Weekends With Chesterton: Cease To Be Fallacies

 

 

 

 

      Just like last weekend, I am just posting a favorite GKC quote.......not take from anything I am reading.......just a quote that comes across as so prefect to reflect on in today's society when common morals are for the minority.

 

     It reminds me of a homeschooling dad who once wrote something to the effect of:  Simply because the majority of people do not have a problem with immoral behaviors or not even doing the better thing, does not mean we, in the minority, are the abnormal ones. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies

because they become fashions.”

 

 

 

 

– ILN, 4/19/30

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read more Chesterton over at Sarah's Blog!

Wednesday With Words: You Will Not Be The Same

 

      I have finally confiscated my own computer from my youngest boys......who are becoming little Olympics addicts......since for the first the in their lives we have the ability to see the Olympics through streaming......

       I tried to write this post all day Wednesday......but was unable to pin the computer down when I had the free time......so Thursday With Words it is.....

      Last week I misunderstood the link-up.  It was my first time, after all. I thought it was simply "quotes"......then I discovered it was quotes from books we are reading......Well, yeah.  This is a literature-based blog.  I can handle book quotes.

     So, when I thought about what I was currently reading, I decided to consider the The Hobbit.  I am reading it aloud to my 12 year old son.  I wanted to make sure he heard all of it from Tolkien before Hollywood twisted the story in his mind.  I wonder if it will be my last time to read it aloud......it is my third time.  He is my youngest. 

      Since I am reading aloud, we discuss the great quotes when they come up......but I do not have time to write down or savor any of the words........so I put "Hobbit Quotes" into Google......found one that spoke to me...and brought it here.

 

Gandalf: I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it’s very difficult to find anyone.

Bilbo: I should think so—in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them …

Gandalf:  You’ll have a tale or two to tell when you come back

Bilbo:  You can promise that I’ll come back?”

Gandalf:  No. And if you do, you will not be the same

      The very first thing that came to my mind when I read this quote.......were my three kids who chose to go off on the adventure of a lifetime........even knowing that it would forever change them.

     In fact, as we said farewell to each of them as they departed in their own turn as Rotary International Exchange Student Ambassadors, both they knew and we knew, we were saying goodbye to the who they were at that moment in time, at just eighteen years of age. 

      Two have gone and returned home.  One is currently on her exchange.  And yes, they have changed.  And I love them for it.  They are certainly more global in their thinking.....

My sweet baby girl, Maddelyn, is currently in Slovakia. 
I am so proud of her.
She is offspring number 4, youngest of the three girls.
Becoming fluent in Slavic.

Matthew lived in Switzerland for a year.
His is standing on the Matterhorn here.
He is offspring Number 2, the oldest of the three boys.
Fluent in German.

 

Sarah lived in Austria for her exchange year.
She is the middle girl of the three girls, and offspring Number 3.
She is now fluent in German.
I am so proud of her.

 

      I am so very excited that I found this quote in one of our favorite books by one of our favorite authors.......one who encouraged the spirit of adventure in my kids.  First they practiced with his stories in our living room and then our backyard....and then they applied it to the world.

 

God bless JRR Tolkien!

 

 

 

 

Go to Ordo Amoris for more Wednesdays with Words.

 

Blessings,

              Chari

 

Weekends With Chesterton: Act of Defending

 

 

 

 

       Since Willa is busy packing and preparing to leave on a big deal vacation....Walt Disney World!......I will post our contribution to Weekends With Chesterton for the next two weekends.....

 

 

     The list of Chesterton Books that I have read is woefully blank.  I keep meaning to read GKC.....but there are so.darn.many.books.  I can only read so much.  I had planned to follow those GKC lectures that Willa was following.......and then I found out that she was following them!  I have yet to start.  Maybe someday.

 

 

      Then when Sarah began the Weekends With Chesterton, I though I would do that, get more involved and read some.....but I became severely ill on the first weekend and have just barely recovered. And I lost any momentum I thought that I might have......

 

 

      Anyway, that is my background.  In spite of not having read his works......I have been exposed to much GKC and I have many favorite quotes.

 

 

     The quote below is one of my favorites.  I am always in such awe that what he wrote about in the past.......is so applicable to our present.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues  

has today all the exhilaration of a vice.”

 

 

 

 

–from A Defense of Humilities, The Defendant, 1901

 

 

 

Agreed???

 

 

Read more Chesterton over at Sarah's Blog today!

 

 

 

Blessings,

 

            Chari

Wednesday With Words: Restore Thy Church

 

 

 

 

From one of my favorite Saints.....my confirmation saint.........always food for thought.....

