redemption Archives - Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Mud and the Breath of God: That is What We Are

Several years ago, I wanted to go through a study on Agape Love, the blazing core of Christianity–but not a particular strength of mine!! And being an extroverted, sort of A type personality, I got permission from my church to organise a Bible Study on the topic under their auspices.

Now, like most everyone, I suppose, I do not like things I do to flop. And I sometimes go to far-fetched lengths to ensure they do not flop. So in organising the study, as when throwing a party, I heeded the internal tick-tock of fear…what if no one showed up?

So I invited, and I invited, and I emailed, and I telephoned… and too many accepted. There were over thirty people in my Bible study, which should have had twelve. Well, my ego was pleased with thirty, though I realized it would therefore be less participatory, less transparent, less transformative.

I looked at the list, and my eyes lingered, exasperated, on a particular name. It wasn’t someone I disliked–I wouldn’t have invited anyone I disliked–but it was someone I was neutral towards. So why had I invited her to my Bible study which I intended to prepare thoroughly; give 110%; pour myself out, body, mind, soul and spirit; teach everything I knew, and no doubt, use deeply personal stories and illustrations?

Fear, I realised. Fear that the Bible study would flop, and it would be one of those dismal things to which only five people show up, including the leader. Pride, for I would have felt shame if only five people showed up. I would have felt ungifted, unpopular, unimportant, insignificant, “nobody.” (I would perhaps be able to smile wryly, shrug and bear it now that I am safely middle-aged…but not then.)

So I invited and invited not because of the love of God overflowing from my heart, not because of a desire to bless people with the overflow of Biblical treasure which had blessed me, but out of pride, fear, shame.

I studied the list again, and I was sad. I had freaked out. One never thinks well or acts wisely when impelled by fear, the seizing up reptile brain.

I had started well. I wanted to study those concepts, and I thought I would study them more deeply if I were teaching them. But then, vanity crept in.

I looked out of my window at the slim fingernail of moon in a dark-sapphire sky. Mixed, mixed; light and darkness, all our motives. Mud and the breath of God, that is what we are, sometimes muddier, sometimes more spirit-filled.

* * *

Yeah, so I acted out of pride, fear and vanity and general freaking out. Not out of the centre of God’s will. Not abandoned to him. Those branches did not spring from the mighty trunk of God. How could I ask him to bless them?

“Oh Lord, oh Lord,” I cried, “I’ve done this all wrong. Look at my silliness and vanity. Can you redeem this?”

* * *

And then I laughed.

And what made me think that grace, and the love of God, and the goodness of God, were only for the times when I was all perfect? That I needed to be perfect to be a child of God, entitled to the goodness of his household?

And the Bible, that document I loved to teach? From first to last, it is the story of God stepping in when we have messed everything up. We eat the only dangerous fruit; we are murderous towards our brothers; we diverge from the beautiful way things could have been in our marriages, in our parenting, in our friendships, in our physical health, in our homes and gardens…

And so often God steps in and surprises everyone, creates a bittersweet yet beautiful thing out of our messes.

The story of lives is not perfect, as it might have been were we perfect people in a perfect world. But neither is it dark as when a fractious child mixes together all the bright colours in her paint-box, reducing the glory to blackness.

Yes, our lives are not the original design—beauty. But neither are they things of entropy and chaos, as would happen if there were no grace, if we consistently reaped what we sowed.

What happens is redemption. God takes our mistakes, our shattered shards, and creates a thing of beauty, windows of stained glass though which his light shines.

* * *

When you are certain you’ve married the wrong person, all is not lost, for you or them.

The Bible has an Open Sesame phrase which pops up when all is dark and hopeless and everything is chaotic and disintegrating.

But God.

Failure seems certain. The future looks bleak. We are all out of options.

But God…

You twist your spouse’s arm to go on a holiday which is too expensive, when you should have been working hard, making money, not spending it. Why should grace strike you on that holiday? But it does.

But God…

When you fear that all your parenting mistakes might add up, and your child may not fulfil her academic potential,

but God, but God…

and that child is now an undergraduate at Oxford University reading Theology.

