“It is better to rise from life as from a banquet - neither thirsty nor drunken.”
~Aristotle
I’ve started doing yoga. What I’ve learned is what looks so very easy can be so very difficult.
Even when I’m not moving (especially when I’m not supposed to be moving).
It’s the balancing that gets me. It takes so much muscle control to remain still. I have constant checks (small and large) in one direction and then then other. Sometimes I completely lose any semblance of form and have to begin again.
Let’s return to our pendulum from chapter one. It feels great, at first, to swing from a place of oppression to a place of freedom, but some of us may have discovered that the swing away from tyranny brings us to a different form of slavery on the other extreme. Slavery to an over-loaded schedule, closet, or body, for example.
Seneca, the famous Stoic, wrote, “So-called pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments…”
The solution seems so easy: just shed a few activities, pairs of shoes, or pounds.
But it takes an extraordinary amount of muscle control (and willingness to live in tension) to find that place of equilibrium and remain there. It’s a constant effort of self-imposed limits, and we’re easily tired by constant effort.
We make decisions. We second-guess ourselves. We give in to pleasure or convenience. We punish ourselves.
Aristotle, writing about ethics, examined moral behavior according to the “golden mean of virtue.” He argued that virtuous living is a balance within a sliding scale of deficiency and excess (the extremes). The deficiency and excess are both vices, and the golden mean is virtue.
“For both excessive and insufficient exercise destroy one’s strength, and both eating and drinking too much or too little destroy health, whereas the right quantity produces, increases or preserves it. So it is the same with temperance, courage and the other virtues… This much then, is clear: in all our conduct it is the mean that is to be commended.” [Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics]
True liberty is liberty from excess.
True liberty is liberty to choose virtue.
Not cowardice or recklessness, but courage. Not stinginess or extravagance, but generosity. Not sloth or greed, but ambition. Not bashfulness or flamboyance, but modesty. Not apathy or aggression, but patience. Not indecisiveness or impulsiveness, but self-control. Not starvation or gluttony, but sufficiency. Not cacophony or monotony, but harmony. Not tyranny or anarchy, but freedom. Not laziness or obsessiveness, but perseverance. Not uniformity or eccentricity, but individuality. Not false-modesty or boastfulness, but truthfulness. Not chaos or reginmentation, but order. Not self-deprecation or vanity, but confidence. Not quarrelsomeness or flattery, but friendliness. Not moroseness or absurdity, but good humor.
In our culture’s quest for freedom, we think in terms of “freedom from” rather than “freedom to.” We want freedom from limits (seeking pleasure and happiness) instead of the freedom to do what we ought (seeking virtue and character).
“Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.” - Pope John Paul II
Do I have a handle on this in my own life? Absolutely not. I’m just a shaky tree pose over here. You’ll hear me chanting “I am, I can, I ought, I will,” as I wobble, fall, and start again.
In upcoming posts, I’ll be sharing how the “golden mean” applies to various areas in my life.
We imagine that the more choices we have, the freer we are. In reality, a multitude of choices makes us no freer than we were before unless we have the freedom (that is, the power, the ability) to choose between the right action and the wrong action... A myriad of evil choices is no choice at all.
Utility measures our needs; but by what standard can you check the superfluous?
It is for this reason that men sink themselves in pleasures, and they cannot do without them when once they have become accustomed to them, and for this reason they are most wretched, because they have reached such a pass that what was once superfluous to them has become indispensable.
And so they are the slaves of their pleasures instead of enjoying them; they even love their own ills, - and that is the worst ill of all! Then it is that the height of unhappiness is reached, when men are not only attracted, but even pleased, by shameful things, and when there is no longer any room for a cure, now that those things which once were vices have become habits.
This is certainly the answer society gives us for our restlessness, our boredom, our anxiousness, and unhappiness. The answer is always MORE. More stimulation. More sex, more movies, more music, more drinking, more money, more freedom, more food. More of anything is sold as the cure for everything. Yet paradoxically, the more stimulation we receive, the less joy and enjoyment we get out of it. The key to experiencing greater fulfillment and pleasure is actually moderation.
As a society we pride ourselves on extremes. We flaunt how few hours of sleep we maintain, how insatiable we are in our careers, and how comfortable our lives are thanks to an excess of luxury goods. But the problem is that when we aspire to extremes, we also run the risk of taking our virtues too far, which collapse into their opposite-crippling flaws in character.
[I discovered and/or shared all of the following verses, quotes, and links on Facebook. FB can be a wildnerness itself, but curated rightly, it is full of manna and water.]
But her post today (link below) was meant for me. My friend Tinsa had shared the above verse just yesterday, and both the verse and the post very clearly weave in and out of another quote by Marilynne Robinson (from Gilead) that has been on my mind and in my heart (and which I shared three days ago).
"That is how life goes—we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's. I need to bear this in mind."
Maybe there is one person reading this post who needs to read Rebecca’s words. Go.
The wilderness. The desert. Here is the backdrop of Genesis 1:2, the context upon which God is brooding, growing soft and relaxed as a competent artist who knows he has the ability to bring a heavy, aching chaos to order. He has a plan. He is not frantic like I am. He is not weary.
…Immanuel. God is with us. And this time, instead of hovering over the waters, he has walked inside of them, absorbing the crashing waves of confusion, misery, destruction, death, ignorance, sorrow, and my own wickedness even into his own flesh—and rising like emanating daylight.
For those whose 2017 had no clear stop and 2018, no clear beginning. • Instead, midnight came and went, and the sorrow of last year clung tightly, even sunk its grip in deeper. • May you have the manna of grace sufficient for each day, and may it be as good as a feast.
For those of you who have struggled through Christmas, may the following beautiful words and posts be manna in the desert, a feast for your soul.
The British author J.R.R. Tolkien — something of an expert on such things — argued that every great fairy story has a “turn” in which despair is suddenly and miraculously reversed and the heart’s desire is fulfilled. “It denies (in the face of much evidence if you will) universal final defeat . . . giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” For Tolkien, this moment “rends . . . the very web of story” and allows us to see something real about the universe itself.
“I believe that there is a logic that stands behind all things, and as a poet, I see the wonderful appropriateness that this awesome power would express itself as a baby born in straw poverty.” [Bono]
Christmas arrived in darkness and murder and failure and fear and sorrow, and that is precisely why it is filled with so much hope. Because Christmas arrived. Jesus came. In a town that was held in the grip of a tyrannical, cruel king, to a mother who was completely unknown and too young, announced to a group of outcast shepherds, in a world that was too dark in 400 years of God’s silence, he came.
To look at the last great self-portraits of Rembrandt or to read Pascal or hear Bach's B-minor Mass is to know beyond the need for further evidence that if God is anywhere, he is with them, as he is also with the man behind the meat counter, the woman who scrubs floors at Roosevelt Memorial, the high-school math teacher who explains fractions to the bewildered child. And the step from "God with them" to Emmanuel, "God with us," may not be as great as it seems. What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us and our own snowbound, snowblind longing for him.
I pray that your new year is filled with rivers and manna—unspeakable, unfathomable, unmitigated hope and joy—even in the midst of any desert you may be walking through.
This morning I re-read an old article at First Things, A Curriculum of Life. The author asserts that a child’s curriculum should enlarge his current life, not be a self-serving means to an end (diploma, employment). He proposes structuring a curriculum using the “Three L’s”: Logic, Literature, and Love.
"But we must never allow a curriculum for school to replace a curriculum of life; schooling mustn’t take over the education of living. When it does it becomes deeply mis-educative and disenchanting. It robs our children of the present gift of life they have been given by God.
