lay all day on her jute-strung cot, her legs atrophied. As she grew stronger, I helped her to walk again, walking beside her, her arms around my shoulders, or walking in front of her, holding her hands, until she regained balance and confidence and strength.

Krishna walked, shakily but unaided, before I left Mother Teresa’s congregation. I saw her discharged, another Lazarus restored, another woman returned to Calcutta’s Darwinian struggle for survival, but with an ounce of hope. Just one drop removed from the ocean of misery— but the ocean would be greater were it not there.

(From Notre Dame magazine; reprinted in The Best Spiritual Writing 1999, edited by Philip Zaleski. Used by arrangement with HarperSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright 1998 by Anita Mathias)

Read the rest of my autobiographical essays in Wandering Between Two Worlds (amazon.com) or on amazon.co.uk

Filed Under: In Which my Blog Morphs into Memoir and Gets Personal Tagged With: Calcutta, Kalighat, Kolkota, Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa, Nirmal Hriday

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Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India

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Wandering Between Two Worlds: Essays on Faith and Art

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Francesco, Artist of Florence: The Man Who Gave Too Much

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The Story of Dirk Willems

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Premier Digital Awards 2015 - Finalist - Blogger of the year
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Recent Posts

  • Change your Life by Changing your Thinking
  • Do Not Be Afraid–But Be as Wise as a Serpent
  • Our Failures are the Cracks through which God’s Light Enters
  • The Whole Earth is Full of God’s Glory
  • Mindfulness is Remembering the Presence of Christ with Us
  • “Rosaries at the Grotto” A Chapter from my newly-published memoir, “Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India.”
  • An Infallible Secret of Joy
  • Thoughts on Writing my Just-published Memoir, & the Prologue to “Rosaries, Reading, Secrets”
  • Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India. My new memoir
  •  On Not Wasting a Desert Experience

