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The Life-Changing Practice of Meditation

By Anita Mathias

So, a couple of years ago, almost on a whim, my husband Roy and I took an intensive eight week course in Mindfulness at the Oxford Department of Psychiatry! (and at the famous local psychiatric hospital, the Warneford!!)

I didn’t really know what Mindfulness was, but I “knew,” we should do it. You can imagine how annoyed Roy felt!!

As it turned out, it was an amazing course, filled with many new ways of thinking and being. We learned and practiced different meditations such as the body scan, walking meditation, meditations when experiencing difficult things, and mindful movement (i.e. yoga, “yoga is meditation.”) While, unsurprisingly, not many stuck, those that did were life-changing!

I am learning the art of stopping and taking a breath, though the three step breathing space, a four minute meditation. It sometimes feels as if I am too busy, too stressed, too behind, running too late, to stop and take a few minutes to just breathe for heaven’s sake… but doing that settles my mind and then I am so much more effective. In fact, it is a cure for the racing mind, the busy heart, and the slumbering spirit…stop, breathe, calm the mind.

“Sitting meditation” is what I practice most often. Forty minutes, the optimal meditation session, takes you, your mind, body, and spirit to another, generally peaceful and joyful state, and I aim to spend forty minutes a day on meditation, though I do it according to need—sometimes two sets of twenty minutes which some teachers say yields maximum benefits, sometimes four sets of ten minutes which calms me and gives focus before I work, or deal with difficult tasks, thoughts, and emotions.

I found learning meditation so helpful that Roy and I are currently doing a 12 week advanced course in Mindfulness at the Warneford, led by Willem Kuyken, Oxford Professor of Mindfulness; it’s a mind-changing and joyful experience.

So here are some personal benefits I have experienced over the last two years of regular meditation, some of them accidental and unexpected!

1 Better Sleep

I often listen to a guided meditation by Mark Williams or Jon Kabat-Zinn to calm my mind, which usually has a hundred thoughts, questions, and things to resolve. I am calm and sleepy by the end of it and drift off to sleep easily. Meditation for me is a gateway into sleep.

2 Focus and Creativity

I frequently meditate, just for ten minutes, before beginning to write, and it helps focus my mind. It is a brilliant investment of time. I was interested to read that Juval Noah Harari who condensed the history of humanity into Sapiens, 464 bestselling pages meditates for two hours a day, and says he would not have been able to  focus on the important themes and events in the morass of world history without the practice of meditation.

If my mind is scattered and distracted, meditating before I settle down to write helps me focus, an essential skill for creative work in this culture in which the internet, with its invitations to distraction, its gratification of idle curiosity, and its addictive dopamine surges make focus more difficult.

3 Weight Loss

This is possibly an accidental benefit, a synergistic, serendipitous connection… though perhaps not. But since I started meditation in May 2017, I have lost 30 pounds, over two stone.

One day, I realised that my Fitbit showed that my weight had dropped for each week I had been meditating, and hypothesized a connection. Then I worked with a health coach, who suggested  meditating twice a day for 20 minutes (to lower cortisol, the stress hormone which prevents weight loss) and texting her after each session.

I have now pretty much broken the habit of emotional eating and snacking, and though I have more weight to lose, I am hopeful because your trajectory is more important than where you currently are. And I am trying to eat more mindfully, actually savouring food.

4 Relief of chronic pain

I had crippling, life-affecting pain from sciatica for over a year (and, amazingly, was healed from chronic pain after an Oxford Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery PRAYED for me in church!!!).

I worked with a health coach and got Sports Massages, but then she tried removing the pain without placing her hands on me, but simply by meditating with me… and, lo and behold, it worked.

So I used meditation when pain gripped me. It calmed the mind, it relaxed the body, and, astonishingly, pain left while I focused on my breath. The benefits of meditation for chronic pain have been well-documented by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and in this Atlantic article, for instance.

5 A Pathway into Prayer

For me, meditation is a pathway into prayer. Sometimes, my mind is racing, and my emotions feel turbulent, and I know it would take a long time to settle down to prayer. So I do a ten or twenty minute guided meditation until I am calm enough to enter the presence of Jesus.

I used to calm myself and resolve things through prayer, but prayer for me can be work; it’s conversation; it takes energy, and, at night, it uses the mind which I want to simmer down. Meditation, especially the two practices I use most often, Sitting Meditation, and Lying Down Meditation, calms the mind and body, and creates the necessary conditions for fruitful prayer, which for me happens when I actually “see” the face of Jesus, and am in his presence.

6 Problem-Solving.

I love the “Sitting with Difficulties Meditation.”  You get super-calm through breathing, and then face the difficulty…an emotion, task, person or situation. It is a half an hour meditation, and during the course of it, I usually know exactly what I should do about the difficulty, and what the next steps should be. If it is an inter-personal hassle, sometimes I have a better understanding of the person’s behaviour, and more compassion, and forgiveness comes more easily. Sometimes, I just take the difficulty and leave it in God’s hands to do what he wants with it. It functions as a Serenity Prayer, accepting the things I cannot change, and changing the things I can. And it cuts problems down to size. Some annoying situations and random people one can just blow off.

7 Emotional and Mental Health

Meditation helps me calm my emotions, and achieve a (sometimes temporary) serenity from which productivity flows. It gives me space to confront my thoughts and the emotional niggles and dissatisfactions which otherwise would be shoved underground to emerge in a perhaps harmful form.  When under stress, a 20 minute guided meditation is a way of checking out, like taking a small boat out to sea, and when I return, I am so much calmer.

Emotional health is not something I have focused on… In my teens and twenties, I focused on my intellectual life, reading, reading, reading; in my thirties and forties, I began to focus on my interior and spiritual life. A health breakdown, almost five years ago, made me begin to take my physical health seriously. And now, I am also trying to be more cognisant of my emotional life, not just interrogating what I think about people, situations, projects, commitments, holiday destinations, but also what I feel about them, for emotions, the iceberg beneath the surface, control more of our actions and behaviour than we realise. Our intuition and emotions carry a lot of wisdom, for perhaps the heart, the gut, the unconscious is smarter than our thinking mind.

8 Connecting with the Body

Meditation is teaching me to reconnect with the body, and its wisdom and signals. Hey, Anita, your stomach is tightening, your breath is constricting, be careful of this person, this situation, this commitment, this demand. Hey Anita, your heart is beating faster, your mind is racing. Stop. Meditate. Slow down. Slow down.

