Marriage and Divorce

G.K. Chesterton had quite a lot to say on the subject of marriage and divorce. The quotes below are mainly from The Superstition of Divorce which was written in 1920. The others are from The Hebdomadal Chesterton which is a wonderful place to visit if you like Chesterton.

Of all human institutions marriage is the only one which most depends upon slow development, upon patience, upon long reaches of times, upon magnanimous compromise, upon kindly habit.

...marriage itself is an act of freedom and responsibility; and the desertion of it is the desertion of one’s self; and is always at least humiliating. Even if divorce is not a sin, it is most certainly a disgrace. It is not like the breaking of a chain, which has been forcibly imposed upon a slave. It is like the breaking of a sword, that has been deliberately taken up and deliberately dishonoured by a traitor.

As a child of divorced parents his words on disgrace made sense. In Chesterton's day divorce carried a  greater stigma than it does today, but for a child the sense of disgrace is caused by rejection. 'If my mum and dad really loved me they would have stayed together.' The repercussions of  breaking the sword have a ripple effect and they are not something that a child would necessarily articulate or understand.

I may be misunderstood if I say, for brevity, that marriage is an affair of honour. The skeptic will be delighted to assent, by saying it is a fight.  And so it is, if only with oneself; but the point here is that it necessarily has the touch of the heroic, in which virtue can be translated by virtus. Now about fighting, in its nature, there is an implied infinity or at least a potential infinity. I mean that loyalty in war is loyalty in defeat or even disgrace; it is due to the flag precisely at the moment when the flag nearly falls.

Marriage is honourable. 

It requires heroism at times.

Heroic: altruistic, determined, dauntless, brave, courageous but desperate.

In a medical sense a heroic procedure is one which may endanger the patient if it's performed. There's a chance it will  be successful but if it's not done the patient will probably die. Heroic effort and desperate action are honourable responses whatever the outcome might be in the end.

Virtus was a specific virtue in Ancient Rome. It carries connotations of valor, manliness, excellence, courage, character, and worth, perceived as masculine strengths (from Latin vir, "man"). It was thus a frequently stated virtue of Roman emperors, and was personified as a deity. (Wikipedia)

The dictionary definition states that Virtus comes from the root Vireo and implies strength from straining, stretching, extending.

G.K.Chesterton: The Glory of Grey

A Glorious Grey Day on Sydney Harbour

Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a grey day a "colourless" day. Grey is a colour, and can be a very powerful and pleasing colour.
There is also an insulting style of speech about "one grey day just like another."
You might as well talk about one green tree just like another...

 Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless; 

 that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise.
Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour;
of brightening into blue or blanching into white or bursting into green and gold.
So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself;
and when there is grey weather in our hills or grey hairs in our heads,
perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.

Alarms and Discursions: Chapter 18

Linking up with Weekends with Chesterton

Some Musings on Unconsidered Aspects of Moral Training: School Education by Charlotte Mason

'We too are under authority and there are limitations to parental authority.'

The limitations to the parental authority we exercise over our children in the area of moral training become more evident as our children mature. When our children are little we have broad overarching responsibilities which tend to obscure these limitations. As our children mature it's not so black and white anymore and if I treat my 14 year old the same way I'd treat a 6 year old in how I wield my authority he is not going to develop any moral muscle.

I think one of the biggest strains of parenting is adjusting our authority as our children mature and knowing how, when and where to extend or limit the boundaries we have in place.

Morals don't come by nature:

'An educated conscience is a far rare possession than we imagine.'

A sobering thought!

'An educated conscience comes only by teaching with authority and adorning by example.'

Our authority needs to be paired with example. I can't hide behind my authority for very long. They'll spot hypocrisy or double standards a mile away.

I never felt I was particularly good at coming up with lessons or ideas for transmitting moral training and I've never done much in the way of pre-planning these times, but something I've purposely tried to do is to live in a devotional context. Every day I have opportunities for devotional living and moral training by taking the common little incidents of daily life and using them as tools to help shape the characters of my children. Often these incidents seem like interruptions and I've realised that part of my own moral training has been to see these things as God might see them and ask, "Lord, what can I learn from this?" and "What can I teach my children in this situation?"

