Landscape Plotted and Pieced

Completely unrelated comments on The Marsh King and Vitamin D

2011-12-06T13:11:00.003-05:00

We’re reading The Marsh King, as I mentioned before (yes, we’re still reading our October books in December; c’est la vie), and Friday we read the chapter “The Battle of Kynwit.” Kynwit is a fortress being held by one of King Alfred’s men and during the night a band of Vikings sail up and attack. I had the hardest time at first, kept stumbling over the words until I realized what was happening. Up to this point the narrative has been a simple, straightforward style, but just listen to this (do, do read it aloud so you can hear it!):

Brightly the moonpath shone upon the sea, widely seen from high Kynwit wall, the stone fortress where Odda, Helmund’s stark son, stood watching. Hands gripping stone wall stood he there proudly. As a ship’s prow the wall was to him. Moon-swimming clouds above him breasted the sky, and he felt the fortress as a ship moving, traveling the shadowed sea.

On the dark sea eastward no ship moved that he saw. On the high sea cliff westward no warning watchfire gleamed. Men slept in Odda’s hall; the clustered shields slept on the long walls, weary with waiting. Odda therefore went weary likewise to his bedplace. The sentry alone now on the high wall watched nothing, saw nothing but the crowding shadows of clouds on the face of the moon-gleaming sea. On the high sea-cliff by the watchfire the sentry slept, and did not see the dark ships creeping that way, close below the cliff.

It’s prose but it’s written very much like Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry – it feels like reading Beowulf. There’s the alliteration, the parallelism, and the kennings. The whole chapter is like that and it’s a wonderful chapter.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

A few months ago when my doctor ordered a battery of tests for me, one of the things she tested was for my Vitamin D levels. I was pretty low – about 25, when she wants me to be above 60 – so I’ve been taking 1000 mg of D3 every day for about twelve weeks now. I get bloodwork done again this week to see if things are improving, but I can tell you that they are. Usually some time in the middle of November I start feeling like if the sun doesn’t come back soon I’ll die. When I get that feeling, I go get my globe and look at the analemma, finding the day’s date. (Click the picture for a close-up to see what I’m talking about.)

Then I look straight across the figure-8 to the date on the other side. That’s the date when the day will be just as long as it is “today,” only the days will be lengthening. Then I tell myself that I really can live until that day.

Well, it’s December 6th today, and it hasn’t happened yet. I’m happy.

The Collect for the First Sunday in Advent

2011-11-28T13:13:00.003-05:00

ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.

A collect, pronounced /KOL-ect/ when used as a noun, is a brief prayer that's meant to be used at a certain place during a prayer service. There is one Collect for each Sunday of the year, plus for special days, and there are other collects, a Collect for Peace and a Collect for Grace are both used during Morning Prayer.

The Church year begins with Advent and the Collect for the First Sunday in Advent is to be used during prayers every day from now until Christmas.

Lex orandi lex credendi is an ancient principle that is translated, "The law of prayer is the law of belief." Among other things, this means that the way you pray, the way you worship, shapes what you believe. This little prayer beautifully encapsulates the entire Gospel.

One thing I love about written prayers is that they can be memorized and said by everyone in the family -- even the non-readers -- so that we can pray with one voice. We'll be including this one in our daily Morning and Evening prayers, after the Lord's Prayer, and before the closing prayers. Last night Mike read it alone, but after this we're going to encourage everyone to say it together.

I hope you'll pray it with us this Advent season. :-)

Advent Tree

2011-11-21T16:57:00.004-05:00

I can't believe it's nearly Advent -- this year just flew by!

This is an updated repost from last year.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Advent preparations

We've celebrated Advent with an Advent wreath nearly every Christmas since we married, but two years ago we added a new tradition: An Advent Tree!

It came about like this: We usually wait till just before Christmas Eve to get the Christmas tree and for some reason the kids always panic -- they always think we're not going to be able to find one this year. It almost happened once, ten or twelve years ago -- there had been a drought out west so there were fewer trees available than usual, and nearly all of them were sold out by the time we went shopping. We ended up with a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

Well, six years ago when we first moved here to Virginia, we went to a church that put a Christmas tree up in the Parish house right after Thanksgiving, and had the children make ornaments on the first Sunday of Advent to put on it. Each ornament was decorated with, or made in the shape of, a traditional symbol that represents Christ -- a lamb, a cross, the Chi Rho, Alpha and Omega, and so forth. This style of ornament is called a "Chrismon," which means "Christ Monogram." I thought it was a neat idea and tried to figure out how to do it at home -- I mean, really, where would I put a second tree?

Finally I figured it out -- we didn't need two trees. All we had to do was put up the Christmas tree at the beginning of Advent, call it an Advent tree, and then decorate it with Chrismons. On Christmas Eve we could remove the Chrismons (or not) and add our usual Christmas ornaments. It worked out so well we did it again the next year and the kids are looking forward to it this year. We'll make the ornaments tomorrow so they'll have plenty of time to dry and can be decorated on Friday.

Here are the specifics (sorry I don't have any pictures -- I never have pictures).

Here's where you can find an explanation of Chrismons and a PDF file of patterns you can print out.

Here is a recipe for the ornaments. I cut them all out with a 3" biscuit cutter which is a nice size for decorating. The first year we used white fabric paint but last year I tried Wilton's fondant icing writer and sprinkled them with gold, silver, or pearl dust. They turned out beautifully. After Christmas we hung them outside for the birds. (Well, that was the intention anyway, and I thought we'd done it, but Elaienar tells me that none of them made it because the younger children insisted on saving them.)

The designs I have used are fairly simple -- Celtic cross, shepherd's crook, crown of thorns, cross and crown, eternity cross, IXΘYΣ, and several others that don't require much detail.

Thanksgiving weekend we put up the tree, with its lights and the star topper, a brass Moravian star, pierced, with a light inside. Saturday night before evening prayers, we turn on the lights (but not the star) and let the kids each pick one Chrismon to put on the tree, and talk a bit about the symbol and what it means. On Sunday we have the lights on all day, and that night we let them add a Chrismon, or one purple or silver ornament from our collection (purple being the color of Advent). The next week we add one Chrismon a day, but we leave the lights off until the next Saturday night. Then we do the whole thing over again so that the tree grows more and more festive as Christmas approaches.

On the 24th, we remove some of the purple and silver ornaments (because we have a LOT of Chrismas ornaments) and add the rest of our Christmas stuff. That night we turn on the star as well as the lights, and leave them on through Epiphany (except for while we were sleeping or away from home, of course). We take the tree down a day or so after Epiphany, and we generally start back to school on the next Monday, known traditionally as Plough Monday.

The kids love crafty stuff and I normally don't do much of that kind of thing with them, so it makes a nice change, and adding the ornaments day by day builds excitement in a way that's just perfect for this season of anticipation.

Time, Death, and Poetry

2011-11-16T14:34:00.001-05:00

or, Interesting and Sometimes Awkward Connections Made in Poetry Class

To get the full effect of this poem, you really need to read it aloud.

Calico Pie
~Edward Lear (1812-1888)

Calico Pie,
The little Birds fly
Down to the calico tree,
Their wings were blue,
And they sang ‘Tilly-loo!’
Till away they flew,
And they never came back to me!
They never came back!
They never came back!
They never came back to me!

Calico Jam,
The little Fish swam
Over the syllabub sea,
He took off his hat
To the Sole and the Sprat,
And the Willeby-wat,
But he never came back to me!
He never came back!
He never came back!
He never came back to me!

Calico Ban,
The little Mice ran,
To be ready in time for tea,
Flippity-flup,
They drank it all up,
And danced in the cup,
But they never came back to me!
They never came back!
They never came back!
They never came back to me!

Calico Drum,
The Grasshoppers come,
The Butterfly, Beetle, and Bee,
Over the ground,
Around and around,
With a hop and a bound—
But they never came back!
They never came back!
They never came back!
They never came back to me!

My second son tends to latch onto a particular topic and want to discuss it over and over again from every conceivable angle... for years. It used to be ambulances and fire trucks and police cars, then it moved to the movie “Darby O’Gill and the Little People,” particularly the fight scene between Michael and Pony. He still loves those and we still talk about them regularly, but his current passion is time.

Four years ago he started taking me to the calendar every morning so I could show him what day we were on and tell him the name of the day. Then he wanted to know the names of all the days of the week. We’d spend five or ten minutes, several times a day going over all this. He’s just about gotten them all memorized in order now, and I think he understands yesterday, today, and tomorrow, although he calls them, “last day,” “this day,” and “next day.”

This last year his questions have gotten harder. He wants to know where the days go when they leave.

When he first started asking me that I’d tell him, “They fly away like the little birds, and they never come back! They never come back, they never come back, they never come back to me!”

He liked that for a long time and would say the lines with me, but a few months ago he seemed to be wanting something more, so I told him that Sunday is the engine of a train and the rest of the days are the cars. He loves that one. Saturday is the caboose. He wanted Monday to be a special car, so it’s the coal car. Then, this Monday he asked me if “next day” is the next coal car, but I said a train would only have one coal car, so we decided that Tuesday is a freight car. “What does it carry?” I asked him. “Boxes,” he said.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

One of our poems in Dr. Taylor’s poetry class Monday was Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break.”

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

As you read this poem aloud (and you should) you can hear and feel the poet’s grief as he talks about missing this loved one. I hear an echo of David’s resignation to his baby’s death, “I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.” But I’m sure you can imagine how hard it is for me to read that last line with the proper seriousness—my voice gets all sing-songy of its own accord, and it feels so irreverent, like giggling during prayer, because of course it reminds me of those lines in “Calico Pie,” which I’ve been reciting for years now.

That kind of connection is so embarrassing that I didn’t mention it in class. I wondered if Lear and Tennyson knew each other, or read each other’s works—whether one of them had borrowed from the other. They were contemporaries, so it’s possible.

Well, I’ve been thinking about it since then and I’ve decided that it’s not inappropriate. Both poems are describing loss, and in “Calico Pie” you get a feeling of inevitability as that repetitive refrain comes back again and again. Of course, Lear’s poem is lighthearted at first, but it starts feeling wistful by the time you get to the end of it. It’s right that it should feel that way.

And I’m glad that I’ve been using “Calico Pie” to talk about the days, about how, once they leave, they’re gone forever. Children should have a large store of words for giving voice to these feelings. They should feel comfortable using them in lots of situations, even when we’re only talking about a small loss. I think that being able to talk about the small losses will help them when the really painful losses start happening to them.

BCP: Morning Prayers, Thanksgiving 2011

2011-11-08T15:03:00.001-05:00

I can’t believe it’s only a little over two weeks till Thanksgiving! I was born on Thanksgiving and it’s my favorite holiday. Isn’t that wonderful? I feel like Tootie in “Meet me in St. Louis,” who felt so lucky to have been born in her favorite city. ;-)

I like to have a huge, extravagant meal, enough to feed the whole family for the whole weekend. And we like to have a long morning prayer time before dinner, with songs and Scripture readings, and giving thanks for everything in the world.

To make things easier, I print out a missal (that’s a booklet that contains everything needed for the service) and make booklets of the hymns and canticles we’ll be using, so there are no disctractions created by flipping pages in the prayer book, Bible, and hymnal. I always try to print them out the day before so the younger children can decorate them.

Here are a few covers from last year’s missals:

And here are a few from 2008 before I had my long-arm stapler. That stapler saves a lot of time, but I think the yarn ties are prettier.

Here’s the missal we’ll be using this month. It’s mostly taken from the 1928 BCP, but the 1979 has some several appropriate prayers that I’ve included. The titles of the hymns and canticles we’ll be using are listed, but not the words, so it should be pretty easy for you to edit if you’d like to use it for your own family.

Click link below to view document

Morning Prayer Thanksgiving 2011

I always use my printer’s booklet printing option for these, which is why the font is so large.

How we use the prayer book, part 2B

2011-11-01T20:57:00.001-04:00

Below is the same document I posted earlier today, only I've added in red the traditional salutations and the directions and other things I mentioned in the previous post. Hopefully this is more helpful than than all those random directions in the earlier post.

Edit Click "Read more" below to view the document. It was slowing down my page's load time and making the format act wonky, so I took it off the main page.

Daily Morning Prayer for Families With Directions and Additions in Red

How we use the BCP, part 2

2011-11-01T14:34:00.009-04:00

From my comments in the previous post, you’ll have seen that there’s not just one prayer book, but at least three. Here’s a quick history.

Some history
Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canturbury, wrote the first one in 1549 under Edward VI. It was revised a during the reign of Mary I and again after her death. In 1662, after the Civil War, it received a major revision and this one is still the official prayer book of the Church of England, although since the 1980s most churches have been using officially sanctioned alternative service books. How this is different from an official prayer book I really don’t know.

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer would be the one Charlotte Mason was familiar with. I haven’t read much of Charlotte Mason, but I’ve seen words from the Holy Communion service on a couple of occasions that I can think of—once she mentions the Sursum Corda (Priest: “Lift up your hearts.” Answer: “We lift them up unto the Lord.”) and once I remember her using the words “this our bounden duty and service,” when referring to raising children, which comes from the post-communion prayer. I just point that out in case anyone’s interested in reading the book that influenced her.

In America, after the War for Independence, the Prayer Book was revised to take out prayers for the Queen and substitute prayers for the President, and a few other changes of that nature. It received minor revisions in 1892 and in 1928, and a major revision in 1979. The Anglican church we belong to is not part of the mainline denomination, and we use the 1928 BCP, but the 1979 was the first that we used and we’ve continued to use it for prayers at home, although we use the lectionary from the 1928 so we’ll be reading the same Scriptures during the week as other members of our church.

Now some prayers
The 1979 Book of Common Prayer has a section called Daily Devotions for Individuals and Families that has four brief prayer services: “In the Morning,” “At Noon,” “In the Early Evening,” and “At the Close of Day.” These are the simplest forms, so I’m starting here. Below is a link to a document you can download and use (all of the American prayer books are in the public domain).

Here are a few tips about the service.

It’s customary for the leader to begin the service by saying, “The Lord be with you.” The proper response is “And also with you,” (1979) or “And with thy spirit,” (1928). Then the leader says, “Let us pray,” and begins with the first line, “Open my lips, O Lord.” You don’t read the headers—“From Psalm 51” and so forth. Just jump into the text.

That opening verse is read responsively, with the leader reading up to the star, then the congregation reading the indented lines.

The directions in small italics are optional. The Lord’s Prayer is not optional and is said by everyone. Since the text is not included in the document below, I’ll include it here:

Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.

If you’re from a non-liturgical tradition, you’ll notice that the language is a little different than what you might be used to. That’s because the first English language Bible authorized for use in the Church of England was Miles Coverdale’s 1538 version which was based on William Tyndale’s earlier translation. Tyndale used “trespasses,” and Cranmer kept that language when he wrote the first Prayer Book. But Presbyterian and Reformed churches preferred to use John Wycliff’s 1382 translation, and so did the translators of the King James version of the Bible.

Edit Click "Read more" below to view the document and the rest of my notes. It was slowing down my page's load time and making the format act wonky, so I took it off the main page.

Daily Morning Prayer for Families

The Collect at the conclusion of the service is read by the leader, but everyone says “Amen,” which is why it’s in italics.

We usually wind up by having the leader say, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” The congregation responds, “Thanks be to God.” I say that even if we’re getting ready to sit back down again and begin reading our literature selection for the day.

Speaking of sitting down, that reminds me. In a liturgical service, you never sit during prayers. You either stand or kneel, unless you’re physically incapable of it. When the leader says, “The Lord be with you,” everyone should stand and respond, and remain standing until the end (unless you’re going to do Lectionary readings; in that case everyone but the Reader may sit, then everyone stands again when it’s time for the hymn, Creed, and/or Lord’s Prayer). Tiny babies, and elderly people with bad knees and backs are exempt and allowed to sit, but otherwise you should be standing for all of this service

Part of the beauty of using this for family prayers is that it’s so brief that young children can memorize it, but it can easily be expanded. We generally include Lectionary readings after the reading from I Peter. Prayers and Thanksgivings for almost any occasion are found in the book and these can be included where indicated.

Next time I’ll post the full Morning Prayer service that we are planning on using for Thanksgiving. Another time I’ll talk about how those two forms can be combined, giving you even greater flexibility.

The Book of Common Prayer and how we use it: Introduction

2011-10-30T21:21:00.005-04:00

Brandy asked me to write a bit about how we use the prayer book in our family and I’d be glad to share that as best I can (even though I know I still owe y’all an Abolition of Man post), but first I thought I’d give some background information so you can see where my husband and I are coming from.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, going to Sunday School and Vacation Bible School and youth camp every summer. I loved that church and am so grateful for the pastor we had and his Bible teaching. Though I’d loved Jesus as far back as I could remember, it wasn’t until I was fifteen that I made a public profession of faith in him and was baptized. I figured I’d spend the rest of my life in that church.

My husband’s family started out Southern Baptist, then attended various charismatic churches for several years, but joined an Episcopal church around the time he was twelve because it had an active youth group that they wanted him to be part of. This particular church also had a charismatic bent, which wasn’t unusual in mainline churches in the seventies.

When I was nineteen, one of my friends started going to a Southern Baptist church that had had a charismatic revival, and I liked her new friends so much that I started going there on Sunday nights. You might expect that it would be hard for a Southern Baptist girl to fit into a charasmatic church, but I had a kind of conversion there, and loved that church and those people.

Speaking of love…
That’s where Mike and I met. :-) After we married we joined a non-denominational charismatic church that was considered to be very conservative by other charismatics. That was in south Georgia where we lived for the first six years of our marriage.

Then we moved to Upstate New York and attended an Assembly of God church for the eleven months were there. After that we moved to Alabama and spent several months looking for a good charismatic church, but never found one that suited us, so we joined an SBC that a coworker of Mike’s invited us to.

Then in the spring of 1998 we moved to Virginia and began looking for another charismatic or Baptist church. After a long and fruitless search we wound up, through a series of fortunate events which I will not go into here for brevity’s sake, joining a Presbyterian church. And when I say “join” I mean whole hog. It really was another conversion experience and on the day we joined we had all of our children, there were five at the time, baptized, and if you know anything about Southern Baptists and charismatics you’ll realize what a huge change that was.

Into the desert
In the fall of 2001 we were sent to Texas where the nearest Presbyterian church of the same denomination was two hours away. We went there for a couple of months, but really, it was just too much. There was another conservative Presbyterian denomination that was only an hour and a half away, so we visited there for nearly a year. Eventually though, Mike decided that we needed to be part of a community that was closer to home, so we began attending the Traditional service at the base chapel.

This was a good choice for us for another year or so, especially the Wednesday night Bible study and Evening Prayers led by the Lutheran chaplain. But then the base chapel isn’t technically a church and the elders of the Presbyterian church we belonged to in Virginia wanted us to join a real church. Owing to some things that were going on at the chapel we realized that not only should we do what the elders suggested, but do it posthaste.

Oasis
Knowing my husband had an Episcopal background, someone recommended one of the two Episcopal churches in town—the priest was a friend and very conservative. We tried it and loved it, so we joined there.

In 2005 my husband retired from the military and we moved here (we’re back in Virginia, but three hours away from our former church). After a while we decided that we needed to find a more conservative, or “Traditional,” as Anglican-speech puts it, church, but we wanted to stay within the Anglican tradition, so now we belong to an Anglican church that uses the older Book of Common Prayer—the 1928 one.

We have much to be grateful for. Every church we’ve been touched by has enriched us. Love of Scripture from the Baptists. Zeal from the charismatics. Deep wonder at God’s supreme power and goodness from the Presbyterians. The beauty of holiness from the Lutherans.

Home
And from the Anglicans? That’s so hard to define. We didn’t mean to stay Anglican. It was meant to be a temporary lodging until we could get back to the Presbyterians. But after eight years in this tradition, the Anglican church has become our home, with all that that implies and I can’t imagine being anything else now.

I don’t mean to insult anyone else’s church service, and I’ve participated in and been blessed by and loved many different styles of worship, but let me tell you, the Anglicans know How to Do Church. When we visit other churches, we feel like we’ve been to a really good Bible study, good Christian fellowship, but it just doesn’t feel like Church.

Please, please, please don’t take that as an insult to other churches. I’m just telling you how I feel about my own church, and I know you love your church tradition as much as I love mine. At least, I hope you do. Just take it the same way you’d take it if someone said, “No one can make Sunday dinner like my Mama.” You know that’s not really a swipe at your mama.

But now, I think I finally understand what is meant by the term Mother Kirk.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Edited to add:

I've created a new tag "Book of Common Prayer" and have scanned over my older posts trying to tag things that mention the BCP or quote from it. I didn't tag all the Psalms I've posted, but all those Latin titles for the Psalms come from the Psalter in the BCP.