You let money slip through your fingers in the seven years of plenty, and did not save enough, and now have to work so hard all over again…

How foolish, so foolish, but the story is not yet over, grace strikes you in this period of hard work; your creativity burgeons, and ironically through this spurt of work, you end up with a wee bit more prosperity than if you had never blown your windfalls and then had to refill your barns.

Ah, unfair, you really did not deserve grace, you prodigal…

But God…

When you think of all the time you’ve lost: to arguments, quarrels and conflict, to depression and sluggishness, to burnouts following overwork, and you fear you will never achieve your dreams, grace steps in.

Your mind is burnt out; our nervous system is shot; your body is not as healthy as it was…

You are in no position to do anything by strength, resolve or hard work…

And here you are, forced to rely on a force beyond yourself…

Just the right candidate for grace, in precisely the right place to receive it..

Amazing grace, rescuing what you set out to do with pride, fear and petrified rabbit brain, stepping in, as Jesus told us the Holy Spirit steps in on request, intervening, turning things around

Amazing grace.

Tweetables

Mud and the breath of God…that is what we are. NEW post from @anitamathias1

“Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness” NEW post from @anitamathias1

The Bible has an Open Sesame phrase which appears when all is dark and hopeless. But God. From @anitamathias1

At the End of Broken Dreams, an Open Door

By Anita Mathias

About 20 years ago, in Williamsburg, Virginia, we used to sing this in church, “At the end of broken dreams, an open door.”

I sung it because I liked the lyricism, but I had no interest in the open door at the end of broken dreams because then the dreams would have to be broken, right?

* * *

Well, well, well…

My daughters, choosing their own paths, ask me what my goals were when I was their age. I confess–with a wry smile–that my life barely resembles the dreams I had at 21.

Well, hello there, “failure.” Except the word has lost its sting. Sadness has given way to a shrug.

My life hasn’t worked out as I wanted…more dreaming than writing….though I perhaps have some good decades ahead of me.

And had a career worked out as I had wished, there would have been a lot more stress, busyness, pointless work, self-promotion, and exhaustion, and I would have reached middle age substantially more tired. And in worse health!

There are gains to all our losses—and some loss to all our gains.

The best thing we can do then is throw up our hands in acceptance and worship.

Failure. The beautiful thing about achieving failure is that we no longer fear it.

Failure is a re-direction. We have been whisked into a different plot.

* * *

The dreams of 20-30 years ago are not entirely “broken,” though they have morphed.

I wanted to write as beautifully as the writers I then idolised…Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, Annie Dillard, Laurie Lee; to write with that beautiful texture, almost music. Yeah, I’d still like to.

However, that kind of writing comes out of immersion in literature, and the way life has happened…I haven’t read enough.

I took four years out of reading and writing to establish a business. At the end of that four years, I faced my broken dreams. My fingers had got stiff. My writing felt like the flightless cormorant of the Galapagos– bland, music-less, poetry-less compared to what it had been just four years ago. The instinct had gone dormant. That intricate lace-like writing which had once won me a National Endowment of the Arts award of $20,000– I couldn’t do it any more. I had lost the knack.

Broken dreams.

Once the business no longer needed my involvement for my husband is now running it, I wondered what I was going to do, how I was going to wriggle back to writing.

And I did perhaps the only thing I really know how to do… I prayed.

* * *

And, four months in limbo, I heard God suggest blogging…

That sounds like a grand way of putting it, but it’s the only accurate way!

My readers when I started were my Facebook friends…but slowly through the miracle of Google and the web and social sharing, they grew. About 10,000 people read my blogs each month, unique monthly visitors Google calls them.

And, ironically, my blogs may touch more people’s hearts, spirits and lives than the exquisite, artful writing I wanted to create. They may influence people for good on a daily basis. May help shape the way people think and perceive; help shape spirits. Blogging has been an unexpected adventure, and an unexpected gift!

* * *

I want to write beautifully, of course I do, and I will keep trying to write well until I die. Keep practising.

But what I am primarily aiming for in blogging is not a lace-maker’s artistry.

I think instead of a leaf, a kite, a raptor, catching the wings of the wind, flying high and higher as the wind lifts it.

I think of recording what God whispers to my heart.

* * *

I am trying to write–if it’s not too grand a word–“prophetically.” I try to hear what God is saying to me, and write it down. Record what I am struggling with…and the answers I have discovered. Answers which may perhaps help someone else up to the next step of the ladder.

