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In which Imaginative Literature Stirs the Heart to Conversion (A Guest Post by Holly Ordway)

By Anita Mathias

I am honoured to welcome Dr. Holly Ordway to my blog today.

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In which Imaginative Literature Stirs the Heart to Conversion

How could a fierce atheist enter into Christian faith? There are many ways for God’s grace to work; my own story is one that highlights the importance of imaginative literature!

When I was firmly an atheist, I dismissed Christianity as superstitious nonsense, and I simply would not have listened to the arguments that ultimately convinced me that the Christian claim is objectively true. Apologetics arguments were (eventually) vitally important, but as I reflected and wrote about my journey, I recognized the importance of imagination as both the catalyst and the foundation of my rational exploration of the faith.

How did that happen?

Let me give you a little glimpse from my memoir of conversion, Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms.

From my childhood:

Long before I gave any thought about whether Christianity was true, and long before I considered questions of faith and practice, my imagination was being fed Christianly. I delighted in the stories of King Arthur’s knights and the quest for the Holy Grail, without knowing that the Grail was the cup from the Last Supper. I had no idea that the Chronicles of Narnia had anything to do with Jesus, but images from the stories stuck with me, as bright and vivid in my memory as if I had caught sight of a real landscape, had a real encounter, with more significance than I could quite grasp.

And at some point in my childhood, I found J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and that changed everything. Not suddenly. Not even immediately. But slowly, surely. Like light from an invisible lamp, God’s grace was beginning to shine out from Tolkien’s works, illuminating my Godless imagination with a Christian vision.

I don’t remember reading The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit for the first time, only re-reading them again and again… Middle Earth was a world in which there is darkness, but also real light, a light that shines in the darkness and is not extinguished: Galadriel’s light, and the light of the star that Sam sees break through the clouds in Mordor, and the ray of sun that falls on the flower-crowned head of the king’s broken statue at the crossroads… I didn’t know, then, that my imagination had been, as it were, baptized in Middle Earth. But something took root in my reading of Tolkien that would flower many years later.

From my time at college:

The bumper-sticker expressions of Christian affirmation – “I’m not perfect, just forgiven!” “God is my co-pilot!” – and the kitsch art that I saw – a blue-eyed Jesus in drapey robes (polyester?) comforting some repentant hipster, or cuddling impossibly adorable children (none crying or distracted), presented faith as a kind of pious flag-waving. No thanks!

I didn’t know then how to say it, but I was looking for the cosmic Christ, the one by whom all things were made, the risen and glorified Jesus at the right hand of the Father.

The Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins got past my allergic reaction to kitsch because it flowed naturally out of what he saw in the world.

Where his poetry was sweet, it had the sweetness of a perfectly ripe strawberry, or of the very best chocolate, creamy and rich – not the chemical sweetness of a low-fat sugar-free pudding with non-dairy whipped topping.

Where his poetry was bitter, it was bitter with the taste of real misery, the kind that fills up your awareness, squeezes out the memory of better times and draws a blank on tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow – not the faux-sadness of “Jesus died for you!” (so cheer up and get with the program already), the faux-compassion that can’t bear to look at a crucifix (so morbid).

Somehow for Hopkins the sweet and the bitter were not opposed; they were part of the same experience of being in the world, and undergirding all of it was something I didn’t understand at all, never having experienced it or known anyone who had: the reality of God, not as an abstract moral figure or as a name dropped to show off one’s piety, but a dynamic awareness of being in relationship with the Trinitarian God, an experienced reality bigger by far than the words used to point to it.

Years later, struggling with questions of meaning, wrestling with despair, I re-read Hopkins. I had no conscious desire to find God; I thought I knew that He did not exist. And yet something was at work in me, just as Hopkins wrote in “The Windhover”: “My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird. . .” My heart stirred – for what? For something beyond my experience.

Poetry had done its work. I was ready to listen.

Ordway photo

Holly Ordway is Professor of English and Director of the MA in Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, and the author of Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms (Ignatius Press, 2014). She holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst; her academic work focuses on imagination in apologetics, with special attention to the writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.

Filed Under: In which I celebrate books and film and art, In which I play in the fields of poetry, In which I proudly introduce my guest posters Tagged With: Apologetics, Conversion narratives, Gerard Manley Hopkins, grace, Holly Ordway, King Arthur, Lewis, Not God's Type, Poetry, Tolkein

When Faith falls into Place like a Jigsaw, Piece by Piece

By Anita Mathias

Jigsaw Puzzle Tabgha - Bread and Fish Mosaic
 As I was writing on the cosmic significance of the Cross of Christ, I realised that though I was born Catholic, remaining so until I was 21 and was, sometimes, a serious Catholic–even a novice in Mother Teresa’s Convent for 14 months–I had never understood why Jesus had to die. If I committed a mortal sin, I would go to hell–if I had not had the chance to go to confession and be absolved before I died (Do you see how this strengthens the power of the priesthood?)