 

 

 

 

 

O Lord, let all the parts of my body, my bones, all the marrow within my bones, be beaten and pounded together in a mortar; only restore Thy Church to her comeliness and beauty

                                                                                                         --St. Catherine of Siena

 

 

******+++++++++++******

Go to Ordo Amoris for more Wednesdays with Words.

Blessings,

              Chari

Sorry.....I do not have an actual book resource for this........but my favorite Catherine of Siena book was lent to me by my godmother......and I do not know the title.  On my shelf is The Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Siena from Tan Books. 

If you do not know Saint Catherine's amazing story......please read it!  She was instrumental in returning the true pope to the Vatican in the day when there were "three" popes!  God loved Saint Catherine!

Weekends with Chesterton: The Moor Eeffoc

We are linking with Sarah at Amongst Lovely Things for this Weekends with Chesterton post.

 

Do you know the MOOR EEFFOC?  asks the blog of the American Chesterton Society.

In the door there was an oval glass plate, with COFFEE-ROOM painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backward on the wrong side MOOR-EEFFOC (as I often used to do then, in a dismal reverie,) a shock goes through my blood.   -- Charles Dickens, autobiographical fragment

Chesterton writes in his book on Charles Dickens--

Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalize some dark or dull corner of London. There are details in the Dickens descriptions - a window, or a railing, or the keyhole of a door - which he endows with demoniac life. The things seem more actual than things really are. Indeed, that degree of realism does not exist in reality: it is the unbearable realism of a dream. And this kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it cannot be gained by walking observantly. Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of how these nightmare minutiae grew upon him in his trance of abstraction...
That wild word, "Moor Eeffoc," is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle - the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. And that elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere. His world was alive with inanimate objects.

This is something you see constantly in Chesterton's work, as well -- the transmogrification of the ordinary and commonplace into the eerie and extraordinary.   It is the world of the imaginative child, of Adam Wayne in Napoleon of Notting Hill. 

Tolkien writes, in On Fairy Stories:

And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle..... The word Mooreeffoc may cause you suddenly to realize that England is an utterly alien land, lost either in some remote past age glimpsed by history, or in some strange dim future to be reached only by a time-machine; to see the amazing oddity and interest of its inhabitants and their customs and feeding-habits... 

 He contrasts this type of fantasy with the kind Tolkien himself is doing, the kind where something new is made, but of course you can't read any good fantasy without seeing some echoes of the everyday world, if only in the homely pipe and pots and pans of Samwise Gamgee, or the name and lineage of the Proudfoots.

For some reason, the term reminds me of the term used by Kathleen Norris in the title of a book, The Quotidian Mysteries.    The subtitle is "Laundry, Liturgy, and Women's Work".   She writes:

The Bible is full of evidence that God's attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a great cosmic cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us--loves us so much that we the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here-and-now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew-laden grass that is "renewed in the morning" or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, "our inner nature is being renewed everyday". Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous details in Leviticus involving God in the minuitae of daily life might be revisioned as the very love of God.

The idea of Mooreeffoc as expressed by Chesterton is that humble, commonplace things are only showing one side, and that if you look at it another way, something vast and mysterious and new may just reveal itself to you.    He writes in The Ethics of Elfland:

This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived from this. Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales--because they find them romantic.

Wednesday with Words: Culture is Parent and Child

Go to Ordo Amoris for more Wednesdays with Words.

Now, here’s something interesting about culture: It’s both parent and child. As we’ve just seen, culture is the child of the community, because it’s born from and formed by the people of the community. On the other hand, it’s also the parent of the people of the community, because it nurtures and forms them. In other words, it educates them, and education, according to Pope John Paul II, is the “primary and essential task” of culture.

 The One Thing is Three:  How the Holy Trinity Explains Everything 

The JPII quote is from Towards a Pastoral Approach to Culture. 
More in context from that document:

«The primary and essential task of culture in general»,(18) education which, since the times of early Christianity, has been one of the most remarkable areas of the Church's pastoral activity, at the religious and cultural levels as well as on the personal and social plain, is now more complex and crucial than ever. It is primarily the responsibility of families, but calls for the help of society as a whole. Tomorrow's world depends on today's education, and education cannot be seen merely as a transmission of knowledge. It forms people and prepares them for their participation in social life by fostering their psychological, intellectual, cultural, moral and spiritual maturity. 


The note (18) takes you to a talk by John Paul II to UNESCO on culture.   It was given in 1980.    It gets a little philosophically heavy but it is interesting.  