There were a handful where I mentioned it so briefly that I decided not to tag them. Mostly they were short quotes from the book. In the post "Grief, a year later," when I said, "I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come," that's from the Nicene Creed, which we recite every Sunday after the Scripture readings.

In a couple of different places I mentioned that some of my favorite words are these:

"With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and all my worldly goods I thee endow," from the 1662 BCP.

"Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again," said by the congregation during the Eucharistic Prayer, 1979 BCP.

"These are the gifts of God for the people of God. Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your hearts by faith, with thanksgiving," said by the priest while holding the bread and the cup, just after the breaking of the bread, inviting God's people to the Table, 1979 BCP.

This day is call'd the feast of Crispian

2011-10-25T12:49:00.000-04:00

This is supposed to be a post about "Men Without Chests."

2011-10-14T13:29:00.002-04:00

But my children are clamoring for me to read another chapter of Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood, about an Irish soldier-doctor living in England during the reign of James II who is falsely accused of treason then sold into slavery. Peter Blood has so far quoted Horace and Richard Lovelace (I've had a crush on Lovelace ever since I read "To Lucasta, going to the Wars" in my teens), and is showing us how Courage, Honour, and Kindness behave in adverse circumstances.

I must warn you that this is a dangerous route. My oldest son is an EMT/firefighter, which is scary enough for a mom, but he's also working hard on academics this year so he can be accepted into an ROTC program -- he would love to be a fighter pilot like my hero-uncle was.

So I don't have time to write just now. I have to go pray for my son's success and my own peace of mind. And read more hero stories to my children.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Follow the discussion at Cindy's blog.

October reading plans

2011-10-02T14:25:00.002-04:00

I am a hero worshiper. My hero is Alfred the Great whose feast day is the 26th of this month. Every October for several years now we have read G.K. Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse during October, and it has become my favorite work of poetry.

I’m going to save Chesterton for later in the month when Eldest Daughter will be back home, but this week I’ll be starting a book about my hero and his times that we’ve never read before—The Marsh King, recommended by ~~Mystie~~ Cindy in her "Literature of Honor for Boys" list.

Chapter 1
“The Witnesses”

Athelstan Redbeard the Dane, King of East Anglia, died suddenly, sitting upright upon his horse, when I was two years old. He was my godfather, so my mother told me; but I have heard that he considered it his right to be godfather to all the children born at his court, so this was a distinction I shared with many. Once every year, on the anniversary of his own baptism, he held a great christening feast in his hall. There my grandfather, Olaf the Skald, would sing the long story of the King’s deeds and battles, as he himself had known them, having stood beside him both as pagan and Christian through most of them.

The three oldest and I will be finishing King Lear when Eldest Daughter returns, and I hadn’t planned what to do after that, but then I remembered that the 25th of the this month is the feast of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, and you know what that means—Henry V. This time I’m taking a cue from Cindy and going to show Kenneth Branagh’s version of the play first, then read it, then show Laurence Olivier’s version. We’ve watched both of those and we’ve read the play before, but I’ve never done them back-to-back like that.

I’ve been reading E. Nesbit’s and Charles and Mary Lamb’s retellings (Amazon has free Kindle editions of both of those books!) to the younger four children but I don’t remember ever reading them The Real Thing. I think we’ll do that this term with Henry V. When we read Shakespeare, we take parts. #1 Son likes doing accents, but the girls and I don’t much. We each sometimes have to read more than one character per scene so I usually do voices—you know, altering my pitch and pace and so forth to fit the character. I’m going to ask my twelve year old daughter if she wants a part—she’s a good reader.

Cumberland Books sells six of Shakespeare’s plays (scroll all the way down) in very inexpensive volumes—75¢ to $1.50—so you can buy enough copies for all your readers. You can probably find the plays online and print them off yourself, but I’ve never looked for them.

For the rest, I’m still reading through Ambleside Online’s Year Three with the younger ones, and the older ones are continuing their own studies, so I won’t have any more planning to do till November.

C.S. Lewis's Debunkers

2011-09-28T20:21:00.002-04:00

Cindy is leading a discussion of C.S. Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man, and what “debunking” means is being discussed.

This is the Oxford American Dictionary’s definition of debunk: to expose the falseness or hollowness of (a myth, idea, or belief); to reduce the inflated reputation of (someone), esp. by ridicule.

C.S. Lewis’s stories are full of debunkers and I’ve pulled a number of quotes to give you an idea of what he means by that term as he uses it in The Abolition of Man.

From The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

“You can’t always believe what Fauns say,” said Edmund, trying to sound as if he knew far more about them than Lucy.

“Who said so?” asked Lucy.

“Everyone knows it,” said Edmund; “ask anybody you like.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

“Probably,” he thought, “this is the great Lion Aslan that they were all talking about. She’s caught him already and turned him into stone. So that’s the end of all their fine ideas about him! Pooh! Who’s afraid of Aslan?”

And he stood there gloating over the stone lion, and presently he did something very silly and childish. He took a stump of lead pencil out of his pocket and scribbled a moustache on the lion’s upper lip and then a pair of spectacles on its eyes. Then he said, “Yah! Silly old Aslan! You thought yourself mighty fine, didn’t you?”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

“Why, he’s only a great cat after all!” cried one.

“Is that what we were afraid of?” said another.

And they surged around Aslan, jeering at him, saying things like, “Puss, Puss! Poor Pussy,” and “How many mice have you caught today, Cat?” and “Would you like a saucer of milk, Pussums?”

From Prince Caspian

“Eh? What’s that?” he said. “What old days do you mean?”

“Oh, don’t you know, Uncle?” said Caspian. “When everything was quite different. When all the animals could talk, and there were nice people who lived in the streams and the trees. Naiads and Dryads they were called. And there were Dwarfs. And there were lovely little Fauns in all the woods. They had feet like goats. And—”

“That’s all nonsense, for babies,” said the King sternly. “Only fit for babies, do you hear? You’re getting too old for that sort of stuff…. And never let me catch you talking—or thinking either—about all those silly stories again. There never were those Kings and Queens. How could there be two Kings at the same time? And there’s no such person as Aslan. And there are no such things as lions. And there never was a time when animals could talk. Do you hear?”

From The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

“I am Ramandu. But I see that you stare at one another and have not heard this name. And no wonder, for the days when I was a star had ceased long before any of you knew this world, and all the constellations have changed.”

“Golly,” said Edmund, under his breath. “He’s a retired star.”

“Aren’t you a star any longer?” asked Lucy.

“I am a star at rest, my daughter,” answered Ramandu….

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

From The Silver Chair

“What is this sun that you all speak of? Do you mean anything by the word?” …

“Please it your Grace,” said the Prince, very coldly and politely. “You see that lamp. It is round and yellow and gives light to the whole room; and hangeth moreover from the roof. Now that thing which we call the sun is like the lamp, only far greater and brighter. It giveth light to the whole Overworld and hangeth in the sky.”

“Hangeth from what, my lord?” asked the Witch; and then, while they were all still thinking how to answer her, she added, with another of her soft, silver laughs: “You see? When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me it is like the lamp. Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children’s story.”

From The Horse and His Boy

“What’s it got to do with you if she is [a Talking Horse]?” said the strange rider fiercely, laying hand on sword-hilt. But the voice in which the words were spoken had already told Shasta something.

“Why, it’s only a girl!” he exclaimed.

“And what business is it of yours if I am only a girl?” snapped the stranger. “You’re probably only a boy: a rude, common little boy—a slave probably, who’s stolen his master’s horse.”

“That’s all you know,” said Shasta.

From The Magician’s Nephew

[W]hat you see and hear depends a great deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.

…When the Lion had first begun singing, long ago when it was still quite dark, he had realized that the noise was a song. And he had disliked the song very much. It made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel. Then, when the sun rose and he saw that the singer was a lion (“only a lion,” as he said to himself) he tried his hardest to make believe that it wasn’t singing and never had been singing—only roaring as any lion might in a zoo in our own world. “Of course it can’t really have been singing,” he thought, “I must have imagined it. I’ve been letting my nerves get out of order. Who ever heard of a lion singing?” And the longer and more beautiful the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring. Now the trouble with trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song. Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to.

From The Last Battle

“You must think we’re blooming soft in the head, that you must,” said Griffle. “We’ve been taken in once and now you expect us to be taken in again the next minute. We’ve no more use for stories about Aslan, see!... No thanks. We’ve been fooled once and we’re not going to be fooled again.”

… “Do you mean you don’t believe in the real Aslan?” said Jill. “But I’ve seen him. And he has sent us two here out of a different world.”

“Ah,” said Griffle with a broad smile. “So you say. They’ve taught you your stuff all right. Saying your lessons, ain’t you?”

That’s without digging deeply, and I was going to type quotes from his other stories that I’ve read: Till We Have Faces, The Pilgrim’s Regress, and That Hideous Strength, but I’m tired of typing. Those books are just full of it. You should read them all, but especially That Hideous Strength, if you want to see what the abolition of man looks like and how men without chests behave.

Follow the discussion at Cindy’s blog.

I would like to do an average day post...

2011-09-20T22:29:00.000-04:00

but we don't seem to have any average days right now.

Tuesday is our crazy day. I'm actually having to use Google Calendar because we're so busy this term.

I was up at six (which isn't average for me this time of year -- I tend to get up with the sun and right now the sun isn't up till seven) so I read for a while. I'm re-reading CS Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress. Then I started breakfast and a load of laundry (usually laundry comes later in the day, but Mike needed a clean undershirt. OOPS! I still haven't gotten used to my new washer. I hate it. It's not simple and obedient like my old one and I'm having to change my laundry habits in order to accommodate it.)

Ate breakfast, sent Hubby off to work (with a clean undershirt that was found at the bottom of a basket of clean clothes on top of the dryer), cleaned a little.

Called family to prayers. We use the 1979 Book of Common Prayer because we're used to it, but we're using the Lectionary from the 1928 since that's the prayer book our current church uses. We have a Psalm every day, plus an Old Testament and a New Testament reading, but we got behind and everyone wants to hear the OT stories (we're in II Samuel reading about David's exploits) so we're skipping the NT readings for now.

The OT reading reminded my 12 year old daughter of the story of Perseus in Charles Kingsley's book The Heroes, which we read last spring, so we talked about it, and that led us to our Wall Chart of World History to find when the Trojan War happened (less than a hundred years before King David).

By then it was ten o'clock and time for the three music students to leave for their lesson. The three remaining children and I went back to the kitchen to finish cleaning it while listening to Beethoven's 7th Symphony, and then a friend dropped by for half an hour or so. I haven't seen her in a few weeks so we had a lot of catching up to do. The younger kids played a few rounds of their Monopoly game in the living room while we chatted in the dining room. I sent her off with a half gallon of goat milk.

Then the music students came back home and I remembered that I hadn't fixed any lunch yet (OOPS! I'm still used to Eldest Daughter being here and taking care of that), so we we cooked a chicken/spinach/ricotta cheese dish, but it wasn't finished before the two older girls had to leave for their drama class, so I gave them some money so they could buy fast food on the way (sigh).

I don't remember what I did after that. I know I spent some time on the computer and then I laid down for a while. I also spent fifteen or twenty minutes with my eleven year old son who's playing baseball for the first time this fall, helping him with his batting. Then I went to doctor my injured finger and decided it really was infected and I should call the real doctor, so I did and the nurse said "Come now." Took my Kindle with me and read a couple of chapters of Thomas Shields' The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard while waiting for Doctor C.

Got back home at four; #1 Son went to pick up his sisters from drama; I took Baseball Son (along with two of his sisters) to practice, then went to Walmart to get my prescription filled (another round of antibiotics, and this time it's completely my fault; I injured my finger on purpose. That is, I asked #1 Son to do it. Long story, but I have cyst or something under the skin of the middle finger on my right hand -- my pencil-holding finger, you see, and it's right in that spot, which makes it uncomfortable. Well, I had this brilliant idea: instead of wasting time and money going to the doctor about it, why don't I just cut it open myself and let the cyst out? Only I'm not brave enough to cut myself, so I asked Son to do it for me and being a good boy, he did. Only the cyst didn't come out -- it's attached, which I was not expecting at all. That's not the bad part though. I was planning to let it heal up and then go to the doctor and let him remove it properly, only my bandage would get wet from doing housework and I wouldn't get around to putting on a fresh bandage until bedtime... so it got infected. Yes, I took a lot of ribbing from the doctor about DIY surgery. He wasn't best pleased, but he's a grandfatherly sort of man and didn't make me feel like a criminal for doing it.)

Went back to the park for the rest of ball practice, came home, ate supper, listened to Hubby reading The Hobbit to the younger four, and wasted another hour in front of the computer. Where I still am, typing this report of our non-average day.

This wasn't even an average Tuesday, what with the doctor and all.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, the children did their farm chores -- looking for eggs, milking the goats and straining and chilling the milk (twice), walking the dog, bringing the goats home when they escaped over the fence... stuff like that. I noticed my twelve-year-old reading Diana Wynne Jones's Dogsbody. My eighteen year old daughter spent some time singing into the computer so she could analyze her voice and improve it. #1 Son spent at least an hour on his algebra and another reading Clarence Carson's Basic American Government and working on his paper. The youngest two spent a lot of time adding up Monopoly money and figuring rents.

I never meant to be an unschooler, but it seems that we are by default.

Their skills have improved somewhat in the last five years

2011-09-05T12:10:00.000-04:00

[From the archives, because I’m taking an antibiotic right now and feel generally lousy, but want to post something cheerful – originally posted April 28, 2006.]

Small children playing 20 questions

Child A: “I’m thinking of something.”
Child B: “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
Child A: “Mineral.”
Child C: “What is it?”
Child A: “Our goats! Your turn.”

Child C: “I’m thinking of something.”
Child A: “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
Child C: “Mama, is the table mineral?”
Mama: “No, it’s vegetable.”
Child C: “Vegetable.”
Child B: “Is it the table?”
Child C: “Yes!”

Grief, a year later

2011-08-26T10:54:00.001-04:00

One thing I’ve learned in the year since my sister’s death is that it didn’t cause a new wound – it reopened the wound that was made when my brother was murdered, and it’s a wound that will never heal, this side of the Jordan.

The last time I spoke to Johnny was over the phone on my 24th birthday. As we said goodbye I told him I would call him on his birthday, eleven days after mine. Instead, we buried him. It’s been nearly twenty-two years now. This December he will have been dead as long as he was alive. When he died, the only person who had shared my childhood died, and in a sense, my childhood died with him.

My sister was nearly thirteen years younger than I was and I loved mothering her. When I had children of my own I’d tell people that Anne Marie was my first baby, not even half-joking. I almost didn’t marry – for her sake. Things were getting even rougher between my parents and I was worried about leaving her.

Instead, she spent every spring break and summer with me until she was fifteen or sixteen. She even lived with me and went to school in our town for a semester during our parents’ divorce, a year after our brother died. And the year Mike was in Alaska alone and I was in Georgia with a baby, a toddler, and a preschooler, she lived with me to help with my children, and I home schooled her.

I saw her faith in the Lord from the time she was quite small. I saw her struggles as she reached adolescence, and when she began to pull away from me as a teen I tried not to take it personally, to let her have her own space while assuring her that I was always there for her. I know she knew how much I loved her. She always called me when she was having any kind of trouble to ask me to pray for her.

But I can’t stop the questions. “Why didn’t I…?” and “What if…?” and “Shouldn’t I have…?” Surely, if I had been a better sister, a better Christian, all this suffering could have been avoided.

In those last months of her second struggle with leukemia, following a bout of breast cancer, I saw her faith grow. She talked about being ready to be with Jesus. I know she’s safe with him now. I know she’s not suffering any more. I’ve seen the good fruit she’s borne through her death, in the newfound faith of one of her best friends.

I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. And that’s the only thing that makes the pain of loss bearable – knowing that it’s not forever.

But really, that knowledge doesn’t stop the ache of loss. I want my sister to know the joys of marriage and motherhood. I want the hollow, hungry look to go out of my mother’s eyes. I want my Baby back.

So, how's your day been?

2011-08-23T15:13:00.001-04:00

We just had an earthquake -- a 5.9, reportedly, centered about fifty miles southwest of here. Lotta rumbling and rattling, but nothing worse, thank the Lord.

My son, who's a volunteer fire and rescue guy, went straight down to the station when it was over, and for the last half an hour it's been non-stop sirens on our highway. I hope it's just lines or trees down, and no injuries.

Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

2011-08-23T10:33:00.001-04:00

We started back to school last week, taking it slow and easy. I never begin on a Monday, and I never begin with more than a half day. I’ve had health problems for the last several years that mean I’m tired and low-energy most of the time, so this is my way of coping – start slowly and work my way up, hoping the stamina will come. Thankfully, I’ve finally found a doctor I like and she’s helping me.

Over the summer we finished memorizing Edgar Allan Poe’s “Eldorado,” so yesterday we started a new one, my current favorite:

Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
~William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Isn’t it gorgeous?

I’m starting back to school myself, on next Monday. I signed up for James Taylor’s introduction to the Major British and American Poets through CiRCE’s Online Academy. I’m so excited that for the first two days after I signed up I actually wept whenever I thought about it. Sheesh.

Comparisons are odious

2011-08-21T16:30:00.003-04:00

[Every once in a while, when the mood strikes, I'll add posts from my old, defunct blog on to this one in their proper historical places. Today I ran across one that was originally posted in May of 2008 and decided to repost it. Because I haven't changed any.]

My oldest children participate in a community chorus that focuses on the great music of the Church, historical and contemporary, putting on a concert twice each year. Every spring the director has the graduating seniors sing a special song together, and she includes a brief bio on each in the program.

Well, the spring concert was last night and Elaienar [aka Eldest Daughter] was included in the “graduating senior” group even though if I had to get technical about it I’d say she finished 12th grade last year. I didn’t think about mentioning it to the director back then since Elai was busy with other things that spring and high school graduation would be, for us, a rather artificial way of marking our children’s milestones. But we had no objection to her being part of the graduating group, since this is the last year she’ll be singing with the group as a student. If she continues to sing with them, it will be as a mentor.

Unfortunately, we’d forgotten about the bio, so when Elai was asked to write one up at the last moment, she wrote one that was short on facts but long on wit. I thought it portrayed her personality in a way that a list of facts wouldn’t do.

But the dear director, bless her heart and we do love her to pieces, doesn’t share Elai’s quirky sense of humor, so the bio that was written up in the program was nothing like what she had written. It was sweet and affectionate, but it looked so dull next to everyone else’s lists of accomplishments and awards and honors and scholarships and where they’re all going to college. If I’d known it was going to be rewritten I’d’ve had her supply more facts to pad it.

You may not believe this, but I actually woke up this morning with a sick tummy because it was bothering me so.

When I’m at home doing what we’ve set out to do, I’m reasonably happy with what we’re doing and I like the way things are working out. It’s just when these occasions where it’s impossible not to make a comparison occur that I doubt and second-guess the Lord’s leading. And I don’t like being different – it’s so uncomfortable. Really, I just want to fit in… I want everyone else to like me and approve of me. Elai says I have an inferiority complex – she’s not worried about the bio at all because she honestly doesn’t care what other people think about her and her abilities.

Blech.

See, I should make this into a post that encourages other people to trust the Lord.

Something spiritual.

Like my favorite bloggers would do.
:-p

Depart, O Christian soul, out of this world

2011-08-03T23:33:00.001-04:00

In the Name of God the Father Almighty who created thee.
In the Name of Jesus Christ who redeemed thee.
In the Name of the Holy Ghost who sanctifieth thee.
May thy rest be this day in peace, and thy dwellingplace in the Paradise of God.

Jewell C., 24 June 1909 - 3 August 2011

My husband's dear sweet grandmother passed peacefully into the arms of her Saviour today. Thankfully, we knew she would be leaving us soon, and Mike and our oldest son were able to go to her on Sunday and stay with her till the end.

Foodness

2011-07-30T20:44:00.007-04:00

This afternoon my son made a batch of chocolate chip cookies, but it was too hot to turn on the oven, so we just ate the dough raw. :-)

~*~ ~*~ ~*~
Owing to a late spring and an even later start with the garden, we just got our first tomatoes today. I'm telling you, I bit into one and thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

If you ask me, the only reason even to have summer is so you can eat fresh, warm-from-the-garden, home-grown tomatoes. Without growing your own tomatoes you're just getting hot and sweaty for nothing.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~
This morning Mike and I went to an Amish grocery store we'd heard about. They have spices in large quantities for really good prices, so I stocked up on a few things I was out of -- celery seed, turmeric, paprika -- and bought a quarter pound of parsley, because you can never have too much parsley.

