Dreaming Beneath the Spires

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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

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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

Burn-Out Vanishes When We Rediscover Purpose

By Anita Mathias

ravenna-s-apollnare-nuovo-the-three-wise-men-1When I blogged regularly, which I did for six years, I felt more alive, more alert, more attentive to my life, and what God was doing in it. In Frederick Buechner’s phrase, I listened to my life.

 

I have taken a six month blogging break, and the peril of blogging breaks (or writing breaks: ask Harper Lee or Margaret Mitchell!) is that you feel you have to write something substantial, beautiful, and meaty when you return to blogging …which seems daunting, and so you put off writing—and returning.

 

The cardinal rule for avoiding writers’ and bloggers’ block—and indeed for any endeavour—is to begin where you are, with something little and slight if need be.

 

So perhaps I should catch you up with a snippet from my life, and an insight stemming from it.

* * *

The country lane on the outskirts of Oxford, England which we live, unbelievably quiet and beautiful when we moved in over ten years ago, has changed its character as more people have moved in—“Traveller” families, as it happens. It has become noisier, less idyllic and scenic. The whole village was up in arms against “Travellers” moving in; there were public meetings and hearings; I was particularly troubled because they were moving onto a field adjacent to my large garden. But in prayer, I “heard” clearly that we were not to oppose them, so we did not; we ceased attending public meetings or lodging planning protests against them, much to our other neighbours’ mystification.

 

In early June, because of many and noisy neighbours in what had been a quiet and deserted lane, I realized that the time had come to move–from the countryside on the edge of Oxford, where I have happily lived for the last 11 years to the city, to North Oxford in particular. And we even had an offer to buy our house, phew!!

 

Why North Oxford? When I applied to study in Oxford as a student in the eighties, I felt a call, a leading to Oxford, and I have never felt a call to any other city. North Oxford is walking distance from my church, St. Andrew’s; from Oxford University where I am now on my second year of the German classes I am taking for fun; from the Ashmolean Museum; the superb Oxford Playhouse, friends, parks, the river, a good gym, yoga classes. I would be able to walk most everywhere.

 

North Oxford is, however, substantially more expensive than my country village on the outskirts of the city. It’s the most expensive area of the UK, outside of London!!

So…

* * *

Deciding to move has galvanized us. “God meant it for good.” We have owned a small business for almost ten years now, and we have started diligently and creatively expanding it to finance our move. So that’s a definite blessing that’s come from this decision.

 

Many, many, years ago, I felt a longing, to write a memoir. A call? A desire, a longing, a call–they are all intertwined. God reveals his call on our lives through the desires, gifts and experiences he has given us. But the book turned out to a bigger, longer project than I had visualized, and early rejections of the proposal at a hassled, overwhelmed time of my life broke me. Temporarily.

 

But writing this book was a mysterious call, all right, something that perched on my shoulder, and I didn’t feel free to move on to anything else until I had completed it. So I did not…move on to something else… nor complete it.

 

The tale has tragic overtones now, but God who loves good stories can make dark plot twists like Joseph-in-the-well-and-dungeon and Good Friday spiral upwards and morph into gold, into Easter Sunday

 

Anyway, when I decided to move because of my new and noisy neighbours, I swiftly realised that moving was out of the question until I had finished this book. Moving can be stressful, especially in middle age… People can lose their health, their peace and their papers…

 

So I decided to finish my book before I moved. Realising that living next door to my noisy neighbours was unsustainable in the long run galvanized me to do what I had always wanted to do for years, get some momentum on the book–which has been a great joy. How relieved, how delighted I will be when the book finally gets finished.

* * *

So here I am, writing slowly but steadily.

 

Funny thing… In June 2016, I was convinced that I was burnt-out. Our daughter Irene, our last nestling, didn’t want to go on holiday over the February or the June half-term breaks because of her mocks and A-S exams, and all I could think of was how tired and burnt out I was, and how I needed a long, active holiday, and to walk many miles a day to exorcise a cobwebby from my mind, and flood it again with oxygen and ideas.