Thoughts create actual molecules in our bodies, raising levels of stress hormones like cortisol or adrenaline, bonding hormones like oxytocin, or “happy chemicals” like the neurotransmitters serotonin or dopamine. Just as bodily tension or pain stresses the mind, the mind causes psychosomatic physical pain and tension. Meditation calms both mind and body, increasing both physical and mental health and productivity through the power of the mind.

9 Learning to be Present

This is something I am beginning to learn, but the practice of paying attention, though practices like the body scan teaches me to come into my body and just be present… for instance, when I am physically uncomfortable or bored in Yoga class, or in social or group situations. It is so rare in our distracted age to either listen or be listened to with full attention that increasingly people pay therapists big bucks to do just that.  The practice of meditation is helping me learn to be really present, and really listen to people with my full attention, and, of course, when you do that you learn far more than what they saying, for, unless you are dealing with a practised con-person, the eyes, face, and body speak their own language.

How can you learn to meditate?

I went to classes. However, if you need to learn promptly or haven’t the time or finance right now, I’d suggest

Mark Williams’ wonderful book Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World which has a meditation CD included, on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

Or Jon Kabat-Zinn’s great and encyclopaedic book Full Catastrophe Living on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Or Jon Kabat-Zinn’s magisterial meditation CDs on Amazon.com or on Amazon.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: random Tagged With: Chronic Pain, Creativity, Emotional Health, focus, jon kabat-zinn, Mark Williams, meditation, mental health, Mindfulness, peace, Prayer, Productivity, sleep, weight loss

Writing and Prayer

By Anita Mathias

“Writing and Prayer” was published in an earlier version as “Learning to Pray,” in The Christian Century, March 22nd, 2000. Reproduced in Religion Online, and many other places.

This is from my book Wandering Between Two Worlds, available  on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and Amazon.in

* * *

Writing and Prayer.  We read about them, write about them, talk about them, agonize about them, resolve to do them, wish we’d done them, more than we actually do them.  In this they resemble other pursuits that people overestimate the intensity, frequency, and duration of–reading, and sex.

Both writing and prayer are archaic, anachronistic, against the grain of modern life, solitary and often heartbreaking, embarked on without the certainty of fruit.   Both demand an expenditure, an apparent waste of time, that’s like a waste of self.  Bill Gates in Time magazine: “In terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient.  There’s a lot more I could be doing on Sunday morning.”  Of course, of course.  Making art is not the most efficient use of time either when it comes to tangible economic rewards.  It’s working in the darkness with no guarantees of success, publication, or “fame, money, and the love of beautiful people.”  Now or ever.  It’s working with blind faith, stubborn hope, dumb love.

 

The tiny stunted wings of the flightless cormorant of the Galapagos are useless for flying.  Yet with hazy, ancestral memories of flight, it spends much of its time standing on rocks near the shore spreading its vestigial wings out to dry in the sun, just as flying cormorants do.  Flapping wings with a sense of futility, a foreboding of failure.  That’s how we feel on the brink of something difficult, but exhilarating like writing or prayer.  But if the wind suddenly lifted the bird and it sailed through the skies, effortlessly, beautifully–well, that’s like flight into the realm where the right words in the right order surprise like a free gift; ideas cascade, inevitable as a cataract; and each sentence sings; or in prayer when “so great a sweetness flows in the breast that we must laugh and we must sing, we are blest by everything, everything we look upon is blest.”

 

In both prayer and writing, these blessed states are partly a free gift, and partly earned: we travail to forge the metal which lightning may strike.  Both take a quiet life, hard work, and sacrifice.  Henry James captures the pain: “If one would do the best he can with his pen, there is one word he must inscribe on his banner, and that word is solitude.”  Though there have, of course, been gregarious writers–I think of Trollope who treasured the social success, the club life, and the friends his writing brought him–and though friendships bring insight, knowledge, self-knowledge, and growth, my own experience echoes T.S. Eliot in “Ash Wednesday,” “Where shall the word be found, where will the word/ Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.”  Conversations echo in my head, a dissonance drowning out my own thoughts.  Too much extroversion robs me of the inner quiet necessary to view my life sanely, leave alone to revise it.  In fact, my writing and my thinking are inversely proportional to my social life.

“Be still and know that I am God,” echoes an Old Testament imperative.  In the Book of Kings, the Lord appeared to the prophet Elijah, not  in “the great and powerful wind that tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks,” not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but in “a gentle whisper.”  A whisper, easily drowned in the tumult of an overambitious schedule.  The Quaker writer, Richard Foster, extols the otium sanctum, “holy leisure,” of the Church Fathers.  “If we expect to succeed in the contemplative arts, we must pursue “holy leisure” with a determination that is ruthless to our date books,” he says.

Holy Leisure.  It is indeed the best soil for writing or prayer: a considered, underscheduled and  life with fallow hours, and pruned activities, commitments, friends.  It’s important especially for women, trained to be “nice,” to perfect the difficult art of saying No, resisting the blandishments to busyness, “giving back to the community,” taking your turn, doing your fair share.  Not to do as much as–possibly–you can, but to live with “the broad margin to life,” Thoreau praises, thus making space for the new idea, the transforming insight.  When I look at Vermeer’s paintings, the girl pausing in the midst of quiet work to gaze out of the window and muse, I think: That is how I want to live my life, softly, meditatively, reverently.  Coming to the quietness has a cost, of course, the cost of the loneliness that wrenches you when the quietness you have courted seems more than you can bear.  Precious, costly, and priceless, that holy loneliness, carved out and set apart from the dead wood of lunches, dinner parties, and talk, talk, talk.

 

We enter the realm of paradoxes.  Though we need solitude to pray, prayer returns to the engagement of love.  The refrain of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” long embroidered into samplers declares, “He prayeth well who loveth well/ Both man and bird and beast./  He prayeth best who loveth best/ All things both great and small.”  John, Jesus’ beloved friend, gives us two yardsticks to gauge our spirituality–growing love for God, growing love for the people in our lives.  Real prayer does not so much change God’s mind as it changes us, slowly, almost imperceptibly.  And in the quietness of prayer, we learn the arts of kindness.  Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation: “It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers.  The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them.  It is pure affection and filled with reverence for the solitude of others.  Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.”