I also bought, for the first time ever, a tub of lard. I used it to cook our salmon patties for supper tonight and they turned out well. I'm glad to have another fat to add to my inventory. I've read that animal fats are the best for frying in since they can take the heat.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~
We're raising ducks for the first time and several of them have turned out to be males, so we should have plenty of duck fat this winter. Sally Fallon says duck fat is the best thing in the world to cook potatoes in.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~
My two oldest are in town tonight and they're going to go by the big grocery store while they're there to see if they can buy some things that I'm not able to get in the stores in our rural county: cream of coconut, macadamia nuts, instant espresso powder, plus a couple of other things. Tomorrow I'm going to make either Mystie's Intense Coffee Ice Cream or Coconut Macadamia Ice Cream for our Sunday treat, depending on which ingredients they're able to find. We bought the cream this morning from the man who butchered our pig a few years ago.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~
While we were in Amish country we also bought a gallon of milk from pastured cows from a man we get milk from when our goats aren't producing enough, or when I want cow milk. (We would have bought the cream from him too, but he was out, and sent us to the butcher.) I'm going to try making yogurt with it because I don't like the way our goat-milk yogurt turns out.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~
My sous chef and I have been in a food rut for the last year -- kind of bored with everything, not interested in coming up with meal plans, wondering why we have to eat every day anyway, let alone three times every day. Today, I'm loving food again.

I like it better this way. :-)

Summer school

2011-07-20T16:30:00.002-04:00

So, yesterday morning after reviewing all his phonograms and other memory work (Psalm 8, the seventh day of the creation week, The Parable of the Sower from Matthew 13, the latter portion of Ephesians chapter 4, Pater Noster, and Poe's "Eldorado"), and having a handwriting lesson, I sent John outside to run around the house three times while I set up his French lesson. I've found that his eleven-year-old mind works better when his body has had some recent exercise, and it had already been more than an hour since he'd finished helping with milking the goats and putting them out to pasture, investigating the death of a chicken, taking the dog for a walk, and collecting and taking out the trash.

His run took a lot longer than I'd expected and when he came in he was mad as a hornet. Four of the goats had gotten out and gone to our neighbor's house to feast on their apple trees, and while running up the path through the woods to get them, he'd been stung twice by yellow jackets. I put baking soda on his wounds and sent him back out to find another way around. No good. The yellow jackets were stirred up all along the ridge he has to cross to get to the neighbor's.

Naturally I panicked and called my husband. Then, having sent John and Nathan on one more vain excursion, I fitted them out in ad hoc beekeeper's gear: jeans tucked into socks, a cowboy hat with a sheer curtain draped over it and tucked inside a jacket, plus a pair of gloves. By the time Mike got home, John had brought Psyche, the herd queen, home, and penned her up and the other three were following... slowly, but since the queen had gone home, they were on their way, too.

While the guys were out managing the mischief, I made half a gallon of lemonade to serve them when they came back inside. It's awfully hot here now -- in the 90s and muggy. It was past lunch time by then and my two oldest had come back from the library, so we made quesadillas and Mike went back to work.

It was nearly 2 o'clock by the time we finished eating and I didn't feel like doing anything else, so, remembering that Tuesday was the day that The Eagle was supposed to be in the Redbox, I sent Number One Son out to pick it up, and we spent the rest of the afternoon watching it. My three youngest girls are at their grandmother's and they're going to be sorry they missed the movie.

Oh, the two oldest were at the library because Eldest Daughter had an internet class which began at 11:00 (James Taylor's short story class through CiRCE and those of you who didn't sign up for it ought to be ashamed of yourselves), and our internet was down. We have this theory that our local provider houses the equipment in a leaky basement because service goes down whenever the weather gets a little damp.

Today we saw a bluebird in the bird bath and stood watching it for a while. Other than that, it was less exciting than yesterday, but we didn't accomplish much more.

I'm not worried though. It's too hot to do anything besides stand and stare.

I'm enjoying the time off, but I am looking forward to the fall, when all the children are home again and we get back into our cozy routine.

Happy Independence Day!

2011-07-02T12:20:00.003-04:00

In her post Video Games, Home Education, and the U.S. Supreme Court, Brandy discusses what is being called the third wave of home school persecution, and has encouraging things to say.

In the course of her post she mentions the earlier days when “socialization” was the big issue that home schoolers had to deal with, but then explains that this newer form of persecution is based on the fact that when a parent educates his own children at home, he is passing his own ideas down to his children, and those ideas might be dangerous or unacceptable.

But I’ve come to believe that this is what the whole socialization argument was about – not that home schooled children won’t know how to interact politely with other people on an individual basis, but that they won’t know how to fit into Society at large, meaning, they won’t grow up to be good contributors to the national economy.

The other night we were at Home Depot looking at new flooring for our kitchen and the young woman who was helping us, mentioned the installation fee a couple of times. After a while, when we’d finished picking out what we wanted, she said something about calling to schedule installation, but I said, “Oh, I have a son – he does all my installation.”

She responded with mock horror at the idea of us not paying someone to do our work, and I said, laughing, “I know – our family is so bad for the economy.”

And this is the point: As soon as you figure out that you can raise your own kids from infancy to adulthood without needing a paid professional to do it for you, you figure out that there are scads of things you can do yourself, and those kids grow up assuming that doing things as frugally and as independently as possible is the way Normal people function. They pay for fewer and fewer services, and in a service economy, if everybody did that, where would we be? This, I believe, is what so many fear about parents educating their own children at home.

One of the first times we visited George Washington’s birthplace, one of the blacksmiths was telling visitors about how economically independent from Britain the Virginians strove to be, refining their own iron ore, for example, and forging it into the necessary items, instead of sending the ore the England to be refined and forged there, as Parliament wished. In fact, Parliament wanted all raw materials to be sent to England for processing, and then bought back (as value-added products, in today’s speech) by the colonists. So the colonists were supposed to raise sheep and harvest the wool, but send it straight to England for carding, spinning, and weaving into cloth which would then be purchased by the colonists to make their clothes from. The same with timber, which the colonists were expected to harvest and ship to England, to be turned into the lumber and shingles they would buy to build their houses and barns with.

But at the Pope’s Creek Plantation, where George Washington was born, all of the family’s basic needs were provided by the farm. The plantation functioned like a village, with a blacksmith shop, a spin shop (for spinning, dying, and weaving wool and flax). Cobblers and carpenters had their shops, too. Most of the Virginia plantations worked this way, and allowed their craftsmen, who were nearly all indentured servants and slaves, to hire themselves out to locals who needed their labor. In this way, local communities provided for all of their basic needs. Wealthy families bought luxuries from Britain when they shipped their tobacco harvest to London, but not the daily necessities Parliament wanted them to buy, such as cloth for everyday clothes, lumber, and hardware.

Well, this blacksmith, in giving us this history lesson, remarked that, “When a people have gained economic freedom, political freedom won’t be far behind.”

That’s something to keep in mind this weekend, as we celebrate our political independence from Great Britain.

Happy Ascension Day!

2011-06-02T00:00:00.010-04:00

Here’s something by John Donne (1572-1631).

Ascention.

Salute the last and everlasting day,
Joy at the uprising of the Sunne, and Sonne,
Yee whose just teares, or tribulation
Have purely washt, or burnt your drossie clay;
Behold the Highest, parting hence away,
Lightens the darke clouds, which hee treads upon,
Nor doth hee by ascending, show alone,
But first hee, and hee first enters the way.
O strong Ramme, which hast batter’d heaven for mee,
Mild lambe, which with thy blood, hast mark’d the path;
Bright torch, which shin’st, that I the way may see,
Oh, with thy owne blood quench thy owne just wrath,
And if thy holy Spirit, my Muse did raise,
Deigne at my hands this crown of prayer and praise.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

This poem is the last in a cycle of seven sonnets on the life of Christ. In each sonnet, the last line is the first line of the next in the cycle, so in this one, the last line, “Deigne at my hands this crown of prayer and praise” is the first line of the first sonnet in the cycle. I’ll try to remember to post all seven of them over the course of seven days next April for National Poetry Month.

Conversation as education

2011-06-01T18:33:00.003-04:00

(Follow the discussion of Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education, by James S. Taylor at Mystie's blog)

In chapter six Taylor gives another example of what teaching in the poetic mode has looked like in recent times, this time by describing the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, a two-year program for freshmen and sophomores at the University of Kansas, which ran for a decade and a half or so beginning in the early 1970s.

Three professors would gather with the students for twice-weekly meetings which consisted of the students listening intently (no note-taking!) to an hour and twenty minute long conversation between the professors.

The conversations were, by design, unrehearsed and spontaneous, begun by simply taking up some moment from the Odyssey, or from Herodotus, or The Republic that interested one of the teachers, then exploring it with anecdotes, stories, connections with other readings, following where ever the theme took them. [p.147]

The example of these professors, teaching by way of their personal conversation, speaking as naturally as if around a table where a leisurely lunch was taking place, making quick connections with the similar and contrary ideas, or meandering, wandering around and around the topic, digressing to personal experiences, relevant to the subject—all taught the students, indirectly at least, the joy of the memory and a healthy independence from books and notes and all the gimmicks so often used to keep this generation’s attention. [p.149]

They made use of concrete examples from everyday life, from traditional life, from childhood, all to give a vicarious experience of philosophy, history, and so on. [p.151]

During the rest of the week, poetry, Latin, and songs were taught orally. The students learned calligraphy and spent evenings star-gazing and learning the Greek myths associated with the constellations. They read history and literature, and were taught Rhetoric using Aesop’s fables and Grimm’s fairy tales.

Each spring the students organized a waltz. They gave each other dance lessons, hired an orchestra, reserved the University ballroom. Many of the young women sewed their own evening gowns.

This program was “not an attempt to advance knowledge at all,” but was meant to lay the foundation for advanced studies. For this reason philosophy and theology as such weren’t taught, because, “while it is possible to train youth in the rigors of formal philosophy, what one often gets as a result, without the prior humanizing of the poetic mode, are disputatious young students.”

Instead the profressors’ goal was, in part, to help the students relive aspects of their childhood, “that time of leisure in which the wonders of reality are encountered simply as wonders. As this entire study has demonstrated, there can be no real advancement in knowledge unless it first begin in leisure and wonder, where the controlling motive throughout remains to be delight and love.”

A lot of this is the kind of thing the mother educating her children at home can do herself—reading stories, memorizing poetry and songs together, laying in the yard at night watching the stars… even teaching calligraphy, which is something I’ve never even thought about. I’ve barely bothered to teach good penmanship, and I guess I should remedy that.

But it seems to me that the core aspect, the conversations between the professors, is the hardest to reproduce at home, especially in the early years. I have the advantage of grown children at home who are still studying with me, so my younger children get to sit in on this kind of conversation regularly, both during our Morning Time, and during meals.

We have a rule that the younger children are not allowed to speak during supper, the only meal when Daddy is at home, so that they can listen to the grown-ups talking. It’s not a hard and fast rule—on occasion Mike will ask one of the younger ones to tell him something interesting that they learned that day—but I’ve found that when the little ones are allowed to chatter they’ll drown out everything else at the table with their silliness. I tolerate an awful lot of silliness during the day, but I want supper to be civilized. At this season of my life that means a table cloth, candles, real dishes and glasses and silverware, and occasionally playing good music in the background, but most of all, good manners and real conversation.

If you’re a sleep-deprived young mom, you may not be able to set the table like I’m able to now. We used a lot of paper plates when my children were all little, and still use paper napkins most of the time to keep from making the laundry burden even greater. But you can begin to teach your young children good table manners by setting the example yourself. Beginning the meal with a prayer of thanks and singing the Doxology will help set the tone.

When I had four children under the age of six, mealtime conversation wasn’t very edifying unless we had company. When it’s just Mama and Daddy and Babies, Mama and Daddy tend to focus on the babies’ behavior at the meal and forget to talk about anything, never mind the fact that they might not have anything much to talk about besides the children’s and coworkers’ antics. But having company over always changed all that for us, especially having over two or three single young adults.

The important thing is that the atmosphere should be “meditative, not disputatious.”

If all else fails, try Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. :-)

Experience not formulas

2011-05-28T18:08:00.002-04:00

One of my early influences on the way I raise my children was Raymond and Dorothy Moore’s book Home Grown Kids. The Moores are known for their “delayed academics” approach, encouraging parents to let their children have plenty of time to play, to give them opportunities for real work around the house and yard, and to read good stories to them.

“Delayed academics” doesn’t mean NO academics; it just means to wait until they’re developmentally ready to handle formal study, which varies from child to child. The hard part of this for the home schooling mom is that it requires her to pay careful attention to each child’s needs and tailor their academic studies accordingly. It also means that if you have a child who doesn’t read well until he’s eight or ten or twelve years old (and I’ve had a couple of those) you’re going to hear from the grandparents and concerned friends, so you have to be pretty confident that you know what you’re doing.

That’s one reason why I’ve loved reading Poetic Knowledge, and Charlotte Mason’s books. They remind me that Mike and I really do know what we’re doing with our kids.

But they also keep me from becoming complacent—there’s always room for improvement. Poetic Knowledge is so full of ideas that I can’t even begin make good use of them all. All those ideas are just composting in the back of my mind, but I trust that my own soul will be nurtured and I’ll be better able to nurture my children’s as a result.

One idea that Taylor has presented throughout the book is what he calls “gymnastic.” I’m trying to get a handle on this because it’s something I’ve never realized was an important part of every child’s education. By “gymnastic” he doesn’t mean taking gymnastics classes and learning tumbling and so forth, although that could certainly be a good avenue if it suits your family. On page 142, Taylor defines “gymnastic” by quoting French educator Henri Charlier:

The essential of gymnastics is the training to race, including different types of jumps and climbs. But physical labor must be added, which gives resistance, brings one back to the hard realities of life.

Physical labor I can do—we have plenty of yard work and caring for animals to go around. Training to race, though. I think I need to talk to my oldest son when he gets back home and see if he can help me out.

Here’s an aspect of it that I feel more confident of ability to teach:

In the ancient times and in all the middle ages, music was a part of the studies…. For the Greeks, the word ‘music’ meant poetry, music, and dance, all at the same time. They never separated them…. Dance is the best way for youngsters to calm their senses and control this violence of a young vitality which they usually use in a wrong way. We re not speaking of the dancing of dance halls, but of outdoor dancing; the ancient folk dances.

For our family, that’s just a matter of building on things we’re already doing: learning to play musical instruments, participating in a community chorus of sacred music, singing prayers and hymns at home, square-dancing in the dining room and sometimes on the lawn.

The point of all this, the way it relates to a good education, is that it gives the child (and the adult who’s remediating himself, like me!) the proper foundation of experience in the real world to build upon. Charlier says that “it is indispensable that teaching break loose from a sort of academic letters of thought…. Teaching must fill up with intellectual experience and not with ready-made formulas.”

Taylor says:

This is not unlike the understanding Socrates had for the necessity of what he called “gymnastic” for his beginners, to learn the interdependence of the sensory faculties in contact with nature and crafts. This is learning in the poetic mode, and for Charlier, to learn by the language alone is simply the opposite of gymnastic and the logic of crafts. Language means the realm of formulas and general ideas bereft of the their actual antecedents. Under such teaching, there will be no images offered to the memory of the real things placed there by actual experience of the way things are…. [O]ne cannot simply think; one has to think about some thing.

So, give your children plenty of real play in the out of doors, and plenty of real, useful, work to do around the house and yard. Sing with them. Teach them the childhood games you played, like “London Bridge.” Teach them how to sip the nectar out of honeysuckle. Enjoy the journey together.

(Follow the discussion of Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education, by James S. Taylor at Mystie's blog)

Beating the bounds

2011-05-27T19:17:00.003-04:00

The Gospel reading for next Sunday, the fifth Sunday after Easter, is John 16:23-33, which begins, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you.” The Latin word for ask is rogare, and so this Sunday is known in liturgical churches as “Rogation Sunday.”

For centuries, churches celebrated this Sunday and the following three days by walking around the parish boundaries, praying for good weather, for a good harvest, and for the Lord’s protection over the people. In order to be sure that the memory of those boundaries was passed on to the coming generations, boys walking in the procession would carry sticks and beat the stones or trees that served as markers.

Most of us don’t live in geographically contiguous parishes any more, and more’s the pity. But there are still meaningful ways to observe this season, and my bishop has included several ideas in an email he sent out yesterday, which I have reproduced here, with his permission. I especially like his idea of blessing soil for each parishioner to take home—it reminds me of the soil of Lothlórien that Galadriel gave to Samwise to take back to the Shire, but I suppose Tolkien meant for the imagery to work in the other direction. :-D

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

“beating the bounds of men’s hearts”

Rogation Sunday and the 400th Anniversary of Our Bible.

This Sunday I encourage us all to pray for a good harvest from our fields and a spiritual harvest of souls. Too, I ask that we remember those who suffer from natural disasters... tornados, fire and flood.

This Sunday begins a little known season in the Church calendar not fully understood nor practiced: Rogationtide. It is a time for asking God for bountiful harvests, beginning Sunday and continuing through Tuesday.

2011 marks the 400th Anniversary of the most printed and widely circulated book in the world. In May of 1611 the Authorized Version (King James) of the HOLY BIBLE was introduced into the Church of England. This book is without question the most significant book in the history of civilization. How do these two relate, Rogation and the Bible? I will explain.

Rogation is an ancient service forgotten in many churches. Its early use was when most people farmed and depended upon the harvest for their sustenance. Now most of us think little of raising vegetables, fruits, wheat, hay and nuts to sustain our lives. We take for granted that the supermarkets will have what we need. We do not ask God to protect cattle, lambs and chickens from disease since we don’t see the effect if animals become ill and die. We suffer no personal loss or so we think. Unless the cost of our food and other agriculturally related items increases.

Rogation Sunday tradition for those who practice it is the same today as in the time of Queen Elizabeth I. She instructed by Royal Injunctions Rogation processions of clergy and parishioners to “beat the bounds” praying for a good harvest. “Beating the bounds” means walking around your property lines and praying that God will bless your harvest and protect you from evil.

Rogation prayers started in the sixth century in Rome and by the eighth century it was fully an Anglo Saxon tradition. This tradition is spelled out in Massey Shepherd’s Commentary on the American 1928 Book of Common Prayer on page 261.

The Collect for the Fifth Sunday after Easter and Rogation Sunday found on page 175 of the BCP is as follows.

“O Lord, from whom all good things do come; Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that are good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same; through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen”

And on pages 39, 40 and 41 we have prayers For Fruitful Seasons, Rain, Fair Weather, and In time of Dearth and Famine.

Prayers from The Litany are appropriate in view of the numbers of recent deaths suffered in natural disasters and war. Page 54 of the BCP,

“From lightning and tempest: from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us.

Question: How can we follow the Rogation tradition when most of us are not connected directly to farming and crop production? Answer: we are all part of God’s creation!

I suggest this custom be taught. Parishioners bring a pinch of soil to the church building and place it in a basin at the church door. The soil is taken to the Altar and blessed by the priest. After the service each person may take a little soil home. The vestry may provide bags for soil and soil for those who may have forgotten or did not know to bring any.

At home the soil is spread on gardens, plants, crops or in potted plants while reading the 51st Psalm. The Gloria Patri is said after the Psalm. The priest may encourage people to place a small cross in the garden where the soil is distributed. Crosses can be blessed but do not have to be. Prayers are not only for our individual gardens but for a fruitful nation, for farmers who serve us and for all who sustain us by their toil. See the Priest Manual for blessings.

Sermons are usually related to growth, planting, gardening, and plant life. God’s promise of new life is not only for plants and farm animals but is for the protection of our souls as well. Note several hymns from the 1940 Hymn Book (numbers 138, 101, 497, 311, 315 [n.b.“We plow the fields and scatter,” “O Jesus, crowned with all renown,” “O God of Bethel, by whose hand,” “All things bright and beautiful,” and “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing,” respectively. Kelly.]) can be sung for Rogation Sunday.

The church yard is another option for “beating the bounds.” The congregation may visit a friend’s farm or walk the boundaries of their own property or apartments and “beat the bounds.”

It is important for Anglicans to not only pray for good harvests and for the victims of famines, droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, winter storms and tornados in the United States but also for people abroad.

Lastly, there is His harvest which He calls us to and this is the harvest of men’s Souls. He reminds us in the Bible that “the harvest is great and the workers are few.” Seeds must be planted in the hearts of men. To be a worker in the vineyard is to share and spread nourishment by the dew of the Holy Spirit. In this 400th year of our Holy Bible let us powerfully lead the way.

Please, where ever you are, will you join with me in the “beating of the bounds” of men’s hearts?

Email and let me know. larrywjohnson@embarqmail.com

In the Name of our Savior and Advocate, Jesus Christ. Amen

+Larry Johnson

###

New blog name

2011-05-21T15:20:00.000-04:00

What do y’all think?