The essential meaning of culture consists, according to the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, in the fact that it is a characteristic of human life as such. Man lives a really human life thanks to culture. Human life is culture in this sense too that, through it, man is distinguished and differentiated from everything that exists elsewhere in the visible world: man cannot do without culture.
Culture is specific way of man's “existing and “being”. Man always lives according to a culture which is specifically his, and which, in its turn, creates among men a tie which is also specifically theirs, determining the inter-human and social character of human existence.

. Man who, in the visible world, is the only ontic subject of culture , is also its only object and its term. Culture is that through which man as man, becomes more man, “is” more, has more access to “being”. The fundamental distinction between what man is and what he has, between being and having, has its foundation there too. Culture is always in an essential and necessary relationship to what man is, whereas its relationship to what he has, to his “having”, is not secondary, but entirely relative. All man's “having” is important for culture, is a factor creative of culture, only to the extent to which man, through his “having”, can at the same time “be” more fully as a man, become more fully a man in all the dimensions of his existence, in everything that characterizes his humanity. 

Ontic is a word I keep finding in Heidegger.  

"Ontic" describes what is there, as opposed to the nature or properties of that being.

Heidegger uses the term ontic, often in contrast to the term ontological, when he gives descriptive characteristics of a particular thing and the "plain facts" of its existence. What is ontic is what makes something what it is.

That doesn't help me too much, but by saying man is the only ontic subject as well as the only object I think John Paul  is saying something like "culture is child and parent" -- that is, that man is the author but also a character, immersed in the milieu/ world of culture as well as forming it. 

Anyway, all of this reminded me of the points being made in Desiring the Kingdom, because  culture and liturgy are intrinsically connected, a point made by Josef Pieper.  

Pieper shows us that culture and liturgy are fused in a society's public worship.   It can be said of all civilizations that what is ultimately valued, what is worshiped, is embodied in the products of the culture. 

Weekends with Chesterton: Being Good, and Adventure

Joining with Sarah at Amongst Lovely Things for the Weekends with Chesterton Link-Up!


I am up to Lecture 7 in Dale Ahlquist's Chesterton 101.    So that means I am reading The Club of Queer Trades (free Kindle version).   It is really fun -- Chesterton hits his stylistic stride and precursors his famous Father Brown series.     Ahlquist writes of the book:

 At the beginning of the 20th century, in detective fiction there was Sherlock Holmes and that was all. There were other fictional detectives, to be sure, but they were only bad imitations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous consulting detective. The sleuths offered by other writers would try to outdo Holmes in eccentricity and in solving crimes that were evermore contrived and convoluted.But in 1905 a book of mysteries came along that finally managed to turn the Sherlock Holmes idea on its head. The book was The Club of Queer Trades by G.K. Chesterton. His detective, Rupert Grant, is a Sherlock Holmes-like private eye who investigates crimes and chases crooks with great self-assuredness in his powers of deduction. But he is always wrong. The hero of these stories is not Rupert, but his older brother, Basil Grant, a retired judge. In each case, Basil proves to Rupert hat there has been no crime and no crooks.

A quote I love, believe heartily  -- and want my kids to internalize:

There are a lot more good quotes in the book.   Just a few:

Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Dore, must have had something to do with the designing of the things called flats in England and America. There is something entirely Gargantuan in the idea of economising space by piling houses on top of each other, front doors and all. And in the chaos and complexity of those perpendicular streets anything may dwell or happen, and it is in one of them, I believe, that the inquirer may find the offices of the Club of Queer Trades.

Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the least unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked into his rooms he would have kept him talking till morning. Few people knew him, because, like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the sunset clouds.

Basil smiled at me. "You didn't know," he said, "that I had a practical brother. This is Rupert Grant, Esquire, who can and does all there is to be done. Just as I was a failure at one thing, he is a success at everything. I remember him as a journalist, a house-agent, a naturalist, an inventor, a publisher, a schoolmaster, a—what are you now, Rupert?" "I am and have been for some time," said Rupert, with some dignity, "a private detective, and there's my client."

"Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction," said Basil placidly. "For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it."

"Facts," murmured Basil, like one mentioning some strange, far-off animals, "how facts obscure the truth. I may be silly—in fact, I'm off my head—but I never could believe in that man—what's his name, in those capital stories?—Sherlock Holmes. Every detail points to something, certainly; but generally to the wrong thing. Facts point in all directions, it seems to me, like the thousands of twigs on a tree. It's only the life of the tree that has unity and goes up—only the green blood that springs, like a fountain, at the stars."

