Let the Bells Ring

I mentioned I have been trying to walk in the mornings before our day begins. It has been a good thing for exercise and to clear my head. I love the muted sounds of morning; those of us out seem to tread quietly. We live in a great neighborhood for parlor peaking—each house and yard, though compact, have their own design and beauty. It is one of the reasons that drew us here, a largely Catholic town, which has an aesthetic we admire and appreciate, even if it is not completely our own. Yes, the yards are mostly postage-stamp sized, but that has led to a wonderful use of civic space with playgrounds on every corner, the butcher and the baker in walking distance. How good it is to live a life locally--to be able to work and shop and play and live in one community so that all concerns and care are brought to one place. Ah, and the front porches, which also bring a sense of community as people sit in calling distance, not hidden away in the privacy of the backyard patio. There are often nights when you hear laughter spill down the street, a baseball game if our team is playing, or, my favorite, the Italian neighbor two doors down listening to his Sinatra.

And so I set out this morning, enveloped in the heat and humidity of August. There is a hint of autumn as the sun is not quite so high as it was when I began my walks in July. I pass the faithful and the late as I head up my block where a large Catholic Church on the corner is beginning its daily mass. I realize that walking to church, the parish model, is no longer popular for most Christians. We are people of movement and choice; just as it is rare to work and live in one place so it is rare to worship in that town, unless the place is so large to offer enough choices or so isolated to not offer much else, and then again the community often suffers. But with the parish model, you are forced to engage with your neighbor and pastor, faithful or not, likeable or not; there is not much choice but to push for the good.

And so, I am drawn to follow these walkers to their parish church. It is inviting with its doors and windows flung open and light shining out. I peer into a place so holy, giving and alienating all at once. As I pause, I hear the familiar words of the liturgy of my own church:

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Lift up your hearts.

We lift them up to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

It is right to give him thanks and praise.

Over 50 people sit and stand and kneel in unison, using their bodies to worship and train their hearts. Before I realize time has passed, a chime rings, the consecration has occurred, and I know it is my time to go. The chime reminds me, not of the Light, devotion, holiness, and beauty that drew me in, but of the differences between my beliefs and those worshipping here.

And so, I turn the corner, heading downhill to the next block where an Episcopal Church, my denomination though not my church, sits. The differences are striking: The red doors are locked and barred and the placard sign offers no invitation, solace or conviction, mustering a weak "Go Phillies." No light shines forth here so the stained glass shows only its lines creating the look of a web blurring the images of Christ. I am sad now. Here is my supposed parish church that we drive past every Sunday morning so that we may worship in a place that is preaching a gospel of Life and Truth; a church that is vibrant and orthodox. The parish model cannot work when a church is bereft of Life. I am reminded of a friend's recent quip that most Episcopal churches are becoming either Day Care Centers or Museums (depending on the wealth of their first parishioners) more than places of worship. So it is with this one. I am filled with such doubt and sadness; how can the creeds and the liturgy and the sacrament that I find so meaningful not draw others?

Despair creeps in. But then as I turn the corner, heading away from the church and its confusion, the hour strikes, the church bells ring.

Church bells built to call and proclaim, strong, rhythmic, and clear.

The world sings forth with the Gospel.

And I hear again the mystery of faith: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.

Sitting now at my computer, I realize I don’t know from which church the bells rang. Was it the Catholic church calling me to join the ranks that have stood through crisis and heresy and confusion since Peter? Or is my beloved Episcopal church calling me to stand firm during its time of crisis, heresy, confusion? It could even be the bells from the non-denominational church a few blocks away, a church much like the one my childhood, where I feel safe in its evangelical fervor and clarity of belief.

But I realize that for today the message is not about denominational politics.
Christ himself calls. Whatever humans believe or do, God is God. I find hope and joy. Thanks be to God.

And now I pray for those of you who small in number do remain faithful in a denomination struggling with unbelief and conflict. Where even two or more are gathered in His Name, He is there.