"If—heaven forbid—they die young, I hope they will have lived beautiful lives even in their youth, perhaps even more so than those who survive them."
This reminded me of beautiful discussion this month with my Scholé Sisters, led my my brilliant friend Mindy Pickens. We gathered, about twenty of us, to talk about why we take time to read, take time to contemplate, take time to gather and discuss, when we are busy homeschooling moms with endless to-do lists.
What is the use of spending a year on Hamlet or a year on Flannery O’Connor or a year on Tolkien or a year on Pride and Prejudice (our upcoming year)? What do we have to show for our time? Why should this pursuit take up space in our lives that could be used for something more productive or practical?
Let’s contemplate those questions.
In our modern American culture, we tend to divide pursuits or activities into two categories: productive/useful and pleasurable/wasteful. These two categories often carry a moral designation as well: productive, good; pleasurable, bad.
In some ancient cultures, however, different categories of thinking were used: self-focused/utilitarian and truth-focused/non-utilitarian (pursuits that were worthy in and of themselves and not as the means to an end). These weren't moral designations. Both of them were necessary for life.
The interesting thing about self-focused and truth-focused categories is that they are more fluid than our productive and wasteful categories and it often depends on a person's mindset while doing them. We talked about how monks turned the most routine labor into a means of worship.
We can clean our homes so that we can check that task off our list or we can clean our homes in service of the people we love who live there or visit there.
We can stand and eat a protein bar so that our bodies will function for all of our tasks that day, or we can use our meal time as a time to reflect or practice gratefulness. We can make an artful meal or a beautiful table. We can eat in community with others. We can use a meal to bless our families. There is nothing wrong with fueling our bodies quickly with a protein bar, but there are other ways to make meals and fuel our bodies that are less utilitarian.
One of my friends talked about how shifting her mindset to thinking of all the mundane tasks of motherhood (breaking up fights, cleaning up vomit, carpooling to activities) as truth-seeking and service was instrumental in saving her sanity as a mom to many little children. Those aren't big time-drains that take away from our ability to be productive. They have value beyond what they lead to or produce.
The word "school" itself comes from the word "scholé" which means leisure. In the past, leisure was synonymous with activities that were truth-focused and non-utilitarian. Leisure wasn't the absence of work. It wasn't vacation. It wasn't consumerism. It wasn't non-activity such as sitting in front of the television. It was work that was worthy for its own sake, not as a means to an end (a diploma, a good job, a position in society).
When we say we are pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty in education, we mean that we are learning because truth, goodness, and beauty are worthy pursuits in their own right. Cultivating virtue (self-discipline, commitment, perseverance, compassion, cooperation, patience...) is also a goal of education and an end in itself.
I like the three categories in the article: Logic, Literature, and Love. I can fit all of the Classical Conversations Challenge content into those three categories. I can fit all of it into truth-seeking and true leisure—living a beautiful life now and not as the means to an end.
The difficulty lies in thinking of the curriculum in that way, pursuing it in that way, and especially helping our 8th and 10th grade boys to see it that way, rather than as an obligation, a drudge, a check-list, and a stepping-stone to a diploma, which is a stepping-stone to a good job, which is a stepping-stone to vacations and possessions and savings, which is a stepping-stone to retirement.
I also struggle with habit-forming and teaching my boys and myself to love what we ought and not just what is pleasurable. Virtue formation is hard, and often requires doing something repeatedly until we grow to love it.
So I'm saying all this not to be preachy, but to remind myself (because I forget every minute of every day) what a beautiful education can be. It doesn't have to be CC—absolutely not—and it can (and should) be a tailored version of CC, if that’s the path you’re on, but I believe Challenge is full of logic, literature, and love (and leisure!) that can enlarge our students’ present lives. It happens to be a good fit for us at this time.
Figuring out what a beautiful life looks like for ourselves and our children and our families is always going to require constant prayer and consideration. Implementing it in reality is going to be even more difficult (especially with teen boys). There is no formula. It’s complex and messy and hard and beautiful. It also requires a magnitude of faith.
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How can we operate under a truth-seeking mindset rather than a self-focused mindset?
How can we pursue leisure and virtue and truth, goodness, and beauty rather than a utilitarian outcome?
Do our pursuits enlarge our humanity or diminish it?
What skills are we learning? My friend Mindy thinks in skills rather than subjects. Attending, listening, speaking, reading, writing, remembering, and reasoning.
How can we serve others in this pursuit?
Where is the truth, goodness, beauty, and order in what we are viewing and contemplating?
What virtues are we striving toward? Self-discipline, patience, compassion, wonder?
How can we turn this pursuit into truth-seeking or leisure?
How can we practice re-creating in this endeavor rather than consuming?
How can we delight, attend, worship, contemplate, or build relationships in this moment?
As my friend Sara Masarik said, “A monastery strives to serve with feet on earth and hearts and heads in heaven. And that, I think, is what our homes [our educations, our lives] can be as well.”
Wilson unleashes a blizzard of swirling poetic imagery as he invites us to travel through a year with him, season by season, giving us the distinct impression that he is along for the ride as well.
In the preface he states:
For me, this book was an occurrence. It rolled over me. I worked to shape and control it, to pace it, to leash it and teach it to sit and roll over. I did my best. But at times my best was insufficient, and in some places you might notice this thing climbing on the furniture, licking my face, or dragging me down the street.
I enjoyed the ride, though it left me panting and clammy.
For sure.
This romp through philosophy, science, nature, theology, and poetry is not for linear, just the facts, ma’am reader. It’s for the reader who is ready to experience an exhilarating and sometimes queasy joyride on the Tilt-A-Whirl. [Spoiler alert: you’re already riding it.]
Why has every culture “felt the overwhelming pressure of existence itself and the need to explain it”?
What is this place? Why is this place? Who approved it?… Was this cosmic behavior expected? Am I supposed to take it seriously? How can I? I’ve watched goldfish make babies, and ants execute earwigs. I’ve seen a fly deliver live young while having its head eaten by a mantis.
This is not a sober world. Bats really do exist. Caterpillars really turn into butterflies—it’s not just a lie for children. Coal squishes into diamonds. Apple trees turn flowers into apples using sunlight and air.
Nothing is too small or too large to escape Wilson’s notice, and he delights in the absurd.
The tour begins in winter while we are shoveling snow. We are introduced to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Voltaire, and Kant. On to Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Hume. Wilson is tough on them. He prefers priests.
They know this universe is brimming with magic, with life and riddles and ironies. They know that the world might eat them, and no encyclopedia could stop it.
So we move on to the question What is the world made of?
Illusion? Suffering? Thoughts? The ancient elements—earth, air, fire and water? Quarks and leptons?
What are quarks made of? Can quarks be made of something which is made of something else which is in turn made of yet another thing, ad infinitum? “Infinite regress isn’t possible.” Is the answer, at some point, “nothing”?
That olive [I held in my hand] had mass, it had savor and flavor, texture and temperature, and even a tiny fragment of pit that nicked my gum. It had a measurable amount of potential energy. I am comfortable saying that the olive was no illusion. That the material world exists in all of its toe-stubbing glory. (I see no reason to wander down the long, lonely road of self-sensory doubt. That way avoids no difficulties and only leads to chat rooms, meds, atonal music, and cosmic loathing. It is a slow and painful suicide. And, in my opinion, it’s tacky.)
Then he welcomes us to the world of faith. What is the world made of?