"What, in God's name, do you mean by your customers and overcharges?" shrieked Major Brown, whose keen feminine nature, steady in pain or danger, became almost hysterical in the presence of a long and exasperating mystery. "Who are you? I've never seen you or your insolent tomfool bills. I know one of your cursed brutes tried to choke me—" "Mad," said Northover, gazing blankly round; "all of them mad. I didn't know they travelled in quartettes."

"We believe that we are doing a noble work," said Northover warmly. "It has continually struck us that there is no element in modern life that is more lamentable than the fact that the modern man has to seek all artistic existence in a sedentary state. If he wishes to float into fairyland, he reads a book; if he wishes to dash into the thick of battle, he reads a book; if he wishes to soar into heaven, he reads a book; if he wishes to slide down the banisters, he reads a book. We give him these visions, but we give him exercise at the same time, the necessity of leaping from wall to wall, of fighting strange gentlemen, of running down long streets from pursuers—all healthy and pleasant exercises. We give him a glimpse of that great morning world of Robin Hood or the Knights Errant, when one great game was played under the splendid sky. We give him back his childhood, that godlike time when we can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance and dream." Basil gazed at him curiously. The most singular psychological discovery had been reserved to the end, for as the little business man ceased speaking he had the blazing eyes of a fanatic.

Wednesday with Words: Playing before Him at All Times

I am joining with Cindy at Ordo Amoris and others for Wednesday with Words.  Go there for more quotes.

I'm reading a book called The One Thing is Three by Fr Michael Gaitley.  In fact, my husband and I are both reading it and discussing it in a small Catholic book club a little ways up our mountain.    It's on a notoriously difficult topic, the Trinity, but Fr Gaitley strives to make it approachable without dumbing down the rich conceptual material.

I am on Part 2, where he quotes two of my very favorite passages, and one of them is the Proverb 8 quote I quoted above.   I love that quote and  have discussed it before, while I was reading Josef Pieper's In Defense of Philosophy.   It seems to be important to a true understanding of education, as well.   The element of play and delight is never to be lost sight of:  "Wisdom begins in wonder" -- as Plato says.

Gaitley envisions Creation in the form of a dance, where God stands back for a moment to behold His creation before drawing it towards him again.   The "Great Circle of Being" he talks about is a concept he got from Father Norris Clarke, a Thomist and one of his seminary professors.    I found a bit about the idea here if you are interested (the idea of a Circle of Being sounds new-agey, but apparently has a solid philosophical underpinning).    Certainly the idea of a journey is very resonant with tradition -- Augustine uses it in On Christian Doctrine, and one of Chesterton's largest themes is the one where you journey through the world and find yourself back at home.

Fr Gaitley writes:

there are two basic stages to the journey: first, the journey out from God and then, the journey back to God. In Latin, these two stages are known as exitus (exit) and reditus (return). Together, the “out and back,” “exitus and reditus” make a circle, the Great Circle of Being. In what follows, we’ll trace these two stages of the journey out from God and back to God 

Then he quotes Proverbs and Isaiah, both about creation and both expressing sheer gratuitous delight in the works wrought:  

• Isaiah 55: 10-12
• Proverbs 8:  25-31

He goes on to say

..... Together, these two passages reveal the exitus-reditus structure of reality as well as the intimacy, joyfulness, and delight that God finds in creating. They remind us that God did not have to create. Creation was a freely chosen overflow of love marked by, we might say again, a kind of playfulness. It really does seem like that moment of the dance, the moment of “twirling out.” It also reminds us of that brief moment of the loving gaze, that moment to take the other in with one’s eyes in a new light and, as it were, “from a distance.” I wonder if part of the reason why God the Father created in the first place was to take a “step back” to admire the beauty of the Word in a new light, namely, in creatures. For all creatures are created according to the pattern of the Word, and it’s the Word’s reflection in creatures that causes the Father to gaze so lovingly upon them.

The Border of Fairyland: : Weekends with Chesterton

I just finished Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill (I am working my way through Dale Ahlquist's Chesterton 101, and I am on Lecture 6, reading along with the books he discusses)

I am joining with Sarah at Amongst Lovely Things for this linkup.

Here is the quote for the week.  There were a lot of good quotes in the book!  



This one reminded me that there is poetry everywhere, that the "woods of elfland" infringe on our daily lives more than we know, if we can only see it.

While thinking about this quote, I tried to imagine the "border of fairyland" in something that seems ultimately prosaic and non-elf-like.  That is, housekeeping.  I think I was scrubbing down the bathroom at the time.

My first thought was that the essence of housekeeping is "keeping fairyland far away" -- that is, that ordinary housecleaning and maintaining is kind of a war against the land of Faerie, the land of the mysterious, oblique, enchanted.