 

But then an offer came to buy my house, and I decided to sell the house, and move, and to finish my book before I even contemplate moving. With that fresh hearing of the ancient call came a new momentum, and energy descended from the heavens.

 

I came across this quote recently, “Burnout is more often caused by purpose deficiency than vitamin deficiency.”

 

My burnout lifted, just like that.

 

I do not make bucket lists…I see God as full of kindness towards me, with open hands towards me, full of gifts, and am okay with accepting the gifts he pours out. But if I were to make a bucket list… well, finishing and publishing this book would be one of the few things in that bucket. And circumstances have now given me a sort of deadline.

* * *

Years ago, my mentor suggested that I have a writing goal. But incredibly, I didn’t then know how to set goals. You know I would hope to write two chapters, but instead wrote a teeny bit of one… and then what?

 

So this time, I started really, really ridiculously small, since I was adding a new thing–finishing a book–to a life already full with blogging, parenting, exercising, German classes, gardening, house-running, church, small group, writers’ group, etc. etc. I set the timer for 5 minutes, and decided to write 20 words minimum. The next day, I went for 40, then 60, and now I am at 2300 words a day, new or revised. I keep track of the words I’ve missed on busy days, and try to make up on the days when writing feels like flying (which are not that frequent, sadly).

 

So this is the second/third draft of the book, revising is not the most scintillating thing, but getting the book finished will be scintillating, so I try to sit down, revise 2300 words, do some make-up words, and then I’m all done for the day.

* * *

A couple of things that are helping me. I start my writing with reading, to take the revision process more joyous. (Currently reading One Man’s Meat, E. B. White’s memoir of country life which I have just decided is not for me, and Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves’ horrifying memoir of his service in the first World War).

 

I am using the Pomodoro technique, work for 25 minutes, and then take a 5 minute break to tidy and declutter, or bounce on my trampoline for 1000 steps, and then back to work. 25 minutes is a maddeningly short work session, but according to Britain’s NHS, one should take an active break from sitting every 30 minutes: “excessive sitting slows the metabolism – which affects our ability to regulate blood sugar and blood pressure, and metabolise fat – and may cause weaker muscles and bones. Essentially, the body is ‘shutting down’ while sitting and there is little muscle activity.”  

 

I am using “Freedom,” software which blocks the entire internet for the short time I am reading and writing. Divided attention destroys productivity.

 

I have discovered that a three mile walk through a park or by a river resets my tired mind and floods it with oxygen again; I don’t necessarily need a week or a weekend away, though they are wonderful.

 

I have been influenced by a book I am reading by Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey, called “Spark: How Exercise will Improve the Performance of Your Brain,” about how running, lifting weights, yoga, dance and sport can spark a measurable improvement in cognitive ability… help you think more clearly, read faster and concentrate longer… essentially make you smarter. I have certainly found it to be true. I am taking yoga classes, and lifting weights, which helps me concentrate for longer, feel more alive and happier, and sleep better.

* * *

Take away? If you are listless, bored, burnt-out and aren’t getting anything much done, re-align yourself with God. Seek his marching orders for the hour in front of you, the day in front of you, the year. Each of us has been created for a purpose, and is intended to be a bright spot in the jigsaw, the mosaic that God is working on. Ask him to reveal the purpose he has for you in the coming year, or years, and then beaver away at it. Having a purpose and focussing on it has cured cancer patients, as we’ve all anecdotally heard; given the dying a new lease of life; lifted depression; helped people achieve more than they ever imagined possible.

 

What is the next purpose God has in mind for your one and precious life? Aligning yourself with the Father and working on it will fill your life with excitement and energy again.

 

Love, Anita, tortoising, and sometimes haring, away on the book she has always wanted to write.