And that’s more satisfying, healing, and enriching for my mind, heart, soul, and body than writing the beautiful literary books I wanted to.

Blogging…the open door at the end of broken dreams.

Will I ever write the books I wanted to? I believe so, though they will be different, more products of Spirit than of blood, sweat, toil and tears.

And that’s all to the good, isn’t it?

* * *
Anyway, it’s become second nature now, when I face the rubble of broken dreams, things not turning out as I had expected, to ask, “So what’s the plot, Lord? Where’s the open door in this rubble? Show me the road I am to take.”

You come to a dead end, and there is hope in the deadness. For nothing in this world truly dies; dead seeds reappear as sheaves of wheat. Every death has some resurrection in it.

This world whispers of infinity. Pi has been computed to 10 trillion digits. 10 trillion of an infinite number of digits? Is that success or failure? It’s interwoven. There’s some failure in our bright successes, and our failures have ironic gains and golden lessons.

* * *

There are no dead ends. The door which seems closed whispers of windows.

And that window swings open….and you see the stars.

Tweetables

For nothing in this world truly dies; dead seeds reappear as sheaves of wheat. From @AnitaMathias1

The best thing then that we can do is throw up our hands in acceptance and worship. From @AnitaMathias1

The beautiful thing about achieving failure is that we no longer fear it. From @AnitaMathias1

Failure is a re-direction. We have been whisked into a different plot. From @AnitaMathias1

Every death has some resurrection in it. From “At the end of broken dreams, an open door.”

In which God Creates Beauty from My Mistakes

By Anita Mathias

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

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

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

* * *

But what can be done with regrets for time past?

I reach for another alliterative word…redemption.

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

Fair and merciless.

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t have time to maintain these regrets

By Anita Mathias

Gaudi mosaic

My daughter Zoe introduced me to this song by John Mark Macmillan: I don’t have time to maintain these regrets

I am a memoirist (and also a restless, tiptoes person full of hope for the future).

However examination of the past is rarely without regret.

If only. I wish I had

But that’s it!! No more looking back in sorrow.

Love’s like a hurricane, and I am a tree

Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy.

I don’t have time to maintain all these regrets

When I think about how he loves us.

* * *

Besides, the past is never past (as Faulkner famously said). It is the introduction of an ongoing story. Its reverberations continue through space–time; beauty can still emerge from disasters.

Glorious mosaics are fashioned from shards of shattered glass.

2000 year old seeds have been germinated.

Entire towns in Yorkshire or Wales are built of stone plundered from destroyed monasteries, like Rievaulx or Tintern Abbey.

God can build castles out of the glorious ruins of the past.

He can use the ancient smashed goblets to make stained glass or kintsugi.

I truly believe it. We can write off no experience as wasted because we do not yet know what God will make of it.

So Martha faced with the stench of her brother Lazarus, dead four days, tells Jesus, “Even now, God will give you whatever you ask.”

Even now, God can somehow combine all the things I am tempted to regret: anger, self-pity, unforgiveness, fear, sloth—into art which lives.

Even now, God can combine hazy memories, half-read books, broken friendships and wasted days into art that is different, new and shimmering, an iridescent morpho butterfly shimmying from a drab chrysalis.

* * *

And so I will not give way to regret. Because I have a very clever Redeemer.

All the sadness, the mistakes, the sins, the waste of the past have made me who I am: a woman who is, today, the Beloved of God. (As I always was, always was, even when I didn’t feel it in my bones, as I do now.)

The novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick says she read 18 hours a day when she was training to be a writer. Joyce Carol Oates has published over 50 novels, 30 volumes of short stories, and 52 volumes of children’s stories, poetry, young adult fiction, essays, memoir and drama. She writes from 8 to 1 in the morning, from 4 to 7 in the evening, and then reads or writes at night. (John Updike had a similar schedule).

I read this, and inwardly writhe. As a writer, I wish I had read more, and wish I had written more.

When I was younger, I wanted to write like Salman Rushdie, or Vladimir Nabokov or Laurie Lee or William Faulkner or Toni Morrison. I haven’t read as much as they, or practiced as much as they have.

And so my thoughts and sentences may never have the depth and richness of one who has single-mindedly trained her mind and pen.