And though there have been splendid lyric poets like Emily Dickinson who were essentially recluses, drawing inspiration from the certain slant of light on winter afternoons, much of the inexhaustible art like Hamlet, Lear, Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, or Wuthering Heights that shares its wisdom and beauty with you afresh on each encounter, springs from the empathy from which Flaubert declares, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”  That’s interesting considering a writer’s actual work, faced with the blank page, is quiet to the point of sensory deprivation.  Just as a foreigner sees the quirks and oddities of a country more clearly than the native, the person who deliberately seeks solitude gains clear-sightedness.  I like that line of Yeats, “And eyes by solitary thought made aquiline.”

 

Whether one seeks to be an artist or a contemplative, discipline, mundane word, must channel the streams of sweetness that surprise, whether “inspiration,” or the rapturous insights of contemplation.  We’ve heard the metaphor: inspiration, like lightning, strikes where it wills, whom it wills.  But if anything lasting, anything lovely, is to remain after its sudden blazing descent, there is no substitute for the long hours of learning a craft.  This apprenticeship teaches us to tame a torrent of ideas in sinuous, sinewy sentences, in the essay’s narrow room.  (And, as with any craft, and this is one of life’s unfairnesses, there are the naturals who absorb the tricks of the trade rapidly, as if by osmosis, and others, of whom I am one, who learn them slowly, arduously).

In fact, inspiration is a way of seeing, a loving perception of the mystery, the magic, the tiny miracles in daily life that we can train ourselves to acquire.  It takes slowing down.  Consider the subjects that the house-bound Emily Dickinson made poetry of–the fly, the bird, the worm, the snake.  Traveling through the hours lightly, looking, thinking, helps our eyes cultivate the retina of wonder, the ability to “see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”

Writing a literary book feels like tunneling through the Himalayas with a spade.  You work in the darkness with no surety that you’ll ever succeed, just wild hope.  You just do it, and do it, and do it, and you probably do it best when you do it without hope of reward–for its own sake.  In “Writing in the Cold,” his brilliant essay on the writing life, the editor Ted Solotaroff suggests that “the turning point in many people’s writing lives was when the intrinsic interest of what they were doing began to take over, and generate a sense of necessity.”  The intrinsic interest rather than ambition, or restlessness for reward: money, praise, “the buzz.”

There’s always the intermittent temptation to abandon being a writer, or being a Christian.   I have, at moments of crushing discouragement, contemplated giving up writing altogether.  But then I know I cannot.  There will always be empty hours.  I cannot imagine living without a passion to fill them, and nothing for me is more interesting.  And so I continue like Macbeth after the first murder that necessitated sequential crimes: “I am steeped in blood so far, that returning were as tedious as going o’er.”  So I work dumbly, doggedly, like a ox plodding in circles, treading grain.  To modify Eliot’s stricture in “The Four Quartets,”  I work and “wait without hope/ For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; work and wait without love/ For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith/ But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting./  For us there is only the trying.  The rest is not our business,” Eliot concludes.

Writing early drafts feels like groping in the darkness–like reaching for God who is somewhere in the shadows, loving and good, powerful and wise.  And amid the griefs of life–a precious friendship dissolves amid gossip and misunderstandings, the book manuscript I’ve worked on for five years is not viable, when I feel pierced by “the arrow that flies by night,” inexplicable malice, envy, betrayal, the human depravity scripture details–I grope for him, trying to see the meaning, the final draft, when all around me is a mess of manuscript, haphazard, crossed-out, added-to.  And I try to revise myself and my life beyond the first draft, believing that with the help of the sovereign wise artificer, this manuscript of aspirations will eventually become the  finished, completed, perfect book.

 

While practicing both arts, you yearn for acceleration.  You get fed up of this trying and failing; you want to write well; you want to master your craft.  You want to savor the joy, and the peace that passeth understanding that lured you onwards.  But spiritual growth is slow and gradual.  The good man in the Psalms is compared to “a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in due season.”  Evolving as an artist is a similarly organic process.  The natural can master her craft more rapidly by a ferocity of hours and will, diligence and discipline, but wisdom comes in its own time.  That’s why it’s hard to think of a writer who has been a child prodigy, a Mozart.

Yet, though nothing but time can turn a sapling into the largest of trees, so that the birds of the air come and perch on its branches, there are organic fertilizers for one’s tender spiritual or artistic life, that will help it grow stronger, lovelier, and, yes, faster. Reading widely and deeply, the old masters as well as new ones; writing carefully and continually for writing is an art one learns by doing; seeking out smart criticism to show you your blind spots; creating time and space to work quietly–these help a writer develop.  A fierce yearning–“God-hunger”–launches spiritual growth.  “You shall seek me, and you shall find me when you seek me with all your heart:” Jeremiah’s words were engraved on a plaque in our dormitory when I was a novice with Mother Teresa at Calcutta.  Yearning and seeking–but also making time to meditate on Scripture, discipline in obeying its wisdom.  Though spiritual maturity will come in its own time, these practices might hasten that day.

 

And in both arts, like a shadow behind the bright yearning for perfection, is the inevitability of failure.  The Apostle Paul laments this in a poignant, brilliant passage: “I do not understand what I do.  For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.  For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing.

        So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me.  For in my inner being, I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin.  What a wretched man I am! 

        Failure–or, theologically, sin–is the antiphon to our yearning for goodness; to be loving; to be, in the Biblical word, righteous.  But through it all, through the valley of failure,  emerges a faint, pointillist likeness to Christ.  You are changed as you seek to imitate Christ, and more, to be merged with him, to be blood brothers in the ancient sense, and have his sweet life flow through you as sap through a vine, in his metaphor.

When I write, I desire beauty in my inmost being.  I want my sentences to be as iridescent as Nabokov’s, as grave and freighted and precise as Alice Munro’s, as haunting as Keats’ or Hopkins’ or Sylvia Plath’s.  I want to create essays as lovely as a bough quivering with spring blossoms or glistening with icicles.  I do not see this in my drafts.  Wretched woman that I am, what will rescue me from this imperfect work?  Time might, and hard work might, and reading constantly and critically might.

 

Or perhaps nothing will.  I may never be Nabokov or Rushdie, my favorite prose stylists.  John Gardner claims that more people fail at becoming successful businessmen than at becoming writers.  If so, I must know many of the unsuccessful, for I know many who write hard, and read hard, and long hard for success, but whom success eludes, who have very minor careers at best.  Solotaroff, less encouragingly, looks at the young writers full of bright promise that he published in the “New American Review,” and estimates that one-quarter go on to have reasonably successful careers; one-quarter have marginal ones in the alternative literary community of the little magazines and small presses; and one half simply disappear.