And I pray for those of you who have left the old, seeing no future for a church given over to its sin. May your courage bring change and a future for Anglicans in our country. He is there.

And I pray for those who have left vibrant Anglican churches, whether in Africa or Wheaton to proclaim the Gospel in its fullness. There are times when you may be few; there are times when you may grow weary. Do not forget, He is there.

Thanks be to God.

Masterly Inactivity

There are moments when my two older children, just 17 months apart, have a hard time getting along, can't find anything to do, and set out looking for trouble. In these moments, it is so tempting for me to turn to a video to occupy them. But we want movies to be a treat in our house, not a part of our regular routine. We've all read the studies that show the negative affects of tv on young children...but it is easy to fall into that morning show and just before dinner habit.
My other temptation is to try to create things for them to do. To feel the need to sit down and play with them, to invent the game, do the craft together.

This temptation, like a good movie, has its place too.

But I've found that falling into either trap as a way of life only creates more problems. When the tv show is done, they don't seem any more ready to play with one another or come up with an activity. When they depend on me to play with them, they grow rusty in using their own imaginations and thinking skills.

Though I have many goals for my children's education, one of my biggest hopes is that they will develop inner resources to approach the world He has created with curiosity. That they will have an active mind that seeks beauty and meaning even though they are just 10 months, and 3 and 4!

Charlotte Mason, the British educator I love so much, seems to have a solution for the two extremes in my parenting, ignoring the child or overly orchestrating their time. She writes that as parents

“We ought to do so much for our children, and are able to do so much for them, that we begin to think everything rests with us and that we should never intermit for a moment our conscious action on the young minds and hearts about us. Our endeavours become fussy and restless. We are too much with our children, ‘late and soon.’ We try to dominate them too much, even when we fail to govern, and we are unable to perceive that wise and purposeful letting alone is the best part of education” (Vol. 3, p. 27).

Besides the fact that she quotes from my favorite Wordsworth poem, she gets to the heart of my over-parenting. Rather she suggests we think of our role as parents as "Masterly Inactivity." This is not the Rousseauian belief of leaving a child to their own innocent state of nature--our children need our care and direction, they need God's grace and mercy. Though our modern culture often shrinks from the idea of Authority, our duty is to be Masterly. With a "thinking love," we can create a family culture where all can thrive and develop under authority: "The mastery is not over ourselves [as the parent] only; there is also a sense of authority, which our children should be as much aware of when it is inactive as when they are doing our bidding" (Mason, Vol. 3, p. 28). Yet we must hold our authority with enough good humor and confidence to prevents us from discovering what the child must discover himself, from creating what the child must create herself, leading the child to true learning.

Thus, Mason teaches that children must be free to play and work but helped to have the atmosphere and space as well as the training of habit and ability to do so. An over-scheduled child will be too tired to "play." A chaotic or messy house filled with too many toys will overwhelm. A child who has only heard stories of twaddle or watched silly tv shows will lack a real imagination to imitate and create. A child who has not learned to control his hand or eye or tongue will not see beauty or nature or God's handiwork around them. "In this matter the child who goes too much on crutches never learns to walk; he who is most played with by his elders has little power of inventing plays for himself; and so he misses that education which comes to him when allowed to go his own way" (Mason, Vol. 3 p. 37).

All of this has come together for me in the last few days as we have returned from a wonderful week of travel and rest, where we had either lots of tv time or time together in activity. It was wonderful but they had forgotten how to play. Though they hadn't seen their toys in a week, they were uninterested unless their sibling picked the toy up and then a fight broke out. But I had been reading about this idea of "Masterly Inactivity." How could I help them to play on their own more?

