Mister God, This is Anna

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The relationship between Fynn and Anne is very fluid. As he himself says, "I saw myself variously as father, brother, uncle, friend." I admired their immediate connection with each other and Fynn's clear devotion for the little girl. But instead of focusing on this beautiful, short-lived relationship, Fynn decides to focus mainly on Anne's thoughts about God, and the hundred thousand questions raised in his mind by her constant musings. This is what brings the book down. The conversations between the two get very repetitive and dragged. I think I should have been much more of a religious idealist or much more of a philosopher to truly appreciate this book. Sadly, I am neither. The book allows us to meet Anna, a precocious child of four years. She has run away from home and makes a life with Fynn and his mum. During her short life, Anna develops a refined way of looking at almost everything around her and manages to teach twenty year old Fynn a thing or two about life. From the moment Anna refused to tell anyone where her parents lived to the moment of her death, Anna manages to control her environment and those around her, although her control is a loving, gentle control. This is by no means a sentimental, trite, or simple story, as the title might suggest to today's reader. In fact, I intend to re-read parts of it and add reference notes in my copy of the book. As a whole it is beyond amazing. It is astounding. The ending of the book describes Anna's death at age seven after falling from a tree and Fynn's profound grief. "She never made eight years, she died by an accident. She died with a grin on her beautiful face. She died saying, 'I bet Mister God lets me get into heaven for this'." [4] Fynn experiences a period of angst, blaming God, but when he visits Anna's grave and sees it to be a riot of flowers, he lets go of his anger against God. The answer, he realizes, is "Anna is in my middle". This particular reference is to a conversation between Anna and Fynn. God is part of everybody and everybody is part of God. Fynn walks away from her graveyard with renewed hope. could become a world of iron mountains, of iron plains with crystal trees.It was a new world to explore, a world of the imagination, a world where few people would or could follow her. In this broken-off stump was a whole new realm of possibilities to be explored and to be enjoyed.

I don't know why I was getting the feeling that this account is partly fictionalised. Children can be precocious but this book does seem to be a stretch. So many of the conversations seem impossible for a 5-7 year old. The pessimistic part of me just doesn't let me trust this narrative to be entirely based in reality. This is, by far, the most boring book I have read this year, and that's including the one book I DNFed. There is some uncertainty about Fynn's age on first encountering Anna. Early editions of the book say he was nineteen, but this would be impossible if he was to know Anna for three years before the outbreak of war, and in the latest editions of Mister God, This Is Anna his age has been amended to sixteen. [10] Sources [ edit ]bird?" Indeed, how could he? So, like Alice in Wonderland, Anna ate of the cake of imagination and altered her size to fit the occasion.After all, Mister God did not have only one point of view but an infinity of viewing points, and the whole purpose of living was to be like Mister God. So far as Anna was concerned, being good, being generous, being kind, praying, and all that kind of stuff had very little to do with Mister God. They were, in the jargon of today, merely In his preface to both the British and American editions of the book, Vernon Sproxton remarks that he has seen Anna's drawings and notes and that he believes her to be real. The book gives an account of their friendship. Anna by nature is the inquisitor, the forever probing creature who likes to find a reason for everything. Fynn, a student, tries to follow her hard-to-understand, yet simple logic. Philosophical questions are investigated through the eyes of a child, who proposes simple, common-sense solutions. Many of the conversations involve religion, with Anna personalising God, calling him "Mister God". At five years Anna knew absolutely the purpose of being, knew the meaning of love and was a personal friend and helper of Mister God. At six Anna was a theologian, mathematician, philosopher, poet and gardener. If you asked her a question you would always get an answer – in due course. On some occasions the answer would be delayed for weeks or months; but eventually, in her own good time, the answer would come: direct, simple and much to the point." [3] Anna treats Fynn with her special philosophy of church, God, sex, and numbers. The reader is taken along for this wonderful ride.

have none of it. No! Religion was all about being like Mister God and it was here that things could get a little tough. The instructions weren't to be good and kind and loving, etc., and it therefore followed that you would be more like Mi She was silent for a little while. Later I thought that at this moment she was taking her last look at babyhood. Then she went on. You see, Fynn, Mister God is different because he can finish things and we cant. I cant finish loving you because I shall be dead millions of years before I can finish, but Mister God can finish loving you, and so its not the same kind of love, is it?” This is a short book I want everyone to read, though there are some who will find it too simple to enjoy. I loved Anna and her many ideas. One of my favorites is when Anna realized she knew the answer to a squillion (the biggest number Anna could think of) questions. Just when Fynn thinks he is going to set her right, she proves she is already right: How much is 4 take away 1? How much is 2 plus 1? How much is 5 take away 2? By now you must have figured out we could go on all day with this line of reasoning. Indeed, Anna taught Fynn that it is the questions that are truly important. Even beyond that, it is the circumstance of the question that is important. Saying yes to the offer of a drink of water may be drastically different depending on if you are three days into the desert or just newly arrived at the restaurant.Sydney George Hopkins (26 March 1919 - 3 July 1999), as a teenager and young adult, lived in the East End of London in the early 1930s. He was briefly drawn towards the politics of Oswald Mosley, but soon became disillusioned. He won a scholarship to a local grammar school, Cooper's Company College, [5] London E3, and left aged 15 to work for The Russian Oil and Petroleum Company, where he had aspirations of becoming a research chemist. [6] Following a fall off a cliff he suffered chronic insomnia and in 1939 was referred to Finchden Manor [7] in Kent, a therapeutic community run by George Lyward O.B.E., and later joined the staff. [8] mind making himself small. People thought that Mister God was very big, and that's where they made a big mistake. Obviously Mister God could be any size he wanted to be. I must have made some movement or noise, for she levered herself upright and sat on her haunches and giggled. The she launched herself at me and undid my little pang of hurt, cut from the useless spark of jealousy with the delicate sureness of a surgeon. of God. It isn't the devil in humanity that makes man a lonely creature, it's his God-likeness. It's the fullness of the Good that can't get out or can't find its proper "other place" that makes for loneliness.Anna's misery was for others. They just could not see the beauty of that broken iron stump, the colors, the crystalline shapes; they could not see the possibilities there. Anna wanted them to join with her in this exciting new world , but they could not imagine themselves to be so small that this jagged fracture Schade ist - was man von Anfang an weiß, dass Anna nicht alt wird und das sie nur ganze zwei Jahre, glaube ich, bei Fynn lebt. Sie stirbt also sehr jung.