But, no longer trying to imitate the singing-masters of my soul, I now write simply and transparently, pages which can be grasped at the first reading. I write differently, and for a different audience.

But it is the audience God had prepared for me to speak to before the beginning of time, before the Big Bang, before Planet Earth spun into being, before the dinosaurs prowled the earth, before the saber-toothed tigers.

* * *

The race is not to the swiftest, nor favour indeed to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, but time and change happen to them all. (Ecc. 9:11).

And that is most true when it comes to creativity!

I love Solomon’s observation, and often pray for luck—being neither as swift, nor as wise, nor as understanding as I could be.

But creativity is like the wind which blows, and we cannot see where it comes from or where it goes. The best read do not produce the best writing, which speaks to the most people. Those most diligent in practicing their craft do not necessarily produce art which changes lives, which makes the world happier.

Creativity is the art of combining—things you’ve read, and things you’ve done, and things you’ve thought and felt and heard, and all those 10,000 hours of practice to make something entirely new. And the value is in the combination, not in the raw materials.

Look at Gaudi’s mosaics….

Art is the spark from stoniest flint that sings in the dark and cold, I’m light.

So what I am going to do as a writer is to put it all into His hands–everything I’ve read and heard and thought and felt and experienced–and ask him to make of it an entirely new thing:

Such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enameling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing

Stinging Nettle to Butterfly Wings

By Anita Mathias

And how, and how

Could that prickly caterpillar

–All bristles and danger–

Feeding on the stinging nettle in my garden

Become a peacock butterfly,

Four shimmering iridescent eyes?

My God, my God, redeemer,

Even today, take my life,

The years lost to self-pity, anger and sadness,

False starts, wrong directions, promising trails abandoned

The sin, the exhaustion, the folly, the folly,

Take the stinging nettles of my life, my Lord,

And make of them butterfly wings.

Image Credit

In which Christ can heal the fierce memories of the past

By Anita Mathias

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun.

Keats, sitting down to read King Lear again, feels torn between anticipation and the dread of immersing himself again in this scabrous tragedy.

Once again the fierce dispute,

Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay

Must I burn through; once more humbly assay

The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit, he writes.

* * *

I feel like that when I work in memoir. Amid the richness of my childhood, amid its intensity, its chockfulness, memories of pain periodically surface, accompanied by pain and anger.

I have a file called “The Dark Side of the Moon,” for the major characters in my story, stuff that will not directly make it into my memoir. Because the golden rule and all that….

I read this file and feel the intense emotion that surfaces as one strips a scab from a wound. Anger, rage, fury, and discomfort bubble up. And sometimes I shake my head and smile. And in those cases, the hard work of forgiveness and understanding–hey, everyone in my story is as human and flawed and limited as I am–has been done. I remember as if it were a chapter in Jane Eyre–that I have read and read many times, and so no longer cry over. Once the stories have been processed and healed they no longer feel like my story.

* * *

Once, when I was 11, I woke, and “saw’ a silent figure cloaked in light stand at the foot of my bed. I decided it was my grandfather, who had recently died. I closed my eyes tightly, and he was gone.

Silly me, what if it were Jesus? Why didn’t I grab him and not let him go, as I do now when I “see” Jesus in my room (with the eyes of faith?

For, of course, Jesus was right there, standing there, through everything. The silent compassionate witness who stood there through all the pain and fury and despair, letting it happen, (but surely preventing worse). He knew that one day, he would take the clay of rage and grief and injustice into his own hands, shaping, shaping, shaping a redemptive jar from what seemed wasted mud.

Providing for those who grieve—
a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.
(Isaiah 61:3)

I type out this passage from Isaiah, and I ask myself, severely, “Hey, do you really believe this, Anita? Or are you being poetic?”

And I answer, “Both. For I am healed, aren’t I? I am, indeed, in the process of being healed.”

* * *

God is good. All the time. This I believe. I know it partly from experience. And partly by faith.

And I believe the past is not really past. It is still alive, in memory, in the scars on our brains and spirit. And so, it can still be redeemed; diamonds can appear amidst the mire of the past, as diamonds are continually formed from the muck deep within the earth.

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. All our lives are a continuum in his sight.