 

Filed Under: In which I explore Productivity and Time Management and Life Management, In which I just keep Trusting the Lord, In which I try to discern the Voice and Will of God Tagged With: blogging, bucket lists, exercise, listen to your life, memoir, Oxford, Pomodoro technique, Purpose, reading, revising a book, walking, writing

On “Defining Decisions” Rather Than New Year’s Resolutions

By Anita Mathias

tra-nautical-artImage Credit

Mark Batterson, in  The Circle-Maker, a fascinating book on a prayer, praises “defining decisions,” that set the course of your life, sort of like choosing whether you drive to Slovenia (which our family did last summer), or to Scotland (which we might do this summer).

I made three defining decisions in my twenties. Chronologically: I decided to become a writer. I decided to follow Jesus. And I decided to take a marriage vow to love.

Yeah, well…

I have failed in all of these, continually. There have been days, weeks, months, and years, in which I have not written at all. I sometimes think of my beloved Jesus sadly: how imperfectly I imitate him. And marriage, well.

Yet, oddly, I’ve not failed in any of these, because I am still on the road. I am writing, albeit less than I would like to. I am still following after Jesus, albeit imperfectly. I am still married, more or less happily.

* * *

Oh, it is this season again, this season of resolutions. And I will probably make some.

But what I am more interested in are defining decisions, North Stars, compass points, things I will continue to do even if I sometimes go off course. Things that I will continue doing, even if I fall. Not resolutions I make year after year like Yom Kippur sacrifices, but a once-and-for-all decision I will follow, though I may wobble, and fail some days, some weeks…

Here are a few of my defining decisions, which I return to again and again. These are to do with health

1 I will walk 10,000 steps a day.

2 I will avoid sugar

3 I will avoid white flour (using bread, pasta and noodles as a treat, rather than as food).

4 I will begin reading myself to sleep at 10 p.m.

5 I will do some yoga every day (a habit I am struggling to adopt).

These are habits which are not yet second nature. There are other habits which are second nature, though again I fail some days, some weeks, some months….

I will spend time with God

I will read or listen to my Bible.

I will read.

I will write at least a little.

I will keep the rooms in which I work and sleep tidy.

I will garden.

* * *

How about you? Instead of a resolution, different every year, why not try a defining decision which you will return to, despite falls and wobbles, as we continue trying to follow Jesus, though like Peter, we might forget him, deny him, and yearn to go on a break.

Filed Under: Applying my heart unto wisdom, goals Tagged With: Defining decisions, Mark Batterson, new year's resolutions, reading, The Circle-Maker, walking, writing, yoga

In praise of tiny goals

By Anita Mathias

I know many people who want to write books they haven’t completed—and I, alas, am one of them.

The standard advice for writing a book? Ray Bradbury, Stephen King or Donald Miller recommend 1000 words a day. If people did that, they’d publish 4-6 books in a year, Miller says.

More commonly, writing gurus recommend 500 words a day, which gives you 182,500 words a year—i.e. 2-3 books of average length. However, how many writers do you know who publish 2 to 3 books in a year?

500 words a day is more challenging than it seems, apparently.

Because….Life!!

* * *

But how about slice that finer? 250 words a day? Which makes for 91,000 words a year. One long book.

1000 words is too challenging for me. I have streaks of the perfectionist. I get distracted. I get tired. I have a life, a very full one. And I need to work on my health, which is partly built by exercise. And I want to make time for my spiritual life, my family life, my social life, my house and garden. A consistent 500 words every day I find challenging for the same reasons. If I do it consistently, other things slip.

But 250 words? 250 words. Beautiful. Piece of cake. Blink of an eyelash. Not quite, but I can often write it, and revise the previous day or two’s words in half an hour. Perhaps it’s psychological–1000 words or 500 seems like a lot; 250 words feels like nothing. If you’ve read this far, you’ve read 267 words.

But 250 words a day adds up to a long book a year.

And isn’t it better to have a low goal, and reach it than a lofty one which sneers at you when, more days than not, you fall short?