Yes, there’s a story behind it, but I’ll tell it later.

:-)

Seasonal challenges in the home school

2011-05-18T22:26:00.003-04:00

When I wrote that over-long post about our mini-farm the other day I meant for it to be this post, but I thought I’d better give some background information and it just grew into a post of its own.

So this is the post I meant to write.

When the weather is fine we like to have school outside.

[Our outdoor school room, under two pecan trees and one black walnut, between the house and garage-cum-barn. This is another picture from years ago—all the jungle beyond the yard and smoke house has been fenced in and eaten by the goats. Beyond that is the woods.]

On other fine days I might cancel school so we can be outside playing, but in the spring we often have to be out working. Monday is our regular yard work day. Normally my oldest son takes care of most of it, but it’s work I like doing so I’ll spend a couple of hours mowing each week, and I take care of nearly all of the seasonal pruning. But this year is much harder for two reasons. Life has been so messy the last year and a half that I haven’t pruned anything in all that time, and my oldest son has been with my mom in Arkansas since February.

Even letting the other children share the mowing, we still aren’t able to get it all done in one day, so I’ve only been mowing the acre or so that surrounds the house. You’d think we could get it all done, but that acre-or-so requires that we mow around various flower beds, shrubs, and fruit trees, so it’s a slow job. Much of it can be done on the riding mower, but there’s a lot that has to be done with the push mower and some that can only be done with the weed-eater.

Unfortunately, my missing son is also my mechanic and I’ve been having more trouble with the machines than usual. Mike works on them as he has time, but then most of his work-at-home time is taken up with infrastructure—mending fences, building a new chicken coop, and so forth—and taking care of the animals. My sixteen year old son does most of the milking on weekdays, but Mike does most of it on the weekends, plus he trims hooves, butchers poultry, and all of that sort of thing.

Last week I spent nearly the whole Monday and Wednesday pruning things and pulling honeysuckle out of trees and shrubs I don’t want it to kill. My twelve year old daughter and ten year old son mowed but they weren’t able to finish it all. I’d hoped to get back on top of it this week, but Monday was… Well, Eldest Daughter called it “three Mondays rolled into one,” but that’s a story for another time.

Until Number One Son returns late in June it looks like I’m going to have to devote at least two days a week, maybe three, just to maintaining this yard. By the time he gets home the heavy rains and rapid growth will have stopped, so I’m making a note to myself never to let him leave home during the spring again. He’s simply going to have to stay home until he gets his youngest brother trained to take his place. ;-)

In the meantime, when we do have time for academic work, I’m having to shift around what we do. I’ve been using Ambleside Online’s reading lists, with a few modifications, since the summer of 2007, but it takes me a year and a half to two years to get through one year of their recommended reading, so that means that we’re currently on Week 14 of Year 3, having begun last fall.

Every school day we have our prayers, memory work, and poem of the day, so we’re accomplishing more than that confession makes it seem. We’re just moving through the books slowly. But since we’re moving even slower than usual lately I’ve decided to change something about the way this works.

We’re reading a biography of Marco Polo, and instead of reading one chapter a “week,” and by “week” I mean “Ambleside reading list week” not “calendar week,” I’m going to read a chapter each time we have lessons. The same for Children of the New Forest, and I’m going to try to finish a book on ancient China by the end of the month, and when we start the story of Jason and the Argonauts from The Heroes I’m going to try to finish it within a couple of weeks, instead of timing the readings to fit the Ambleside schedule.

Most of the other books don’t lose anything by being strung out—Our Island Story, This Country of Ours, Stories of the Old Dominion—but I’m trying to keep the whole thing from feeling so sporadic, and then when this yard work season is over and we can spend more time at the books, hopefully the schedule won’t seem so daunting.

The good news is that we’ve already finished all the poetry that was planned for Year 3, so I’m reading poems by Edgar Allan Poe, interspersed with poets we’ve already read but love to reread, like Robert Louis Stevenson and A.A. Milne.

My next big challenge will be to figure out how to make consistent time for “drill” work, like math and reading and Latin, which is my great weakness.

Peonies

2011-05-13T17:20:00.002-04:00

Especially for Dana.

This picture was taken a few years ago, but I don't have anything more recent. The tallish white flowering thing beyond the peonies is a flowering almond, which, sadly, means it's ornamental and doesn't produce any nuts. The blossoms are lovely -- some have four and some six petals, cup shaped, with a delicate yellow crown inside, but unfortunately don't have any scent. It's my favorite part of the garden this time of the year, mainly because the the rapturous frangrance of the peonies.

I think I'll go outside and smell them again right now -- they won't last much longer.

Our mini-farm

2011-05-13T17:02:00.002-04:00

We have a little over three and a third acres, about half of which is covered in woods. Our house, the garage, smoke house, and surrounding yard and flower and herb gardens take up about half of the rest, and that leaves a largish open place at the back for growing vegetables, playing ball, and keeping chickens, and another spot to the north for other poultry and a goat pasture.

When we first bought the place, the civilized parts around the house and along the driveway were beautifully landscaped, but the rest of it was a tangle of wild rose, sawbriar, poison ivy, Virginia creeper, honeysuckle, wild grapes, and I don’t know what all. It was beautiful, but it was infested with black snakes and ticks, and the moths and June bugs were so bad at night that we couldn’t leave any outside lights on or stay out after dark.

My predecessor spent several hours a day maintaining the gardens but I don’t have the time or the talent for that, so the gardens aren’t nearly as pretty as they were six years ago, and we’ve had to remove several things that were just too labor-intensive. But having poultry has nearly eliminated the bug population plus they keep the snakes away from the house. The goats have eaten all the undergrowth so that we have a lot of clear land. The woods are more open to the sun and breezes now so it’s a lot more pleasant in the summer.

Our farm animal population right now consists of eight goats (a wether, four does, and three kids), some chickens (we already had a few males that were for meat, and we just got about a dozen hens and another rooster from a neighbor who is selling out and going to live like gypsies for a year or two), three turkeys (Thanksgiving dinner for us and a friend), a few ducks (for eggs and meat), a gosling, and one guinea hen that is sitting in vain on a well-hidden nest of unfertilized eggs.

Our goats give us all the fresh milk we drink year-round. The first few years we had them, we bred the does in the late summer, then dried them off two months before the kids were due, so we had a few weeks when there was NO MILK. It was awful. After you’ve gotten used to drinking raw milk it’s really really hard to go back to pasteurized milk. During the dry times we bought a few gallons of raw cow milk from an Amish farmer in Maryland, but it’s not only expensive, it’s just not the same as goat milk, which I’ve found I like better than cow milk.

For the last couple of years, we’ve managed this by not breeding all of our does. We have one in particular that “milks through” quite well. That means that she doesn’t have to be bred every year to keep her production up. Many goats are like this and will continue to produce high quality, good tasting milk, unlike cows which have to be bred every year or the flavor of the milk will deteriorate. Production does drop in the winter and I have to ration the milk, but then it comes back up in spring.

My 22 year old daughter has a salad an herb garden along the south-facing side of the house, and she’s moved our raised beds to a location that makes mowing easier for me. She put the beds very close together and mulched between them with old hay and straw from the barn floor, hoping that she can keep the grass out of the beds this way. The one old raised bed that’s still in place has a crop of garlic she planted last fall, so that has to stay until the end of summer. In the new beds she has cabbage, beans, tomatoes, and some herbs that make good companions and help repel pests. She also has a patch of Jerusalem artichokes.

We also have three apple trees, four peaches, and two pears, but the fruit is small and not very good. We have a nice patch of blackberries in the back yard, which finally started blooming a week or so ago. Here’s some folklore for you that has always been reliable: when your blackberries bloom you’re past all danger of frost and can set out your tomatoes. :-)

Well, this is a lot longer than I meant for it to be. I wish I had some nice pictures for you but I don't have anything recent. Even the pix in the mosaic in the sidebar are from a couple of years ago. :-p

Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum*

2011-05-10T23:56:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I spent the day outside trying to tame this jungle we live in. I’ll tell you what’s real – honeysuckle is real and it’ll take over the world if we give it half a chance. I’m all for reducing carbon emissions if it’ll keep all this plant growth in check – they’ll take over the planet otherwise. But somehow I don’t think that’s what the greenies have in mind with their environmental proposals.

I’m glad to have a slightly better understanding of what Descartes was about. I remember in high school having classmates who were what can only be called skeptics. They doubted whether existence was real. Maybe everything we think we see and know is an illusion. I couldn’t tell whether they’d been educated beyond their level of intelligence or had had too much pot over the weekend. After reading this chapter I’m guessing they were taking a philosophy class and trying on existentialism for size.

Prior to Descartes, there were certain “givens” that were universally recognized by philosophers – that the physical world is real, for instance, and that it can be truly known through the senses. A broad experience of the physical world lays the foundation for further knowledge, so that, eventually one can reason his way to knowledge. I can’t find the quote now, but I think Copernicus said that he came up with the idea of a heliocentric universe by means of philosophy, not science.

Decartes, however, begins with reason. He then applies the scientific method of breaking a thing down to the smallest possible parts and analysing them This is the only place where experience has any value – experiments are made to prove or disprove each particle of information in an effort to build up a factual knowledge of the thing being studied. Interestingly, by starting with reason, by starting with his own thoughts, Descartes removes the possibility of learning anything simply by thinking.

This idea is developed in Dewey’s philosophy, which “neglects the innate powers of the knower to know prior to experiment.” His goal was completely utilitarian: to adapt the student to meet the needs of the community, those needs being political and economic.

Dewey’s so-called pragmatism, as it filtered down to the masses who largely never read a word he wrote, fit neatly into the American view of education for the good life. It was perfect, in its popular versions, for the American oligarchic man, that is, the practical businessman seeking to not only retain, but to increase his property and profits. Ideas were important to these descendants of the European industrial revolutions and the new notions of the wealth of nations, insofar as they worked toward increasing the common wealth of the country and the personal wealth of those practical and clever enough to succeed….

Interestingly, Dewey’s scientific and practical philosophy with its emphasis on dealing with the conflicts of social change was also attractive to some Marxists, although this fact is not surprising, for both systems of economics, industrial capitalism and communism, inevitably in the first case and absolutely in the second, are materialistic and have little or nothing to do with eternal truths, or beauty, or goodness in any transcendent way…. Sooner or later, the education for a student under either way of progressive, materialist life will be informed by the dominance of the practical ends of the state.

Sadly, since most American Christians have been educated this way, it even affects the way we approach the Faith. We either put too much faith in Reason, or we expect to be led by direct revelation.

Taylor doesn’t make this connection himself, but I think this section where he quotes Jacques Maritain describes the over reliance on Reason nicely:

In Descartes the result is the most radical leveling of the things of the spirit: one same single type of certitude, rigid as Law, is imposed on thought; everything which cannot be brought under it must be rejected; absolute exclusion of everything that is not mathematically evident, or deemed so. It is inhuman cognition, because it would be superhuman!

Therefore, some expressions of American Christianity tend “to displace from reality, if not remove altogether, the order of knowing that includes the valid role of the sensory-emotional response, integrated with the will and the intellect.”

At first glance, it seems like a contradiction for me to say that the mystical kind of experience relied upon by another branch of Christianity has the same root, but consider this (quoting Maritain again):

The angel neither reasons, nor proceeds by reasoning; he has but one intellectual act, which is at once perceiving and judging: he sees consequences not successively from the principle, but immediately in the principle.

Taylor continues:

Maritain sees this angelism as the greatest error of Descartes’ philosophy; that is, he begins with the proposition that man is essentially a thinking substance, a definition hitherto reserved for angels whose intellect is “always in act with regard to its intelligible objects [and] does not derive its ideas from things, as does ours, but has them direct from God.”

This is actually a splitting apart of Descartes’ method, which insists “that all knowledge, after an exercise in the rigor of mathematical method, be angelically intuitive,” but it makes sense, as his method itself “causes a disintegration of the natural unity of the knower to know.”

(Follow the discussion of Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education, by James S. Taylor at Mystie's blog)

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

*I can’t take credit for the clever title – a forum friend uses it for his signature line.

I love reading George MacDonald

2011-05-07T09:59:00.000-04:00

He has such an interesting way of seeing things and then writing what he sees. This example is from the very opening paragraphs of The Princess and Curdie, which can be read online here.

A mountain is a strange and awful thing.... I will try to tell you what they are. They are portions of the heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed up and out. For the heart of the earth is a great wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals, but of glowing hot, melted metals and stones. And as our hearts keep us alive, so that great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried sunlight - that is what it is.

Making cheese

2011-05-06T10:44:00.002-04:00

Whenever our goats produce more milk than we can drink or give away, I like to make cheese.

Over the years I’ve tried making Gouda, Mozerella, Ricotta, Queso Blanco, and Cheddar, but I don’t really like the way these turn out with goat milk. The variety I have the most success with is a soft, spreadable cheese, like what you might buy in the grocery store labeled “Chèvre.” It’s also the easiest to make since it sets up overnight, then in the morning all I have to do is strain and season it, and it’s ready to eat.

I’ve also tried to make Feta on several occasions. It’s a much more complicated cheese, involving cutting and cooking the curds, draining, cutting, salting, aging, and brining. So far I have not had a single successful batch, but I’m trying again because I love Feta and it’s meant to be made with goat milk.

Today I’m going to see if the batch I started two weeks ago is ready to be brined. The last time I got to the brining stage, it hadn’t dried long enough and blocks of cheese all dissolved within a day of being put into the brine, so I’m going to make a small batch of brine and put one block into it, and see what happens. The rest of the cheese will have to wait in the fridge.

What I meant to write

2011-04-29T06:02:00.002-04:00

~Eldest Daughter (April 29, 1989- )

I am not a poet: I am a fountain
words run through my veins like fire and blood
like a bird I am filled up with song
and my mouth is an unskilled beak.

In the stomach of my mind I hold the words I knew last night
I will turn them and beat
them and
then I will let them drip
from the ends of
my fingers.
On the straight-ruled page they will lose their shape...

That was not what I meant to write.

This Method of Education Works Even if You're Not Terribly Bright and Don’t Know What You’re Doing—Exhibit A: Eldest Daughter

2011-04-26T16:42:00.005-04:00

(Follow the discussion of Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education, by James S. Taylor at Mystie's blog)

When I first officially started home schooling my children I didn’t have much to go on – just the idea that I wanted them to have a real childhood, something like what C.S. Lewis described in Surprised by Joy and what Raymond and Dorothy Moore described in Home-Grown Kids. So even though I’ve gone through various phases and have changed focus in various ways over the years, what we’ve done has generally been pretty relaxed in one sense, but academically challenging in another.

An awful lot of what Taylor is writing about is putting words to things that I had a vague idea of before, but plenty of it is stuff I’ve never heard of before and can barely understand. I finished reading this section on Friday and I freely admit to having to wade through several pages that felt like a marsh full of reeds, hoping for some solid ground to put my feet on or a tree I could cling to or something.

When the time came to begin writing this post I found that though I’d liked several passages I didn’t have anything to say, so I turned to my eldest daughter and asked her to read the section and pose a question or three for me to answer, since I function better in conversation mode than in essay mode. She took the book read over it, and less than an hour later presented me with the following:

“How does the idea that the most basic form of knowledge of being entails “getting inside it and possessing it spiritually… unassisted by rational dialogue” relate to your studies of astronomy?”

“At this level of knowledge, is the initial “estimation” of a thing’s goodness or badness more or less likely to be correct?”

“Taylor uses philosophical terms in the same way lawyers and doctors use obscure language in text books. Can his ideas be understood through poetic knowledge, or is a “rational act” required to decipher the meaning?”

“Absolute truth – objective truth – subjective truth –
Which one is the Bible?”

BONUS
QUESTION
If Aquinas is right (p. 62), then chameleons are higher life forms than humans.
TRUE or FALSE

I admit that I am almost completely stumped. She is at least ten times smarter than I am, and I like to take some credit for it, because I am, after all, the one who provided her education. My second daughter disagrees. She says that it’s because “genius skips a generation” and Eldest Daughter got it from my daddy. That young lady will be on bread and water for the rest of the week.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Well, if I worked really hard maybe I could come up with answers to a couple of those, but instead I think I’ll go ahead and grant Eldest Daughter her Bachelor of Arts.

In the meantime, here are some of the passages from the book that caught my eye:

“It is the habit of noticing what is happening here and now

and reflecting with the natural powers upon that experience

that cultivates the connatural degree of knowledge.”

“Here, where the ordinary becomes illuminated, is when the habit of poetry sees something marvelous in the thing itself, especially in its relation to another real thing where the art of juxtaposition and metaphor produce a third thing.”

“Poetic knowledge is the wonder of the thing itself—not the essences of trees but the stately presence of the hawthorn in summer is the stuff of poetic experience.”

“…the play’s the thing”

“Wholeness and integration…”

“…we are, throughout, poetic beings even as we live and move among the most ordinary and everyday experiences.”

“It is this ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday functioning’ of the mind with reality that is poetic, that is knowledge, and informs all that can be learned, that most people in the present day have ceased to believe in.”

“What is important is engagement with reality, not simply discerning of reality.”

“…it is the appetites that move us toward the perceived good.”

“…appetite assimilates one to what is desired;
one becomes like what one loves…”

The Song of the Jellicles

2011-04-26T09:59:00.000-04:00

~T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Jellicle Cats come out to-night
Jellicle Cats come one come all:
The Jellicle Moon is shining bright –
Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball.

Jellicle Cats are black and white,
Jellicle Cats are rather small;
Jellicle Cats are merry and bright,
And pleasant to hear when they caterwaul.
Jellicle Cats have cheerful faces,
Jellicle Cats have bright black eyes;
They like to practise their airs and graces
And wait for the Jellicle Moon to rise.

Jellicle Cats develop slowly,
Jellicle Cats are not too big;
Jellicle Cats are roly-poly,
They know how to dance a gavotte and a jig.
Until the Jellicle Moon appears
They make their toilette and take their repose:
Jellicle Cats wash behind their ears,
Jellicle dry between their toes.

Jellicle Cats are white and black,
Jellicle Cats are of moderate size;
Jellicle Cats jump like a jumping-jack,
Jellicle Cats have moonlit eyes.
They're quitet enough in the morning hours,
They're quitet enough in the afternoon,
Reserving their terpsichorean powers
To dance by the light of the Jellicle Moon.

Jellicle Cats are black and white,
Jellicle Cats (as I said) are small;
If it happends to be a stormy night
They will practise a caper or two in the hall.
If it happens the sun is shining bright
You would say they had nothing to do at all:
They are resting and saving themselves to be right
For the Jellicle Moon and the Jellicle Ball.

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry

2011-04-25T17:35:00.001-04:00

~Christopher Smart (1722-1771)
from Jubilate Agno

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having considered God and himself he will consider his neighbor.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he’s a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him, and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defense is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord’s poor, and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually—Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can sit up with gravity, which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick, which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Icneumon rat, very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
For the electrical fire is the spiritual substance which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Christopher Smart was in a lunatic assylum for several years, during which time he wrote this paeon of his sole companion, his cat, Jeoffry, but isn’t it wonderful? He knew and loved that cat.

I was going to pick out my favorite lines, but that’s about a half of them. :-)

Easter Day

2011-04-24T00:00:00.003-04:00

~Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Words cannot utter
Christ His returning:
Mankind, keep jubilee,
Strip off your mourning,
Crown you with garlands,
Set your lamps burning.

Speech is left speechless;
Set you to singing,
Fling your hearts open wide,
Set your bells ringing:
Christ the Chief Reaper
Comes, His sheaf bringing.

Earth wakes her song-birds,
Puts on her flowers,
Leads out her lambkins,
Builds up her bowers:
This is man’s spousal day,
Christ’s day and ours.

Easter Even

2011-04-23T18:00:00.001-04:00

~Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)

The tempest over and gone, the calm begun,
Lo, “it is finished” and the Strong Man sleeps:
All stars keep vigil watching for the sun,
The moon her vigil keeps.

A garden full of silence and of dew
Beside a virgin cave and entrance stone:
Surely a garden full of Angels too,
Wondering, on watch, alone.

They who cry “Holy, Holy, Holy,” still
Veiling their faces round God's Throne above,
May well keep vigil on this heavenly hill
And cry their cry of love,

Adoring God in His new mystery
Of Love more deep than hell, more strong than death;
Until the day break and the shadows flee,
The Shaking and the Breath.

“A bundle of myrrh is my Well-beloved unto me.”

2011-04-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

~Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Thy Cross cruciferous doth flower in all
And every cross, dear Lord, assigned to us:
Ours lowly-statured crosses; Thine how tall,
Thy Cross cruciferous.

Thy Cross alone life-giving, glorious:
For love of Thine, souls love their own when small,
Easy and light, or great and ponderous.