What separates the writer who emerges from the one who disappears?  These help budding talent flower–the time and quiet to write, the stimulation and encouragement of the literary community, the support of family, adequate money and privacy: “500 pounds a year and a room of one’s own”–a concatenation of happy circumstances.  When I read biographies of writers, I am struck by how their development as artists was aided by “luck”–a crucial nurturing friendship with a mentor or a fellow writer in their formative years, the zigzags of life leading to the books, paintings, cities, teachers, friends they needed to blossom.  As the old weary book of Ecclesiastes observes, “The race is not to the swiftest, nor does food come to the wise, or wealth to the brilliant, or favor to the learned, but time and chance happen to them all.”  On the other hand, luck does tend to happen to gifted people who work hard.  And good writing is the best connection, the best “in” to the loop.

And then there’s “talent,” arbitrary, undemocratic thing.  In Christ’s parable of the talents, the master at random gives his three servants one, two, and five talents.  The latter two servants work mightily, but limited by their “raw talent” produce four and ten talents respectively.  If you start out with but two talents–of time, energy, intelligence, literary education, opportunity, flair–all your diligence will probably increase it to no more than four talents.  And it may take ten talents to write a truly beautiful book.  These are facts one accepts, then forgets about; they do not take away from your duty to work, nor from the joy of work.  For there is no exact gauge for literary talent; you do not know how luminous a book you might write till you have written it.

You need luck, you need talent, and you need determination and perseverance which, finally, is crucial.  “The writer’s main task is to persist.  Her most important imperative is to be at work,” Solotaroff says.  Through constant reading, writing, revision, a style is forged.  To finish writing a difficult book, or to mature spiritually until you transcend your oldself as modern saints like Gandhi, or Mother Teresa, or Maximilian Kolbe, takes the stamina of a pilgrim walking across a continent, or a gold miner digging in the almost unendurable heat of the Kolar gold fields of India, his eyes on the prize.

 

Both writing and prayer require a strenuous attempt at detachment from our distracting world of dollars, demands, the telephone, mail, friends, false friends, and extended family–“the enemies of one’s own household,” Jesus calls them.  The world that is too much with us.  Entering the world of the imagination is like gazing into the enchanted universe of an intertidal pool in which purple sea urchins and emerald sea anemones glow, along with hermit crabs hiding in other creature’s shells, and sea stars, black, white, and orange.  I must tiptoe into this world–leaving behind the nagging Old World of people and their irritations, mess in the house, to-do lists, the jagged edges of life jabbing me–slowly, gingerly, like an immigrant unsure of the language, the customs, the geography of a country.

So spiritual directors suggest rituals to nudge the spirit into the presence of God–reading scripture, or breathing deeply to calm the body and concentrate thought before floating free.  I offer myself absolution for the bumpy hours of easing into the zone, the priming rituals of reading great stylists until my pulse throbs in a complex rhythm I’ve unconsciously absorbed–or mechanically rereading the last few pages I’ve written to reenter the imaginative field of my piece.  And then when ideas race from my neurons to my fingers, when my mind starts connecting all the scattered leaves of my universe, and I begin writing, almost instinctively, the language of literature: metaphor, imagery, alliteration, assonance, poetry, and my sentences sing, a car pulls into the driveway, my husband and daughters are home, and I am back to my old life, blinking like Lazarus, summarily summoned from death’s dark kingdom to the blithe goings-on of the everyday, to the crowd that gapes at him, quite unaware of the shadow world of beauty and terror (if Dante is to believed).  I return shakily, a bit uncertainly, like one roused from a vivid dream, dazzled in the light.

 

Both writing and prayer are best done in the same place, at the same time.  When I walk up to my familiar writing place–my armchair facing the woods–and see it waiting, quiet and ready, I start feeling calm.  I feel like writing.  An inner voice says, “Hurry up now; it’s time.”  And contrary to romantic myth, a steady, scheduled life helps writers as much as it helps pray-ers.  Flaubert: “It is good to be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

So too, the memories of the previous times we have met with God on our habitual holy ground usher us into an expectant quietness.  Merton describes prayer in his accustomed sacred spot: My chief joy is to escape to the attic of the garden house and the little broken window that looks out over the valley.  There in the silence, I love the green grass.  The tortured gestures of the apple trees have become part of my prayer….  So much do I love this solitude that when I walk out along the road to the old barns that stand alone, delight begins to overpower me from head to foot, and peace smiles even in the marrow of my bones.”

 

Praying is like talking a foreign language.  The nouns and verbs in this holy terra incognita are in a softer, lower timbre–patience, quietness, humility, self-denial, or turning the other cheek.  When I read the New Testament, I’m struck by this “upside-down kingdom,” its reversal of the values of even good people.  Do not repay anyone evil for evil.  Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you. Give secretly so that your right hand does not know what your left hand is doing.  Invite those to your home who cannot invite you back. 

In our world, we trust in our ability to work, network, charm, maneuver.  But “the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight,” the Apostle Paul says.  In God’s world, the person who trusts in God will be as blessed as “a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream.  It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green.  It has no worries in a year of drought, and never fails to bear fruit.”  Our world values action, quick success–grabbing our desire from the jaws of hostile fate, battering down doors with our will.  In God’s realm, we work quietly, knowing success will come according to his will, and in his perfect timing.  In the world we know, we blow our own trumpet for fear that no one else will do it for us.  If we try to walk Christ’s way, we do not exalt ourselves, believing Jesus: “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”  We wait, feeding off the wise, strong, sweet life of Jesus, God made flesh, metaphorically eating his flesh and drinking his blood.  And when we glimpse the quietness and wisdom of God, and even momentarily take a God’s eye view of our life, our internal chatter of anxiety and annoyance is silenced as our perspective shifts, and our spirit sings in worship.

Humility, an acceptance of unknowing, is a shortcut in both paths.  “If the angel comes, it will be because you have wooed him by your grim resolve to be always a beginner,” Rilke muses.  I have grown as a writer through the humility that rejection brings.  A publisher turns down my work, I do not get the fellowship I applied for, and I realize that my writing is probably not good enough–yet.  In the first humbling, I feel I know nothing about literature or writing, nothing at all.  Then I read with an alert hunger, studying again Speak Memory or Midnight’s Children.  I study the craft of writing; I let books on tape murmur to me at fallow moments in the car, on the treadmill.  I revise my manuscript with renewed rigor, a rekindled passion for beauty.  And through this starting again as a beginner with fresh joy, trying again to say in as few words as possible exactly what I mean; once more reading continually the books that are truly great, I learn, I grow; my writing changes, matures.  Rejection is a disguised friend, freezing me in my onward motion, forcing me to rethink my essay, my vocation.