So last week, I wrote 250 words a day six days a week on my memoir, did not miss a single day, and took new ground every day. So easy, so joyous, and how quickly it gets done.

* * *

Mid-life is a time for radical changes. And change, revision of life, excites me. But what I am trying is what the Japanese call kaizen—making big changes in the smallest measurable increments, a technique used brilliantly to change the corporate culture and increase productivity in Japanese companies. I am making changes in the smallest possible increments—using a app, Runkeeper, that gives me feedback as I walk so that most days I increase my speed and distance by a few seconds a mile, and a tiny increment of a mile; slowly improving the efficiency of my housekeeping practices; slowly but radically changing my diet; and writing more by aiming at less.

Everest is climbed step by step, and slow progress means you are more likely to get there smiling.

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules, ” Trollope wrote, who wrote daily and steadily for 35 years, producing 49 novels.

So off I go then to write 250 words.

 

 

Filed Under: goals, In which I celebrate discipline Tagged With: 250 words, consistency, Donald MIller, Kaizen, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Tiny goals, trollope, writing

When, For a Season, God Himself Blocks You

By Anita Mathias

 desert_cactus_flowers
You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good, to save many lives,” Joseph quietly tells his brothers. (Genesis 50:20)

Oh they did; they sure did, first throwing him into a disused well, then uncaringly selling him on for thirty shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites, not caring what became of him.

And what came out of his experience of betrayal, slavery, false accusation, and imprisonment was elevation—promotion—influence–the ability to save many lives.

* * *

I used to feel stressed and a bit hopeless if I had enemies, if I thought there were people with inveterate animosity, jealousy, competitiveness, or malice towards me, who would block me, who might slander me. The thought of such people still does not make my heart sing!

But they are a fact of life. “Some are jealous of your face. Some are jealous of your lace. And some will be jealous of your grace,” as RT Kendall writes in The Anointing.

However, Shakespeare’s young Henry V puts it well, “We are in God’s hands, brothers, not in theirs.”

I sigh if I realize someone is reflexively blocking me or my ideas, putting in a bad word for me, but I am not afraid.

I do not fear them.

Because there are always two stories going on in our lives: the plot we see, and the story God is still writing. There is the story people think they are forcing onto your life–in which you may miss the chance to lead, speak, get the prize, the invitation, because someone feels threatened by you, is jealous of you, or just plain dislikes you.

Often you are unaware of these machinations, and that’s best. When you do know, you wring your hands with a sense of loss.

But all is not lost.

You were not meant to lead at that time. You were meant to quietly follow the One. You were not meant to speak at that time. You were meant to listen.

Sure, it will take you longer to achieve your heart’s desire. The Spirit is taking you on the scenic route. You are in the desert, where all voices are silent, but the voice of God;   Tweet: You are in the desert, where all voices are silent, but the voice of God. rom @AnitaMathias1 http://ctt.ec/ot7J1+ where is no trophy but his companionship; no wine but his spirit; where your progress is not measurable, and, anyway, there’s no one to praise it.

Why, even your prayers aren’t working. Every avenue of showing off is blocked.

Welcome to the desert, fellow pilgrim, where God himself blocks you. Tweet: Welcome to the desert, fellow pilgrim, where God himself blocks you. From @anitamathias1 http://ctt.ec/1AB5R+

* * *

You say: “See here, God, I have wasted my life. Look at me, mid-life and achievement-poor. Remember, God, those years I was promising; remember that award for a writer of unusual promise? Why I was in my twenties then. The snazzy university, the snazzy prizes, the early publications, the blushing peach down of promise, remember?

Well, I’ve failed, and you’ve failed me; we’ve failed together, you and I.

Yeah, you really haven’t managed my life too well, Lord, and neither have I. Let’s just go eat some worms.

My twenties are over, my thirties, my… Let’s just say “my hasting days fly on with full career, but my summer little bud or blossom showeth.”