Words. Magic words. Words spoken by the Infinite, words so potent, spoken by One so potent that they have weight and mass and flavor. They are real. They have taken on flesh and dwelt among us. They are us. In the Christian story, the material world came into existence at the point of speech, and that speech was ex nihilo, from nothing. [God] sang a song, composed a poem, began a novel so enormous that even the Russians are dwarfed by its heaped up pages.
We look around us and realize that everything we see, feel, hear, taste, and touch is art that inhabits our story and we are the characters. What will your character do? Think? Say?
Listen to your dialogue. Look at your thoughts. Be horrified. Be grateful that God loves characters and loves characters on journeys, characters honestly striving to grow.
And later:
Living makes dying worth it.
That seems to be a theme with Wilson.
And then spring. Ah, “death and pain, injustice and grief. Evil, the problem of.”
I see a stage, a world where every scene is crafted. Where men act out their lives within a tapestry, where meaning and beauty exist, where right and wrong are more than imagined constructs.There is evil. There is darkness. There is the Winter of tragedy, every life ending, churned back in the soil. But the tragedy leads to Spring. The story does not end in frozen death. The fields are sown in grief. The harvest will be reaped in joy. I see a Master’s painting. I listen to a Master’s prose.
More philosophers. The Discovery Channel. Croesus, Agamemnon, Oedipus, Odysseus. Puddleglum.
Tell us what is, by all means. But without God, you cannot tell us what ought to be.
And quintessential Wilson humor.
The platypus is quite clearly the best currently living creature, but it is not the best of all possible creatures. In addition to its mammalian, egg-laying, duck-billed, web-footed, amphibious life, it also could have had bat wings, sonar, and the ability to fire explosions out of its rear like a bombardier beetle. To speak franky, I feel that a creative opportunity was missed.
But back to pain.
If we live in art, struggling in the boundary between the shadow and the light, unable to see the whole, how can we begin to judge? How can we presume to talk about a better painting, a better novel, when we see only a single line, a single page, and it brings us grief?
Later.
Our art is tiny in comparison to His… He is infinite… and the narratives of this universe, the song of this universe, the epic of this universe, the still-frames of this universe on every level—from quarks to galaxies—reflect His self, His character, His loves, His hates, His mercies, His judgments, His kindnesses, and His wraths.
Wilson explores the difference between cute and beautiful. We try to soften the terrible edges of beauty into a palatable and trivial cuteness. Something comfortable. “Safety scissors for all the saints!”
No safety scissors here.
Wilson continues through summer sandcastles and a fallish hell.
St. Augustine, Aquinas, Kvanvig, C.S Lewis, John Donne, Christ, Louis XV, William Blake, and Oscar Wilde.
He ends with Christ. A return to winter. Christmas.
The Lord came to clean the unclean. He brought the taint of Holiness, and it has been growing ever since. He was born in a barn and slept in a food trough.
Through it all, Wilson keeps his eyes wide open with wonder as he attempts “to find unity cacophany.”
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Even though Notes asks big questions and confronts tough subjects, the book itself is a fairly brisk 200 pages. It’s engaging and never dull. It provides fodder for great discussions with teens, reading partners, or book clubs. It’s on my 15 year old son’s summer reading list, and I’m looking forward to the conversations the book elicits.
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I’ll be reading Death by Living, his follow-up book, this summer.
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N.D. Wilson is best known and loved, however, for his adventurous children’s novels. My boys have read and loved his 100 Cupboards series, Ashtown Burials series, Leepike Ridge, and Boys of Blur (a retelling of Beowulf set in the swamps of Florida—who can resist?).
We all (myself, my husband, and boys) read Outlaws of Time as soon as it was released last year, and the sequel was just released today. I absolutely loved the first book, and I’m glad he finished the sequel so quickly because it ended on a cliff-hanger. I’ll be reviewing them both soon, but my friend Sara at Plumfield and Paideia has great reviews of 100 Cupboards and Outlaws of Time to read in the meantime.
Here’s a teaser trailer for the first Outlaws of Time.
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The following interview is a great representation of Wilson’s personality and approach to life and literature.
This quote by C.S. Lewis from The Four Loves expresses the book’s theme for me:
“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Yes. But not to love is a casket.
From Edward Tulane:
[all happy stories must end with love]
“But answer me this: how can a story end happily if there is no love? But. Well. It is late. And you must go to sleep.”
[one of my favorite themes in literature, the idea of being known]
And Edward felt a warm rush of pleasure at being recognized, at being known.
[being named, listening]
Edward knew what it was like to say over and over again the names of those you had left behind. He knew what it was like to miss someone. And so he listened. And in his listening, his heart opened wide and then wider still.
[sacrifice]
“Two options only,” he said. “And your friend chose option two. He gave you up so that you could be healed. Extraordinary, really.”
[the casket]
He prided himself on not hoping, on not allowing his heart to lift inside of him. He prided himself on keeping his heart silent, immobile, closed tight.
[hope, vulnerability, courage, journey]
“You must be filled with expectancy. You must be awash in hope. You must wonder who will love you, whom you will love next.”
“I am done with being loved,” Edward told her. “I’m done with loving. It’s too painful.”
“Pish,” said the old doll. “Where is your courage?”
“Somewhere else, I guess,” said Edward.
“You disappoint me,” she said. “You disappoint me greatly. If you have no intention of loving or being loved, then the whole journey is pointless.”
From the very beginning, all I could think about was a Rembrandt painting. Darkness, darkness, a touch of light. Darkness, darkness, a touch of light. So masterfully painted.
The April sun, weak but determined, shone through a castle window and from there squeezed itself through a small hole in the wall and placed one golden finger on the little mouse.
[eyes open]
The light was shining onto the ceiling in an oval brilliance, and he was smiling up at the sight…
“The last one,” said the father. “And he’ll be dead soon. He can’t live. Not with his eyes open like that.”
But, reader, he did live.
This is his story.
[light]
Despeareaux’s sister Merlot took him into the castle library, where light came streaming in through tall, high windows and landed on the floor in bright yellow patches.
[story]
“Once upon a time,” he said aloud, relishing the sound. And then, tracing each word with his paw, he read the story of a beautiful princess and the brave knight who serves and honors her.
Despereaux did not know it, but he would need, very soon, to be brave himself.
[music]
“Oh,” he said, “it sounds like heaven. It smells like honey.”
The song was as sweet as light shining through stained-glass windows, as captivating as the story in a book… Despereaux forgot all his fear… He crept closer… until, reader, he was sitting right at the foot of the king.
[chiaroscuro]
… A rat named Chiaroscuro and called Roscuro, a rat born into the filth and darkenss of the dungeon…
Reader, do you know the definition of the word “chiaroscuro”? If you look in the dictionary, you will find that it means the arrangement of light and dark, darkness and light together. Rats do not care for light. Roscuro’s parents were having a bit of fun when they named their son.
[longing]
His rat soul longed inexplicably for it; he began to think that light was the only thing that gave life meaning, and he despaired that there was so little of it to be had.
“I think,” said Roscuro, “that the meaning of life is light.”
[brokenness]
There are those hearts, reader, that never mend again, once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves in a crooked and lopsided way… Such was the fate of Chiaroscuro. His heart was broken… Speaking of revenge… helped him to put his heart together again. But it was, alas, put together wrong.
[courage]
And the passage was dark, dark, dark.
“I wil tell myself a story,” said Despereaux. “I will make some light. Let’s see. It will begin this way: Once upon a time. Yes. Once upon a time, there was a mouse who was very, very small. Exceptionally small. And there was a beautiful human princess whose name was Pea. And it so happened that this mouse was the one who was selected by fate to serve the princess, to honor her, and to save her from the darkness of a terrible dungeon.”