 

The support of a community strengthens one in both quests because they are counter-cultural; in fact, senseless judged by the efficient values of the marketplace.  We invest much time in seeking God, without any scientific certainty that he exists, just the knowledge of the heart.   And when with twentieth century rationality, I query: Do I really believe that God invaded human history 2000 years ago; walked our mountains and waters teaching, was crucified for uttering uncompromising truth; it helps me believe when I see Jesus’ great insights proved true, not only in the wrinkles of my own life, but in the lives of other Christians.  That joy comes not from gratifying every clamorous desire, but in silencing the frog chorus, I, I, I, and losing oneself in contemplating Christ and in loving–spouse, children, friends; in seeking righteousness rather than the gratifications of money or success.  In my Christian friends too, I often observe increasing goodness and a slow deepening, as they are transformed from glory to glory, in the Apostle Paul’s phrase.  And though I do believe, deeply, as one does when faith is verified by experience, I am an existentialist Christian when assailed by doubt.  I choose to believe like Puddleglum, the Marshwiggle in The Chronicles of Narnia who says: “I’m on Aslan’s side, even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it.  I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”  And so I go to my small church most Sundays to pray and worship with other believers, refiring my weary distracted heart with other’s fervor.

Few writers evolve in solitude. At some point, even the martyrs of art–like Emily Dickinson, Keats or Thoreau–met other writers who shared the twin passions of the love of literature and their own ambition.  It is reinforcing to have other writers in our lives to share the glow of that first publication in a literary journal for which we made fifteen dollars, but which meant that our craft had begun to take that miraculous leap from saggy, unpublishable writing to  publishable, published writing.  It strengthens our passion to have people to talk to about books and writing, and esoteric conditions like writer’s block, who understand our anguish when the chapter, the book we worked on for so long miscarries.  Our fellow-travelers bolster our conviction that our vocation, often dismissed as a pleasing hobby, an indulgence–Oh how nice!  You write!  Have you published anything I might have seen?--rather than the disciplined pursuit of an art is significant, worthwhile work for grown-up people.

 

Thomas Merton connects the two vocations in his essay, “Integrity.”  “Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves.  They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God.  They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their lives.

They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint.  They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to write somebody else’s poems or possess somebody else’s spirituality.

There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else.  People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular–and too lazy to think of anything better.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.  They want quick success and they are in such haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves.”

 

Writers begin as babies or mockingbirds–by imitating.  Partly because of the mimicry involved in the extended process of finding their own voice and subject matter, many writers–consciously or unconsciously–sound like someone else while in their apprenticeship.  The fashionable, with its lures of quick success or fame, tempts.  However, once the writer grows in confidence and begin to tell the truth, she slowly discovers her own quirky, original voice.  A distinctive style begins to shape itself.  She begins to draw, truthfully, on her own ideas, convictions, emotions, family, and biography, unfashionable and squirmy though they may be, not on what has been published or is popular, and so finds the memoir that she alone can write, that is like no other memoir ever written, just as the inner geography of her life in its hills and valleys, heartbreak and delight, is like no other life.  If she dips her pen into the sore of her own grief, her shame, her secrets, she will add electricity to her memoir, or to the more disguised forms of autobiographical writing like poems, novels, or short stories.  Rushdie–“A writer’s injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.”

And from the molten lava of her own guilt, her hypocrisy, her pangs of despised love, and yes, stabs at virtue, self-forgetting love, longing for transcendence, the writer can mold powerful art–with this six inches of ivory, this postage stamp of earth.  In The Enigma of Arrival, V.S. Naipaul describes how he tried to sound cosmopolitan when he first started to write, while striving to edit out his past in his Asian community in Trinidad, his naivete and clodhopperish inexperience, and the humiliations attendant on his transplantation to the West, not realizing that in his peasant background and behaviors lay his most authentic story.  Later in his masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas, he lingers on the things he was most ashamed of.  He writes, “Man and writer were the same person.  But that is a writer’s greatest discovery.  It took time–and how much writing!–to arrive at that synthesis.”

 

Both writing and prayer are disciplines of little things.  I love this poem by Robert Francis:

Excellence is millimeters and not miles.

From poor to good is great.  From good to best is small.

From almost best to best sometimes not measurable.

The man who leaps the highest leaps perhaps an inch

Above the runner-up.  How glorious that inch

And that split-second longer in the air before the fall.

What are the millimeters from almost best to best?  Spare writing with every unnecessary word shaken off the page.  Details almost invisible to the rapid reader: the imagistic verb, the painterly image, a sentence that sings.  Writing that in Conrad’s phrase, “makes you hear, makes you feel–that is, before all, makes you see.”  So too, it’s in the details of love that spiritual transformation occurs and exhibits itself–not so much in the showy dahlias and cannas, but in violets and bluebells.  The Apostle Paul declares in, probably, the most famous passage in the New Testament: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”  He explicates the tiny virtues.  “Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

 

A snide definition of a classic: a book which everyone wants to have read, but no one wants to actually read, today, tonight–the Iliad or The Remembrance of Things Past.  We desire the blessings of God–life in its fullness, joy, peace, fruitfulness more than we desire God himself.  We yearn for a book magical, lyrical, perfect, more than for the actual process of rewriting a chapter yet again, the long months and years before the finished book.  And in both quests, the secret of joy is losing yourself in the pleasure of the present, in the play of words, in learning Christ, his quirky values, and imitating him.

How crass this sounds, but in both endeavors, quality springs from quantity!  “If you want to pray better, you should pray more,” Mother Teresa says.  Somerset Maugham writes: “I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much.”  The more we write–if we do so critically, learning from good teachers, getting insightful feedback, reading, reading, practicing, practicing–the better we write.  As loving-heartedness is the touchstone of the verity of our prayers, the market is the red light in writing.  Rejection slips speak their own language.  Of admonition.  You are not there yet.  Seize the day.  Work as hard as you can.

Both writing and prayer usher us into the heart of mystery.  From where do poems come?  Or from where, indeed, does nature?  Or God?  The faces of the audience at the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival at which I sought a total immersion into poetry, were rapt as at a religious service.  For literature partially and temporarily slakes the religious yearning for beauty, order, truth.  Both disciplines are therapeutic in their search for the difficult truth that frees.  Like prayer, the very act of writing calms and focuses us.  Often, the difficulty lies in just settling down and doing it.  As with sex or exercise or good conversation, it can be hard to get going, but once we have, it’s as if we can keep going indefinitely.  Good writing and good prayer, like good sex or good mothering, demand self-forgetfulness, losing ourselves in the other, our subject, our Lord.  And the flow of creativity or prayer can be jammed and dammed by similar barricades–anxiety, hostility, anger, cherishing  untruths, saying too many Noes.