The first example that came to mind was our dress-up box. I had not taken the time to be masterly here. It was an overly stuffed mess of clothes, purses, wands, crowns, and random toys that had been long missing. So I tried to do two masterly things . The first was to have us all clean out the box together, throwing away the broken and useless, putting toys back in the proper place. We then grouped together the possibilities of the dress-up box--a hat creates a construction worker, a stethoscope for a doctor, wings enough for a fairy, a sword a tool for a knight, etc. As we worked and imagined together, I realized they never played with their cowboy things, an animal skin vest from my husband's childhood on the ranch and a cowboy hat from his current hunting trips in the Rocky Mountains. And so in my second moment of guiding, I casually mentioned where the vest and the hat were from. DD and DS were full of questions about their Dad as we packed his things in the box. The next morning when the restlessness began, instead of turning on the tv or coming up with an activity for them, I waited. And sure enough, when I checked in again, they were happily playing cowboys! After a long time went by and they were starting to grow restless, I suggested that my cowgirl and boy take a ride on their "horses" to check the area for foxes or coyotes.G in her dad's vest from when he was 2!

M proud in his Dad's hat

They were so excited as we rode around the block on bikes.



Mind you, it takes a long time for Cowboys and Cowgirls to get around the block when they are busy scoping out tracks or signs of the fox and other predators.



It even led to impromptu nature study as my son found lots of Cicada skins and collected them as we went. When we got home, we read about Cicadas online and listened to the Cicada's call and went out again to look and listen for live ones.




Another example of the development of imagination through good books was in telling of the story of "The Lady and the Tiger."They were mesmerized and wanted to know so badly what happened in the end. We guessed together and left it at that. A few hours later when my dd was looking for something to do in that restless way, I noticed she eventually picked up her Disney Princess Figurines. She had ignored these of late, the old tales had grown stale. When I checked back in I realized, she also had her brother's soldier and toy tiger and was narrating the tale of "The Lady and The Tiger." This afforded her a long time lost in her own world of imagination.

To be "masterly" requires not only a sense of authority, but also a bit of thought, organization and planning. To be "inactive," takes the patience to allow the children to discover on their own. Perhaps my above examples then are a bit trite in the larger sense of what the term can mean for our parenting. Because what underlies an ability for a parent to be both masterly and inactive is a deep trust in The Authority who holds our very lives in His Hand:

"When we recognise that God does not make over [give over] the bringing up of children absolutely even to their parents, but that He works Himself, in ways which it must be our care not to hinder, in the training of every child, then we shall learn passiveness, humble and wise. We shall give children space to develop on the lines of their own characters in all right ways, and shall know how to intervene effectually to prevent those errors which, also, are proper to their individual characters." (Mason, Vol. 3, p. 35)


*All Mason quotes from the full text of Miss Mason's Original Homeschooling Series can be found at http://www.amblesideonline.org/CM/3_03.html


**And for all wondering, little C tagged along too! She is her own delightful nature-lovin' buckaroo!

Brightening our Rainy Day

This grace-filled song has been brightening our rainy day!




Hope you enjoy as much us we have!

A New Other World

"Have you ever been up at five o'clock on a fine summer morning? It is very beautiful. The sunlight is pinky and yellow, all the grass and trees are covered with dew diamonds. And all the shadows go the opposite way to the way they do in the evening, which is very interesting and makes you feel as though you were in a new other world."

-E. Nesbitt Five Children and It

Well, I'm finally posting after a month of silence. Is there anyone left reading?!

Our summer has been so full, it has been difficult to find the space mentally to write and once I stopped it was hard to begin again. It makes me appreciate even more my husband's ability to write, fitting his writing in between classes and office hours, or late at night when we are all asleep!

Don't get me wrong, I love summer: there are a million and one ways to spend a day and the freedom to do it. Yet by August I begin to look forward to the more structured routines of normal life. With all of the fun of summer, I've found it difficult not just to blog but to have time alone...to read, write, reflect...

And so, I have begun a new habit of waking up in the early morning. I'm loving it so much, I hope it will continue into the Fall but it may just be for this season of my life. I know there are seasons it certainly wouldn't have worked--the last months of pregnancy, night-wakings with a nursing baby, lots of late nights in a row. But though my days have been busy, I've been getting good sleep for the first time in a long while! And though I'd covet a few more minutes of sleep, the idea of time all to myself to do with as I please, is enough to get me going.

