Seven Links for Sunday

I

Snapshots from a CM-Influenced Household

In In This House of Brede, English writer Rumer Godden’s novel of Benedictine religious life, the wise Abbess Catherine, confronted with winds of change in the early 1960s, observes that the Rule of Saint Benedict was made to bend – not to break altogether, but to give, to accommodate. So, too, I think, Charlotte Mason’s method has a lot of “give” built into it, so that an individual homeschooling family, faced with curriculum and scheduling decisions, might ask not, Did Charlotte Mason do this, but Might Charlotte Mason, in our shoes, possibly choose this? Or, and possibly more to the point, Is this decision compatible with what both Miss Mason and we believe about the child, and about education?

II

Think of It as Creative Therapy and Pockets of Peace Lots of ideas for making homemade things, but I'm keeping it for the title. Pockets of peace rather than heaping up seasonal demands? I like that way of thinking about it.  

III

Is Your Sports Program More Classical Than Your Academic Program?

Sports are on the hearts of the students. Students have taught themselves sports diligently. Students talk of sports when they sit in their houses, when they walk by the way, when the lie down and when they rise up. “Be warned,” writes Solomon in Ecclesiastes, “much study is wearisome to the flesh.” Not the study of sports, though. Perhaps this is because students don’t so much study sports as they live sports. There is no kind of paideia so living and active in America as the paideia of sports.

IV


Saintly Stories

Homeschooling mom Dessi Jackson, who writes beautifully for Seton Magazine, and Lydia Grace, daughter of Kimberlee,  have teamed up in creating a children's picture book, St Felix and the Spider.   Exciting!

V

JRR Tolkien on Fairy Stories
Lots of nice quotes and illustrations here.

Mythology is not a disease at all, though it may like all human things become diseased. You might as well say that thinking is a disease of the mind. It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology. But Language cannot, all the same, be dismissed. The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval.

VI

The Four Rivers of Meaning

All revelation has four dimensions, or can be approached from four directions, which we may call the historical (or literal), doctrinal, moral, and mystical. The doctrinal, moral, and mystical meanings taken together constitute the “spiritual” meaning of Scripture. The modern crisis over religion is due to the confusion of these four meanings...

For context, see Augustine On Christian Doctrine, Pope Leo XIII on the Study of Holy Scripture,

VII



Pope Francis Talks of the Way of Beauty

Every form of catechesis would do well to attend to the “way of beauty” (via pulchritudinis). Proclaiming Christ means showing that to believe in and to follow him is not only something right and true, but also something beautiful, capable of filling life with new splendour and profound joy, even in the midst of difficulties. Every expression of true beauty can thus be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus. This has nothing to do with fostering an aesthetic relativism which would downplay the inseparable bond between truth, goodness and beauty, but rather a renewed esteem for beauty as a means of touching the human heart and enabling the truth and goodness of the Risen Christ to radiate within it. If, as Saint Augustine says, we love only that which is beautiful, the incarnate Son, as the revelation of infinite beauty, is supremely lovable and draws us to himself with bonds of love. So a formation in the via pulchritudinis ought to be part of our effort to pass on the faith.

Oh, and St Ambrose read without moving his lips!   More on Silent Reading and St Augustine here.