Could we improve this picture? How can we make it not better but best? Remove the tension and the contrast. Remove the black. All of it. Remove the struggle and the inevitable end.
Leave the white. Only white. And now it is perfect. Perfectly blank.
If we live in art, struggling in the boundary between the shadow and the light, unable to see the whole, how can we begin to judge? How can we presume to talk about a better painting, a better novel, when we see only a single line, a single page, and it brings us grief?
…And so we speak. Each of us wanting our own position a little more comfortable. Each of us wanting to see a little more happiness, a little less contrast, wanting to skip the struggle, throw away the novel and save only the final page, the FINIS. A world of tombstones would have no wars, no hardships, and no complaints. So would a world without births or loves or creeping, crawling, walking, or growing things.
A better artist would have made this world more like the moon, only without the black space behind it, without the contrast of edges. A sprawling, near-infinite moon. Erase the craters.
The painting is blank. The art is numb. Perhaps it is the best of all possible numbness.
And later,
When men act out their lives within a tapestry, where meaning and beauty exist, where right and wrong are more than imagined constructs. There is evil. There is darkness. There is the Winter of tragedy, every life ending, churned back in the soil. But the tragedy leads to Spring. The story does not end in frozen death. The fields are sown in grief. The harvest will be reaped in joy. I see a Master’s painting. I listen to a Master’s prose. When darkness falls on me, when I stand on my corner of the stage and hear my cue, when I know my final scene has come and I must exit, I will go into the ground like corn, waiting for the Son.”
And then,
“Why do we so often ignore the beautiful in exchange for the cute?”
Kate DiCamillo’s writing is not cute, friends. It loves. It hurts. And then it sings with hope.
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As if I needed the message pounded deeper, deeper, CiRCE Institute published this article by Greg Wilbur yesterday:
Creation. Words, song, bringing light. A cycle of night and day.
Death and resurrection.
I’m listening.
The theme of hopelessness turning into rejoicing, of weeping that lasts for the night before the joy that comes in the morning, forms the basis of fiction and story. If we did not feel the peril and potential loss of the knight as he battles the dragon, we would also not feel the thrill of the victory over what seemed to be hopeless. A hero that nonchalantly and easily dispatched dangers and foes would not stir the imagination, the blood, or our concern. In fact, he comes off looking a bit like a bully. His light does not shine brightly because the darkness is not deep and seemingly impenetrable.
This year, our new Christmas books correspond with my current literary projects. Just this month I revealed my Tolkien project, and Tolkien’s magical Letters from Father Christmas, with reproductions of his delightful illustrations and handwritten letters, is just perfect for me to read aloud to the kids!
I haven’t yet posted about my second ongoing literary project, but you might guess it from the second title. Yes, I am also immersing myself in G.K. Chesterton. This simple Advent and Christmas reader will be perfect for my own studies, and I am deliberating whether to read it aloud to the family. It contains 28 Advent readings and 12 readings for the days of Christmas. Each reading includes a short selection written by Chesterton (a poem or quote from an essay or book), a short bible passage, a prayer, and an “Advent Action.”
Have you added any books to your Christmas collection this season? Share in the comments!
Thanksgiving was the usual joyful gathering. We missed Drake, who is in boot camp in Illinois, his girlfriend, Jess, who wasn’t feeling well, and Olive’s son, Ben. But the rest of us (17 in all) feasted as an act of war. And then we took our traditional after-dinner walk. Later we colored (Shannon shared her sophisticated coloring books and jars of colored pencils) and played games while eating pie.
A Thanksgiving celebration of parallelism by Robert Louis Stevenson:
"Lord, behold our family here assembled. We thank Thee
for this place in which we dwell; for the love that unites us; for the peace accorded us this day; for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food, and the bright skies, that make our lives delightful; for our friends in all parts of the earth, and our friendly helpers in this foreign isle.
Let peace abound in our small company. Purge out of every heart the lurking grudge. Give usgrace and strengthto forbear and to persevere.
Offenders, give us the grace to accept and to forgive offenders. Forgetful ourselves, help usto bear cheerfully the forgetfulness of others.
Give us
courage and gaiety and the quiet mind.
Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.
Bless us,
if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we be
brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath,
and in all changes of fortune, and, down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another.
As the clay to the potter, as the windmill to the wind, as children of their sire,
we beseech of Thee this help and mercy for Christ’s sake."
I am so glad I took the time to read her deeply. Her biography and the discussions were absolutely essential for me. I never would have understood (to a small degree) her stories without a nudge in the right direction.
O’Connor’s essays allow the reader fascinating insight into the way she viewed the world, writing as an art, reading as a practice, and her own stories. My copy of Mystery and Manners is heavily underlined and marked with notes in the margins. What a pleasure to have a “conversation” with Flannery.
It’s almost impossible to decide which quotes to share with you here, so I’ll eeny-meeny-miny-mo it.
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
The Catholic novelist believes that you destroy your freedom by sin; the modern reader believes, I think, that you gain it in that way.
In my stories a reader will find that the devil accomplishes a good deal of groundwork that seems to be necessary before grace is effective.
Redemption is meaningless unless there is a cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular believe that there is no such cause.
Our response to life is different if we have been taught only a definition of faith than if we have trembled with Abraham as he held the knife over Isaac.
At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.
Christ didn’t redeem us by a direct intellectual act, but became incarnate in human form…
When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.
I am embarking on two new literary projects this winter. I’ll share more about them in upcoming posts. Stick around!
We have been saying the Lord’s Prayer/Pater Noster in English and Latin during our morning symposium.
During my quiet time this past week I read the following:
In the Episcopal order of worship, the priest sometimes introduces the Lord’s Prayer with the words, “Now, as our Savior Christ hath taught us, we are bold to say…” The word bold is worth thinking about. We do well not to pray the prayer lightly. It takes guts to pray it at all. We can pray it in the unthinking and perfunctory way we usually do only by disregarding what we are saying.
“Thy will be done” is what we are saying. That is the climax of the first half of the prayer. We are asking God to be God. We are asking God to do not what we want but what God wants. We are asking God to make manifest the holiness that is now mostly hidden, to set free in all its terrible splendor the devastating power that is now mostly under restraint. “Thy kingdom come… on earth” is what we are saying. And if that were suddenly to happen, what then? What would stand and what would fall? Who would be welcomed in and who would be thrown the Hell out? Which if any of our most precious visions of what God is and of what human beings are would prove to be more or less on the mark and which would turn out to be phony as three-dollar bills? Boldness indeed. To speak those words is to invite the tiger out of the cage, to unleash a power that makes atomic power look like a warm breeze.
You need to be bold in another way to speak the second half. Give us. Forgive us. Don’t test us. Deliver us. If it takes guts to face the omnipotence that is God’s, it takes perhaps no less to face the impotence that is ours. We can do nothing without God. We can have nothing without God. Without God we are nothing.
It is only the words “Our Father” that can make the prayer bearable. If God is indeed something like a father, then as something like children maybe we can risk approaching him anyway.
7 He stretches out the north over empty space; He hangs the earth on nothing. 8 He binds up the water in His thick clouds, Yet the clouds are not broken under it. 9 He covers the face of His throne, And spreads His cloud over it. 10 He drew a circular horizon on the face of the waters, At the boundary of light and darkness. 11 The pillars of heaven tremble, And are astonished at His rebuke. 12 He stirs up the sea with His power, And by His understanding He breaks up the storm. 13 By His Spirit He adorned the heavens; His hand pierced the fleeing serpent. 14 Indeed these are the mere edges of His ways, And how small a whisper we hear of Him! But the thunder of His power who can understand?”