Since deep calls deep, Lord, hearken when we call;
When cross calls Cross racking and emulous:—
Remember us with him who shared Thy gall,
Thy Cross cruciferous.

Good Friday Evening

2011-04-22T15:00:00.001-04:00

~Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)

“Bring forth the Spear.”

No Cherub’s heart or hand for us might ache,
No Seraph’s heart of fire had half sufficed:
Thine own were pierced and broken for our sake,
O Jesus Christ.

Therefore we love Thee with our faint good-will,
We crave to love Thee not as heretofore,
To love Thee much, to love Thee more, and still
More and yet more.

Good Friday

2011-04-22T12:00:00.001-04:00

~Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Lord Jesus Christ, grown faint upon the Cross,
A sorrow beyond sorrow in Thy look,
The unutterable craving for my soul;
Thy love of me sufficed
To load upon Thee and make good my loss
In face of darkened heaven and earth that shook:—
In face of earth and heaven, take Thou my whole
Heart, O Lord Jesus Christ.

Good Friday Morning

2011-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

~Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)

“Bearing His Cross.”

Up Thy Hill of Sorrows
Thou all alone,
Jesus, man’s Redeemer,
Climbing to a Throne:
Thro’ the world triumphant,
Thro’ the Church in pain,
Which think to look upon Thee
No more again.

Upon my hill of sorrows
I, Lord, with Thee,
Cheered, upheld, yea, carried,
If a need should be:
Cheered, upheld, yea, carried,
Never left alone,
Carried in Thy heart of hearts
To a throne.

Maundy Thursday

2011-04-21T11:24:00.000-04:00

~Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)

“And the Vine said…Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?”

The great Vine left its glory to reign as Forest King.
“Nay,” quoth the lofty forest trees, “we will not have this thing;
We will not have this supple one enring us with its ring.
Lo, from immemorial time our might towers shadowing:
Not we were born to curve and droop, not we to climb and cling:
We buffet back the buffeting wind, tough to its buffeting:
We screen great beasts, the wild fowl build in our heads and sing,
Every bird of every feather from off our tops takes wing:
I a king, and thou a king, and what king shall be our king?”

Nevertheless the great Vine stooped to be the Forest King,
While the forest swayed and murmured like seas that are tempesting:
Stooped and drooped with thousand tendrils in thirsty languishing;
Bowed to earth and lay on earth for earth’s replenishing;
Put off sweetness, tasted bitterness, endured time’s fashioning;
Put off life and put on death: and lo! it was all to bring
All its fellows down to a death which hath lost the sting,
All its fellows up to a life in endless triumphing,—
I a king, and thou a king, and this King to be our King.

Eldorado

2011-04-20T10:07:00.000-04:00

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old—
This knight so bold—
And o’er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow—
“Shadow,” said he,
“Where can it be—
This land of Eldorado?”

“Over the mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,”
The shade replied—
“If you seek for Eldorado!”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Written in the year of his death, I like to think that this poem is autobiographical and that Poe was looking forward to the Heavenly City of Gold.

Sailing to Byzantium

2011-04-19T00:00:00.002-04:00

~William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

I first read this one a couple of months ago and like way it sounds and the imagery of it. I couldn't find a copy of Yeats reading it, but I did find him reading Innisfree and a couple of others. It's very interesting -- he's chanting the poem, almost Gregorian style.

Irascible

2011-04-18T12:25:00.001-04:00

Trying to understand the concept of irascible emotions or affections, I came across this:

And he that follows theſe Advices of Reaſon, and conducts his Iraƒcible Affections by them, has a Mind that is elevated above the Reach of Injury; that ſits above the Clouds in the calm and quiet Æther, and with a brave Indifferency hears the rowling Thunders grumble and burſt under its Feet.

[The Christian Life, John Scott, Rector of St Peter Poor, London; published 1686 (p.68)]

I don’t quite know what he’s saying, but didn’t he say it beautifully?

The Donkey

2011-04-18T00:00:00.003-04:00

~G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

When forests walked and fishes flew
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood,
Then, surely, I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening bray
And ears like errant wings—
The devil's walking parody
Of all four-footed things:

The battered outlaw of the earth
Of ancient crooked will;
Scourge, beat, deride me—I am dumb—
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour—
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout around my head
And palms about my feet.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Compare this to Aesop’s story “The Ass Carrying the Image.”

A sacred Image was being carried to the temple. It was mounted on an Ass adorned with garlands and gorgeous trappings, and a grand procession of priests and pages followed it through the streets. As the Ass walked along, the people bowed their heads reverently or fell on their knees, and the Ass thought the honor was being paid to himself.

With his head full of this foolish idea, he became so puffed up with pride and vanity that he halted and started to bray loudly. But in the midst of his song, his driver guessed what the Ass had got into his head, and began to beat him unmercifully with a stick.

“Go along with you, you stupid Ass,” he cried. “The honor is not meant for you but for the image you are carrying.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Do Chesterton and Aesop have the same attitude toward the donkey?

Domini est terra

2011-04-17T00:00:00.001-04:00

The earth is the LORD’s, and the fulness thereof;
the world, and they that dwell therein.
For he hath founded it upon the seas,
and established it upon the floods.

Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD?
or who shall stand in his holy place?
He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart;
who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity,
nor sworn deceitfully.
He shall receive the blessing from the LORD,
and righteousness from the God of his salvation.
This is the generation of them that seek him,
that seek thy face, O Jacob.

Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors;
and the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory?
The LORD strong and mighty, the LORD mighty in battle.
Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors;
and the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory?
The LORD of hosts, he is the King of glory.

~Psalm 24

The Moon was but a Chin of Gold

2011-04-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

~Emily Dickenson (1830-1886)

The Moon was but a Chin of Gold
A Night or two ago—
And now she turns Her perfect Face
Upon the World below—

Her Forehead is of Amplest Blonde—
Her Cheek—a Beryl hewn—
Her Eye unto the Summer Dew
The likest I have known—

Her Lips of Amber never part—
But what must be the smile
Upon Her Friend she could confer
Were such Her Silver Will—

And what a privilege to be
But the remotest Star—
For Certainty She take Her Way
Beside Your Palace Door—

Her Bonnet is the Firmament—
The Universe—Her Shoe—
The Stars—the Trinkets at Her Belt—
Her Dimities—of Blue—

The Grass

2011-04-15T14:17:00.000-04:00

~Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

The grass so little has to do,—
A sphere of simple green,
With only butterflies to brood,
And bees to entertain,

And stir all day to pretty tunes
The breezes fetch along,
And hold the sunshine in its lap
And bow to everything;

And thread the dews all night, like pearls,
And make itself so fine,—
A duchess were too common
For such a noticing.

And even when it dies, to pass
In odours so divine,
As lowly spices gone to sleep,
Or amulets of pine.

And then to dwell in sovereign barns,
And dream the days away,—
The grass so little has to do,
I wish I were the hay!

The Dance

2011-04-14T09:04:00.002-04:00

"The Kermess," by Pieter Brueghel (1520?-1569)

In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.

~William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

This poem and the painting are in my college literature book (of all the textbooks I kept this one gets used the most often -- yesterday's poem came from it too) while flipping through it this morning looking for a poem today. Obviously, after yesterday's post on Poetic Knowledge, this one caught my eye. While searching online for a copy of the painting to use, I found this site, which you might want to check out. It shares some information about kind of dance that might be represented in the painting plus there's a video of the kind of music they might be dancing to, and there's a link to a recording of William Carlos Williams himself reading his poem. Enjoy!

Music, poetry, and gymnastic

2011-04-13T14:05:00.006-04:00

(Follow the discussion of Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education, by James S. Taylor at Mystie's blog)

What interested me most about the first part of chapter two is the idea of music, poetry, and gymnastic as the way to prepare your child for an education.

Quotes

[P]oetic knowledge… tends to take us inside the objects of knowledge through the immediate powers of the sense and emotions. For example, this would be the difference, for the beginner, between studying music—theory, harmony, rhythm—and actually doing music, by singing and dancing, to become, in a sense, music itself.

~*~

[S]ongs, poetry, music, gymnastic—are meant to awaken and refine a sympathetic knowledge of the reality of the True, Good, and Beautiful, by placing the child inside the experience of those transcendentals as they are contained in these arts and sensory experiences.

~*~

[T]he child's natural disposition [is] to learn by imitation; that is, not only to attempt to duplicate what they hear and see but to become the thing that is imitated…

~*~

[M]inute sifting of the particular passages of poetry, music, and movements of physical exercise to be taught [is required], so that only a balanced and refined character emerges to take up much later the rigor of those higher modes of knowledge contained in geometry, logic, and, finally, dialectic.

~*~

The “rhythm and harmony” is not meant to be restricted to music, but under the Greek notions of proportion and integration, would be applied to all prerational modes of knowledge.

Music has always been a large part of our daily lives, and about three years ago when I started using Ambleside Online’s suggestions I began reading a poem a day to the children and became more diligent in memorizing Scripture with them. Well, they’re memorizing it anyway—I’m reading it to them and hoping it sinks into myself since it seems my ability to memorize has evaporated.

Something this chapter impressed on me was that quality is very important. Not that I’m going to be a perfectionist about every poem, Psalm, and song they learn, but that at any given time we need to have one piece that we’re perfecting. Our tiny church doesn’t have a choir so my family is asked to sing during communion on occasion, so it would be a good idea to have a hymn that we’re perfecting at all times, so we can be ready when asked, but also so that they learn what excellence is. This is significant to me because I tend to be a “that’s good enough” kind of mom.

What we’re doing precious little of is gymnastic. The children spend plenty of time out-of-doors, but beyond me correcting them for their posture on occasion there’s not much that could be considered physical training. On special occasions we move the dining room table out of the way and dance country and square dances. We love that, so I should probably do more of it… find a way to incorporate it on a weekly basis, at least.

The elegant art of eighteenth-century movement was an integral part of daily living for the cultivated elite. All aspects of life related to it. Enthusiasm and excitement should never show. Lord Chesterfield, whose book of letters was in Washington’s library, cautioned his son to curb his excess of passion. “Do everything in Minuet time, speak, think, and move always in that measure, equally free from the dulness of slow, or the hurry... of quick time.” (Dec. 12, 1767, quoted in Annas 54) In his period slow time for military purposes was 60 steps per minute, quick time, 120. (Camus 7)

As might be expected, this suppression of feelings creates an inner tension and intensity that acts as a buoyant force. All movement appears to float without effort; the dancer’s sinking into a demi-plié is a push down through the heel into the floor, and the rise to the demi-coupé is a release upward. Movement is direct, the body does not sway or waver, and the paths are straight or in clear curves. This inner energy should be carried into all dance types, and, in fact, to all movement.

[from George Washington: A Biography in Social Dance, p. 123]

I love that. Doesn’t it make you want to learn the Minuet? This idea of teaching movement in one area so that it translates over to the rest of life only went out of favor recently.

I would love to learn swing dancing, too. It’s so fascinating the way the man leads and woman responds. And it has something in common with the Minuet: in both of them there are particular steps that must be learned (and the Minuet requires that the dance describe a Z-shaped pattern across the floor) but there’s no set order to the steps as in the Virginia Reel. Each dance is an improvization where the man leads by subtle cues and the woman must pay attention in order to do her part. That’s a movement that we could probably all learn a lot from.

A Limerick

2011-04-13T00:00:00.001-04:00

~Mark Twain (1835-1910)

A man hired by John Smith and Co.
Loudly declared that he'd tho.
Men that he saw
Dumping dirt near his store.
The drivers, therefore, didn't do.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Just for fun. :-D

Curdie's song

2011-04-12T07:25:00.000-04:00

The princess Irene and her nurse, Lootie, have taken a walk up the side of the mountain and unintentionally stayed out after dark. They have gotten lost in their haste to get back home, and Lootie is terrified. Irene doesn't realize that the strange shapes she sees peeping out at them from the shadows are goblins who are the enemies of her King Papa and mean to harm her.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Before, however, she had time to grow thoroughly alarmed like [Lootie], she heard the sound of whistling, and that revived her. Presently she saw a boy coming up the road from the valley to meet them. He was the whistler; but before they met his whistling changed to singing. And this is something like what he sang:

'Ring! dod! bang!
Go the hammers' clang!
Hit and turn and bore!
Whizz and puff and roar!
Thus we rive the rocks,
Force the goblin locks. -
See the shining ore!
One, two, three -
Bright as gold can be!
Four, five, six -
Shovels, mattocks, picks!
Seven, eight, nine -
Light your lamp at mine.
Ten, eleven, twelve -
Loosely hold the helve.
We're the merry miner-boys,
Make the goblins hold their noise.'

...

'Hush! scush! scurry!
There you go in a hurry!
Gobble! gobble! goblin!
There you go a wobblin';
Hobble, hobble, hobblin' -
Cobble! cobble! cobblin'!
Hob-bob-goblin! -
Huuuuuh!'

'There!' said the boy, as he stood still opposite them. 'There! that'll do for them. They can't bear singing, and they can't stand that song. They can't sing themselves, for they have no more voice than a crow; and they don't like other people to sing.'

(George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin)

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

This passage and yesterday's are connected by the idea of poetry as spiritual warfare -- something I'd like to keep an eye out for in the future.

Luxuria

2011-04-11T00:00:00.001-04:00

For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is as bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. (Proverbs 5:3-4)

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

[John, accompanied by a Guide, is traveling to the Landlord’s Island and passes through Luxuria where he sees a great crowd of men “so disfigured that he had not recognized them for men,” who are being given drink from a cup held by a “dark but beautiful woman.” The witch, for so she is, follows John offering him a drink from her cup over and over again, using soothing and almost truthful words, but John steadfastly walks on in silence.]

So she accompanied him for a long way, till the weariness of her importunity tempted him far more than any positive desire. But he forced his mind to other things and kept himself occupied for a mile or so by making the following verses:

When Lilith means to draw me
Within her secret bower,
She does not overawe me
With beauty’s pomp and power,
Nor, with angelic grace
Of courtesy, and the pace
Of gliding ships, comes veiled at evening hour.

Eager, unmasked, she lingers
Heartsick and hunger sore;
With hot, dry, jewelled fingers
Stretched out, beside her door,
Offering with gnawing haste
Her cup, whereof who taste,
(She promises no better) thirst far more.

What moves me, then, to drink it?
—Her spells, which all around
So change the land, we think it
A great waste where a sound
Of wind like tales twice told
Blusters, and cloud is rolled
Always above yet no rain falls to ground.

Across drab iteration
Of bare hills, line on line,
The long road’s sinuation
Leads on. The witch’s wine,
Though promising nothing, seems
In that land of no streams,
To promise best—the unrelished anodyne.

And by the time he had reached the word anodyne the witch was gone. But he had never in his life felt more weary, and for a while the purpose of his pilgrimage woke no desire in him.

[The Pilgrim's Regress, C.S. Lewis]

Domine, Dominus noster

2011-04-10T00:00:00.003-04:00

O LORD, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!
who hast set thy glory above the heavens.

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings
hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies,
that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels,
and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands;
thou hast put all things under his feet:

All sheep and oxen,
yea, and the beasts of the field;

The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea,
and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.

O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!

~Psalm 8

Education and the arts

2011-04-09T13:05:00.000-04:00

I’m reading I’ll Take my Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition slowly. Very, very slowly. This is a reread, since my reading goal this year is to read again a dozen books that have had a major influence on my thinking. I don’t remember when I first read it—it’s not on any of the lists I’ve kept since 2003, but my 2005 list is missing, so maybe it was that year. Certain essays of the book are heavily underlined, but the second one didn't have any underlining at all... until now.

Here’s a fairly long passage that leapt out at me just now:

Education can do comparatively little to aid the cause of the arts as long as it must turn out graduates into an industrialized society which demands specialists in vocational, technical, and scientific subjects. The humanities, which could reasonably be expected to foster the arts, have fought a losing battle since the issue between vocational and liberal education was raised in the nineteenth century. Or, they have kept their place by imitating the technique of their rivals, so that one studies the biology of language, the chemistry of drama, the evolution of the novel, and the geological strata or fossil forms of literature and the fine arts. That is, they abdicate the function by which they were formerly able to affect the tone of society. So far as they still maintain this function, they still face a dilemma. Either they will appear as decorative and useless to the rising generations who know that poetry sells no bonds and music manages no factories, and hence will be taken under duress or enjoyed as a pleasant concession to the softer and more frivolous side of life. Or, the more successfully they indoctrinate the student with their values, the more unhappy they will make him. For he will be spoiled for industrial tasks by being rendered inefficient. He will not fit in. The more refined and intelligent he becomes, the more surely will he see in the material world the lack of the image of nobility and beauty that the humanities inculcate in him. The product of a humanistic education in an industrial age is most likely to be an exotic, unrelated creature—a disillusionist or a dilettante.
(“A Mirror for Artists,” Donald Davidson)

[emphasis mine]

That’s something to think about, isn’t it? How do we guard against that—our children becoming unhappy “disillusionists”? I know I struggle against cynicism.

Leisure

2011-04-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

~William Henry Davies (1871-1940)

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this is if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

Unstooping

2011-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00

~Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)

Low on his fours the Lion
Treads with the surly Bear;
But Men straight upward from the dust
Walk with their heads in air;
The free sweet winds of heaven,
The sunlight from on high
Beat on their clear bright cheeks and brows
As they go striding by;
The doors of all their houses
They arch so they may go,
Uplifted o’er the four-foot beasts,
Unstooping, to and fro.

St. Stephen

2011-04-07T12:15:00.004-04:00

(My oldest daughter has decided to draw a series of seven saints. She completed the first today. The picture is a hotlink to the site where she posts her artwork -- if you click it you can click the picture there, and it will take you to a full-size image so you can see the detail better.) Note: I've removed the link to the site where the art is -- we got malware from there yesterday -- first time ever, but I'm deleting the link anyway, as a precaution.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Among the first seven deacons ordained by the apostles was a man named Stephen, who was “full of faith and the Holy Ghost”. Falsely accused of blasphemy by his enemies, he was brought to speak before the high priest and the council, and instead of defending himself, he spoke out against those who had again and again rejected God’s prophets and repaid God’s love with idolatry. Because they knew what he said was true, they hardened their hearts against him. He was dragged out of the city and stoned to death.

I have here represented St. Stephen as a young man in the choir dress worn by deacons in the Anglican Church of Virginia. He carries a Bible to represent his knowledge and understanding of the Word, and his head is wreathed with the red roses that symbolize martyrdom. Beneath his feet are stones, and by his side palms, which are associated with both martyrdom and victory.

St. Stephen’s feast day is the 26th of December, and one of the psalms appointed to be read on this day is the 118th (117 in the Vulgate), a hymn of victory which begins “O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good: because his mercy endureth for ever.” When I first read through it to select a verse to include in this work, I thought that it was hardly an appropriate psalm to read on the day dedicated to the first martyr, and selected verse six – “The Lord is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto me?” – as the only verse relevant to the subject of my icon.

But when I read it again, the writer's trust in and love for God struck me: “I called upon the Lord in distress: the Lord answered me, and set me in a large place … It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in men. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in princes … The Lord is my strength and song, and has become my salvation.”

The psalmist writes “All nations compassed me about: but in the name of the Lord will I destroy them. They compassed me about; yea, they compassed me about: but in the name of the Lord I will destroy them.” What could be more appropriate for a martyr? For there is victory in death: the men who killed St. Stephen because they could not answer his words wrote their defeat in his blood. Their souls were as destroyed by hate as his was transformed by love. His last words were a prayer: “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.”

Death could not touch him. The victorious saint sleeps, awaiting the Resurrection.

I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. Psalm 118:17

Imagination, wonder, and science

2011-04-06T20:24:00.007-04:00

(Follow the discussion of Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education, by James S. Taylor at Mystie's blog)
.

.

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”
C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I’m doing something new this year: teaching science to my young children from a textbook – astronomy, to be specific. A couple of weeks ago we were reading about Venus, and in the chapter’s concluding paragraphs, the author says, “It’s a burning hot planet with lava and heat-trapping clouds made of sulfuric acid swirling madly around.”

I snapped the book shut and said, “That made be what Venus is made of but it’s not what she is.”

Venus is the goddess of love, beauty, and fertility who arrives across the sea fully grown and unclothed, her parents unknown, and is clothed by the gods. Venus is the wife of the deformed Vulcan—blacksmith, and god of the fire, patron of craftsmen and artisans—but forever enamored of Mars, the handsome god of war and agriculture.

Venus is the Evening Star that blesses the night with peace and comfort.

Lo! in the painted oriel of the West,
Whose panes the sunken sun incarnadines,
Like a fair lady at her casement, shines
The evening star, the star of love and rest!
(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

Venus is the Morning Star that brings hope of the rising sun.