If I only committed venial sins, I would go to Purgatory, and then after a period there, shortened if people prayed or paid, offering Masses on my behalf, I would go to heaven. Just as if Jesus had not died?

And when–after a six year period in my twenties of not really believing anything very much–I decided to recommit to following Christ, I went to serious Bible-believing Protestant churches.

And when the Atonement was first explained to me, I am afraid I did not really believe it.

Why? Because it could not really be proven.

I had, similarly, not really believed in heaven and hell for those six years, because, for all I knew they were theological inventions, theological fairy tales. I had decided not do anything for desire for heaven or fear of hell, because there was no proof for either of these.

* * *

As an undergraduate at Oxford, I had listened to lectures on Lord Raglan’s The Hero and was struck at the resemblances the life of Jesus bore to these mythical heroes across cultures.

1. Hero’s mother is a royal virgin;
2. His father is a king, and
3 4. The circumstances of his conception are unusual, and
5. He is also reputed to be the son of a god.
6. At birth an attempt is made,   to kill him, but
7. he is spirited away, and
8. Reared by foster -parents in a far country.
9. We are told nothing of his childhood, but
10. On reaching manhood he returns or goes to his future Kingdom.
14. For a time he reigns uneventfully and
15. Prescribes laws, but
16. Later he loses favour with the gods and/or his subjects, and
17. Is driven from the throne and city, after which
18. He meets with a mysterious death,
19. Often at the top of a hill,
20. His children, if any do not succeed him.
21. His body is not buried, but nevertheless
22. He has one or more holy sepulchres.

Numerous heroes fit into this archetype, including Krishna, Moses, Romulus, King Arthur, Perseus, Heracles, Mohammed, Beowulf, Buddha, Zeus, Samson, Achilles, and Odysseus.  

And so I wondered: Was Jesus God? Was there a God?

* * *

When C.S. Lewis was troubled by the same thing, in Oxford, 45 year earlier, Tolkein sorted him out by explaining that Christianity is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened:

Lewis writes to his friend, Arthur Greeves,

  My puzzle was about the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ “saved” or “opened salvation to” the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now — except in so far as his example helped us.

 And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (“propitiation” — “sacrifice” — “the blood of the Lamb”) — expressions which I could only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.

Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a God sacrificing himself to himself, I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it. 

Again, the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me, provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant.”

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call “real things”. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a “description” of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties.

 The “doctrines” we get out of the true myth are translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh. God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.  At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approached the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also certain that it really happened…  

Ah, but I then had no Tolkein to sort me out!

* * *

In my mid-twenties, I yearned to return to faith because my life was not working elegantly, and I thought I had made rather a mess of it. Surely I would do better if I followed Christ, I thought.

When I longed for faith again a North Star to guide; when, you might say, I missed Jesus; a friend, Peggy Goetz, suggested I try to do what Jesus said, and see if it was true or not.

“If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own,” John 7:17 was Jesus’s own apologetic, the proof he offered of whether his words were from God, or his own.

So I started giving to everyone who asked of me; lending and not asking back; praying and keeping a list of my prayer requests. And there was a tidal wave of answers, sweeping me into the Kingdom. Little odd things: I had just moved into an unfurnished house for my Ph. D and realized I’d need to buy a mattress. What a hassle without a car! I prayed I’d be given one, and a student returning to Korea offered me hers the next day. Several coincidences like that! Wow!

And so, real faith slowly slipped into place like pieces in a jigsaw.

* * *

Does anyone become a Christian and then instantly believe all its doctrines? Or do they fall into place, step by step as they did for me? Do we construct our creeds gradually? Yeah, I believe in the Resurrection. Yes, I believe in the Atonement. Yeah, I believe in Hell, because Jesus talked so much about it, though I am uncertain of its demographics. Yeah, I believe in Heaven–ditto!!

I believe!

 

Filed Under: In which I play in the fields of Theology Tagged With: Apologetics, Atonement, C. S. Lewis, Prayer, theology, Tolkein

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My Books

Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India

Wandering Between Two Worlds - Amazon.com
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Wandering Between Two Worlds: Essays on Faith and Art

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

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The Story of Dirk Willems

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Premier Digital Awards 2015 - Finalist - Blogger of the year
Runner Up Christian Media Awards 2014 - Tweeter of the year

Recent Posts

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

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Country Girl
Edna O'Brien

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C S Lewis

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