Later again, while still reading Job during my morning quiet time, I read G.K. Chesterton’s essay The Book of Job from In Defense of Sanity. Much of this essay is underlined in my book, but we’ll start with this quote:
“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”
And Chesterton on the boldness (he calls it optimism) of Job:
Job is an optimist; he is an outraged and insulted optimist. He wishes the universe to justify itself, not because he wishes it to be caught out, but because he really wishes it to be justified.
…He shakes the pillars of the world and strikes insanely at the heaves; he lashes the stars, but it is not to silence them; it is to make them speak.
He ends by repenting of his idolatry and spurning his previous attempts to usurp God’s place in the universe. He has learned the most important lesson of all: there is a God in heaven, and I am not He.
Missy and I count ourselves lucky in that the calamity that was necessary in Job’s case has not been visited on us. And yet, it is fair to call Job lucky, too - for his troubles produced repentance and humility, which are the best goals of a good education.
This brings me full circle to the opening quote by Frederick Buechner:
“If it takes guts to face the omnipotence that is God’s, it takes perhaps no less to face the impotence that is ours.”
Supper. Walking along a road. In the midst of real life.
“Jesus is apt to come, into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable. Not in a blaze of unearthly light, not in the midst of a sermon, not in the throes of some kind of religious daydream, but… at supper time, or walking along a road.
This is the element that all the stories about Christ’s return to life have in common:
…Peter taking his boat back after a night at sea, and there on the shore, near a little fire of coals, a familiar figure asking, “Children, have you any fish?”; the two men at Emmaus who know him in the breaking of the bread.
He never approached from on high, but always in the midst, in the midst of people, in the midst of real life and the questions that real life asks.”
We have been observing the bull thistles in our field during each morning walk before symposium. We exclaim in delight when the purple crowns appear, and the kids have chosen the thistle for drawing in their nature journals a couple times (though they are hazardous to handle).
Connect
I found the above quote from an essay by Mary Oliver, because Mary Oliver always says what needs to be said about anything, profoundly, I might add.
If that isn’t quite enough for you, how about the beauty in this poem?
The singular and cheerful life of any flower in anyone’s garden or any still unowned field-
if there are any- catches me by the heart, by its color,
by its obedience to the holiest of laws: be alive until you are not.
Ragweed, pale violet bull thistle, morning glories curling through the field corn;
and those princes of everything green— the grasses of which there are truly an uncountable company,
each on its singular stem striving to rise and ripen.
What, in the earth world, is there not to be amazed by and to be steadied by and to cherish?
Oh, my dear heart, my own dear heart, full of hesitations, questions, choice of directions,
look at the world. Behold the morning glory, the meanest flower, the ragweed, the thistle. Look at the grass.
Mary Oliver, The Singular and Cheerful Life (Evidence: Poems)
I’m a little partial to the thistle because I am part Scottish (my maiden name is of Scottish origin), and the thistle is the national flower of Scotland. But why?, you might ask. Why the thistle? I didn’t know, so I had to do a little research. Legends, heraldry, poetry. Good stuff. But what I loved most was the Latin Motto of the Order of the Thistle:
NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT
(No one attacks me with impunity)
This led to a search for the definition of impunity. No one has impunity (freedom from punishment) where a thistle is concerned, that’s for sure.
And Latin. Ah, Latin. My eldest son immediately translated “nemo” into “no one” and said that Captain Nemo of the Nautilus in 2,000 Leagues Under the Sea specifically took that name because of its Latin meaning. (And, of course, the Nautilus also has Latin meaning.)
Create
The kids sketch in their nature journals while I read aloud from Shakespeare Stories after our quick morning walk, but I felt like I needed to join them on this one, even if my sketching leaves much to be desired. I’m setting the example that it is okay not to be excellent at something. We do it anyway, with a cheerful attitude…
The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we [demons] have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy [God] (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.
To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven:
2 A time to be born, And a time to die; A time to plant, And a time to pluck what is planted; 3 A time to kill, And a time to heal; A time to break down, And a time to build up; 4 A time to weep, And a time to laugh; A time to mourn, And a time to dance; 5 A time to cast away stones, And a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing; 6 A time to gain, And a time to lose; A time to keep, And a time to throw away; 7 A time to tear, And a time to sew; A time to keep silence, And a time to speak; 8 A time to love, And a time to hate; A time of war, And a time of peace.
9 What profit has the worker from that in which he labors? 10 I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.
12 I know that nothing is better for them than to rejoice, and to do good in their lives, 13 and also that every man should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all his labor—it is the gift of God.
Animals don’t know there is such a thing as a year, But they do know about seasons. Animals know when the cold will come, And they grow heavy overcoats. They know when it is summer, And they shed them. When it is hot, they look for shade, And in winter, they look for shelter.
As I’ve been contemplating the concept of Liturgy, I’ve been working to put some ideas into practice. Our Symposium time is the most obvious time to incorporate liturgical practices, as well as family dinner time. Several people have asked about our Symposium, so this is a brief glimpse into our mornings so far this scholé year.
[My alarm goes off at 6am, but I snooze until 6:15 then immediately make the bed and go shower, get dressed, and put on makeup and earrings. I usually have a few minutes to read my Bible before waking the kids.]
6:45 Wake up boys cheerfully (I let Lola wake on her own; Luke sets his own alarm and is often up earlier). Give hugs and snuggles as needed. [I often finish my quiet time while they are slowing getting up out of bed. I give them a second, more imperative wake-up call at 7ish.]
Put on classical music [Week 1 was Aaron Copland, week 2 was George Gershwin, week 3 is Stravinsky]
Morning chores [I need to be better about assigning chores. I switch laundry (all the clean laundry gets put on my bed to fold as I can during the day and put away before bedtime), make tea, check email and FB.]
7:30 Breakfast [I have a list posted on the fridge, but I often make eggs or protein waffles for myself and whomever will eat them.]
Clean up.
8:00 SHARP. Shoes and sweatshirts on and everyone out the door. Levi (with broken foot) on porch. Walk with whomever down the driveway. Talk about how the air feels, the clouds, what we see. Find nature specimen (thistle with purple crown, Queen Anne’s Lace, fallen leaf, remnant of a wasp’s nest, pet snail, pine cone, blackberry sprig…). Talk with Lola about what is nature and what is not (which leads to boy questions such as “are genetically modified foods nature?”). I take pictures of nature. [On rainy days, jump rope or other activity on porch. Grab nature book for nature specimen.]
8:10 ish: Back inside for nature journal sketching while I read from Shakespeare Stories by Leon Garfield. [I don’t micro-manage their journals. They draw and write whatever they want.]
“In our lives and in our prayers : may your kingdom come.”
Psalm [We sing a complete song from Sing the Word: Psalm 24 from God Our Provider to tie in with Challenge A catechism (will rotate Psalm songs weekly, next will be Psalm 19 from The Heavens Declare, again to tie in with Challenge A).]
“In our lives and in our prayers : may your kingdom come.”
Scripture [Take turns reading from Bible, beginning with the book of John]
“In our lives and in our prayers : may your kingdom come.”
Our Father/Pater Noster [We say it in English and then in Latin.]
