From My Commonplace: "O Goodness Infinite!"

(Originally posted July 20, 2016.  I had a new quote queued up to post today, but this one seemed a fitting reminder today.)

"Yet him God the Most High vouchsafes

To call by vision, from his father's house,

His kindred, and false gods, into a land

Which He will show him, And from him will raise

A mighty nation, and upon him shower

His benediction, so that in his seed

All nations shall be blest. He straight obeys,

Not knowing to what land, yet firm believes.

'I see him, but thou canst not, with what faith

He leaves his gods, his friends, and native soil…

 

Not wandering poor, but trusting all his wealth

With God, who called him, in a land unknown…

 

This ponder, that all nations of the earth

Shall in his seed be blessed. By the seed

Is meant they great Deliverer, who shall bruise

The serpent's head…"

(Lines 120-129, 133-134, 147-150)

 

"Jesus…

…who shall quell

The adversary serpent, and bring back,

Through the world's wilderness, long-wandered Man

Safe to eternal paradise of rest…

… of His reign shall be no end."

(Lines 310-314, 330)

 

"Thy punishment

He shall endure, by coming in the flesh

To a reproachful life, and cursed death;

Proclaiming life to all who shall be believe

In His redemption; and that His obedience,

Imputed, becomes theirs by faith: His merits

To save them, not their own, though legal, works."

(Lines 404-410)

                                                                                                                                                                                          

"O Goodness infinite, Goodness immense!

That all this good of evil shall produce,

And evil turn to good; more wonderful

Than that which by creation first brought forth

Light out of darkness."

(Lines 469-473)

 

~John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book XII

 

A few choice lines from the final book of Paradise Lost.   I had set Paradise Lost aside during a busy season this past spring, and figured it might be a couple of years before I would pick it up again.  So much to read, so little time, right?  But my summer reading took a bit of a detour when I picked up a paperback copy of Surprised by Oxford (I had previously read it off my Kindle) and re-read it.  Her descriptions of studying seventeenth century literature at Oxford inspired me to pick Paradise Lost back up...and I finished it!  I am so very glad I did.  The story Milton tells in Paradise Lost is a heartbreaking one.  Satan rebels against God in heaven…he falls.  God creates a beautifully perfect world – He speaks order into the chaos, and Satan infiltrates it and tempts Adam and Eve into sin as well.  They are cursed, and thrown out of God's beautiful paradise.  All is lost.

 

Or so we think.

 

But all is not lost.  There is Another One coming.  One who will triumph.   One who did triumph at the cross, and One who will come again in ultimate victory.

 

 

This is a crazy world we live in.  There are times when the Unthinkable happens.  There are times when it seems that Chaos overwhelms.  There are times when it seems All is Lost.

 

Christ Has Died.  Christ Is Risen.  Christ Will Come Again.   We declare those words every week in church as part of the Anglican liturgy.

 

I don't know about you, but that's a truth I need to hold on to.

 

"O Goodness infinite, Goodness immense!"

 

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In My Reading Stack This Week:

Devotional: Luke with the Luke for Everyone Commentary (NT Wright)

The Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven (FD Maurice)

The Daily Office Lectionary Readings and Prayers from The Trinity Mission

 Theological: Mere Christianity (Lewis)

On Education: Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (Woodward)

Personal Choice Fiction: The Game (King)
Personal Choice Nonfiction: Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (McEntyre)

With my Hubby: Emma (Austen)

Family Read-Aloud Literature: At the Back of the North Wind (MacDonald)

 

 

 

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What We've Been Up To...

Oh, yeah…that's right.  I have a blog.  Maybe I should post every so often.  Ahem.

 

In all seriousness, I hope that all of you lovely readers have been enjoying a lovely fall, as we have been.   We are 2+ months back into our school year and other activities and are settling into a fairly smooth an predictable rhythm.  Unfortunately, that rhythm doesn't leave me with a lot of margin in my days…and I'm committed to writing in the margins and not at the expense of my local real-life….so forgive my silence here.  There are so many things I want to share, though…writing is my preferred mode of thinking through and processing things…and today is a rare delightfully free Saturday, so here it goes. J

 

A few highlights of our fall thus far:

 

Field Trip to the "Wee Houses" exhibit at our local botanical gardens with friends from our old co-op

 

 

Lots of park days with our friends from church (with whom we have a low-key co-op this year…)

 

 

Andrew Jackson State Park

 

 

Pumpkins!