Now the bright morning Star, Dayes harbinger,
Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her
The Flowry May…
(John Milton)

The Ancient Greeks originally called the Morning Star Phosphorus, the Light-Bringer, which is Lucifer in Latin, and the Evening Star was Hesperus, Vesper in Latin, from which we get the name of our Evening Prayers. Later they adopted the Babylonian view that these stars were one and the same and named the wanderer Aphrodite, after the Babylonian Ishtar. And since the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ, He is now the Bright and Morning Star.

That’s the kind of thing I want to come to my children’s minds when they think of Venus. There is so much to learn about Venus, and when you know all that, you see how fitting it is that the goddess of desire and passion is made of erupting volcanoes and swirling clouds of sulfuric acid. It’s as though God Himself named her. Well, the Psalmist does say “He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.”

It’s largely because I don’t want my children to turn out like poor Eustace, who had read only the wrong books, that I’ve avoided science textbooks in the early years, focusing mainly on nature studies, but, as I’ve mentioned before, I love the night sky and I wanted a more systematic way to pass on my love and knowledge to my children, thus the textbook.

Naturally, being a mom, I’m second-guessing myself. As good as this book is, should I be using any science textbook at all with young, impressionable children?

Reading Poetic Knowledge assures me that I’m right to be cautious. Taylor says that poetic knowledge is “knowledge from the inside out, radically different in this regard from a knowledge about things. In other words, it is the opposite of scientific knowledge.”

You see, there are two ways to learn about something. If you wanted to learn about roses, you could watch the rose bush in your own garden, day after day observing a particular flower as it progresses from bud to bloom to fruit, noticing how long it stays open, how it smells, what pollinators it attracts, what pests and diseases it is susceptible to, what weather it likes best. You could study roses in the wild, in other people’s gardens, in art, poetry, and music, and in folklore.

Or, you could cut off the flower, take it inside and pull it apart, naming and counting each part—sepals, petals, stamens, stigma—cutting open the ovary to find out what’s inside. There’s a time and place for that sort of thing, but you have to realize that in order to gain that knowledge, you’ve killed the flower.

Poetic experience indicates an encounter with reality that is non-analytical, something that is perceived as beautiful, awful (awefull), spontaneous, mysterious... when the mind, through the sense and emotions, sees in delight, or even in terror, the significance of what is really there.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t want our children to learn real, scientific facts about the creation—we just need to be sure that love for the creation comes first and isn’t killed by the way they learn the facts.

For me, that means I need to share with them the poetry and stories I mentioned above. As I was writing this I realized I’ve never told them any of that, and I don’t know why I haven’t. It also means that I can keep on using the science book as a framework and reference book as long as I am myself giving them “ ‘The One Thing Needful,’ that is, the kind of knowledge that derives from the love of a thing.”

Address to Venus

2011-04-06T08:07:00.001-04:00

~Lucretius (ca. 99 B.C. - ca. 55 B.C.)

Delight of Human kind, and Gods above;
Parent of Rome; Propitious Queen of Love;
Whose vital pow’r, Air, Earth, and Sea supplies;
And breeds what e’r is born beneath the rowling Skies:
For every kind, by thy prolifique might,
Springs, and beholds the Regions of the light:
Thee, Goddess thee, the clouds and tempests fear,
And at thy pleasing presence disappear:
For thee the Land in fragrant Flow’rs is drest,
For thee the Ocean smiles, and smooths her wavy breast;
And Heav’n it self with more serene, and purer light is blest.
For when the rising Spring adorns the Mead,
And a new Scene of Nature stands display’d,
When teeming Budds, and chearful greens appear,
And Western gales unlock the lazy year,
The joyous Birds thy welcome first express,
Whose native Songs thy genial fire confess:
Then savage Beasts bound o’re their slighted food,
Strook with thy darts, and tempt the raging floud:
All Nature is thy Gift; Earth, Air, and Sea:
Of all that breathes, the various progeny,
Stung with delight, is goaded on by thee.
O’er barren Mountains, o’er the flow’ry Plain,
The leavy Forest, and the liquid Main
Extends thy uncontroul’d and boundless reign.
Through all the living Regions dost thou move,
And scattr’st, where thou goest, the kindly seeds of Love:
Since then the race of every living thing,
Obeys thy pow’r; since nothing new can spring
Without thy warmth, without thy influence bear,
Or beautiful, or lovesome can appear,
Be thou my ayd: My tuneful Song inspire,
And kindle with thy own productive fire;
While all thy Province Nature, I survey,
And sing to Memmius an immortal lay
Of Heav’n, and Earth, and every where thy wond’rous pow’r display.
To Memmius, under thy sweet influence born,
Whom thou with all thy gifts and graces dost adorn.
The rather, then assist my Muse and me,
Infusing Verses worthy him and thee.
Mean time on Land and Sea let barb’rous discord cease,
And lull the listening world in universal peace.
To thee, Mankind their soft repose must owe,
For thou alone that blessing canst bestow;
Because the brutal business of the War
Is manag’d by thy dreadful Servant’s care:
Who oft retires from fighting fields, to prove
The pleasing pains of thy eternal Love:
And panting on thy breast, supinely lies,
While with thy heavenly form he feeds his famish’d eyes:
Sucks in with open lips, thy balmy breath,
By turns restor’d to life, and plung’d in pleasing death.
There while thy curling limbs about him move,
Involv’d and fetter’d in the links of Love,
When wishing all, he nothing can deny,
Thy charms in that auspicious moment try;
With winning eloquence our peace implore,
And quiet to the weary World restore.

Weather

2011-04-02T18:43:00.004-04:00

~anonymous

Whether the weather be fine
Or whether the weather be not,
Whether the weather be cold
Or whether the weather be hot,
We'll weather the weather
Whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not.

Because we had so much weather today: first clouds followed by sun, then rain followed by sun, then hail the size of pinto beans, and now it's sunny again!

The Rainy Day

2011-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

Education and government

2011-03-30T12:06:00.002-04:00

Thinking about something I read yesterday:

No one will doubt that the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. The citizen should be moulded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy; and always the better the character, the better the government.

~Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII, 1
tr. Benjamin Jowett

"The citizen should be moulded to suit the form of government under which he lives."

"For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it."

If this is true, then, looking at our government schools, what kind of citizen is our government trying to produce, and what does that say about the kind of government we have? Looking at it in that light the situation is a lot more grim than I'd been thinking.

The lesser of two evils

2011-03-11T13:33:00.010-05:00

I'm reading The Imitation of Christ right now and last night I came across something very interesting. In the Third Book, "On Internal Consolation," Thomas à Kempis has this to say "On Patient Wrestling Against Carnal Desires":

1. O Lord God, I see that patience is very necessary for me, for many things in this life do not happn as we would like.
I see well that whatever plans I make for my own peace, my life cannot be without some battle and sorrow....

2. If you say you are not able to to suffer so much, how then will you be able to suffer the fire of purgatory?
Of two evils we should always choose the lesser. Strive, then, on God's behalf to endure the little pains of this world, so that you may escape eternal torments in the world to come.

Leaving aside the issue of purgatory, Thomas is saying that it's far better to choose the "evil" of a hard struggle against sin in this life, rather than to suffer the evil of eternal punishment for your sins.

Or, for us moms, facing the difficulty of training a toddler can be overwhelming at times, but how much better it is to face that struggle, that "evil," now rather than to put it off until the child is six or twelve or fifteen years old when disciplining him will require far more work and will yield scantier results.

That's very good counsel, and I wonder if The Imitation is the origin of that phrase. If so, its original meaning was nothing like the way it's used in modern politics.

Mummy Slept Late and Daddy Fixed Breakfast

2011-03-08T10:04:00.003-05:00

~John Ciardi (1916-1986)

Daddy fixed the breakfast.
He made us each a waffle.
It looked like gravel pudding.
It tasted something awful.

“Ha, ha,” he said, “I’ll try again.
This time I’ll get it right.”
But what I got was in between
Bituminous and anthracite.

“A little too well done? Oh well,
I’ll have to start all over.”
That time what landed on my plate
Looked like a manhole cover.

I tried to cut it with a fork:
The fork gave off a spark.
I tried a knife and twisted it
Into a question mark.

I tried it with a hack-saw.
I tried it with a torch.
It didn’t even make a dent.
It didn’t even scorch.

The next time Dad gets breakfast
When Mommy’s sleeping late,
I think I’ll skip the waffles,
I’d sooner eat the plate!

I love this poem and woke up this morning thinking about it—but not because I woke up late and Daddy made awful waffles. Years ago we belonged to a church that had a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper cooked by the men, and we’ve carried that tradition into our family, so tonight Mike’ll make pancakes and eggs and sausages for us and they’ll be delicious because he’s a good cook.

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. Some time during the day I’ll take down the last of the Christmas lights in the house, which I keep up through the winter to brighten the short, dreary days, then in the evening we’ll go to our church’s service for the imposition of ashes. What Lenten traditions does your family keep?

"Four ultimate types"

2011-02-22T17:43:00.003-05:00

Through all my own dreams, especially waking dreams, there run and caper and collide only four characters, who seem to sum up the four ultimate types of our existence. These four figures are: St. George and the Dragon, and the Princess offered to the Dragon, and the Princess’s father, who was (if I remember right) the King of Egypt. You have everything in those figures: active virtue destroying evil; passive virtue enduring evil; ignorance or convention permitting evil; and Evil. In these four figures also can be found the real and sane limits of toleration. I admire St. George for being sincere in his wish to save the Princess’s life, because it is an entirely good and healthy wish. I am ready to admire the Princess’s wish to be eaten by the Dragon as part of her religious duties; for the Princess is generous, if a little perverse. I am even ready to admire the sincerity of the silly old potentate of Egypt who gave up his daughter to a dragon because it had always been done in his set. But there is a limit, the ultimate limit of the universe, and I refuse to admire the dragon because he regarded the Princess with a sincere enthusiasm, and honestly believed that she would do him good.

– The Illustrated London News, 29 October 1910.

The latest offering from The Hebdomadal Chesterton, to which you should all be subscribed.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Chapter Five

2011-02-10T12:45:00.007-05:00

(Follow the discussion of Anthony Esolen's book at Cindy’s blog.)

Method 4: Replace the Fairy Tale with Political Clichés and Fads or, Vote Early and Often

I must admit that while I appreciated the the comparisons of various stories Esolen made in this chapter, I don’t think he made his case at all. Like several other bloggers have mentioned, I was convinced before I began the chapter, so I’m going to write about why I’m convinced for the sake of those who may not believe that fairy tales are good for anything, or who may believe that Christians ought to avoid fairy tales and fantasy of any sort.

Before I do that though, I want to say that while I believe that parents ought to teach their children to be kind, patient, courageous, and so forth, I’m not making that case right now. Also, I do not think that virtue is the same thing as saving faith in Christ, and again, I’m not talking about the necessity for our children to have faith in Christ.

The importance of the imagination in the life of virtue

In his essay, “Men Without Chests,” C.S. Lewis says that

no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism…. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. (The Abolition of Man, pp. 24-25)

When a child reads a story he cares what happens to the characters. He’s frustrated with Lootie for not believing Irene’s story about her grandmother. He laughs when Curdie makes up silly rhymes to keep the cobs away, rejoices in his bravery, and worries (but not too much) when he is caught and imprisoned by them. He hates the goblins’ plans for Irene and rightly hopes they will be defeated and is glad when they finally are.

His interest in the characters engages his emotions, and that’s a big reason why it’s so important for parents to be careful what books their children read, and what movies they watch, during the formative years. The child’s taste in literature is being formed and this taste is a large part of the health of his soul, just as his taste in food is a large part of the health of his body.

St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. (p. 16)

When a child has been brought up on a diet of stories that encourage him to love what ought to be loved, to hate what ought to be hated, and everything in between, he is being trained in virtue. So, the best way to show our children what virtue looks like and how it behaves, and to encourage them to be virtuous themselves, is through the imagination, by means of stories.

Fairy tales as a means of instilling virtue

In Tending the Heart of Virtue, Vigen Guroian says:

The great fairy tales and fantasy stories capture the meaning of morality through vivid depictions of the struggle between good and evil, where characters must make difficult choices between right and wrong or heroes and villains contest the very fate of imaginary worlds. The great stories avoid didacticism and supply the imagination with important symbolic information about the shape of our world and appropriate responses to its inhabitants. (pp. 17-18)

Building on Lewis, Guroian says that

[m]ere instruction in morality is not sufficient to nurture the virtues. It might even backfire, especially when the presentation is heavily exhortative and the pupil’s will is coerced. Instead, a compelling vision of the goodness of goodness itself needs to be presented in a way that is attractive and stirs the imagination. A good moral education addresses both the congnitive and affective dimensions of human nature. Stories are an irreplaceable medium for this kind of moral education—that is, the education of character. (p. 20)

Here’s is G.K. Chesterton’s take on the matter:

Now, the little histories that we learnt as children were partly meant simply as inspiring stories. They largely consisted of tales like Alfred and the cakes or Eleanor and the poisoned wound. They ought to have consisted entirely of them. Little children ought to learn nothing but legends; they are the beginnings of all sound morals and manners. I would not be severe on the point: I would not exclude a story solely because it was true. But the essential on which I should insist would be, not that the tale must be true, but that the tale must be fine. (The Illustrated London News, 8 October 1910, found at The Hebdomadal Chesterton)

If we grant that the imagination must be engaged in order to teach virtue, it still doesn’t follow that fairy tale or fantasy must be used, does it? Why not any of the many wonderful realistic stories, like biographies of great men, or stories of fictional characters who are worthy of emulation?

Douglas Jones supplies the best answer I’ve read. “Fantasy,” Jones says, and by extension I’m including fairy tales,

offers a much more accurate picture of the oddness of Christian reality, a reality packed with weird invisibles and interlacing graces and dark evil. These are a large part of the world around us, but they are precluded from “realistic” stories; they can’t be measured. (“Fantasy Most Real,” Credenda/Agenda, Volume 14, Number 2)

As an example of that reality, Jones offers the story of Elisha’s servant who was so worried about all the enemy soldiers he saw surrounding their city. “Doom was sure. The facts were all in. They were grossly outnumbered. The reality was visible.” But Elisha knew that what they saw was not the full extent of what was real, and he prayed that the Lord would open the eyes of the servant, and when the Lord did so, the servant saw that “[t]he world was crammed with beings—flaming chariots—that a surface scan couldn’t begin to see. The servant’s scientific vision was utterly unrealistic and narrow. The reality was far more fantastic.”

But if a storyteller wants to include that “larger reality” in his work, doing so can create problems.

The problem is that we can’t just start putting dialogue in the mouths of angels and demons at whim. Their reality and psychology is beyond us; it would be backhandedly blasphemous to write a tale that dictated where these great beings went and said, what God did next, and how the Holy Spirit answered a particular prayer. In short, we can’t write about real reality without degrading it. (ibid.)

I think it’s convincing―your mileage may vary.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

I also have some thoughts on types and clichés, and on the flattening into political cliché I’ve seen in recent movies made from beloved books, but I think I’ll save that for a later post, if it seems like there’s a need for it.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Chapter Four

2011-02-02T12:53:00.007-05:00

(Follow the discussion of Anthony Esolen's book at Cindy’s blog.)

I’m going to start this off with another story, but before I do I just want to say that all these stories with so little talk about the book itself is because lately I find it so much to tell a story that gets my points across than to write an exposition, so there really is a method, as they say, to my madness, so to speak.

Method 3: Keep Children Away from Machines and Machinists, or All Unauthorized Personnel Prohibited

By the time she was nine years old, my mom’s two older brothers had grown up and left home, so when her daddy needed help rounding up the cows, he taught her how to drive his pickup truck. It was a standard with the gear-shift on the steering column, just like an automatic. I’ve only seen that kind of truck once it my life and it is really confusing -- you’re dealing with the clutch, which I do know how to do, but the gear stick doesn’t move in an orderly fashion from left to right the way an automatic does, nor does it move in a geometrically rational fashion the way a “four on the floor” does. You do this back and forth thing that’s just mind-bogglin. And Mom learned to drive that when she was nine!

I wonder how much of that experience and others like it are what made her into the self-confident person she is today. When I was a child my definition of being a grown up was being competent in every situation that life threw at you, always knowing what to do or to say in any given situation, just like my mom. Well, I’m plenty old enough to be considered a grown-up but I’ve never felt that way and at this late date I don’t expect to. I think that personality has a lot to do with it, basic wiring.

But still, I’m sure that the experiences my parents gave me made me more confident than I would have been otherwise. Daddy taught me to handle guns and shoot from a fairly early age, and started real driving lessons when I was twelve. I’ve tried to do the same for my children but our society has made it nearly impossible for a suburban family (as we were until five years ago, and still are in many respects, including this one) to learn to drive at a suitably impressionable age.

Well, I’m no example when it comes to driving lessons, but I think I have something to offer when it comes to guns, so I’ll talk about that a little. Our policy from the beginning was not to buy our children toy weapons. We intended to teach them to use real guns when the time came, but prior to that their weapons were the sticks and other things they used of their own accord in their play. We never restricted that kind of play except in two important ways: they must always treat the imaginary weapon as if it were real, and loaded, and they must submit to the rules of just warfare -- no unjust wars; no undeclared wars; no endangering women, children, and non-combatants, and so forth. This worked well when it just my own children playing, but when the neighborhood kids wanted to play I quite often had to forbid shooting games because the other kids were not gentlemen. They shot anything that moved including sisters who weren’t playing. They shot people in the back. It was horrible.

My own children knew better than to pull this kind of garbage. I still remember once when my son’s enemy was standing near his mother and me as were talking, and my son drove by on his bicycle and shot at him with his Star Wars blaster (a gift from a well-meaning friend that we, not unnaturally, let him keep). The Powers that Be descended upon him with great wrath and he was sent to the Place of Judgement where he was tried for war crimes, convicted, and summarily executed. He remembers that incident to this very day.

Our policy, as I said, was not buy our children toy weapons, but I accidentally bought one once. It was when we were living in Hampton, Virginia, and while my mom and sister were visiting we decided to go down to Fort Monroe and look around. Fort Monroe was one of the few forts in a Confederate state that remained in Union hands during the war, and President Davis was imprisoned there after he was captured. My mother’s great-grandfather had also been imprisoned there, so you see, it was a very emotional experience and that’s why I lost my head when, visiting the gift shop before leaving, my son asked if he could buy a toy Confederate rifle and I agreed. It was only after we got home that I remembered our policy, but we let him keep the gun after all and I’m glad to report that, what with that and the Star Wars blaster and various and sundry other inconsistencies, he’s grown up to be a good boy in spite of us.

Okay, one more story. When my daddy was in high school he and a cousin built a telescope and took this picture of the moon:

With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies !
How silently, and with how wan a face !

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Okay, I lied -- one more story. I had a friend once who was descended of the earliest New England settlers and I loved listening to her family stories. When she was fifteen her father bought a VW Beetle, brought it into the garage and took it all to pieces. Then he told her that it was hers, after she put it back together. It took a long time and just a little help from one of her older brothers -- he never actually did any of the work, but he'd help her think through whatever trouble she ran into so she could solve it herself -- but she did it, and always remembered how wonderful that feeling of accomplishment was. She never had car trouble after that that baffled her, and if she had to take it to a mechanic for the actual work, they couldn't deceive her about her car's troubles. Love it.

Inspiring the imagination

2011-01-28T15:16:00.002-05:00

In response to my previous post Dawns asks, "[W]hat are some things parents do to help children observe, enjoy, and think?" I started writing about some of the things that my parents did that I've tried to imitate with my own children, and the reply got so long I decided to make a new post.

My daddy loved the night sky and he shared that love with us. Watching the Perseids in August was an annual event and was so much fun. Also, I knew the story of Perseus rescuing Andromeda and I knew that Cassiopeia was her mother and could easily recognize that constellation. I think I knew these stories before I began reading mythology -- I got my first copy of Edith Hamilton's book when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and I was already familiar with some of the stories, so I'm thinking Daddy must have told them to me.

There were at least three things going on here:
1) Daddy loved the stars and shared his excitement with us.
2) He told us some facts about what we were seeing.
3) He told us beautiful stories that both connected to what we were seeing and to people who lived long ago and far away

Charlotte Mason talks about education being the science of relations, and we know how important it is to let children make their own connections, but I think it's also important for parents to make a few connections for their children, to cut the trail, so to speak -- to give them an example of how things are connected. Now, I don’t believe I was “thinking big thoughts” during the Perseids -- we were too busy trying to be the first to see the next shooting star. But on other evenings it would all come together, and it was awe-inspiring to be lying in the grass in the 1970s thinking about people who had lived thousands of years before, and how we have the same sky they had and the same stars and the same stories.