Ending Single Voice/Community prayer
8:30 ish: Memory work [Working on passage from Declaration of Independence and one from Shakespeare (“All the World’s a Stage”) both to tie in with Challenge 1]
8:40 ish: Beauty “Loop”
Day 1: Picture study/narration using Cave Paintings to Picasso (review past artwork, take turns gazing at picture, share what we saw or how it made us feel, or what it reminded us of; read commentary; enter artwork in family timeline notebook)
Day 4: [If we have 4 days of symposium, double up on a favorite (We have CC community day on Mondays and a shorter symposium on Wednesdays due to piano lessons, so our main symposium days are Tu, Th, and Fri.)]
8:55 ish:MCT Caesar’s English [short portion] Latin and literature-based vocabulary
9:00 Dismiss with the doxology from Jude (1):24-25. Say, “The Lord be with you,” and children respond, “And also with you.”
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At this point in our morning, Levi and Leif go off to their respective study spaces to complete independent work, and I stay with Luke in the living room (where his study space is located) to work on Latin.
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So far, I’ve been really consistent with our mornings and then continuing our learning schedule for the rest of the day. I’m trying to add in some more liturgical practices during our day, but that has proved much more difficult once we separate for our daily tasks. We’ve been hit or miss on the following, and I’d like to continue to do them as often as possible:
I’ve been working on setting a formal family dinner as often as possible—nice dishes and all food in serving dishes on the table. We light candles. We pray the Table Blessing in Latin and English before regular prayer at dinner.
I’ve also tried to practice “Collect, Connect, Create” from Jenny Rallens. During dinner we sometimes share something we’ve learned and how it connects to something else we know or have experienced, then we share how we might use this knowledge.
[For example, Luke said he learned that drawing maps from memory is harder than it looks. We talked about other things that are harder than they look. And then we talked about how things get easier the more you practice. Leif said he learned that thistles are very prickly. Then he said that donkeys must have very tough mouths in order to eat them. Lola said she learned that the purple flower on a thistle is soft and not prickly.]
I saw another idea online—the “Thankfulness Pumpkin.” Each day in October and/or November, we’ll use a Sharpie pen to write on the pumpkin things that each person is thankful for and keep the pumpkin on the table as our dining table centerpiece. I think this will be a great, easy way to practice gratitude this fall.
Read as the ChocLit Guild book selection for August
A slim book at only 88 pages
4 stars
Collecting Quotes
Menial derives from a Latin word meaning “to remain,” or “to dwell in a household.” It is thus a word about connections, about family and household ties.
God is a begetter, not a maker, and poets are makers, not begetters. Maker is what the word poet means at its Greek root, and I am all too acutely aware that what I make, the poems and the personae that fill them, are not creatures in the fullest sense, having life and breath.
And I see both the miracle of manna and incarnation of Jesus Christ as scandals. They suggest that God is intimately concerned with our very bodies and their needs, and I doubt that this is really what we want to hear. Our bodies fail us, they grow old, flabby and feeble, and eventually they lead us to the cross. How tempting it is to disdain what God has created, and to retreat into a comfortable gnosticism.
The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread and doing laundry. My everyday experience of walking confirms the poet Donald Hall’s theory that poetic meter originates in the bodily rhythm of arms and legs in motion.
[W]hat ties these threads of biblical narrative together into a revelation of God’s love is that God has commanded us to refrain from grumbling about the dailiness of life. Instead we are meant to accept it gratefully, as a reality that humbles us even as it gives us cause for praise.
[I]f you’re like me, you take a kind of comfort in being busy. The danger is that we will come to feel too useful, so full of purpose and the necessity of fulfilling obligations that we lose sight of God’s play with creation, and with ourselves.
The poem, like housekeeping itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos. In the poem, by pulling many disparate things together, I tried to replicate the actual work of cleaning, sorting through the leftovers, the odd pieces of a life, in order to make a whole. I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers…
I was slow to recognize that combating sloth, being willing to care for oneself and others on a daily basis, is not small part of what constitutes basic human sanity, a faith in the everyday… Benedict’s Rule for monasteries…characterizes sloth as disobedience.
But acedia seeks to hoard against the time when God is no longer present, and we can’t trust the nourishment that other people offer. It rejects the present moment in favor of a vainglorious and imaginary future in which we will do just fine, thank you, at providing for ourselves… In contemplating the “daily bread” that we ask for in the Lord’s Prayer, Simone Weil asserts that God has created us so that the present is all we have.
It is not in romance but in routine that the possibilities for transformation are made manifest. And that requires commitment.
I have come to believe that the true mystics of the quotidian are not those who contemplate holiness in isolation, reaching godlike illumination in serene silence, but those who mange to find God in a life filled with noise, the demands of other people and relentless daily duties that can consume the self.
Our desire is to love God and each other, in stable relationships that, like any good marriage, remain open to surprises and receptive to grace.
I read this article just after finishing Quotidian Mysteries, and it was a painful well-aimed arrow.
But laziness, like all sin, is a deceiver, and the first person it deceives is the sinner. Laziness loves to masquerade as work. It’s easy to deceive ourselves and others when we seem so busy and hard working. But, laziness is not inactivity; it’s doing something other than your duty.
I’ve found a contemplation of the word “leisure” to be a fascinating and fruitful endeavor, and it is interesting that the ideas of acedia and sloth are connected to the concept of leisure. So many words have lost their rich meaning in our modern culture [more about that in an upcoming post].
At the zenith of the Middle Ages, on the contrary, it was held that sloth and restlessness, "leisurelessness," the incapacity to enjoy leisure, were all closely connected; sloth was held to be the source of restlessness, and the ultimate cause of "work for work's sake."
[I am using Collect, Connect, Create as my process for Lectio Devina, as shared by Jenny Rallens. Often in my blog posts, the photograph at the header (and the blog post in general) is my resulting creation from the Lectio Divina process.]
Today, I am practicing Lectio Devina. I am taking what I’m reading and hearing, what I’m contemplating and synthesizing, and sharing it with you.
This series has three parts, because all good thoughts have three parts, right?
We’ll begin with a look at Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. (See? Three!)
For those of you familiar with the Myers Briggs personality types, I am an ISFJ. This means that I’m concrete and sequential, but I’m very emotional about it. [grin]
This also means that I have to digest philosophical ideas in a concrete, practical way. Maybe this is the “caricature” learning, as Andrew Kern calls it. First, the broad and basic outlines, a child’s drawing. Later, the nuances. I’m still in the stick-figure stage.
I am sharing here in humility. Much of what I share with you is what I have organized from excellent thinkers, writers, and speakers. (“I’m a synthesizer, not a generator,” as one of my friends said recently.) Or we can call it curating: select, organize, and present (hey, that’s the three stages of Lectio Devina!). Consider this a peek into my commonplace journal. Or, to state it more correctly, this is my commonplace journal.
The above quote is beautiful, isn’t it? We can let the words wash over us, but I don’t think we can begin to apply them unless we truly contemplate the meaning of the words. When I begin to contemplate, I almost always start with definition.
We will start our series with Truth, Goodness, and Beauty (vision), then move on to Cosmos (form), and then finish with Liturgy (routine and content). This won’t be anything close to an exhaustive contemplation, but merely a jumping off place.
These are our WHY, our principles. Our vision for education.
If you are like me, you’ve heard the words truth, goodness, and beauty often, particularly in the context of defining Classical Education. But what exactly do they mean? What are they? Where did they come from? How do we know them? Why are they important? How do we pursue them?
What are they?
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty transcend our reality, which is why they are known as the transcendentals.
They point to or reflect something beyond our physical reality (God). They don’t explain themselves. They require a first cause, a reason outside of themselves for their existence.