 

Also a broken arm… L

 

 

And a birthday!  (11!  I'm still not sure how that happened…)

 

 

 

On the school front we are making steady progress on AmblesideOnline Years 1, 2, and 4.  The children are enjoying swimming lessons, learning how to play piano (the older two),  participating in our local homeschool choir program (just the girls), and weekly library visits now that we broke down and paid for a membership to the larger library system in a neighboring county.   We've also had some lovely outings, as you can see above.  Overall, I'm pleased with how our school year is going.

 

I was able to attend a local one-day Circe conference, which was refreshing and encouraging.  And as it was the week after my birthday, I actually won a give-away of the Treasure These Things audio collection.  So, lots of good listening....and also lots of good reading.  While I'm currently not participating in any book discussions, I have read some good books this fall.  I am on a bit of a CS Lewis kick - enjoyed his conversion memoir Surprised By Joy  - followed that with Abigail Santamaria's biography of his wife, Joy Davidman (interesting, and in some ways not particularly likeable person!) - and now Mere Christianity.   I also recently finished an Elizabeth Goudge novel - The Dean's Watch  and introduced my children to one of my childhood-very-favorites Anne of Green Gables. Most recently, I've jumped in with Brandy to read about Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators.  Fascinating stuff, y'all....and part of the reason why I am going to attempt to squeeze some blogging in.  So many thoughts swirling in my mind...

 

So...that's what's up here!  What have you been doing this fall?

From My Commonplace: On The Power of Imaginative Reading

"The books were like rooms in a great house and the pictures were lamps lit in the rooms to show them to him.  As he read, his dreams slowly changed.  The nightmares of being stuck in chimneys that suddenly started to get smaller and smaller, squeezing him until he woke up choking and screaming, gradually gave way to dreams of forests full of great trees, where fabulous beasts galloped down to the cool green aisles, meadows full of flowers and celestial mountains musical with streams.  He dreamed of the sea that had never seen and ships upon it, and of caves where the tide washed in and out."  (p.66)

 

~Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch

 

 

 

"Deep inside I believe that reading aloud covers a multitude of sins.  It is a grace.  When we cannot escape ourselves, we can escape to other worlds together."  (p.139)

 

~Cindy Rollins, Mere Motherhood

 

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On My Nightstand This Week:

Devotional: 2 Thessalonians with the Paul for Everyone Commentary (NT Wright)

The Daily Office Lectionary Readings and Prayers from The Trinity Mission

 Theological: (Between Books)

AO Book Discussion Group: Kim (Kipling)

On Education: Consider This (Glass)

                                                          Personal Choice: The Dean's Watch (Goudge)

Poetry: TS Eliot

With my Hubby: Emma (Austen)

Family Read-Aloud Literature: Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery)

 

*I am also reading Charlotte Mason's Volume 6 for a local CM book club, but these meetings are infrequent, and it is my third – or fourth? – pass through it and so I just read the brief section assigned as our meetings come up. 

 

 

 

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From my Commonplace: Learning to Pray (or learning to do anything, really)

"Prayer and music have always gone together in the Christian church, and making another musical illustration may help us find ways of making Paul's prayers our own.  When children begin to learn a musical instrument, or to sing, the teacher often plays alongside them.  The children hear the music from the teacher mixed in with the sounds they are making, and this encourages them to work together, to copy the teacher and make the same noises.  It will take time, of course; and often the noise of youthful music-making is some way from being pleasant to listen to on its own, or even with a teacher. But as children grow in confidence, they move step by step towards the day when they can play without the teacher there, and may even in due course become teachers themselves." (p.113-114)

 

~NT Wright, thoughts on learning how to pray from Paul's prayer in 1 Thessalonians 3:11-13, Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians

 

I love this analogy on so many levels.

 

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On My Nightstand This Week:

Devotional: 1 Thessalonians with the Paul for Everyone Commentary (NT Wright)

The Daily Office Lectionary Readings and Prayers from The Trinity Mission

 Theological: The Supper of the Lamb (Capon)

AO Book Discussion Group: Kim (Kipling)

On Education: Consider This (Glass)

                                                          Personal Choice: The Dean's Watch (Goudge)

Poetry: TS Eliot

With my Hubby: Emma (Austen)

Family Read-Aloud Literature: Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery)

 

*I am also reading Charlotte Mason's Volume 6 for a local CM book club, but these meetings are infrequent, and it is my third – or fourth? – pass through it and so I just read the brief section assigned as our meetings come up. 