Notice there wasn't a religious lesson, even though the feelings inspired are the kind we associate with religion -- awe, wonder -- and I know Dawn wasn’t asking about religious education, but when you’ve had that experience, repeatedly, and then you read, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork,” you know exactly what that means, and all that you’ve felt in response to the sublime comes back to you and that emotional connection is made there in response to the God who made heaven and earth, and you worship him, and give him the glory due unto his name. And for us Christians, that’s the whole point.

So, in a nutshell, share your loves with your children, make a few judicious, ennobling connections for them, and try to avoid, as Cindy mentions a lot, making everything into a Bible lesson.

Pied Beauty

2011-01-27T10:29:00.002-05:00

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

~Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889)

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Chapters Two and Three

2011-01-26T22:08:00.005-05:00

(Follow the discussion of Anthony Esolen's book at Cindy's blog.)

What does Esolen mean by imagination, anyway? Dictionary.com lists the first definition as “the faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses.” My 1940s Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary goes further by adding, “esp. [mental images or concepts] never perceived in their entirety; hence, mental synthesis of new ideas from elements experienced separately.” I especially like Dictionary.com’s fifth definition, “ability to face and resolve difficulties; resourcefulness.”

Those qualities are what I’ve been thinking of so far while reading the book, and I’ve seen children who really didn’t have any imagination -- or, as my children would say, “Those kids don’t know how to play!” It’s not that they didn’t know how to play on the swingset or throw and catch a ball, but that they didn’t know how to make-believe.

In her post on keeping them inside, Dawn says:

I don’t ever remember, as does Esolen, thinking big thoughts, being intrigued by nature, staring at the sky, being around animals other than sheep or dogs or cats.

Part of my problem with these sorts of books is that I think the writers are the exception to the norm; do most children enjoy wandering with their inmost thoughts on death and proving God’s existence? Are children really that introspective? The examples he gives are wonderful, but I have to think something at home was done so the examples wished to think on Dante or other long thoughts. That being outside wasn’t by itself the solution.

I think she’s right. My parents’ attitudes surely influenced my own, and they also made sure I had the right books to read and plenty of time to read them and to daydream. But maybe being an introvert has something to do with it, too, since you’re predisposed to sit and wonder about things. When I was in kindergarten, every morning I’d go sit quietly at my desk and watch the other kids laughing and talking and playing together, and I distinctly remember wondering how they were able to do that. “I have to get used to people before I can do that,” I told myself, and that was every morning for at least half the school year. When I was five years old. Maybe “most children” aren’t that introspective, but I don’t think I’m exceptional, either -- just more inclined to sit and watch and think than to interact.

Well, on to the methods -- and I’m so late on last week’s contribution, and anyway these two methods belong to each other, that I’ve decided to make one post of it.

Method 1: Keep Your Children Indoors as Much as Possible, or They Used to Call It “Air”

Method 2: Never Leave Children to Themselves, or If Only We Had a Committee

My parents utterly failed at these, and how grateful I am that they did!

I have a lot of pleasant childhood memories -- Mom playing Chopin’s waltzes on the piano as we fell asleep at night; Daddy taking me on my first boat ride, and to visit his workplace, a laboratory -- he was a chemist; make-believe games with my brother, usually involving the deep recesses of the linen closet which could be anything from the Swiss Family Robinson’s tree house to a spaceship, or appliance boxes Daddy brought home.... But most of my happy memories take place outside.

Daddy would take us out to the carport during thunderstorms to watch the lightening and listen to the thunder, and we had regular times of lying in the back yard watching meteor showers. My best friend, Nan, and I would lie on our backs watching the clouds and tell stories about what we saw there, then we’d roll over onto our stomachs and look for four-leaf clovers. I don’t remember whether I ever found one, but I did find a five-leaf clover once and pressed it in my Bible. I remember the tiny flowers that grew in the grass and watching the ants move about in their own tiny world, as oblivious of us as we were to what happened above the sky in the daytime. I remember waking up one morning and looking out my bedroom window to see that a ring of mushrooms had magically sprung up overnight. Thankfully I’d read the right books, so I knew just what that meant -- the fairies had danced there in the night!

When we were a little older, my brother and I played in the woods that were behind our house. Our neighborhood was a suburban one, but it had once been part of a farm and our house was built on the edge of a former pasture up against a large wooded area that was state property. Trails wandered all through it and one of them led to a pauper’s cemetery -- people who’d died in the State Hospital were buried there. It was such a sad lonely place, no real headstones at all, only small, flat concrete markers with numbers identifying whoever was buried there. I used to sit and wonder who those people were and how they got to be there instead of in a cemetery surrounded by family like all my relatives were. The cemetery was dug up when I was ten or eleven years old to make way for new buildings for the state police and the Game and Fish Commission and I always wondered what they did with the bones. Of course there were also ghost stories that we kids told each other that all took place in that cemetery after dark. That neighborhood couldn’t have been more than five years older than I was, but our stories made it seem like it had a long history, and we told all of them as if they were true.

The best part of the woods was the creek that ran out of it and across the wide path that ran between the back yards and the woods, and into a concrete pipe and underground. Johnny and I spent countless hours there panning for gold -- never found any. One summer we dug out the area beneath a tiny waterfall (it was maybe a foot high) to make a swimming hole. We finally got it deep enough that we could sit, one at a time, up to our chests in the water.

We had to move away when I was thirteen years old, but that place is so much a part of who I am that to this day when I dream about being At Home, I’m in the house I grew up in surrounded by those woods.

Reading over what I’ve written, I notice that there are hardly any adults present in those out-of-doors memories. The parents were there, just in the background. Nearly all of the moms were home during the summer and most were during the rest of the year. My mom taught school for several years while I was growing up, so I spent more time in day care than is typical of people my age, but she preferred being home, so when school was out, we were free -- no organized activities except for Vacation Bible School at our church, the first week of summer break.

In letting us have so much free time outside Mom was merely raising us the way she and my daddy had been raised.

Both my parents grew up in close-knit farming communities, so their parents knew everyone and didn’t have to worry too much about what might happen to their kids when they were out playing with friends, or walking to and from school. I walked to school, too. My kindergarten was a half-day affair at a Methodist church three blocks from my house. Several of the kids in my neighborhood went there and we all walked together. We “Walkers” felt very superior to the kids who were driven by their parents. First through third grade was an elementary school that we got to by walking along the wide path between the woods and the back yards in our neighborhood, then across a pedestrian overpass that spanned the new Interstate, down a hill and across the school yard -- a little over half a mile, over all. Then, from sixth through ninth grades I went to a junior high that was a little more than a mile away, and of course we walked whenever we could. There was a city bus that we could catch on bad weather days or when we were running late, but it cost thirty-five cents we and preferred to use the money to buy a candy bar at Wal-Mart on the way.

That is a lot more freedom than my kids have today, but it’s less than my parents had. My daddy, who was born in 1935, used to tell about going rabbit hunting as a boy -- he’d spend the entire day out hunting, taking along his lunch and gun, and bringing home something for supper. Once, wandering in a swampy area near the Arkansas River, he lost his way and spent hours trying to find a landmark he recognized. It was getting late and he’d decided to look for a dry place to build a fire and spend the night when he finally found his way home. He was eight or ten years old at the time. And it was not the last time he spent the entire day out like that.

It’s certainly a different world today and we can’t let our kids have the same kind of freedom that we had growing up, let alone that our parents had, but I think Esolen still makes a good point, in his tongue-in-cheek manner -- if you want your kids to grow up without two ideas to rub together, keeping them safe indoors and perpetually occupied are where you should start.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Introduction and Chapter One

2011-01-11T21:45:00.002-05:00

(Follow the discussion of Anthony Esolen's book at Cindy's blog.)

I had an epiphany while reading the first chapter, entitled "Why Truth Is Your Enemy and the Benefits of the Vague," and it made me really angry. In the midst of explaining how to make any subject dull, Anthony Esolen turns to mathematics. "There can't possibly be any imagination in manipulating numbers, right?" He answers the question by first talking about memorizing math facts and rules of operation, which are dull enough in themselves, but then warns the reader that having a kid full of that kind of fact is really quite dangerous if you're trying to produce a dull, unimaginative mind, lacking in insight and initiative. To illustrate the danger, he pulls a problem from the classic math text, Ray's New Higher Arithmetic (1880) -- "Multiply 387295 by 216324."

Simple drudgery, you say. Ah, but here's the trick of it. Do the operation by performing only three sets of multiplication. That is, 216324 has six digits in it, and you'd think, if you were not imaginative with numbers, that you would therefore have to perform six sets of multiplication, first by 4, then by 2, and so on. It isn't so.

The trick is to see -- and imagination is a power that allows us to combine things and recombine them, seeing them anew every time -- that 216324 has a pretty set of digits. It has a 3, and a 24, and a 216. But 3 x 8 = 24, and 24 x 9 = 216. These things you just know; they are tools for your cleverness to fool about with, as a machinist learns the feel of a wrench or a drill press. This means that if you multiply by the 3 first, putting the product...

... and then he goes on spouting some gibberish explaining how easy it is to multiply those horrendous numbers in Three Easy Steps. Only I don't "just know" what he suggests I should because I never learned my eights, and don't know my threes very well, either. I know my nines, but only up to eleven, so "24 x 9 = 216" is something I have to figure out either with pencil and paper or by skip-counting.

Esolen describes this facility with numbers as "play." That's when I had my epiphany. I used to LOVE playing with numbers and number patterns. When I was seven or eight years old I invented a pattern that goes like this: 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34... It's only been a few years ago that I learned that some Italian guy nearly a thousand years ago first wrote about that pattern, so it's called a Fibonacci Sequence in his honor.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I'm terrible at math. I'm so bad at it that I've taken to bragging about it as an act of bravado. I hate math because I was so bad at it in school -- well, starting around the fourth grade. Before that I was really good at it and enjoyed it. I don't know what changed in the fourth grade, but by the sixth grade I was happy if I got a "D" in math because that meant I wouldn't have to repeat the class.

But according to Esolen, playing with numbers IS math!

I felt the same way during my oldest child's first year of formal education. We were reading Margaret Pumphrey's book Stories of the Pilgrims as our history text, and thoroughly enjoying it. I've always loved reading about people who lived Long Ago, and finding out what they thought and seeing how they dressed and so forth. But I hated "History" as a subject in school -- we had to memorize names and dates of battles and treaties and whocaresaboutallthatstuff -- so it was a pleasant revelation to find out that, actually, I loved history. But pleasure quickly turned to anger that my schooling made me think I hated it.

Several years later, it slowly dawned on me that, even though I had hated studying Poetry in school, I loved poetry. I've figured out why that's the case: In school, you study poetry by killing and dissecting poems.

I suppose that that's what they do with History and Math, too.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

On a more cheerful note, I now have a new favorite sentence: That sixteen-line-long feast of words and ideas and humorous commentary from Henry Fielding's Jacob Andrews that Esolen quotes earlier in chapter one.

I won't quote it just now, but I will say that if you haven't read Joseph Andrews you really should -- it's delightful. But first you have to prepare yourself by reading Samuel Richardson's Pamela, followed by Fielding's Shamela. Then and only then can you fully appreciate Joseph Andrews.

BC : AD

2010-12-27T13:02:00.003-05:00

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future's
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect

Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.

U. A. Fanthorpe

On keeping saints' days... or not

2010-12-06T15:55:00.005-05:00

[Trying to keep Valerie's Rules of Good Blogging, one of which is that if you have a substantial comment, don't leave it in the comments, make a new post of it. I originally posted this as a comment on Brandy's blog, which you should all be reading.]

We notice saints' days, but mostly in an informal way -- the same way we talk about loved ones who've passed away on their birthdays or the anniversaries of their deaths. Our church gives everyone a calendar, which I keep hung near my phone, that tracks which Sunday of the year it is and the proper liturgical color for each day, plus the saints that Anglicans recognize, and there's one for maybe a fourth of the days. Some of them I've never heard of but occasionally it'll be one with a really cool story, like Boniface, and then I'll mention it and we'll retell the story of him chopping down Thor's sacred oak. Other times it'll be one of the twelve apostles or one of the martyrs, and I'll mention how they remained faithful till the end, suffering much for the sake of Christ.

There are a very few that we notice a little more formally -- St. George, for example, whose feast day is in April. During that month we read Sandol Stoddard Warburg's adaptation of Edmund Spencer's Saint George and the Dragon. Some day I hope to be able to read the original. Then in October, we read Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse about Alfred the Great (who, inexplicably, isn't on our calendar).

For the most part, you see, it's a way of teaching Church history, which is really the history of our extended family. If you start looking up saints' biographies you're likely to find all sorts of wild stuff, like Saint Nicholas standing on his own two feet on the day he was baptized (I'm assuming as a newborn) for three hours, in honor of the Trinity, and that he early on began fasting twice a week, refusing his mother's milk on Wednesdays and Fridays until after evening prayers. I usually skip those, but occasionally include one or two to let my kids know that some fantastic tales have grown up around these heroes of the faith. I don't want them to be cynical, so I don't usually pooh-pooh stories of healings, and things that really could have been miracles, if you see what I'm getting at, so a huge amount of discretion is required on Mama's part when reading anything about the saints to the kids.

We've done a few things to commemorate St Nicholas's day -- one year we bought hope chests for our two oldest daughters. We plan to do the same for our two younger ones in the next few years. If I ever find anything nice to put in there, I try to save it for St Nicholas day, but I'm not too good at doing that. We're not doing anything at all for it this year, other than reading a bit about him -- about how he slapped Arius at the Council of Nicea and temporarily lost his position over it. LOL.

We don't notice Valentine's day at all, unless Mike happens to bring home candy or flowers, and we may or may not wear green on St Pat's day (I've avoided the orange b/c it seems to politicize the day, which misses the point) -- but I just learned something interesting. Green is itself political. The original color of Ireland before the whole Prot/Cat issue came up, was blue. After reading that, I was looking at the flag of our county -- King George -- it has George I's coat of arms on it, which is quartered with all the realms he ruled over. In the lower left quarter is the arms of Ireland, azure (bright blue) with a gold Celtic harp. That's Irish Blue, and I think we'll wear it next year.
;-)

What the best-dressed teapots are wearing this season

2010-11-29T15:42:00.004-05:00

.

My latest knitting project, I made this tea cosy based on a pattern found here: Super Simple Tea Cosy Pattern Generator. You type in your teapot's circumference and the page generates a pattern that makes the cosy the right size.

I used wool left over from two projects -- the brown is from a scarf I crocheted my youngest son a few years ago, and the green is from a shawl I made my sister to help her through her first bout of leukemia. There wasn't enough of either one for anything, but I liked the way they looked together and thought they'd go well with the Brown Betty teapot my oldest daughter gave me for Christmas two years ago.

And it really is simple. I'm still learning to knit, so until now I've only made dish rags and one scarf, which was just a very loooong dish rag. This pattern is two rectangles that you sew together, leaving openings for the spout and handle. The brown yarn is thicker than the green, which is why the brown part is wider.

New-for-me stitches include making the lacing eyelets, using two colors at once, and making I-cord for the drawstring.

Here is Lily, demonstrating how to put on the tea cosy:

... and how to pour tea while hugging big sister:

Advent preparations

2010-11-24T20:50:00.003-05:00

We've celebrated Advent with an Advent wreath nearly every Christmas since we married, but last year we began a new tradition: an Advent Tree!

It came about like this: We usually wait till just before Christmas Eve to get the Christmas tree and for some reason the kids always panic -- they always think we're not going to be able to find one this year. It almost happened once, ten or twelve years ago -- there had been a drought out west so there were fewer trees available than usual, and nearly all of them were sold out by the time we went shopping. We ended up with a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

Well, five years ago when we first moved here to Virginia, we went to a church that put a Christmas tree up in the Parish house right after Thanksgiving, and had the children make ornaments on the first Sunday of Advent to put on it. Each ornament was decorated with, or made in the shape of, a traditional symbol that represents Christ -- a lamb, a cross, the Chi Rho, Alpha and Omega, and so forth. This style of ornament is called a "Chrismon," which means "Christ Monogram." I thought it was a neat idea and tried to figure out how to do it at home -- I mean, really, where would I put a second tree?

Finally, last year I figured it out -- we didn't need two trees. All we had to do was put up the Christmas tree at the beginning of Advent, call it an Advent tree, and then decorate it with Chrismons. On Christmas Eve we could remove the Chrismons (or not) and add our usual Christmas ornaments. It worked out so well we're going to do it again this year. We made the ornaments yesterday and will decorate them on Friday.

Here are the specifics (sorry I don't have any pictures -- I'll see if I can get some this year and add them later).

Here's where you can find an explanation of Chrismons and a PDF file of patterns you can print out [link corrected].

Here is the recipe we used to make the ornaments. [Note added 21 November 2011: That link is dead now, but this one has the recipe and a clear explanation of the technique.] I used the first recipe at that link, cut them out with a 3" biscuit cutter. Last year we decorated them with white fabric paint but this year I'm going to try Wilton's fondant icing writer, but I have fabric paints on hand in case that doesn't work out. The plan is to hang them outside after Christmas for the birds.

The designs I used last year were fairly simple -- Celtic cross, shepherd's crook, crown of thorns, cross and crown, eternity cross, IXΘYΣ, and several others that didn't require much detail.

Thanksgiving weekend we put up the tree, with its lights and the star topper, a brass Moravian star, pierced, with a light inside. Saturday night before evening prayers, we turned on the lights (but not the star) and let the kids each pick one Chrismon to put on the tree, and talked a bit about the symbol and what it meant. On Sunday we had the lights on all day, and that night we let them add a Chrismon, or one purple or silver ornament from our collection (purple being the color of Advent). The next week we added one Chrismon a day, but we left the lights off until the next Saturday night. Then we did the whole thing over again so that the tree grew more and more festive as Christmas approached.

On the 24th, we removed some of the purple and silver ornaments (because we have a LOT of Chrismas ornaments) and added the rest of our Christmas stuff. That night we turned on the star as well as the lights, and left them on through Epiphany (except for while we were sleeping or away from home, of course). We take the tree down a day or so after Epiphany, and we generally start back to school on the next Monday, known traditionally as Plough Monday.

The kids love crafty stuff and I normally don't do much of that kind of thing with them, so it makes a nice change, and adding the ornaments day by day builds excitement in a way that's just perfect for this season of anticipation.

Reading and pronunciation

2010-10-06T07:13:00.002-04:00

Or, Continuing my daughter's education.

Now that my eldest daughter is home again I'm showing her how to do reading lessons with her youngest brother -- the two oldest girls are teaching reading to the two youngest children while I'm having a Latin lesson with my eleven year old daughter. Yesterday's lesson went something like this:

Me: Now sound out this word.
Little Man: Pĕĕĕĕĕnnnnn.
Me: Yes. What word?
LM: Pin.
Me: Good!
Eldest Daughter: But, he said "pin" not "pen."
Me: We're Southerners. That's the way we say it.

Some of y'all might remember this passage from The Fathers by Alan Tate, but I want to highlight one sentence in particular: "In pronunciation the criterion was the oral tradition, not the way the word looked in print to an uneducated school-teacher."

:-D

Death

2010-08-27T12:00:00.002-04:00

Grieving for the loss of my dear baby sister; looking forward to the Resurrection.

But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.
For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.
For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ's at his coming.
Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.
For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet.
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

I Corinthians 15:20-26, 51-55

Summer blessings

2010-07-13T18:56:00.002-04:00

Summer is not exactly my favorite season, but I do LOVE summer food -- all the raw milk I can drink, fresh home-grown tomatoes, watermelons...

I also love Mexicany food -- beans, salsa, avocadoes. Granted these foods are available year-round, but they just aren't the right things in the winter. In the winter you want your food to keep you warm, not cause you to break into a sweat or otherwise cool you down.

Another yummy summer food is smoothie made with yogurt, coconut milk, and frozen fruit -- my favorite combo is half strawberries and half peaches.

Then there's curried dishes. My current favorite curry is salmon cooked with coconut milk, red curry paste, and various chopped veggies, served over rice.

What's your favorite summer food?

Very Like a Whale

2010-04-20T00:00:00.001-04:00

Ogden Nash (1902 - 1971)

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and
metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can't seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to
go out of their way to say that it is like something else.
What does it mean when we are told
That that Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot of
Assyrians.
However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and
thus hinder longevity.
We'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were
gleaming in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a
wold on the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy
there are great many things.
But I don't imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple
and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was
actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red
mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof Woof?
Frankly I think it is very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say,
at the very most,
Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian
cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.
But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he
had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,
With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers
to people they say Oh yes, they're the ones that a lot of
wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.
That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets,
from Homer to Tennyson;
They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket
after a winter storm.
Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of
snow and I'll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical
blanket material and we'll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you'll begin to comprehend dimly
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

"The title is from Hamlet (Act III, scene 2): Feigning madness, Hamlet likens the shape of a cloud to a whale. "Very like a whale," says Polonius, who, to humor his prince, will agree to the accuracy of any figure at all." (footnote in Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, ed. X.J. Kennedy)

A Mongoloid Child Handling Shells on the Beach

2010-04-19T12:13:00.006-04:00

Richard Snyder (1925 - 1986)

She turns them over in her slow hands,
as did the sea sending them to her;
broken bits from the mazarine maze,
they are the calmest things on this sand.