God's Word, poetry, biography and the use of mottoes are some suggestions Charlotte Mason gives to help us in the moral training of our children.

Mottoes

I grew up with one or both of my grannies in the home for many years and both of them used many little sayings or proverbs that were in common use in their day. I rarely hear anyone who is not in old age use mottoes or proverbs in everyday speech. My husband occasionally uses, 'A stitch in time saves nine.' Not that he is old, but he also had a grandmother around him growing up. She is in her nineties and  I think she could come up with a saying, a proverb or a poem on just about anything.

It's similar to Folksongs - they've almost died out in general society and mottoes even more so and if we are to keep them alive we need to make a conscious effort to use them.

A stitch in time saves nine.

Good, better, best, never let it rest, until your good is better and your better best.

Do the next right thing.

Even a child is known by his actions by whether his conduct is pure and right.

A soft answer turns away anger.

Is it true, is it kind, did I really have to say it?

Let another praise you and not your own mouth, someone else and not your own lips.

Treat others the way you'd like to be treated.

Honour one another above yourselves.

Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

Civility costs nothing.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, not today - that's what lazy people say!

Measure twice, cut once.

The biographies of famous Greeks and Romans by Plutarch and the reading of poetry have opened doors for moral instruction in our home. I might read a poem aloud and something will resonate with me so I'll share it with our children. Sometimes I'll give some background information on the poet or the poem and why it was written and we'll talk about that. Or we'll be having our Plutarch reading and we'll get into a discussion over one of the questions in the study notes.

When I use my own experience and am honest about my weaknesses and flaws it has helped my children deal with their own. I tend to have a quick temper and have had to learn some hard lessons about keeping myself in check. I have two children who have a similar disposition, although one of them has had a harder time dealing with it than the other. He knows I've had a similar struggle and I've had some good opportunities to educate his conscience in his teachable moments ie. not when he's in a passion!

I took some words to heart as a young Christian from something Edith Schaeffer wrote which was along the lines of, "In your anger, don't say something hurtful that you would never say if you were under control," and have impressed that on him.

Bible

Besides using the Proverbs, memorising scripture is an obvious way to train moral character.

I have hidden Your Word in my heart that I might not sin against You. Psalm 119

The accounts of men and women in the Bible, the good, the bad, the faithful and the unfaithful are there for our benefit but,

'In the matter of the ideas that inspire the virtuous life, we miss much by our way of taking things for granted.'

We know the story of Noah inside out and because of this familiarity we sometimes miss things but the other week we heard a sermon on love - 'Love Covers.' The speaker talked about Noah preaching for 120 years, building an ark before it had ever rained on the earth and the ridicule he received while he did it. After all his efforts only eight people were saved. After the deluge, Noah planted a vineyard and then he got drunk. He wasn't a wicked man. Perhaps he was discouraged. It was a moment of weakness. Later one of his sons came along, saw him drunk and naked, and called his two brothers to witness their father's condition. His brothers came but they took a garment and placing it over their shoulders, walked in backwards so they didn't see their father's nakedness and covered him up. Their love covered their father's weakness. How easy it is to broadcast another's weakness as the younger son had done. This message was so powerfully conveyed that we won't be forgetting it but we'd passed over it when we'd read it in Genesis the week before.

A mistake I made in the early days of mothering was placing too much emphasis on the outward appearance of virtue. Issues of the heart often go unchecked when we do this. I read this in Whatever Happened to Worship by A.W. Tozer this morning:

'Benjamin Franklin...a deist and not a Christian...kept a daily graph on a series of little square charts which represented such virtues as honesty, faithfulness, charity and probably a dozen others. He worked these into a kind of calendar and when he had violated one of the virtues he would write it down. When he had gone for a day or a month without having broken any of his self-imposed commandments, he considered that he was doing pretty well as a human being.