 

We are lured into both by the dream, the promise of joy.  The cost turns out to be more than we ever imagined: “not less than everything.”  We begin to experience the disappointment, doubt, rejection, agony–and the ultimate triumph of sacrifice–involved in becoming an artist.  And we learn the rending cost of denying ourselves, taking up our cross daily, breaking out of the prison of the self and its incessant needs and demands, choosing small deaths, in a sense, so as to transcend ourselves and have a richer, more fruitful life.  Jesus  understood it: “Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone.  But if it dies, it yields a mighty harvest.”

When we train ourselves in the scriptural precept to pray constantly, trying to be continually aware of the quiet presence of Christ: a radiance, a luminosity, like the silent, ever-present ghost in old movies, a quietness begins to sink over our beings, the quietness in which creative thought is engendered.  We must persist in both disciplines until they become instinctive, until we convert every thought, desire and frustration into a prayer, turning to God as naturally as a flower turns its face to the sun and the butterflies.  Similarly, the writer must keep writing until this inward work, this daily creation, becomes as necessary as thinking; so essential that a day in which she has not written will seem a day in which she has not fully lived.

 

A Chinese saying: “From boredom to fascination.”  Though difficult at first, both quests lead to an awareness of joy, shimmering, pulsing through life.  As I mature spiritually and psychologically, my values shift.  Oh dear, they become more old-fashioned–the preciousness of the family I have chosen, my husband and my daughters; the balm of friendships; the durable self-forgetting pleasures in reading, art, nature, gardening.  And writing?  It remains my vocation, my duty and my desire, a precious strand in the tapestry of my life, a beloved pure note in its orchestra, a joyous obligation like those to my husband and children, who have no other wife, no other mother.  And amid life’s richness in the busy season–two daughters, four years old, and four months old; a career; a husband with a career; a house, a garden, a dog, friends, a life–can writing wait?  At times, it will have to.  And in the forge of dreams deferred, other jewels might be crafted:ethos, character, undergirding and lighting the logos, words, and pathos, emotions they evoke–the three elements of great art Aristotle outlines in his Rhetoric.  Writing with wisdom, depth, power.  And now, in the season of duties, as I choose books to read or subjects to write on more for the pleasure that dwelling on them will bring rather than for rewards of glitter or success, I am recovering some of the joy I’d lost in my anxious, striving, ambitious twenties.

Though the gloomy may say that the life of a writer is simply “the exchange of one level of rejection, uncertainty, and disappointment for another,” persisting long enough to learn and master your craft gives you ever more of those moments of enchantment when your whole being is intensely alive; you are lost in the joy of work; sparks flash from your imagination and set the page on fire; and you read over a finished piece, and like God in the garden of Eden, behold what you have written, and–temporarily–decide that it is good.

“Writing and Prayer” was published in an earlier version as “Learning to Pray,” in The Christian Century, March 22nd, 2000. Reproduced in Religion Online, and many other places.

This is from my book Wandering Between Two Worlds, available  on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

and Amazon.in

Filed Under: Writing and Blogging Tagged With: Prayer, writing

On the Benefits of Writing Down Our Prayers

By Anita Mathias

writingWe are listening to A Praying Life by Paul Miller, a wonderful book on prayer in the car. (I was, incidentally disciplined by the author for almost five years, as he mentions in the book).

Anyway, Miller tells us that he often prays aloud. Jesus did so in his High Priestly Prayer in John 17, and his anguished prayers at Gethsemane. (However, Jesus also encourages us to pray in the privacy of our rooms so that our prayers don’t impress people (rather than God)…and thereby lose us the secret reward God gives those who pray.)

“Praying out loud can be helpful because it keeps you from getting lost in your head. It makes your thoughts concrete,” Miller writes. “When I confess a sin aloud, it feels more real. I’m surprised by how concrete the sin feels. I’ve even thought, ‘Oh I guess that was really wrong.’ On the way to a social event, I will pray aloud in the car that I won’t fall into lust or people pleasing. My prayers become more serious.”

* * *

However, when I find it hard to focus on prayer, what helps me is not praying out loud (I live with two daughters, one husband, one Golden Retriever, and one Labradoodle, and don’t want to startle any of them) but writing out my prayers.

When I pray my thoughts meander in the natural way of thoughts. Writing out my prayers helps me redirect my thoughts to the subject I was praying about so that I can saturate that worry in prayer, make sure I have heard God on it, and am acting in accordance with his directives. (This is particularly important for unanswered prayers so one senses the story God is writing in our lives).

I like to put my worries into the petri dish of prayer, so to say, bathing them in prayer, and continuing to “pray until something happens.” Written prayers help me “worry the bone of a prayer,” until light and clarity emerges as to what God might be doing in the things I am praying about, and what he wants me to do.

(Interestingly, though, Miller says prayer should be like human conversation between friends, meandering, free-flowing, playful. So if, in the middle of praying-worrying about how I am writing less than I want to, I start praying-worrying that I am exercising a bit less than I want to, and then that the room I am praying in is a tad messier than I want it to be…Miller would suggest praying about the latest worries that have popped up their groundhog heads instead of dragging prayer back to the first worry. Confess. Ask for help. Ask for strategy. And who knows? Perhaps the solution to the first worry—disappointing productivity–lies in the next two: not enough exercise, not enough tidying up!! Yes, indeed!)

* * *

The Circle Maker by Mark Batterson is another prayer-changing, hope-refilling book on prayer. Just as Jesus does, Batterson encourages us to pray about anything. Wild dreams, wild-goose dreams, dreams we are afraid to vocalize, dreams we can only keep alive because the Creator of the Universe can do and create anything… The dreams that we are embarrassed to say aloud, we can write down. And in the process of writing them down, they feel a little bit more real. “Dreaming is a form of prayer and prayer is a form of dreaming,” as Batterson says.

I have often found that wild-goose dreams I have prayed for have uncannily come to pass. In that way, our prayers can be prophetic, and, in the areas we have saturated in prayer, the transcript of our lives resembles the transcript of our prayers, to quote Batterson again.