How can you make up to me, God for the years when I wanted to build much, but instead built little?

You have behaved rather badly towards me, my God, my friend. You have let me down. You are my friend, and so I forgive you, but I am sad about this. I am.

But if I love anyone, I love you. So yes, I will follow you because, you’ve sure ruined my appetite for following other paths of glory.

I believe you can restore the years the locusts have eaten. The prophet Joel said so, and Christians have attested to it. But I don’t see how. Jesus, let’s be honest here, I sometimes feel as if nothing can compensate me for those wasted years, the years in Joseph’s dungeon.

I really do.

Though they were what you gave me, and I accept them because I love and trust you. I accept them from your hands in trust as I accept the full years of your goodness.

* * *

And you, Lord, reply:

“Child, child, friend, beloved, Anita, what you wanted was a lesser good, and so I withheld it.

You saw the success of your writer friends—their whirl of book readings, teaching gigs, speaking gigs, lectures, prizes, prolific writing, book contracts, money, fame, fascinating friends, travel. All the trappings of a career. And you wanted it too.

And I knew you wanted it.

But I also knew you better than you knew yourself. Don’t make that face. I truly do.

You were not ready for the busyness of travel, deadlines, speaking, teaching, crises, midnight oil.

Fame and glory–what made you think it would make you happy? I knew it would not. It would not. Rushing to planes, trains and automobiles has never made you happy. Rush has never makes you happy, or busyness, or deadlines. You love quiet unscheduled days at home, or in your garden.

But I promise you this: You will write the books you want to write. You will not die before your pen has gleaned your teeming brain.

All the things you deeply love and want to explore and preserve in words, I will ensure you explore and preserve them,

All the things I kept from you, I kept not for your harm, but that you might find it in my arms.

You are sad that success came later than you wanted it, but trust me.

The bright lights of the big cities would have obscured me.

The noise would have silenced my whisper.

A hammer had to be taken to all those idols.

There had to be a gotterdamerung, a ragnarok. You wanted to be Ms. Famous Writer, to dazzle the world with your creativity. You wanted fame, glory, money, success, as you saw your friends get it.

I gave you quietness, I wooed you to the desert, and there I showed you my love. Tweet: I gave you quietness, I wooed you to the desert, and there I showed you my love. From @AnitaMathias1 http://ctt.ec/c4e_8+

You had but one shot at investing in your children. I slowed down your career so you could teach them all you had to teach them. And could your marriage have withstood the rush in peace, not pieces? Did you want to be Ms. Divorced Famous Writer? You did not.

You have reached mid life with a full heart and full spirit, into which I have poured and poured and poured myself and my words. And now it is time to write.

* * *

“Oh God, could you not have poured both? Both yourself and the other things I wanted?”

“But then there would not have been room for me. I had to pry your fingers from other things, so they would clasp me. Had to silence other sounds, so you could hear me.

I gave you not what you thought you wanted, but what you love, quiet and peace and silence. And in the quietness of your country garden, I shaped you, I formed you, I made you into a woman of integrity, a woman aligned with me, a woman I can trust.

You sometimes feel you’ve wasted your life.

But child, you’ve given your life to me. It’s now my story, not yours. I am the author, not you.

Accept the plot twist I chose. Forgive me, as I forgive you. It was not time before. It’s time now. It’s time.

* * *

Lord, I accept the plot you chose. I accept my years in the wilderness. I accept your judgement that they were necessary. I forgive you.

And I will go forward in joy, in alignment with you, your joy filling my heart.

* * *

Open your hands wide, and I will fill them. Your heart has been reformed in the silent years.

Now I know, and you know, that while your hands are full of my blessings, your eyes will be on me and your heart will be full of me.