If there is no first cause, then the universe is like a great chain with many links; each link is held up by the link above it, but the whole chain is held up by nothing.
The most famous of all arguments for the existence of God are the "five ways" of Saint Thomas Aquinas. One of the five ways, the fifth, is the argument from design, which we looked at in the last essay. The other four are versions of the first-cause argument, which we explore here.
The argument is basically very simple, natural, intuitive, and commonsensical. We have to become complex and clever in order to doubt or dispute it. It is based on an instinct of mind that we all share: the instinct that says everything needs an explanation. Nothing just is without a reason why it is. Everything that is has some adequate or sufficient reason why it is.
C. S. Lewis put it, "I felt in my bones that this universe does not explain itself."
Greg Wolfe gives us some helpful particulars about truth, goodness, and beauty:
They have qualities of being:
· Truth being knowable.
· Goodness being lovable.
· Beauty being admirable and desirable.
They are equal. A trinity.
· Truth without beauty is propaganda. It is moralism (rather than mystery). It is fleshless abstraction. Only beauty can incarnate truth.
· Goodness without beauty is moralism (a “better than thou” mindset).
· Beauty without truth is a lie and a mask, empty and hollow.
· Beauty without goodness is frigid, lifeless virtuosity. It is form without meaning.
David Hicks connects the transcendentals with the person of Christ:
Christ is the incarnation of the transcendentals, the transcendentals embodied in a person. They are not ideas, laws, or art.
· Christ expresses truth not in precepts but in parables.
· He expresses goodness not in laws but in love.
· He expresses beauty not in majesty but in humility, holiness, obedience.
David Hicks goes on to say that our modern culture has tried to convince us that truth is relative, goodness is situational, and beauty is subjective.
[Awakening Wonder] “We cannot teach our students that Truth is relative and expect our politicians to be honest; we can’t claim that the Good has been replaced by situational ethics and expect our bankers to ground their business decisions in anything other than profit, greed, and expediency; and we cannot relegate Beauty to personal preference and then feign shock when we encounter a urinal as part of an art exhibit.”
Where did they come from?
[Awakening Wonder by Turley, roughly quoted/paraphrased] “The concept of the transcendentals first emerged in the early Greek world, around the 5th century BC, but we don’t find the concepts of truth, goodness, and beauty converged until the writings of Plato around 400 BC in what has been termed the ‘Socratic trinity’ or ‘Platonic triad.’ The first clear presentation of truth, goodness, and beauty comes from a 15th century commentary on Plato’s writings by an Italian scholar. For Plato, they were divine concepts, and he believed that the individual human can mirror, reflect, or image the virtues of the transcendentals and thereby participate in divine life. It is philosophia, the love of wisdom, that seeks to recover human perception of truth, goodness, and beauty so as to restore the human soul to its participation in divine life.”
“The Christian tradition (notably expressed by Augustine and Aquinas) asserts that truth, goodness, and beauty are divine attributes by which the whole of creation is endowed with meaning and purpose, and focused particularly in microcosmic form in the distinctly human manifestation of the image of God… and that all that is true, beautiful, and good finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ.”
Why are they important?
[Awakening Wonder] “By encountering Truth, the human intellect is awakened to the infinite wisdom of God revealed in Christ; by encountering Goodness, the human volition is directed to act in accordance with the divine purposefulness of creation and our own created nature renewed in Christ; and by encountering Beauty, the human soul is awakened to the inexhaustible wellspring of diving love revealed in Christ. In short, the Christian vision of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is an invitation, a divine call, to awaken the fullness of our humanity as the entire cosmos is incorporated into the transformative life, death, and resurrection of Christ.”
How do we know them?
Greg Wolfe says that we use human faculties to know them:
· The faculty by which we perceive or apprehend truth is reason.
· The faculty by which we perceive or apprehend goodness is faith or holiness.
· The faculty by which we perceive or apprehend beauty is imagination.
A faculty is an inherent mental or physical power.
Imagination is the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses. Essentially, it is the ability to “picture to oneself.”
How do we pursue them?
So anything that helps us develop our faculties of reason, faith, and/or imagination serves us in our pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty.
We actively praise (beauty), serve (goodness), and contemplate (truth).
And, in imitation of Christ, we seek parables (truth), love (goodness), humility/holiness/obedience (beauty).
“We get robbed of the glory of life because we aren't capable of remembering how we got here. When you are born, you wake slowly to everything... What I'm saying is I think life is staggering and we're just used to it. We are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we're given--it's just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral." ~Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
"Nearly all the best and most precious things in the universe you can get for a halfpenny. I make an exception, of course, of the sun, the moon, the earth, people, stars, thunderstorms, and such trifles. You can get them for nothing." ~G. K. Chesterton, "The Shop of Ghosts"
"If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace." ~Frederick Buechner
[Scroll down if you want to skip this conversation and just see a few more pictures of our trip to Mount Angel Abbey, our local Benedictine Monastery. CC Friends, sing it with me: “Benedict and Monasticism…” Can you stop there?]
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Metaphor is POWERFUL. It ignites the imagination. It allows us to form images, to “picture to oneself.” It allows us to hold an image in our heads that is simple and concrete but so profound and nuanced that we can contemplate its meaning for a long period of time.
Metaphors are VIVID.
One of the ways in which we create metaphors is to ask comparison questions.
How is _______ like _________.
Comparison is one of the 5 Common Topics. You do not have to compare two seemingly similar things. Metaphor, particularly, is the comparison of two unlike things. A pen is like a pencil is not a metaphor. A pen is like a sword is a metaphor.
Recently Andrew Kern asked "If the model for a school isn't the home, what is it?" He's known for his ambiguous, open-ended questions, but I had been pondering this a bit after watching The Liturgical Classroom and Virtue Formation with Jenny Rallens, so I timidly answered "a monastery?" Dr. Christopher Perrin chimed in a bit later with "A garden, museum, table and church--which is to say a monastery." This is a much fuller and more beautiful (and certainly less timid) answer. (And he tagged me in his answer, so I know I've "arrived." [wink])
I've been avoiding organizing and planning for the coming school year (paralyzed, really), but those four words have been running though my mind and heart: a garden, museum, table, and church. What do these mean? How would you model a school after these four elements? How would they inform your day or the content of your lessons? Are they physical realities or metaphorical? Both? How?
As these questions were swirling in my brain, I asked them on my Facebook page. Many friends joined in the discussion, and I wanted to share a bit of it here so that I could return to it again and again. It’s a long discussion, and I’ve only shared a portion here, but I hope it speaks into your life as you learn and teach your children (whether you homeschool or not).
[After this Facebook conversation I attended a Lost Tools of Writing workshop with Matt Bianco. He began our day by asking each attendee to share a metaphor for education. There was no time for explanation or discussion, but just reading all the metaphors on the board (more than thirty) was a powerful beginning to our day. We were able to make our own images and thoughts from the words. Journey, garden, window, feast. Climbing a mountain.]
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One of the questions that came up in discussion is whether the home is a better model for a school and whether a monastery is modeled after a home.
I realized that the reason “a monastery” feeds my imagination in ways that “home” does not is that it is outside of my own reality.
For me, the idea of home is maybe too close to home—it’s more difficult for me to be metaphorical and imaginative about something that is so much a part of my every waking moment that I can't see it from the outside. Harder to make a model out of home when I'm not currently "doing home" in the way that I should.