* * *

We often don’t know our own hearts and minds and spirits. That is why people go to therapy!! Expressive writing is a form of therapy. So too is prayer journaling.

In the process of putting it down, in stark black and white, clarity comes about what I really want—which women socialized to be nice and obliging often don’t know!!

The actions and emotions of my own heart that I am less than proud about get unveiled and gradually repented of. The hurts and slights, the slings and arrows of interpersonal relationships which could metastasize into a cancer of unforgiveness if brooded over are released and forgiven…

Write out your confusion and lack of clarity. The areas of your life where you are not sure what God is doing, or the direction in which your life is veering. I often feel I know very little about my own life, the plot God is writing in and through it, the direction in which he is bending it, and what he wants me to do… Prayer helps me to understand the story that God is writing in my life a little better, and written prayer clarifies and focuses my heart-prayer.

 

I’m Recommending:

The Circle Maker: Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears on Amazon.co.uk and on Amazon.com.

A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World by Paul Miller on Amazon.co.uk and on Amazon.com.

 

 

Filed Under: In which I play in the fields of prayer Tagged With: A Praying Life, Expressive Writing, Mark Batterson, Paul Miller, Prayer, The CircleMaker, writing down our prayers

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

When Shackles become Wings: On Domesticity, Creativity, and Me

By Anita Mathias

saxifrage_anita_mathias_com

wedding-1-235x300I was married 25 years ago, while in a Ph.D programme in Creative Writing at the State University of New York Binghamton. I had just earned a BA and an MA in English from Somerville College, Oxford, then an MA in Creative Writing from Ohio State University.

My husband probably hoped for a traditional marriage, though he never actually said so. You know–I would do the dishes, and laundry and shopping and cleaning and cooking, and he would have a career. In the early years, I urged him to try a role reversal; to let me have a try at a career and at supporting us (and to accept the consequent drop in our standard of living), but he would have none of it.

For the first decade or so of our marriage, I bitterly resented domesticity. My mother had a full-time cook, a full-time maid, an “ayah,” and a gardener (whereas my husband’s mother had done everything herself.) Had I gone through all this higher education to become a cook/maid, I’d sign? My husband insisted that a cleaner was a waste of money, saying that he could easily whisk through the house and clean it. Well, I’ll credit him with good intentions!

We feminist writers in graduate school used to tell each other, “The dishes can wait; the poem cannot wait.” And too often the dishes waited, for days and days, and the resultant domestic and marital stress affected the poetry too.

I found it impossible to keep up with housekeeping. The further behind we got, the harder it was to catch up. Which caused stress and chaos and unhappiness which affected my creativity far more than if I took the bit between my teeth, and simply did what had to be done.

* * *

Finally, about 18 years into our marriage, Roy did what I had been urging him to from two years into our marriage—took early retirement, and tried to be a house-husband.

Well, well, well, turns out he was only a wee bit better as a house-husband than I was as a housewife!! He promptly got the cleaner and gardener I had so long desired!

But he does do enough housework so that we do not live in mess and chaos.

* * *

And since, it now takes just an hour or two to get to the reasonably orderly tidy household we both crave, rather than an apparently infinite task, I, ironically, often spend an hour or two in housework and gardening.

And I have discovered a strange thing. The days I do not spend an hour or two around my house and garden, weeding, sorting laundry, tidying up, my spirit feels slightly out of sorts. My mind is active, as I read and write; my spirit, not so much. I feel a bit out of touch with God. A bit unaligned with him. A bit overwound. It’s as if I need the downtime of traditional “women’s work” to really pray.

It as if I needed the things I despised—folding laundry, putting things back in the right place, pulling weeds—to be able to think, to pray, to right myself with God, to position myself in God, to surrender my life to God again, to seek his wisdom.

Breathing place, sanity-savers, time for thinking, time ironically for creativity, time for repentance, time for surrender—gifts offered by the mundane tasks of folding clothes, tidying rooms, prettying a garden.

I wish I had embraced it from the start. I would, ironically, have been a more productive writer.

A house, living in a house, doing some of the work living in a house demands—this is the life God has given me, mountaintops and valleys, and as I embrace it, I find that, like saxifrage, tiny alpine plant that splits rocks, creativity blooms in the apparently unpromising nooks and crannies of duty!

 

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Filed Under: Finding God in Domesticity, In which I explore writing and blogging and creativity, In which I play in the fields of prayer, In which I pursue happiness and the bluebird of joy Tagged With: Creativity, domesticity, duty, Prayer

The Only Form of Multitasking that makes you Cleverer

By Anita Mathias

jugglerMy daughter Irene returned from a talk by neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield informing us that multitasking decreases fluid IQ more than smoking marijuana, or losing a night’s sleep does.

My daughter, as intense as I am, walks around the house with her iPad, watching documentaries or TED talks or AsapScience (when she isn’t reading or studying.) Or sometimes—okay, mum, get real–lighter, less relentlessly educational stuff; she is a teenager, after all.

I keep telling her to do one thing at a time. Whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your might.

Delighted to have Baroness Susan Greenfield’s backing, I advised Irene to use the mundane things of life, waiting for food to reheat in the microwave, waiting for the kettle or the eggs to boil, as pathways into prayer.  To ask for God’s wisdom and blessing on the next task, on how to do it best. To do a mid-day course correction if necessary. Repent. Ask God’s blessing, wisdom and guidance on the dreams and visions for which she is striving. Ask him for the big picture blue sky visions for her life, for guidance on her life’s work and for the path she is to tread which will be the precise intersection between her deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger. Thank God for his goodness. Breathe.

She said, “Mum, but praying through the day is multitasking too.”

I guess so. And it’s the only form of multitasking that’s scripturally advised: “Pray continually.”

You tap into the vast resources of a brain greater than yours. And somehow, that great kind brain comes to help you with ideas, wisdom and sometimes concrete external interventions, changing your circumstances from the outside, changing you from within.

And I guess prayer is the only multitasking that makes you cleverer.

 

Filed Under: In which I play in the fields of prayer Tagged With: multitasking, Prayer, Susan Greenfield

Wriggling towards Shalom

By Anita Mathias

When I find I am stressed, or distressed,  I like to pause there and then instead of going through the day with undefined, subterranean unease.

I take the question to which I do not know the answer–how to be more productive perhaps. How to read more. How to help someone. How to get our business to flourish further–and ask Jesus for the answer. And keep asking the question, sort of saturating the question in prayer.  If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you (James 1:15). And I keep asking, and keep asking for God’s answer–his surprising out-of-the-box answers, and eventually, as James promises, guidance, answers and wisdom do come.

