Prayer | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Persistent Prayer Turns Christ’s Silence, His “No,” and “Absolutely Not” to “YES!”

Anita Mathias — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 19:57:15 +0000

From Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry (The transcript to the recorded podcast meditation is below, here). Persistent Prayer Turns Christ’s Silence, His “No,” and “Absolutely Not” to YES! Persistent Prayer Turns Christ’s Silence, His “No,” and “Absolutely Not” to YES! So, a Gentile Syro-Phoenician woman comes to Jesus, crying out, “Lord, have […]

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The Life-Changing Practice of Meditation

Anita Mathias — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 18:24:05 +0000

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 […]

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Writing and Prayer

Anita Mathias — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 20:33:28 +0000

“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 […]

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On the Benefits of Writing Down Our Prayers

Anita Mathias — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 18:45:15 +0000

We 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, […]

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Analysing my Experience of Prayer over the Last 19 Years

Anita Mathias — Sat, 19 Dec 2015 22:44:54 +0000

So 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 […]

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

Anita Mathias — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 13:13:51 +0000

I 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, […]

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The Only Form of Multitasking that makes you Cleverer

Anita Mathias — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 13:17:26 +0000

My 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.) […]

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Wriggling towards Shalom

Anita Mathias — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 20:39:53 +0000

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 […]

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“Useless Prayer” by Henri Nouwen

Anita Mathias — Sun, 22 Jun 2014 09:08:56 +0000

“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 […]

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

Anita Mathias — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 10:32:25 +0000

You can almost hear the silence. The milkmaid is quiet, so quiet, and time is suspended as she pours milk. The hands work while the mind thinks. Is it a life of drudgery, or is it a gift–her trivial chore a window into eternity, time to think, to pray, to look out of the window […]

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