 

 

 

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Parents and Children: A Review

So, I told you here that I would try to share a bit with you about my summer reading.  I told you about Mere Motherhood already.  Today, I'd love to tell you a bit about Parents and Children.

 

Parents and Children is Charlotte Mason's second volume.  I picked it up this summer because it was one of the remaining two hold-outs of her six-volume series that I had not read yet.  (Volume 5, Formation of Character, is now the last hold-out.  Hopefully sometime in the next year I'll be able to get to that one, so that I can say that I've read them all. J  I started reading the Volumes in 2011, I think.  Take heart, dear Mama feeling intimidated by those six volumes.  Slow and steady wins the race!)   It is really a series of stand-alone essays, each somewhat distinct from the others.   That said, there is still a definite theme that runs through all of them and a 'big picture' idea that I am taking away.

 

What is that idea, you may ask?  Very simply this:  Parental responsibility is to provide the child with nourishing, vital, ideas and train him in good habits – and to do this in cooperation with the Holy Spirit.  That last bit is so key.  We have the responsibility to plant the seeds, to keep the soil well-watered, to nurture the plants along – but we can't make them grow.  Ultimately, it is the grace of God poured out over the hearts of our children that will bring the growth.  Charlotte Mason puts it this way:

 

"The object of lessons should be in the main, twofold: to train a child in certain mental habits, as attention, accuracy, promptness, etc. and to nourish him with ideas which may bear fruit in his life…

 

Every habit has its beginning.  The beginning is the idea which comes with a stir and takes possession of us….

 

…the fact that God the Holy Spirit is Himself the Supreme Educator dealing with each of us severally in the things we call sacred and those we call secular.  We lay ourselves open to the spiritual impact of ideas, whether these be conveyed by the printed page, the human voice, or whether they reach us without visible sign."  (p.229-230)

 

In Mere Motherhood, Cindy Rollins expressed a very similar idea this way:

 

"You can't fight your children into the Kingdom. You can pray for them, and you can tell them stories, and you can love them."  (p.130)

 

In so doing, Charlotte Mason tells in at the closing of her book, we do much to advance the Kingdom of Christ.

From My Commonplace: On Divine Appointments

"When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you.  So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?  If you confront insult or antagonism, you first impulse will be to respond in kind.  But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it."  (p. 124)

 

~Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

 

(Another must-read for your list, by the way.  I've really hit a gold-mine in my reading choices these days.)

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On My Nightstand This Week:

Devotional: 1 Thessalonians with the Paul for Everyone Commentary (NT Wright)

The Daily Office Lectionary Readings and Prayers from The Trinity Mission

 Theological: The Supper of the Lamb (Capon)

AO Book Discussion Group: Kim (Kipling)

On Education: Consider This (Glass)

                                                          Personal Choice: The Dean's Watch (Goudge)

Poetry: TS Eliot

With my Hubby: Emma (Austen)

Family Read-Aloud Literature: Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery)

 

*I am also reading Charlotte Mason's Volume 6 for a local CM book club, but these meetings are infrequent, and it is my third – or fourth? – pass through it and so I just read the brief section assigned as our meetings come up. 

 

 

 

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Fall 2016 Morning Basket Plans

So, our school year is now pretty well underway and running pretty smoothly…so I thought I'd share what we're doing over the next few posts.

 

Morning Basket Plans

Co-op Plans

Individual Lessons for First, Secondish-Third, and Fifth Grade

Putting all the Pieces Together: Our Daily, Weekly, and Yearly Rhythm

 

Today, let's talk Morning Basket.

 

We are still starting our school day with a Morning Walk.  I cannot begin to tell you what a huge difference this has made in our home.  Even on mornings where people wake up cranky and breakfast is kind of a disaster (yes, we have those days in our house, please tell me you do sometimes too?) – this hits the reset button.  We come back to the couch to begin our time together refreshed and ready.

 

Our Morning Basket lasts 30-45 minutes at the moment, and runs somewhat like this:

 

Morning Prayer

Bible – Reading, Narration, Discussion

Singing: Hymn or Psalm

Read-Aloud from our Rotation with Narration and Discussion

Singing: Folksong or Latin Song

Swedish Drill

 

Here are the Resources I'm using for each of those categories this fall:

 

Morning Prayer:

I use parts of the Morning Prayer service from The Trinity Mission – a nicely organized, user-friendly resource based on The Book of Common Prayer.