* * *

Tweetables

Welcome to the desert, fellow pilgrim, where God himself blocks you. From @anitamathias1  Tweet: When God stills all the noise, and you say “See here, God. I have wasted my life.” From @anitamathias1 http://ctt.ec/0Icc0+

You are in the desert, where all voices are silent, but the voice of God. From @anitamathias1  Tweet: You are in the desert, where all voices are silent, but the voice of God. From @anitamathias1 http://ctt.ec/5m83M+

There are always two stories going on in our lives, the story we perceive, and the story God is still writing From @anitamathias1 Tweet: There are always two stories going on in our lives, the story we perceive, and the story God is still writing From @anitamathias1 http://ctt.ec/M4v4b+

When God stills all the noise, and you say “See here, God. I have wasted my life.” From @anitamathias1 Tweet: When God stills all the noise, and you say “See here, God. I have wasted my life.” From @anitamathias1 http://ctt.ec/2fI1E+

Questions

Have you experienced a period of great silence? Have you experienced God more deeply as a result?

Image Credit

This post is kindly sponsored by mordocrosswords.com. Thank you for your support.

Filed Under: Blog Through The Bible Project, Field notes from the Land of Suffering, Genesis, In which I explore writing and blogging and creativity, Writing and Blogging Tagged With: blog through the bible, desert, failure, Genesis, Joseph, suffering, writing

As Birds Sing Because They Must, Even So I Write

By Anita Mathias

SONY DSC

As long as I have a garden to muck about in, and the health to do it, I shall not mind growing old. My garden is a deep joy at the centre of my life, even though I am making peace with not being able to keep up with it: it’s an acre and a half.

My nerves felt raw today, but then, I went out to the garden, which is bird-loud, and felt peace return.

Listening to birds sing, it’s suggested helps us relax, helps us complete tasks, and even think creatively. For instance, I didn’t have a single fresh idea for a blog post when I went out, and then, the garden gave me this!

* * *

Why do birds sing? Birds sing thousands of times through the day, the red-eyed vireo singing 20,000 songs daily. They sing to mark out their territories, to attract mates, or simply to communicate with other birds. They sing because it is their nature.  They sing because they must.

Gerard Manley Hopkins imagines kingfishers catching fire, dragonflies drawing flame, while singing, “What I do is me. For that I came.”

 As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

* * *

I have at various points considered giving up writing—when I had a miscarriage when Zoe was two; when I was pregnant with Irene; when domestic chaos overwhelmed me.

But each time when I decided to do nothing but housework until our house was orderly—-the last attempt was 7 years ago– I slipped into depression. It was hard to get out of bed, hard to focus on the sorting, organizing, dishes, laundry, the endless domestic routines.

If, however, I gave myself just an hour or two of creating, I had energy for the rest.  Because that is what I was made for: to write. And when I am not doing it, I am listless, slightly unhappy, and don’t have energy for anything else.

And so, each time I was tempted to give up writing to be a perfect homemaker, or a perfect mummy, I would return to writing, because it was my calling, my vocation.

* * *

As a bird sings its high, clear note, and as fish splash through the seas of this world, I am made to play with words and ideas, to attempt to recreate beauty out of beauty.

Writing time is slowly opening as I grow more disciplined. What will I write? How much? I don’t know.

But this I do know–as Milton puts it,

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven;
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Taskmaster’s eye. 

 

Image Credit

Filed Under: In which I explore writing and blogging and creativity, Writing and Blogging Tagged With: birds, calling, Gardening, Hopkins, Milton, vocation, writing

Lucy Mills on her New Book, “Forgetful Heart,” and her Writing and Publishing Journey

By Anita Mathias

Forgetful_Heart

Lucy Mills has just published her first book, Forgetful Heart: Remembering God in a Distracted World (Darton, Longman and Todd) available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

I ask Lucy a few questions about her book

What inspired your book?

There was no ‘one thing’ – at least not that I can remember (!)

I was aware of my own forgetfulness. My cluttered, distracted mind often results in silly mistakes, side-tracked intentions and confused moments.

