Education is a Life

Recently I've been reading books by three very different authors - G.K. Chesterton, Charlotte Mason and A.W.Tozer - and they all touched on a similar idea with their own unique perspectives:
there should be no separation between the secular and the sacred.

But it would be well if we could hinder in our children's minds the rise of a wall of separation between things sacred and things so-called secular, by making them feel that all 'sound learning,' as well as all 'religious instruction,' falls within the office of God, the Holy Spirit, the supreme educator of mankind.
Charlotte Mason 
 
As a home educator I can get sidetracked into this division when I feel the weight of responsibility for our children's education. I need to remind myself of what education really means.


The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection...
I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and public, of peace and war.

Of Education: John Milton (1608-1674)

 Reading Utopia by Sir Thomas More

You say grace before meals.

All right.

But I say grace before the play and the opera, 
And before the concert and the pantomime, 
And grace before I open a book, 
And grace before sketching, painting, 
Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing; 
And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
G.K.Chesterton





You are not worshiping God as you should if you have departmentalized your life so that some areas worship and other parts do not worship.
A.W. Tozer 



A Flowering Bromeliad - occurs every two years

The Apostle Paul teaches that every simple act of our lives may be sacramental. "Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God." And again, "Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him."

Some of the great saints, who were great because they took such admonitions seriously and sought to practice them, managed to achieve the sanctification of the secular, or perhaps I should say the abolition of the secular. Their attitude toward life's common things raised those above the common and imparted to them an aura of divinity.

A.W. Tozer (The Dwelling Place of God) 



Hands to Work, Hearts to God 

 

...a human being comes into the world, not to develop his faculties nor to acquire knowledge, nor even to earn his living, but to establish certain relations; which relations are to him the means of immeasurable expansion and fulness of living. 
Charlotte Mason 

A Little Frog (1cm long) on the Trampoline

Education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness and beauty...
Circe Institute 

The Birthday by Marc Chagall

Teach me, my God and King,

In all things Thee to see,

And what I do in anything

To do it as for Thee.

George Herbert

The Irreparable Past & the Irresistible Future

I've never thought of myself as a worrier but the other morning I woke up very early and the first thing to enter my head was a verse from the Psalms: Do not fret; it only leads to evil.

To fret: to agitate; to disturb; to tease; to irritate; to be vexed; to utter peevish expressions.

I had been fretting about some things that I really had no control over: about whether decisions made had been the right ones; about our children's futures; over decisions that need to be made, amongst other things.  Fretting is never helpful and doesn't change anything - except my ability to rest, receive the grace I need and believe that He will make a way then there seems to be no way.

Later, I read this by Oswald Chambers, a word of wisdom for the start of a new year: 

Our present enjoyment of God's grace is apt to be checked by the memory of yesterday's sins and blunders. But God is the God of our yesterday's, and He allows the memory of them in order to turn the past into a ministry of spiritual culture for the future. God reminds us of the past lest we get into a shallow security in the present.

As we go forth into the coming year, let it not be in the haste of impetuous, unremembering delight, nor with the flight of impulsive thoughtlessness, but with the patient power of knowing that the God of Israel will go before us.

Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future...

Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.

Wednesday with Words

We memorised Psalm 19 many years ago and we when were reviewing our memory work during the week my little girl asked, "Can we do the one about the bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion?" We all laughed because she is very excited about being a flower girl at her big sister's wedding next week and then at her big brother's wedding early next year but there's something very beautiful and splendid about those words and also the rest of the Psalm.

It was the Glory of God that I saw in nature one day in my late teens that revealed Him to me for the first time. I didn't understand it as such at the time but the natural beauty that reached into my heart that day prepared me for the day about five months later when I committed my life to the One who created the beauty I beheld.

Many years later, a couple of months ago in fact, my husband and I were driving to Adelaide airport returning home after my dad's funeral with all the emotion and weariness that occasioned, when after a light shower a rainbow broke through the clouds and I just sensed God's presence in a very tangible way. I read these words later:

Nature to a saint is sacramental. 

If we are children of God, we have a tremendous treasure in Nature. 

In every wind that blows, in every night and day of the year, 

in every sign of the sky, 

in every blossoming and in every withering of the earth, 

there is a real coming of God to us if we simply use our starved imagination to realise it.

Oswald Chambers 

 And Nature, the old nurse, took

  The child upon her knee,

Saying: "Here is a story-book

  Thy Father has written for thee."

"Come, wander with me," she said,

  "Into regions yet untrod;

And read what is still unread

  In the manuscripts of God."

And he wandered away and away

  With Nature, the dear old nurse,

Who sang to him night and day

The rhymes of the universe.

Longfellow

Psalm 19 is a reminder not to take the 'manuscripts of God' for granted. I lived for three years in another state and went back for a visit a couple of decades later. I was really surprised to find that the spot was a beautiful place. I hadn't seen the loveliness when I lived there as I was focusing on my problems and they veiled the beauty that proclaimed His presence.

Intellectual Courage & the Courage of Confession

In common with many other homeschooling families, we have a 'together time' during the day. We use this time to go over the Scriptures we're memorising and for a time of prayer, and on different days we include such things as poetry, Plutarch, Shakespeare, a current read aloud and other additional things I'd like to cover with everyone.

Once a week I've been reading from Ourselves by Charlotte Mason and this week the reading was about Courage.

I thought the words below about intellectual courage were very enlightening. One of my children is often very reluctant to take on anything new and his first reaction is to baulk and say he can't or he isn't any good at this that or the next thing. He's not lazy but I think the term 'intellectual panic' would describe how he reacts at times.

It wasn't until I read this that I realised that courage was the key to overcoming this tendency and reading this aloud gave us a good opportunity to talk about it together.

......there is what we may call the Courage of our Capacity––the courage which assures us that we can do the particular work which comes in our way......

It is intellectual Courage, too, which enables us to grapple with tasks of the mind with a sense of adequacy. Intellectual panic is responsible for many failures; for our failure to understand an argument, to follow an experiment, and very largely for our insular failure to speak and comprehend the vocables of foreign tongues.

 Intellectual panic is responsible, too, for the catchwords we pass as our opinions. We fear it is not in us to form an opinion worth the holding and worth the giving forth.

We've always prayed together but as I was reading these words on the Courage of Confession I suggested something I don't think we'd never done before.

...the Courage of open, frank Confession of that which we have done amiss or left undone, in the small matters of daily life, to the person concerned, is very strengthening...

I asked everyone to have a minute or so of silence, eyes closed and to ask the Lord if there was anything we'd done recently that we shouldn't have done, or left undone what we should have done, and then I asked if anyone wanted to share what came to their attention. I was surprised that all of them kept quiet with their eyes closed (without giggling or squirming or feeling uncomfortable), that I was the one to break the silence, and that all of them shared something. It was a holy moment and I was touched by what each of them shared. It was very strengthening as Charlotte Mason expressed above and it was good for them to hear that I also had things to confess as well.

I shared some more thoughts on Ourselves here.