What do I do with these hours to myself?

It's been varied. But mainly I have good coffee and good books, time in prayer and Scripture, and end with a run and a shower.

Time to experience quiet. Experience peace. Experience beauty. The Nesbitt quote above says it so well. In the early morning, when the house is hushed, all seems good and fresh and new. And a hope and a desire build that the day will continue this way. Okay, with a house of little ones, it will never stay hushed, it shouldn't, right?! Not so quiet then, but an inner peace that overflows and fills the house.

Have you noticed how a mother's mood infects an entire household?

I know when I don't get this personal space, I become impatient and irritable, snapping instead of training, ignoring instead of correcting. I also get an overwhelming desire for escape and so can fritter away time on a project or on the internet. I am not present to the people and tasks at hand. I do dishes and daydream. I fold laundry and mentally compose an email. I cook dinner and plan meals for the week. It is no wonder I then do not enjoy these tasks.

The message our culture sends us is "faster is better; more is better." Susan Wise Bauer writes in the recent magazine article entitled, "Stop cleaning the kitchen and read a book" in the The Classical Teacher that to take the time to read a good book

"pushes back against our society, which tells us that the faster we work, the more we do, the more we produce and accumulate and experience, the better we are...But classical self-education helps us reorient ourselves away from that which is a market ethic. Speed and productivity are not moral goods. It is not ethically superior to do more and to be faster. Reading to yourself in the mornings, instead of doing something else (something "productive") pushes back against the speed ethic, the 'more is better' ethic. It resists the message that says to us: In order to be worthwhile, you must produce something tangible. When you choose to read instead of clean the kitchen you are refusing to accept that your worth as a person is measured by the visible results that you produce in the world. You are asserting, instead, that your worth as a person is based on who you are and who you were created to be...created in the image of God."

And so I may be tempted in this time to plan. I love my lists! Plan our day, our lessons, our grocery list, but I want to resist that. I may be tempted to catch up on internet reading, facebook, emails, but I want to resist that. Not that these things are in themselves problematic, but once the day begins there is little time for reflection or reading or sustained prayer. We always must respond to the urgent--the skinned knee, the hungry belly, the dirty bum. A moment of calm and we decide to de-clutter a desk, send an email, call the doctor, get a head start at dinner (all at the same time!). By the time the children are in bed, we feel like falling into bed ourselves but resist for time with our spouse, a favorite show, an entertaining book, our latest hobby. Picking up the stuff of real meat is rarely likely. Susan Wise Bauer's words are helpful but they are not new. The need for mothers to continue in self-education is of vital importance, evidenced even in the 1892 journal edited by the educator Charlotte Mason entitled "Mother Culture":

"There is no sadder sight in life than a mother, who has so used herself up in her children's childhood, that she has nothing to give them in their youth...is there not some need for "mother culture"? But how is the state of things to be altered? So many mothers say, "I simply have no time for myself!" "I never read a book!" Or else, "I don't think it is right to think of myself!" They not only starve their minds, but they do it deliberately, and with a sense of self-sacrifice which seems to supply ample justification... Each mother must settle this for herself. She must weigh things in the balance. She must see which is the most important--the time spent in luxuriously gloating over the charms of her fascinating baby, or what she may do with that time to keep herself "growing" for the sake of that baby "some day," when it will want her even more than it does now...The wisest woman I ever knew--the best wife, the best mother, the best mistress, the best friend--told me once, when I asked her how, with her weak health and many calls upon her time, she managed to read so much, "I always keep three books going--a stiff book, a moderately easy book, and a novel, and I always take up the one I feel fit for!" That is the secret; always have something "going" to grow by."

And so, I've been waking up "at 5 o'clock on a fine summer morning" and have found myself in a "in a new other world." One of books and ideas, freedom and peace, reflection and truth, Word and Light.