I was coming out of a difficult patch in my life and faith and trying to re-orientate myself. I’d been reading through the Old Testament, and been struck how, particularly in Deuteronomy, God’s people are often called to remember him – not to forget all God had done for them.

I’d been feeling frustrated that things I’d learned in the past had slipped away from me. I’d studied for a degree in theology, which I loved – and it distressed me how the things I’d engaged with so passionately had then retreated somewhere in the dusty recesses of my mind.

But above all, I found I was forgetting the moments of profound revelation, the God-touches in my life. Instead of retelling my stories, I was allowing them to decay until the plot was hard to find.

I’d had ideas for books before, but none that took hold of me in quite this way. The book was part of my own journey, my own quest for remembering.

I ask the question: what does it mean to remember God in my life? If what I remember is essential to my identity, what am I choosing to dwell on day by day? Tell us about your writing journey

I struggled many years with a love-hate relationship with writing.

Many times I wanted to ‘drop it’ altogether and get on with other things. But it wouldn’t let me go. When at last I owned my vocation as a writer, I experienced a feeling of freedom. I couldn’t live my life thinking ‘perhaps I could’. I needed to grasp it and say ‘I will do this’, regardless of whether anyone else wanted to read my words.

I’m now glad that earlier attempts led to limited success. It took me until recently to discover my ‘voice,’ to mature into becoming the writer I want to be. I needed that time of waiting, internal conflict and ‘brewing’ – however difficult that was at the time!

As someone who struggles with CFS/ME, my life is by necessity punctuated by full stops – not always where I would like to put them!

I’ve had to be flexible in my expectations of myself and to accept the occasional ‘derailing’ of my dreams.

Please tell us about your publishing journey

I worked hard on my proposal before approaching publishers. I approached one publisher because I was acquainted with the commissioning editor and knew she would be constructive. The team was interested but they weren’t sure it would sell.

The second editor/publisher I approached was complimentary about both the idea and my writing style but, again, rejected the book.

I then started looking into a third publisher. As I researched them, I felt an affinity with them that I’d not experienced with anyone else. I needed more courage to contact them because of this! I got an out-of-office reply. The then commissioning editor wasn’t back from holiday until the next week. I was surprised to get a reply that next week, asking to see the complete manuscript (such as it was).

The team worked hard over the next few months to make publishing my book viable for them. I signed a contract with Darton, Longman and Todd in August 2013.

It’s worth finding a publisher who is a good ‘fit’ for your book, not just in genre and style but in ethos. What do they care about? What’s your common ground – and how can you bring this to their attention? Don’t just look at them as names on a list; look at the reasons you’d like to be published by them. Yes, it can make the rejection harder. But it will make an acceptance all the more sweet!

For me, finding a publishing team who grasped – from the outset – the ‘soul’ of the book, made a huge difference. I felt I could trust them with it. They wanted to publish my book because they liked it and they understood it. I feel very privileged to have been published by them, as a ‘new author on the block’. I’d love the book to sell well because I want to justify their faith in it.

Lucy’s website and blog are found at http://www.lucy-mills.com and she tweets as @lucymills. You can hear her read an extract from Chapter 16 of Forgetful Heart here: 

 

Lucy Mills

Lucy Mills

 

Filed Under: In which I proudly introduce my guest posters Tagged With: Darton, Forgetful Heart, Longman and Todd, Lucy Mills, Publishing, Remembering, writing

Amy Boucher Pye guest-posts on her writing process and her work in progress

By Anita Mathias

AcuppAmyThank you to Anita for inviting me on the Monday blog tour. Pleasure to be dreaming beneath the spires with you, even if from a sunny garden in North London!

So the game is to share what we’re working on, why we write, and how the process works.

What I am working on

I’m writing and writing but still chasing after that first elusive book. Having worked as an editor in the Christian publishing field for yonks, I find I have to chain up my inner editor when I’m writing, and nowhere more so than with a book-length manuscript. My inner editor voice sees what I’m creating and chimes in with some not-so-helpful comments, “Are you sure you want to write that? You’re a first-time author. What about your platform, or lack thereof? Blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah.”