The unbroken children splash and shout,
rough as surf, gay as their nesting towels.
But she plays soberly with the sea's
small change and hums back to it its slow vowels.

I know "Mongoloid" isn't PC any more but it was perfectly acceptable in 1971 when this poem was written, and nothing derogatory is meant by it. In fact, I sense a deep affection for the child in this poem, and wonder if she was the poet's granddaughter.

I know I promised more Donne for today, but on Saturday I got word that my sister's second bone marrow transplant will be this Wednesday, and Eldest Daughter and I are leaving tomorrow to drive to Houston to spend a few weeks with her. I'll have very limited internet access while I'm gone, so I don't think I'll be able to post much more this month.

Lauda, anima mea

2010-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

Psalm 146

Praise ye the LORD.
Praise the LORD, O my soul.

While I live will I praise the LORD:
I will sing praises unto my God while I have any being.

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man,
in whom there is no help.

His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth;
in that very day his thoughts perish.

Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help,
whose hope is in the LORD his God:

Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is:
which keepeth truth for ever:

Which executeth judgment for the oppressed:
which giveth food to the hungry.

The LORD looseth the prisoners:
The LORD openeth the eyes of the blind:

the LORD raiseth them that are bowed down:
the LORD loveth the righteous:

The LORD preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless and widow:
but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.

The LORD shall reign for ever,
even thy God, O Zion, unto all generations.
Praise ye the LORD.

Dan Dunder

2010-04-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

John Ciardi (1916 - 1986)

Dan Dunder is a blunder.
What makes Dan so loud, I wonder?
If I knew how to be that loud
I think I'd look for a big black cloud
And get a job with it -- as thunder!

[...and more Donne on Monday...]

A Valediction forbidding mourning.

2010-04-16T00:00:00.003-04:00

John Donne (1572 - 1631)

As virtuous men passe mildly away,
And whisper to their soules, to goe,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
The breath goes now, and some say, no;

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No teare-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
T’were prophanation of our joyes
To tell the layetie our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harmes and feares,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the speares,
Though greater farre, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers love
(Whose soule is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love, so much refin’d,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care lesse, eyes, lips, and hands to misse.

Our two soules therefore, which are one,
Though I must goe, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other doe.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth rome,
It leanes, and hearkens after it,
And growes erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like th’ other foot, obliquely runne;
Thy firmnes drawes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begunne.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Written late in 1611, this is a companion piece to the second Song I posted on Wednesday, also written for his wife before he left on the two-month-long journey. The calm rhythm and regular rhymes give it a relatively firm structure that reinforces its message of assurance.

In The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, C.S. Lewis provides very useful information that helped me understand some of the imagery – particularly that passage about “dull sublunary lovers” in stanza four. The whole explanation would be too long, so to be brief, Donne is saying that the love between him and his wife is not just physical, “eyes, lips, and hands,” but transcends the realm of the senses into the spiritual, so physical separation can’t really separate them.

Then in stanza six he uses gold, which symbolizes perfection, as a picture of their relationship. The footnote in my Everyman edition of John Donne: The Complete Poems in English, helpfully informs me that the medieval symbol for gold was a circle with a dot in the middle. Then in the very next stanza, Donne compares their love to the two legs of a compass – the kind you draw a circle with. Anne is the “fixt foot” which doesn’t go anywhere, and he is the pencil, which, because of her fixedness, draws a perfect circle around her – their love is like gold.

After his release from prison, John and Anne Donne lived with a cousin of hers until the cousin’s death in 1606. They rented a house for a few years and then another friend, Sir Robert Drewry, asked them to move into his large house in London. They were terribly grateful for his help because they still had very little to live on, and their family was increasing – a new baby nearly every year.

Then in 1611, Sir Robert decided to go to Paris with the Ambassador to France, and wanted Donne to accompany him. Anne was expecting their eighth baby at the time, and though they’d been separated before, this time she felt very uneasy about it, “saying, ‘Her divining soul boded her some ill in his absence;’ and therefore desired him not to leave her.” Donne would have stayed with her, but Sir Robert pressed him, and Donne told his wife that he felt he owed everything to Sir Robert on account of his charity to them. She finally did, “with an unwilling-willingness, give a faint consent to the journey.”

The trip to Paris took twelve days, and two days later, while he was alone one afternoon, Donne had a vision of Anne – she was walking up and down the room with her hair streaming, carrying a dead child in her arms. Twice he saw her this way, and he was so visibly upset when Sir Robert returned that he had to give an explanation. After hearing the story, Sir Robert said that he must have dozed off and dreamed it, but Donne was unconvinced. The next morning, he was still so bothered by the vision that Sir Robert sent a servant back home to get news. Twelve days later, the servant returned to say that Mrs Donne had had a long and difficult labor and that her child was delivered stillborn.

It had happened on the day, and about the same hour, that Donne had had the vision of her and the child.

Walton compares John and Anne Donne to two lute strings, tuned to the same note. Even though they are separated, when one is struck, the other will resonate.

This is part five in a series begun last Monday. Be sure to read it all, and when thou hast done, thou hast not done, for I have more.
:-)

The Sunne Rising

2010-04-15T00:00:00.003-04:00

John Donne (1572 - 1631)

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?
Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide
Late school boyes, and sowre prentices,
Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,
Call countrey ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,
Nor houres, dayes, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beames, so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou thinke?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,
Whether both the India’s of spice and Myne
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee.
Aske for those Kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.

She is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes doe but play us; compar’d to this,
All honor’s mimique; All wealth alchimie.
Thou sunne art halfe as happy’as wee,
In that the worlds’s contracted thus;
Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee
To warme the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

[This is the fourth in a series on John Donne begun on Monday.]

This is my favorite of favorites. I almost listed it in the number 1 position in my list of ten favorites, but Chesterton's The Ballad of the White Horse is about my favorite person in the world, Alfred the Great, and it's a great work itself, so it got first place.

This is what I love best about Donne -- no commonplace metaphors for him, comparing his love to a flower or something trite like that. No sir, she's India with its spices and the West Indies with their gold mines, and more.

I said before that I don't like to assume that all his poems are biographical, but there might be a clue in this one: "Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride." Donne married in 1601 during Elizabeth's reign -- James I became king a year and a half later, and I think this poem is celebrating the marriage bed.

More than that, I think it's a metonymy, celebrating marriage itself, and Donne was very happily married: "compar’d to this, All honor’s mimique; All wealth alchimie." That's another clue, by the way -- but more on that later.

Mr Walton tells us that Donne had inherited £3000 when his father died many years earlier. A year or so after leaving his law studies he decided to travel in Europe and, so in 1596, as part of the war with Spain, he joined the victorious expedition to Cadiz, which was led by the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh among others. He also took part in the failed expedition of 1597 to the Azores.

Walton says that Donne spent some years travelling in Europe, including Italy, and meant to go to the Holy Land but the difficulties of travel and getting money forwarded made the pilgrimage impossible, something he always regretted. By 1598 he had become very familiar with "those countries, their laws and manner of government, and returned [to England] perfect in their languages."

The same year he was noticed by Sir Thomas Egerton who was Keeper of the Great Seal and Lord Chancellor of England. He recognized Donne's wealth of talents and took him as chief secretary, intending the position to lead Donne to other greater service to the State. Sir Thomas considered Donne a friend and "did always use him with much courtesy, appointing him a place at his own table, to which he esteemed his company and discourse to be a great ornament."

It was during this time that Donne met his future wife. In 1600, Lady Egerton died and her sixteen year old neice, Anne More, became mistress of Sir Thomas's household, presiding at his table. By 1601 Donne had become a Member of Parliament in addtion to his duties to Sir Thomas, but that year, Anne's father, Sir George More, Chancellor of the Garter and Lieutenant of the Tower, become aware of the growing affection between his daughter and Donne, and brought her home again to prevent anything coming of it. Donne was rising in the world, but he'd spent most of his fortune on travelling, books, and "dear-bought experience," so it wasn't a prudent match for Sir George's daughter.

However, before she was removed, Donne and Anne had made promises to each other and the time apart did not change their minds. They were secretly married at the end of 1601, but Sir George soon found out, and in his understandable fury convinced Sir Thomas to fire Donne. When Donne wrote to his wife to tell her this news, he signed his letter "John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done."

Not satisfied with this, Sir George had Donne imprisoned until the marriage was proven valid. Donne attempted a reconciliation with his father-in-law, and while Sir George eventually forgave and grew to love him as a son, it was many years before he gave his daughter her dowry, and the couple lived in poverty.

Walton says that this imprudent marriage was the greatest mistake of Donne's life and that Donne himself recognized it, "and doubtless it had been attended with an heavy repentance, if God had not blessed them with so mutual and cordial affections, as in the midst of their sufferings made their bread of sorrow taste more pleasantly, than the banquets of dull and low-spirited people."

She is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes doe but play us; compar’d to this,
All honor’s mimique; All wealth alchimie.
Thou sunne art halfe as happy’as wee,
In that the worlds’s contracted thus;
Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee
To warme the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.

Song

2010-04-14T00:00:00.006-04:00

John Donne (1572 - 1631)

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be’st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee;
Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.

If thou find’st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet:
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

[By the way, this poem plays a crucial role in Diana Wynne Jones’ book Howl’s Moving Castle. If you haven’t read that book, stop right now and put it on your TBR list. If you've seen the movie, it's a good movie and all that, but it DOES NOT COUNT. You must read the book, O Best Beloved. You’ll thank me this summer when you need some light reading. Jones is the one who put me onto Donne in the first place (he’s quoted or alluded to in many of her stories), and I like many of her books, but I don’t recommend them all -- she’s sort of like the girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead.]

Since I’m writing about Donne’s early life, this poem seems more in keeping with the popular idea of him as a young man, doesn’t it? A ladies’ man made cynical by so many disappointments in love. But I hope by describing his religious upbringing and his desire to be a good Christian in my two earlier posts to counter-balance that idea. There’s an illuminating passage from Mr Walton’s biography that I think is worth quoting at length:

About the nineteenth year of his age, he, being then unresolved what religion to adhere to, and considering how much it concerned his soul to choose the most orthodox, did therefore, – though his youth and health promised him a long life – to rectify all scruples that might concern that, presently laid aside all study of the Law, and of all other sciences that might give him a denomination; and began seriously to survey and consider the body of Divinity, as it was then controverted betwixt the Reformed and the Roman Church. And, as God’s blessed Spirit did then awaken him to the search, and in that industry did never forsake him – they be his own words [in his preface to Pseudo-Martyr] – so he calls the same Holy Spirit to witness his protestation; that in that disquisition and search, he proceeded with humility and diffidence in himself; and by that which he took to be the safest way; namely, frequent prayers, and an indifferent affection to both parties; and indeed, Truth had too much light about her to be hid from so sharp an enquirer; and he had too much ingenuity, not to acknowledge he had found her.

Note that when Walton says “being then unresolved what religion to adhere to,” he doesn’t mean Donne was trying to decide whether to be a Christian. There was no question of that. He was trying to decide which church, or as we would say, which denomination, to join as an adult, and I think this is a testimony of a young man who desired to walk worthy of the vocation wherewith he was called, however imperfectly.

It is well known that during his years in London, Donne spent a lot of time at Queen Elizabeth’s court, and that couldn’t have been a good influence on anyone’s morals. But I hesitate to assume that all of his Disappointed in Love poems are biographical. The one quoted above was set to music, as were several others, and courtly love ala Eleanor of Aquitaine was the mode of Elizabeth’s court. Nearly all of his early poetry was distributed among his friends for their amusement, as Walton says:

The recreations of his youth were poetry, in which he was so happy, as if nature and all her varieties had been made only to exercise his sharp wit and high fancy; and in those pieces which were facetiously composed and carelessly scattered, – most of them being written before the twentieth year of his age – it may appear by his choice metaphors, that both nature and all the arts joined to assist him with their utmost skill.

I don’t want to excuse what Donne himself called “irregularities of [his] life,” but I do want to place it into its proper context. Flirtation was an expected part of life at court, and so was the poetry of disappointed love. It was as common to Elizabethan poetry as it is to our country western music. Even though Donne felt he had much to repent of, I don’t think we have to assume that he was completely dissipated, the way he’s often portrayed.

I want to leave you with another song he wrote, this one to his wife when he was facing an absence of two months from her, after ten years of marriage.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Song

Sweetest love, I do not go,
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for me;
But since that I
At the last must part, ’tis best,
Thus to use myself in jest
By feigned deaths to die.

Yesternight the sun went hence,
And yet is here to-day;
He hath no desire nor sense,
Nor half so short a way;
Then fear not me,
But believe that I shall make
Speedier journeys, since I take
More wings and spurs than he.

O how feeble is man’s power,
That if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
Nor a lost hour recall;
But come bad chance,
And we join to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o’er us to advance.

When thou sigh’st, thou sigh’st not wind,
But sigh’st my soul away;
When thou weep’st, unkindly kind,
My life’s blood doth decay.
It cannot be
That thou lovest me as thou say’st,
If in thine my life thou waste,
That art the best of me.

Let not thy divining heart
Forethink me any ill;
Destiny may take thy part,
And may thy fears fulfil.
But think that we
Are but turn’d aside to sleep.
They who one another keep
Alive, ne'er parted be.

TO MR. GEORGE HERBERT

2010-04-13T00:00:00.004-04:00

SENT HIM WITH ONE OF MY SEALS OF THE ANCHOR AND CHRIST
A Sheaf of Snakes used heretofore to be my Seal, which is the Crest of our poor family

Adopted in God’s family, and so
My old coat lost, into new Arms I go.
The Cross, my Seal in Baptism, spread below,
Does by that form into an Anchor grow.
Crosses grow Anchors, bear as thou shouldst do
Thy Cross, and that Cross grows an Anchor too.
But he that makes our Crosses Anchors thus,
Is Christ, who there is crucified for us.
Yet with this I may my first Serpents hold; –
God gives new blessings, and yet leaves the old –
The Serpent, may, as wise, my pattern be;
My poison, as he feeds on dust, that’s me.
And, as he rounds the earth to murder, sure
He is my death; but on the Cross, my cure,
Crucify nature then; and then implore
All grace from him, crucified there before.
When all is Cross, and that Cross Anchor grown
This Seal’s a Catechism, not a Seal alone.
Under that little Seal great gifts I send,
Both works and prayes, pawns and fruits of a friend.
Oh! may that Saint that rides on our Great Seal,
To you that bear his name, large bounty deal.
JOHN DONNE.

.

.

[Translated from Latin, presumably by Mr. Walton. Shortly before his death, Donne had a miniature of Christ on an anchor, in the manner of a crucifix, engraved in bloodstone and set in gold. Several copies were made and given to his closest friends as tokens of his affection.]

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

[... continued from yesterday...]

After a couple of years in London, Donne had reached the age when it was usual to be confirmed in the Church, but hadn’t yet decided which denomination to join. Out of love and respect for his parents and not wishing to cause a breach with his family, he was inclined to join the Roman Catholic church, but knowing how important a decision he was making he decided to study the best apologists for the Roman and Reformed faiths to find out which one was the more orthodox.

Walton says that Donne eventually left the study of the law in order to devote himself to prayerful study of this question and that he did come to the truth, but he never states when Donne was confirmed in the Anglican church, and I haven’t been able to find out from the few other sources I’ve looked into.

Donne was nineteen years old when he began this study.

Holy Sonnet XIV

2010-04-12T15:08:00.007-04:00

John Donne (1572 - 1631)

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
As yet but knocke; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you,'and would be lov'd faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie;
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish mee.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

"Master John Donne was born in London, in the year 1573*, of good and virtuous parents," says his biographer and friend, Izaak Walton, who wrote The Life of Dr. Donne in 1640. His parents were devout Roman Catholics and Donne was initally educated at home by Jesuits, becoming fluent in both French and Latin before entering Oxford at the age of eleven.

He studied there for three years and then was transferred to Cambridge, "that he might have nourishment of both soils," where he studied until he was seventeen. Although he was a diligent student he never took a degree at either university since in order to do so he would have had to swear the Oath of Supremacy, declaring Queen Elizabeth to be the head of the Church in England, which would have gone against his Catholic upbringing. In fact, his mother was the great-niece of Sir Thomas More, who was beheaded for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church.

[to be continued...]

* Everyone else lists his birth date as 1572; I don't know why the discrepancy.

Pascha nostrum

2010-04-11T00:00:00.001-04:00

[Traditional]

Alleluia.
Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, *
therefore let us keep the feast,
Not with old leaven,
neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, *
but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. Alleluia.

Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; *
death hath no more dominion over him.
For in that he died, he died unto sin once; *
but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.
Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, *
but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Alleluia.

Christ is risen from the dead, *
and become the first fruits of them that slept.
For since by man came death, *
by man came also the resurrection of the dead.
For as in Adam all die, *
even so in Christ shall all be made alive. Alleluia.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

From the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, Morning Prayer I, this canticle, which is taken from 1 Corinthians 5:7-8; Romans 6:9-11; and 1 Corinthians 15:20-22, is the one we use during Morning Prayers on Sundays when we've had to miss church for some reason (except during Lent, of course). It can be sung or spoken. The 1980 Episcopal hymnal has several musical settings for it but we haven't learned any of them. When it's spoken, the leader reads up to the asterisk and the congregation reads all the indented lines.

I can't tell you how beautiful it is to read Scriptures responsively during prayers -- there's a different quality to it than when you read things in unison, as with the Lord's Prayer and the Apostles' Creed. I think it's because it's more like a conversation -- encouraging each other with God's word. If your family doesn't normally do this, I'd suggest adding a Psalm a day to your family's prayer time, reading responsively by the verse or the half verse, and ending with the Gloria Patri.

The Conclusion

2010-04-10T10:10:00.001-04:00

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552? - 1618)

Even such is Time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wander'd all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days;
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust.

His Pilgrimage

2010-04-09T14:35:00.002-04:00

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552? - 1618)

Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage;
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage.

Blood must be my body's balmer;
No other balm will there be given;
Whilst my soul, like quiet palmer,
Travelleth towards the land of heaven;
Over the silver mountains,
Where spring the nectar fountains;
There will I kiss
The bowl of bliss;
And drink mine everlasting fill
Upon every milken hill.
My soul will be a-dry before;
But, after, it will thirst no more.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Once I read that Sir Walter Raleigh wrote this poem during his imprisonment as he was awaiting his execution.

Here is the beautiful letter he wrote to his wife on the eve of his death.

Jabberwocky

2010-04-08T00:00:00.002-04:00

Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898)

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

.

.

On everyone's list of favorite poems, Jabberwocky was one of the first I memorized, to be recited for a speech or drama class (I've forgotten which) in high school, and is one of the few I can still quote from memory.

Here's a gem from Pentamom: Christopher Lee reading Jabberwocky.

And here's another: the crazy kids of a friend of mine, doing a hilarious Jabberwocky Rap of their own composition for their dad's birhtday, who, incidentally, hates rap music.

We are...

2010-04-07T00:00:00.001-04:00

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

(Prospero in The Tempest, Act IV, Scene I)

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

2010-04-06T00:00:00.002-04:00

Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

.

.

.

[... for we sorrow not, as others which have no hope...]

in Just--

2010-04-05T00:00:00.001-04:00

E.E. Cummings (1894 - 1962)

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and
the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

Christus vincit!

2010-04-04T00:00:00.001-04:00

[Traditional]

Christus vincit! Christus regnat!
Christus, Christus imperat!

.

.

.

.

[This hymn is traditionally associated with Christ the King Sunday -- the last Sunday before the new Church year begins at Advent -- but it perfectly expresses my feelings on this resurrection day.]

A Hymne to God the Father

2010-04-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

John Donne (1572 - 1631)

   I.
Wilt thou forgive that sinne where I begunne,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sinne, through which I runne,
And do run still: though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

   II.
Wilt thou forgive that sinne which I have wonne
Others to sinne? and, made my sinne their doore?
Wilt thou forgive that sinne which I did shunne
A yeare, or two: but wallowed in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

   III.
I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne
My last thred, I shall perish on the shore;
But sweare by thy selfe, that at my death thy sonne
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, Thou hast done,
I feare no more.