you know has got Mister God in his middle, and so you have got his Mister God in your middle too. It's easy.” Well then,” she continued, “if we don’t know many things about Mister God, how do we know he loves us?” ster God. No! The whole point of being alive was to be like Mister God and then you couldn't help but be good and kind and loving, could you?” It seemed to me to reduce itself to the fact that we were like God because of the similarities, but God was not like us because of our differences. Her inner fires had refined her ideas, and like some alchemist she had turned lead into gold. Gone were all the human definitions of God, like Goodness, Mercy, Love, and Justice, for these were merely props to describe the indescribable.

Even the dirt and the stars and the animals and the people and the trees and everything, and the pollywogs?” The pollywogs were those little creatures we had seen under the microscope. I could see this was going to be one of those times, but thank goodness she didn’t expect an answer to her question, for she hurried on: “Them pollywogs, I could love them till I bust, but they wouldn’t know, would they? I’m million times bigger than they are and Mister God is million times bigger than me, so how do I know what Mister God does?” One of the things about Anna is the incredible relationship she had with 'Mister God'. Not some distant childhood vision of a god sitting on a throne up in the clouds, but in her wonderful matter of fact way she just really knew 'Mister God'. And her insights were just incredible. And as you read you find yourself, along with Fynn, learning so much. Anna's mirror book, her understanding that you can do billions of sums when you start with the answer, the way she could see everyday objects in a way which reflected her understanding of 'Mister God' are just some of the amazing aspects of Anna. I was sufficiently troubled about all this to execute some google searching. Searching the word "Fynn", I found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_G... Fynn, Mister God doesn’t love us.” She hesitated. “He doesn’t really, you know, only people can love. I love Bossy, but Bossy don’t love me. I love the pollywogs, but they don’t love me. I love you Fynn, and you love me, don’t you?”

Fynn, you can love better than any people that ever was, and so can I, cant I? But Mister God is different. You see, Fynn, people can only love outside, and can only kiss outside, but Mister God can love you right inside, and Mister God can kiss you right inside, so its different. Mister God ain’t like us; we are a little bit like Mister God, but not much yet.” No,” she went on, “no, he don’t love me, not like you do, its different, its millions of times bigger.” Anna dies before she even reaches her eighth birthday and yet at the end of the book I put it down with a sense of feeling full, of wonder and of gratitude for the life she lived and the impact she made. "Anna's life hadn't been cut short, far from it, it had been full, completely fulfilled"

Es ist kein allzu trauriges Buch, da man von vornherein das Ende kennt, allerdings musste ich mir dennoch am Schluss ein Tränchen verkneifen, da es wirklich ein 'schönes' Ende war. Toll beschrieben und mit einer wunderbaren Anekdote, die zum Buch passt. Wundervoll! Aside from any spiritual implications, I remember the book’s emphasis on thinking for oneself, which I have tried latterly to hang on to, even at the risk of sounding like an idiot, or – more usually – proving myself one. As children, we thrive by thinking for ourselves. As adults, we’re cursed with sophistication. We recycle ideas, parade breadth of learning, are paralysed by the thought of being wrong. We call this sophistication cultural capital, which seems to me a good term because it is a currency: a system of value rather than the thing of value. Searching the phrase "Mister God, This is Anna", I found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_G... but best of all this link: http://www.finchden.com/sgh/index.htm My skepticism was satisfied and I was able to read the remainder of the book with a more open mind. Oh,” she said. “well then, why does he let things get hurt and dead?” Her voice sounded as if she felt she had betrayed a sacred trust, but the question had been thought and it had to be spoken. Although the prose is relatively simple and somewhat coarse in some parts of the book and Anna's explanations are rough and terse even to the point of being abtruse, it just goes to show you that not all beauty is created by skilled and stylish techniques of trained artists and not all truth lies in fanciful and coherent arguments. Just as Jesus lied in the manger and Buddah among the ragged, sometimes the most beautiful poetry and the deepest, truest philosophy is 'in the middle' of a field of wildflowers, a child's indecipherable scribble or the silent smile of the common prostitute. In fact, this book eventually goes to demonstrate that when you're 'full' inside, you don't need to fret about what's outside or peripheral, you can concentrate on what's 'in the middle' and being 'what I am' and Mister God.