My journey to book publication has been rocky. A highlight was Easter 2013, when I was thrilled to secure a most fabulous literary agent to represent me, Steve Laube. He shopped around my idea of a memoir called Beloved of God, which traced my journey of awakening to God’s love and accepting my identity as his child. Result? Rejection. Ouch.

And so I’m back to the drawing board. I feel a bit stuck, to be honest, for that nasty inner editor can be so vocal, especially when my first attempt did not meet with success. But now that I’ve just finished with a busy season of speaking engagements, I’m going to clamp down and develop the book idea that keeps popping up, wanting to take a life of its own.

Why do I write what I do?

I’ve always loved words and writing. When I was 11, I was first published in the Minneapolis paper in the kids’ page, which I found thrilling. But when some schoolmates mocked me for scoring 104/100 on the poetry project, I started to lose confidence. Working for a great writer in my early 20s further eroded my willingness to put words on the page, as I thought about what I would write and found myself wanting (to be fair on my younger self, that author/thinker and I have very different styles!)

It was only after my world fell in, seemingly, when Zondervan axed my acquisitions (UK: commissioning) editor position that I started to develop my writing voice. I began writing regularly for publication (feature articles, columns, reviews, devotionals), enjoying the buzz of seeing the finished product and the interacting with readers.

One of my most favorite activities is writing devotionals – Bible reading notes. I learn so much by delving into the biblical text and commentaries, chewing it over with prayer and offering it up. I’ve written for New Daylight, Day by Day with God, Inspiring Women Every Day, Closer to God and Living Light. You can read some of my devotional series on my blog.

I’ve also always loved books, and so another joy is to run the Woman Alive Book Club. Every month I choose a book or two to review as well as interviewing Christian authors. We also publish 5 reader reviews. Our Facebook group is a wonderful place for discussion of books and authors; it’s a real community of grace. (Because I’m always in need of books to review for this monthly feature, publishers regularly send me their books to consider. Free books = result!)

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

The more I write, the more I celebrate the author’s individual voice. Made in the image of God, we all reflect his glory, truth, creativity and love in unique ways. That voice being expressed by words on a page (or a screen) to me is beautiful. The more sure I am about who am I am, rooted in him, the more eager I am to write and share and create.

And yes, I’m aware I didn’t really answer the question…

How does my writing process work?

Once I’ve taken the kids to school, I settle down in my hopefully sunny study. After some time reading the Bible and praying, and yep, catching up on social media, I get down to my task. If it’s a blog post or a short article, I take the hint of the idea that I want to flesh out and get down to writing. (I wrote about this creative process recently in a blog.) If I’m writing Bible reading notes, I delight in reading around the passage in commentaries and spending some time in prayer, asking God what he’d like me to share.

My busy family life means I can’t often go away for a period of uninterrupted writing, but those occasions when I’ve hidden myself away for a few days or even a week are blissful hard work. After getting my work space organized just so, I research and write and drink sparkling water and write and look out the window and drink more sparking water and write. Ah for one of those weeks…

I’ve found that any good writing comes after rewriting. And rewriting. And rewriting. Of course, we also have to learn how to stop the editing process too – and finally to finish off a piece before we destroy it – but going back over one’s work with a fresh eye, tweaking here and cutting there, gives stronger results.

To continue the blog tour, I nominate two fabulous Cathys: Cathy LeFeurve and Cathy Madavan. After all, my middle name is Catherine…

Amy Boucher Pye

Amy Boucher Pye

Filed Under: In which I explore writing and blogging and creativity, In which I proudly introduce my guest posters, Writing and Blogging Tagged With: Amy Boucher Pye, editing, Monday Blog Hop, writing

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Anita Mathias: About Me

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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

  • “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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