  • * * *

Sometimes, I sense a vague fear and unease. Do you? I like to slow down and ask: What is it? What’s bugging me? What is this nebulous dark cloud? Sometimes, the fear, anxiety or annoyance is quite rational, and sometimes not so.

But whether it is a rational fear, or just a vague sense of unease, it does have the same solution.

I mentally put the fear or worry or annoyance into the petri dish of prayer, and invite God’s power to surround, saturate and irradiate it.

I surrender the possible dark outcome I dread to God. Put it in his hands. If it does happen, He will still be there. He will still love me. He will still give me the ability to be happy through it all.

And then I ask him to avert the outcome I dread. Ask him for wisdom for what I am to do today. Ask him for a game plan for the months ahead.

It’s in his hands now, whether things work out just as I prayed for, or just as I dreaded. It’s his worry.

I then just rest in his presence, rest in his love.

It’s not magic, nothing about the spiritual life is …or perhaps everything is!!

But I do get up from the place of prayer so much lighter in my spirit!

 

Image Credit

Filed Under: In which I play in the fields of prayer, In which I surrender all, The peace that transcends understanding Tagged With: peace, Prayer, Shalom, surrender

“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.”

Filed Under: In which I play in the fields of prayer, random Tagged With: contemplation, henri nouwen, Prayer

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Anita Mathias: About Me

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

  • “An Autobiography in Five Chapters” and Avoiding Habitual Holes  
  • Shining Faith in Action: Dirk Willems on the Ice
  • The Story of Dirk Willems: The Man who Died to Save His Enemy
  • On Checking In Before you Fly
  • The Spiritual Practice of Bible-Walking
  • Deep peace in times of political turmoil
  • On Returning Home to yourself, and The Things you Love More than Yourself.
  • Every Prison has a Door… (and We Usually Have the Key!)  
  • The Life-Changing Practice of Meditation
  • Life by the Inch

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anita.mathias

Writer, Blogger, Reader, Mum. Christian. Instaing Oxford, travel, gardens and healthy meals. Oxford English alum. Writing memoir. Lives in Oxford, UK

Instagram post 2187417055488451246_1686032450 My day: admiring a Christmas cactus that my friend Judy gave me last year, photographing winter trees from the bedroom window, lunch with Danny, coffee and food with Irene at Brown’s. Some reading, some writing, some weights, a good day.
I am trying to get back into weight-lifting. It reminds me that life is probably designed to have hard, challenging and difficult stuff to keep us strong. Muscle not used simply disappears. The body reabsorbs it! Muscle used paradoxically gets stronger and makes the tasks of our days and lives so much easier. So here’s to a spot of weights, and breathing in and out through them and life’s seasons, challenges and joys... so help us, God
Instagram post 2186714755975443652_1686032450 A sunny day in Porto and Coimbra.
Now back home, back to Yoga classes and the like.
I find if I get a spot up front near the instructor and next to someone accomplished, and follow them as bravely and gaspingly as I can, I get a thorough workout, totally break a sweat, do things I was certain I could not do, and get so much stronger in the process.
A bit like following Christ. Read what he said, take a deep breath and do it as exactly as you can, and you will slowly find yourself becoming a little bit stronger, wiser and yes, happier! My thought for the day 🙂
#porto #portugal #ilovetravel #happiness
Instagram post 2185957583540871908_1686032450 Images from our week in Porto.
Both my grandmothers, for as long as I knew them, were homebodies, spending their days in just one or two rooms.
I love travel, and excitement, and living as big and expansive life as I can.
But I too spend several hours every day in a quiet room, reading, writing, thinking, praying... And in the quiet room, one can interact the best thoughts of men and women down the ages, and more with infinity.. God, The sweet Spirit, The Lord Christ. #porto #portugal #travel #novembersun #marriage #marriedlife #beaches #portoribeira #fun
Instagram post 2180132061531496763_1686032450 Images from the Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition in Pompeii, death suddenly arriving in the middle of hectic life. Leaving in its aftermath particularly fertile volcanic soil.
When we become stuck in bitterness, when we recount the same sad story, again and again, in our own minds and to others... we forget that EVERY death has the potential for resurrection.
Have you suffered financial loss, financial injustice, completely untrue slander, deep sadness, failure? I have. Many humans have.
Give it to God. Give it to God of resurrection. Ask him to bring beauty from those sad, dead things.
The soil in the aftermath of a volcanic explosion is particularly fertile.
God can bring new life and beauty from dead things.
He calls out to sad hearts, "Come alive. Come alive!" #pompeii # Ashmolean
Instagram post 2175440736861042753_1686032450 Thoughts on avoiding the holes we habitually fall into, and BELATED images from one of my favourite active holidays https://anitamathias.com/2019/11/11/an-autobiography-in-five-chapters-and-avoiding-habitual-holes/
Instagram post 2156925313647782363_1686032450 I am inspired and moved by the story of Dirk Willems, a hero of the Reformation who lost his life to save his enemy, and have written a little book about him. 
It's on http://Amazon.co.uk  https://amzn.to/2Bk9Shl  and on http://Amazon.com  https://amzn.to/2VQOSYN 
Please do consider reading it & reviewing it. I would be immensely grateful.  Thank you!
Instagram post 2156141167803371501_1686032450 Okay, an unabashed Latergram on our first day in Iceland in Thingvellir National Park. Isn’t it dramatic.  And a short blog  https://anitamathias.com/2019/10/16/on-checking-in-before-you-fly/ #thingvellirnationalpark #iceland #travel #beauty #joy #adventure #life
Instagram post 2148813562469383835_1686032450 Family walks in assorted parks and gardens.  On my new spiritual discipline of Bible-walking, listening to and engaging with Scripture on the hoof.  https://anitamathias.com/2019/10/06/the-spiritual-practice-of-bible-walking/ #walkingandpraying #walkingwiththeword #biblewalking #walkingwiththelord
Instagram post 2134504882437551900_1686032450 I am in New York for a couple of weeks, for my niece Kristina’s wedding. We are having an amazing time, and I have taken a zillion pictures, and it is hot. So here’s a #latergram album from our trip to cool Iceland last month.  I have also blogged on experiencing deep peace in times of political turmoil.
https://anitamathias.com/2019/09/17/deep-peace-in-times-of-political-turmoil/  #iceland  #ringroad #icebergs #glaciers #glaciallagoon #beauty
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