A sense of ethics? Yes.

Any sense of the divine? No.'

In all of my thoughts and intentions regarding moral training, I want to inspire the children God has entrusted me with to godliness, and not just give them ethics.

"Lord, help me to see the things I need to see today in my children and give me the wisdom to reach their hearts in those areas."

Wednesday with Words: Abstractitis

 The effect of this disease, now endemic on both sides of the Atlantic, is to make the patient write such sentences as, Participation by the men in the control of the industry is non-existent, instead of, The men have no part in the control of the industry; Early expectation of a vacancy is indicated by the firm, instead of, The firm say they expect to have a vacancy soon; The availability of this material is diminishing, instead of, This material is getting scarcer; A cessation of dredging has taken place, instead of, Dredging has stopped; Was this the realization of an anticipated liability? instead of, Did you expect you would have to do this? And so on, with an abstract word always in command as the subject of the sentence. Persons and what they do, things and what is done to them, are put in the background, and we can only peer at them through a glass darkly. It may no doubt be said that in these examples the meaning is clear enough; but the danger is that, once the disease gets a hold, it sets up a chain reaction. A writer uses abstract words because his thoughts are cloudy; the habit of using them clouds his thoughts still further; he may end by concealing his meaning not only from his readers but also from himself, and writing such sentences as The actualisation of the motivation of the forces must to a great extent be a matter of personal angularity.  

H.W. Fowler (1858-1933)

When I read the above quote I thought of George Orwell. He wrote about what he saw happening to the English language in his day:

By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash -- as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot -- it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. 

He gives an example using the Book of Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English: 

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

British/Australian Grammar for Homeschoolers

We've used quite a few different grammar programmes in our home as some worked better than others with our different children. We've been homeschooling for a long time so many of the resources we have are from the US as that was what was available to suit a homeschooling situation at the time. I've adapted these for use in our Australian situation and added some other books to help me do this.

Part of the problem I had was remembering the grammar I learned when I went to school so I could explain British grammar to my kids while using an American based programme. I really needed a basic book to double check what I thought was right or different and then teach it to them. My daughter had to buy a reference book during her teaching degree and she showed this to me and said it was very good and covered basically everything. It is designed for parents, primary school teachers and students but I've found it useful for the higher grades also. The Oxford Primary Grammar Handbook (third edition) by Gordon Winch & Gregory Blaxell. ISBN: 9780195560282

So many of our novels and other books are printed in the US and spelling can become confusing for children: apologise/apologize; traveller/traveler; judgement/judgment; labour/labor, are a few examples. A good dictionary is indispensable and I really like the Pocket Oxford Dictionary - not that it would actually fit into your pocket - but it's a good size for children and is easy to pick up secondhand for next to nothing.
I found out recently that this dictionary (mine is a 1942 edition) was a condensation of an earlier classic, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (2nd Edition) by H.W. Fowler, slightly edited by Ernest Gowers. I downloaded this for free a while back but I haven't been able to find the original link. Published by Oxford University Press in 1965, it is very highly regarded and was originally written in 1926.
(ISBN: 0192813897)
The copy shown below (the one I have) is a slightly revised version of the 1926 edition but it still retains the flavour of the author's original work. From what I've read, the revised edition by Robert William Burchfield in 1996, doesn't.

Another of H.W. Fowler's books is The King's English, a style guide for British English, and is free online at bartleby.com.

 'Some of the more obvious devices of humorous writers, being fatally easy to imitate, tend to outlive their natural term, and to become a part of the injudicious novice's stock-in-trade. Olfactory organ, once no doubt an agreeable substitute for 'nose', has ceased to be legal tender in literature, and is felt to mark a low level in conversation. No amount of classical authority can redeem a phrase that has once reached this stage.'

The University of New England in NSW has quite a good fact sheet on spelling rules.
A spelling website with British resources is here.