I do struggle with my own disobedience and the messiness of ordinary life. I feel like I need an image in my head to inspire and encourage me despite my failings. When I picture a home, it's either my home with its failings or a home that is not my home. When I picture a garden, a table, a museum, a church in the context of a monastery, they are not my home but can be applied to my home. It is a vivid metaphor for me.
My friend questioned whether those things are metaphors or real things.
I think they are both metaphorical and physical realities. The metaphorical meaning of garden might be a right relationship with all of creation, but certainly we could also have a physical garden at our own home and that may be the best way to practice interacting with nature rightly.
Sara Masarik:
I think that the metaphors are correct because when the esoteric or imaginative value is applied properly, we get a physical result that resembles the original idea.
Say a garden, for example. When I am taking care of my garden, I am doing physical work with living organisms. I am stewarding all of the life that is in my care. That is a physical act of obedience for a spiritual or metaphysical principle. So part of why I garden, because I do, is because that physical work puts me in touch with the metaphysical truth, in both physical and spiritual ways.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that it is a spiral. By physically caring for the garden, I am honing the spiritual principle which then further enables me to be a better caretaker of the physical obligations.
What I am not communicating effectively is that I loved it when he mentioned monastery because I think that's what monasteries do. They seek to pair the physical realities with the metaphysical realities in a way that is deeply obedient.
Me:
I think you just hit the nail on the head, Sara Masarik. A monastery takes the physical model and realities of home and connects them to the metaphysical realities. In that way, I think a monastery is a perfect model for a school (particularly a classical school) with a student moving from the concrete to the abstract, his studies culminating in philosophy and theology.
Sara Masarik:
Yes! That! A monastery is a garden. And a home. And a school. And a hospital. But all for the soul as well as the body. A monastery strives to serve with feet on earth and hearts and heads in heaven. And that, I think, is what our homes can be as well.
Jennifer Bascom:
I've noticed in my faith that the monasteries seem to represent a place between Heaven and Earth. The monks and nuns are like intercessors, praying all the time. They do some light work to keep things going but their main focus is prayer. In a home we can imitate that ideal by praying the hours and everyone pitching in to make the work light on everyone, and we can follow the same calendar and fasting/feasting rhythm but there will be more of a focus on worldly things like working outside the home and activities that accompany family life. The home is a perfect place to imitate some of the aspects of a monastery for peaceful godly living and a perfect place for school and learning I think.
Stacy LaPointe:
I don't think of a monastery as involving light work. Maybe I'm wrong, but I see it as very much about the discipline of hard work in the important aspects of life—in personal habits and labor, in relationships and seeking godly ways to be with your fellow community members, and in spiritual study and prayer. That is exactly like a family, or it can be. I like the idea of imagining it in that setting too because it helps me to abstract it from my very messy home monastery.
Jessi Caca:
Our Home: A garden, museum, table and church. I feel comfortable leaving school out completely with those five words connected. Home, garden, museum, table, church. That's what we're doing. We're not homeschooling, we're lifeliving. And what is that? "A garden, museum, table and church."
I admit I'd not naturally have ever come to the idea of museum, had I thought about this for my whole life, but I do see it fits. Or I want it to fit. We are concerned with treasuring the best of civilization and curating the beautiful, true, and good. That's museuming.
Mindy Pickens:
Rudy and I are discussing this in the car on our way to star watching. He says he thinks garden, museum, table, and church make him think of categories of learning: learn with your hands, from labor and observation, nurturing and growth in a garden; Learn from the past, and particularly beautiful things from the past as in a museum; learn from each other, from community and relationship being nourished at a table; and learn from God, from sacred history and tradition and scripture as in a church.
Tracy Evans:
The garden...Creation that points to a creator. The table....fellowship, communion. A museum...history..standing on the shoulders of those who came before us, traditions. The Church..living the liturgy in our homes.
Danielle Cyrus:
[Regarding resistance] And then I think, creating the vision amongst my little people (or students in a school) maybe starts with these images? Invitation to the table; invitation into the garden to cultivate beauty and order; invitation into worship; invitation to look into the past?
Lynn Wilcox:
A monastery is PERFECT, just as a home from a previous era, as both were expected to be self-sufficient from income, to food, to education, to worship, etc.
Joellen Armstrong:
Surrounding the kids with beauty from nature, giving them guidance to the Father, giving them good things for life (table - food, stories, knowledge rooted in Truth, friendship), and being, & providing for them, spiritual mentorship...
Holly Karstens:
Cultivate, contemplate, nourish and glorify. Cultivate wisdom, contemplate beauty, nourish the soul and glorify God through it all.
Me:
Charlotte Mason says that there are three branches of knowledge: knowledge of man, creation, and God. Philosophy is split into three branches: moral, natural, and divine. Maybe a museum, a garden, a church correspond respectively. And a table represents community, communion, and celebration. All of these are practiced in obedience and worship.
Stacy LaPointe:
“In my literature classes we look at books through these philosophical lenses here--man versus self, man versus society, and man versus God.”
Rebecca McAllister:
“If school is a garden, a museum, a table and a church, then learning is to grow, to observe, to partake and to worship. How often do we neglect one or more of those components when attempting to teach?”
Rachel Goodman:
We often we find great truth in what *isn't* as well as what *is*. So...wee brainstorm...what does a monastery NOT have? I think the similarity is a good start to begin intentionally adding those things to our home and home education but I'm thoughtful about what intentionally needs to go.
In TLAT it says "The musical (coming from the same root word as "museum") education was an education in wonder. It formed the heart and the moral imagination of the youth... They taught passions more than skills and content. They sowed the seeds which would grow into a lifelong love of learning." "It is a total education including the heart—the memory and passions and imagination" and it is "an education in wonder through engagement with reality as a delightful living museum—engagement with...the songs, stories, and art of human culture."
The word museum comes from the "muses," right? And the muses deal with human endeavor/creativity. This video names 9 muses: history, poetry, epic poetry, astronomy, song, dance, tragedy, comedy, history, and hymns.
Imagine a table lacking no good thing: beautiful in its own right.
But man shall not live by bread alone. As indispensable as physical nourishment is, we need more. Our appetites yearn for more than meat and drink, for more than bread and cheese. Our natures yearn for knowledge and understanding, for something to learn and something to say.
“At the heart of any culture worthy of the name is not work but leisure, schole in Greek, a word that lies at the root of the English word ‘school.’ At its highest, leisure is contemplation. It is an activity that is its own justification, the pure expression of what it is to be human. It is what we do. The ‘purpose’ of the quadrivium was to prepare us to contemplate God in an ordered fashion, to take delight in the source of all truth, beauty, and goodness, while the purpose of the trivium was to prepare us for the quadrivium. The ‘purpose’ of the Liberal Arts is therefore to purify the soul, to discipline the attention so that it becomes capable of devotion to God; that is, prayer.”
"Liturgy therefore starts with remembrance. We do not make ourselves from nothing. To be here at all is a gift... The liturgy...is the ultimate school of thanks. In the circle of giving, receiving, and being given, the one divine essence is revealed as an eternal threefold liturgy of love, prayer, and praise. When we come to Mass--or to the nearest equivalent of that liturgy our faith permits--we should be able to experience a sense that here, at last, all the threads of our education are being brought together. If we don't, something is wrong with our education or our liturgy. Science and art, mathematics and ethics, history and psychology, the worlds of nature and the spirit, are all present in a liturgy that gives them a home and a meaning."
“Education begins in the Trinity. Praise (of beauty), service (of goodness), and contemplation (of truth) are essential to the full expression of our humanity. The cosmos is liturgical by its very nature.”