And he can today, turn with a smile to the mid-life woman who remembers events from her teens with rage and fury, and pour, pour, pour. Pour healing, pour forgiveness, poor restoration, so that I am entirely a new creation.

Come, Lord Jesus, journey with me into the past, the story of my Indian Catholic childhood which I feel compelled to tell. And as we go through it, pour healing, pour joy.

And when the past stretches out its long fingers, clutching me, preventing me from being who you want me to be, release me, re-shape me.

Healer of my soul, as you will one day make all things new, continue making me new.

He Makes the Failures of Friday Beautiful in His Time

By Anita Mathias

Ravaged by grief,

she saw you standing right there,

but did not recognize you.

She was living in Friday,

That traumatic Friday.

But it’s Sunday now,

And there you stand,

In front of Mary.

It’s a new day,

The only day that really counts.

Today.

* * *

Lord Jesus,

I give you the Fridays of my past.

My Fridays of trauma and grief

The Fridays I was betrayed,

The Fridays I failed.

It’s Sunday now,

And there you stand in front of me,

Oh Lovely One!

And you make all things new.

* * *

Cleopas walks downcast,

His hopes have crumbled.

He has seen betrayal, and he has learned

Religious leaders can be evil.

He walks, sad, foolish

And slow of heart,

Thinking of crumbled hopes

And his beloved

Humiliated teacher

Who walks beside him,

Always walks beside him.

* * *

Forgive me, Lord,

For the times I walked in darkness,

Shrouded in self-pity,

Unable to get over past betrayal,

Past evil, past disappointment;

My vision darkened as I considered

Other people’s evil

Instead of clearing the logs from my eyes.

Living in Friday.

Not noticing you

Walking beside me,

Always walking beside me,

Even in my valley of suffering

Offering this heart,

Still puckered with yesterday’s vinegar,

Fresh bread.

It is Sunday, today,

And you feed me

With the breaking of the bread,

And beauty and creativity,

And you say, “Be not afraid of broken things.

Even the Christ had to suffer.

Be not afraid.”

“When you walk through the waters, I’ll be with you

And the floods shall not overwhelm you,

When you walk through fire, you shall not be burned,

And the flame shall not consume you.”

* * *

Thomas says:

“Oh, the failure was dreadful,

Humiliating.

How could it be the Lord?

I saw hasty nails pierce

Those exquisite hands.

The impatient spear

driven into his side.

He failed

despite his prayer,

our prayer,

all the love, the preparation,

the hopes,

He failed.

They killed him.

But if prayer worked,

as he said it would,

If faith could move mountains,

as he said it would,

if his Father loved him,

As he said he did,

If he was God,

As he said he was

Would there have been that disgrace,

The mocking crown of thorns,

The mocking scarlet robe,

The stripping, the crucifixion?

* * *

“Thomas,” they say.

“He’s alive now.”

Faith!

I have no faith left.

I am bereft of faith.

Unless I see the nail marks in his hands

and put my finger where the nails were,

and put my hand into his side,

I will not believe, I say.

* * *

And then, I see him,

And words fail me

And I kneel,

And all I can say is

My Lord and My God.

* * *

Oh stupid Thomas!

Forgive me, Lord for my stupidity.

For believing you come

Only in day, and not in night,

Only in summer and not in winter

Only in success and not in failure.

Only in glory, never in shame.

My Lord and My God

Forgive me for needing

to see your radiant, risen body

To realize that there was beauty too

In the three hours on the cross

When you were the voluntary scapegoat

For a selfish world.

I believe.

Help my unbelief.

Help me to accept from your hands

Whatever you give me

With praise, and thanksgiving.

The lacerated hands,

The mauled side,

They too are part of the beautiful body of Christ

Things you make beautiful in your time.

May I never forget this,

lovely Lord Jesus.

Grieve No More For All That’s Broken

By Anita Mathias

Wheat must be crushed to become bread

And bread broken to be eaten.

The chrysalis crumble for the butterfly,

The egg splinter for the chicken.

And sheets of coloured glass

Must be shattered

To become stained glass

Through which the love of God–

In rainbowed light–

Shines.

* * *

And I consider…

Did growth spring green

From my own brokenness?

It always does!

My rejected manuscript

Got me to hone my craft,

Again, more diligently.