 

Bible:

Joshua and Judges with the commentary by J. Paterson-Smyth.  Just a note on those: these were the actual commentaries Charlotte Mason recommended for use in her schools.  He was a product of his times (Victorian) and denomination (Church of Ireland, I think), and so there are places where I disagree with him.  This is not a resource to use blindly.  That said, thoughtfully using excerpts and discussion prompts has given us a lot of food for thought and brought these familiar Bible stories alive in a new way.  So they have been a good resource for us.  If you decide to try them, do be sure to read through the lessons ahead of time and decide how you want to handle them.

 

Hymns and Psalms:

We are mostly following the AmblesideOnline Hymn rotation, although I shuffled a couple around – so the hymns we will actually be learning (one per month) are: Jesus, The Very Thought of Thee; Jesus Lover of My Soul; Be Still My Soul; and Take My Life and Let It Be.  On alternate days, we are continuing to sing our way through Psalm 119 from the Book of Psalms for Worship.

 

Read-Aloud Rotation:

Pilgrim's Progress (Bunyan) – the actual text.  We started this last year, and then in the craziness of moving this spring it got set aside.  We are starting again from the beginning since it had been 6 months+ since we last touched it.

 

Taming of the Shrew is our Shakespeare pick this fall.  We had a great time with Twelfth Night during our summer term, so our children are excited to give the Bard another go.  We started off with Lamb's retelling in Tales from Shakespeare, a film version, and making little wooden character people, and now are beginning the real thing.

 

Child's History of Art: Sculpture  (Hillyer) - I finally scored a fairly reasonably priced copy of this out-of-print gem.  I decided to skip over the painting section since we have learned about a lot of painters through doing picture study, but we are looking forward to expanding our knowledge of art by reading slowly through the sections on sculpture and architecture.

 

Parables from Nature (Gatty) – We've read through this book once already when Michelle was working her way through AO Years 1-3, where it is scheduled, and now have started over again for the sake of the younger two.  Michelle is enjoying giving it a second listen though – fun to see what she remembers from these stories, and how different aspects of them stand out to her now.

 

Trial and Triumph (Hannula) – I had originally wanted to keep this book as it is scheduled – stories of famous people from church history tied in with each year's other history reading across AO Years 1-6.  But this is also a book that needs to be read aloud because it has a little more of an anti-Catholic slant to it than I care for, so it requires a bit of editing and discussion. It got to be too much to be reading from three separate places with three separate students in three separate years.  That said…I didn't want to ditch these stories completely, so our compromise was moving it to a morning basket read.  We do pull out our timelines at add each person we read about, which helps them orient themselves to what other historical events were taking place around the same time, so it works out.

 

Elementary Geography (Charlotte Mason)  - We started slowly working our way through this book last year, and are continuing it into this year, taking time for hands-on exploration and application where appropriate.

 

In the read-aloud rotation, we shoot for reading a short section from Shakespeare and Pilgrim's Progress every week since these are ongoing stories and I don't want too long to elapse between each reading.  The others have more self-contained chapters, so we loop through them more slowly on the other days, hitting each about once every other week.

 

Singing, Again:

For folksongs, we are following the AmblesideOnline rotations.  On alternate days we sing Latin songs from Memoria Press' Lingua Angelica.  This fall, we are hoping to learn Angus Dei, Sanctus, and Veni, Veni Emmanuel (during Advent of course!).

 

Swedish Drill:

Hooray for my lovely friend Dawn for making Drill accessible for us regular folks.  I am pretty much following the outline of exercises and routines she is sharing over at Afterthoughts.  My kids have been loving this!  It also provides a bit of a movement break between our morning basket time on the couch and moving to the rest of our school day.

 

Other 'group' things that don't fit into Morning Basket or Co-op Time:

In addition to our 'formal' group studies, we continue our habit of reading a family free-read literature choice at bedtime.  My husband leads the Evening Prayer service from the Trinity Mission (portions of it anyway) at supper, usually using the New Testament Scripture reading since we are currently studying the Old Testament during our school time.   We just planted our first garden, which is our 'family project' for now….and when the cold, early-dark, winter evenings set in I'm hoping to spend some time with handicrafts.  

The one thing I am struggling to find a place for is drawing.  We enjoy drawing sessions when we have them, and I originally thought we might regroup everyone after lunch on afternoons when we don't have other activities….but that hasn't worked out as well as I hoped.  Still searching for the best place to slip this in….