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Edna O'Brien

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C S Lewis

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From my meditation on being as wise as a serpent h From my meditation on being as wise as a serpent https://anitamathias.com/2023/03/13/do-not-be-afraid-but-be-wise-as-a-serpent/
What is the wisdom Jesus recommends?
We go out as sheep among wolves,Christ says.
And, he adds, dangerously some wolves are dressed like sheep. 
They seem respectable-busy charity volunteers, Church people.
Oh, the noblest sentiments in the noblest words,
But they drain you of money, energy, time, your lifeblood. 
How then could a sheep, the most defenceless creature on earth,
Possibly be safe, among wolves,
Particularly wolves disguised in sheep’s clothing?
A sheep among wolves can be safe 
If it keeps its eyes on its Shepherd, and listens to him.
Check in with your instincts, and pay attention to them, 
for they can be God’s Spirit within you, warning you. 
Then Jesus warns his disciples, those sheep among wolves.
Be as wise, as phronimos as a serpent. 
The koine Greek word phronimos
means shrewd, sensible, cautious, prudent.
These traits don’t come naturally to me.
But if Christ commands that we be as wise as a serpent,
His Spirit will empower us to be so.
A serpent is a carnivorous reptile, 
But animals, birds and frogs are not easily caught.
So, the snake wastes no energy in bluster or self-promotion.
It does not boast of its plans; it does not show-off.
It is a creature of singular purpose, deliberate, slow-moving
For much of its life, it rests, camouflaged,
soaking in the sun, waiting and planning.
It’s patient, almost invisible, until the time is right
And then, it acts swiftly and decisively.
The wisdom of the snake then is in waiting
For the right time. It conserves energy,
Is warmed by the sun, watches, assesses, 
and when the time is right, it moves swiftly
And very effectively. 
However, as always, Jesus balances his advice:
Be as wise as a serpent, yes, but also as blameless 
akeraios  as a dove. As pure, as guileless, as good. 
Be wise, but not only to provide for yourself and family
But, also, to fulfil your calling in the world,
The one task God has given you, and no one else
Which you alone, and no one else, can do, 
And which God will increasingly reveal to you,
as you wait and ask.
Hi Friends, Here's a meditation is on the differen Hi Friends, Here's a meditation is on the difference between fear and prudence. It looks at Jesus's advice to be as wise as a serpent, but as blameless as dove. Wise as a serpent... because we go out as sheep among wolves... and among wolves disguised in sheep's clothing.
A meditation on what the wisdom of the snake is... wisdom I wish I had learned earlier, though it's never too late.
Subscribe on Apple podcasts, or on my blog, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's widely available. Thanks
https://anitamathias.com/2023/03/13/do-not-be-afraid-but-be-wise-as-a-serpent/
Once she was a baby girl. And now, she has, today, Once she was a baby girl. And now, she has, today, been offered her first job as a junior doctor. Delighted that our daughter, Irene, will be working in Oxford for the next two Foundation years. Oxford University Hospitals include the John Radcliffe Hospital, and the Churchill Hospital, both excellent.
But first she’s leaving to work at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto for two months for her elective. 
Congratulations, Irene! And God bless you!
https:/ Images from a winter in Oxford—my belove https:/ Images from a winter in Oxford—my beloved book group, walks near Christ Church, and Iffley, and a favourite tree, down the country lane, about two minutes from my house. I love photographing it in all weathers. 
And I've written a new meditation--ah, and a deeply personal one. This one is a meditation on how our failures provide a landing spot for God's power and love to find us. They are the cracks through which the light gets in. Without our failures, we wouldn't know we needed God--and so would miss out on something much greater than success!!
It's just 6 minutes, if you'd like to listen...and as always, there's a full transcript if you'd like to read it. Thank you for the kind feedback on the meditations I've shared already.
https://anitamathias.com/2023/03/03/our-failures-are-the-cracks-through-which-gods-light-enters/
So last lot of photos from our break in Majorca. F So last lot of photos from our break in Majorca. First image in a stalagmite and stalactite cave through which an undergroun river wended—but one with no trace of Gollum.
It’s definitely spring here… and our garden is a mixture of daffodils, crocus and hellebores.
And here I’ve recorded a short 5 minute meditation on lifting our spirits and practising gratitude by noticing that the whole world is full of God’s glory. Do listen.
https://anitamathias.com/2023/02/24/the-whole-earth-is-full-of-gods-glory/
Our family was in Majorca for 9 sunny days, and he Our family was in Majorca for 9 sunny days, and here are some pictures.
Also, I have started a meditation podcast, Christian meditation with Anita Mathias. Have a listen. https://anitamathias.com/2023/02/20/mindfulness-is-remembering-the-presence-of-christ-with-us/
Feedback welcome!
If you'll forgive me for adding to the noise of th If you'll forgive me for adding to the noise of the world on Black Friday, my memoir ,Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India, is on sale on Kindle all over the world for a few days. 
Carolyn Weber (who has written "Surprised by Oxford," an amazing memoir about coming to faith in Oxford https://amzn.to/3XyIftO )  has written a lovely endorsement of my memoir:
"Joining intelligent winsomeness with an engaging style, Anita Mathias writes with keen observation, lively insight and hard earned wisdom about navigating the life of thoughtful faith in a world of cultural complexities. Her story bears witness to how God wastes nothing and redeems all. Her words sing of a spirit strong in courage, compassion and a pervasive dedication to the adventure of life. As a reader, I have been challenged and changed by her beautifully told and powerful story - so will you."
The memoir is available on sale on Amazon.co.uk at https://amzn.to/3u0Ib8o and on Amazon.com at https://amzn.to/3u0IBvu and is reduced on the other Amazon sites too.
Thank you, and please let me know if you read and enjoy it!! #memoir #indianchildhood #india
Second birthday party. Determinedly escaping! So i Second birthday party. Determinedly escaping!
So it’s a beautiful November here in Oxford, and the trees are blazing. We will soon be celebrating our 33rd wedding anniversary…and are hoping for at least 33 more!! 
And here’s a chapter from my memoir of growing up Catholic in India… rosaries at the grotto, potlucks, the Catholic Family Movement, American missionary Jesuits, Mangaloreans, Goans, and food, food food…
https://anitamathias.com/2022/11/07/rosaries-at-the-grotto-a-chapter-from-my-newly-published-memoir-rosaries-reading-steel-a-catholic-childhood-in-india/
Available on Amazon.co.uk https://amzn.to/3Apjt5r and on Amazon.com https://amzn.to/3gcVboa and wherever Amazon sells books, as well as at most online retailers.
#birthdayparty #memoir #jamshedpur #India #rosariesreadingsecrets
Friends, it’s been a while since I blogged, but Friends, it’s been a while since I blogged, but it’s time to resume, and so I have. Here’s a blog on an absolutely infallible secret of joy, https://anitamathias.com/2022/10/28/an-infallible-secret-of-joy/
Jenny Lewis, whose Gilgamesh Retold https://amzn.to/3zsYfCX is an amazing new translation of the epic, has kindly endorsed my memoir. She writes, “With Rosaries, Reading and Secrets, Anita Mathias invites us into a totally absorbing world of past and present marvels. She is a natural and gifted storyteller who weaves history and biography together in a magical mix. Erudite and literary, generously laced with poetic and literary references and Dickensian levels of observation and detail, Rosaries is alive with glowing, vivid details, bringing to life an era and culture that is unforgettable. A beautifully written, important and addictive book.”
I would, of course, be delighted if you read it. Amazon.co.uk https://amzn.to/3gThsr4 and Amazon.com https://amzn.to/3WdCBwk #joy #amwriting #amblogging #icecreamjoy
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