Then I thought of how many times domesticity and Faerie overlap in the old stories.  The woman of the house leaves a bowl of milk for the Little Folk -- or someone goes straight from the most prosaic and ordinary of cottages, straight into the world of magic and mystery.

That made me think of  two book studies I did several years ago:

• Litany of Housekeeping
• Splendor of the Ordinary

Both of them deal with the mysterious, transcendent, religious aspect of housekeeping and the home.

When you get into "splendor" and "litany" you aren't far from the borders of elfland.   And in fact, when you get into the world of folk fairy tales, if there is anyone closer to the land of magic than a simple, wondering child, it is a housewife.  She may be sweeping away the cobwebs of Faerie with her broom, but she is definitely there, a force to be reckoned with!   

You can see this in the Bantry Bay series by Hilda van Stockum.    The story moves seamlessly from the smallest details of prosaic domestic life to the strange, eerie and humorous world of what CS Lewis called The Longaevi.  

I think the Faerie Folk take the housewife very seriously, and vice versa.   There is a definite relationship there.  

That is a consoling thought somehow, and I am going to keep it in mind as I go about my household tasks this week, and try to see the elusive glimpse of that other world as I scrub and sweep and tidy!

I think you can also see this a bit in the lives of the saints.  They did every ordinary thing well, yet they somehow partook of that bigger world, the world of mystery.   They lived in both worlds.  I aspire to that.  

Wednesday with Words: Child's Evangel

I haven't participated in Wednesday with Words before but I liked this Charlotte Mason quote and thought it was timely for the season.   

Christopher means "Christ-bearer" of course.  

You can find more Words at Ordo Amoris.  

Chari is still sick so please pray that she recovers soon!  

 Charlotte Mason, Parents and Children

Desiring the Kingdom: The Spaces of Education

Mystie at Simply Convivial is hosting a book discussion on a book called Desiring the Kingdom.

 ~details here~

I'm in.  Because I really need one more book to read (!)

And also because I seem to do better homeschooling when I have "something to love, something to do, something to think about" (Charlotte Mason).      

Since I just acquired the book a day or so ago I don't have much to write about, so I thought I would just put down some quotes I liked:

---------------------

Quotes from Desiring the Kingdom

"What if .................
.......education, including higher education, is not primarily[about the absorption of ideas and information, but about the formation of hearts and desires?
"What if ....................we began by appreciating how education not only gets into our head but also (and more fundamentally) grabs us by the gut—what the New Testament refers to as kardia, “the heart”?"

"What if...............
.......... education wasn’t first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?
"That actually is the wager of this book: It is an invitation to re-vision Christian education as a formative rather than just an informative project.
It is an invitation to what we’ll call an “adventure in philosophical anthropology”; its root conviction is that how we think about education is inextricably linked to how we think about human persons."

".....I think we’ll also have to broaden our sense about the “spaces” of education. 
If education is primarily formation—and more specifically, the formation of our desires—then that means education is happening all over the place (for good and ill)."

----------------------------

I love that phrase: 

That's almost like the subtitle of my homeschooling adventures, in some ways!

Go to Simply Convivial for more discussion.  

Weekends with Chesterton:: Folly and Education

I am linking up to Amongst Lovely Things for this post!  Sorry to inflict two posts on you in one day;  I will make sure to skip blogging tomorrow since two cords of firewood are being delivered and I will be superintending my boys as they stack it on the side porch.  

And Chari is sick;  please say prayers that she gets better soon and that her family stays healthy (or gets healthy -- I don't know if the whole family is sick or not).

Below is the familiar quote in context.  It is from What's Wrong with the World, the chapter on Folly and Female Education.    As is not uncommon when he talks about women, Chesterton is by modern standards politically incorrect, yet perceptive and acute.   In fact, I think he speaks for himself more than for the Victorian female with drooping ringlets!

There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to God; so that even now the color of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of a flower (or a firework), comes to our hearts with a kind of authority and certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or features of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes the woman—she understands. To say what she understands is beyond me; save only this, that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as run. To smatter the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in the dreadful sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference which the human soul, like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep up forever. This is that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female, drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it. She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable. She was maintaining the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

His main point in the chapter is that in instituting female education, we should not perpetuate the worst things about male education.   He makes a case for the amateur gloriously and leisurely dabbling in the liberal arts rather than the industrialized, standardized education that was becoming the common thing.  Also from the chapter:

It is all a part of the same silly subjugation; there must be a hard stick-up collar round the neck of a woman, because it is already a nuisance round the neck of a man. Though a Saxon serf, if he wore that collar of cardboard, would ask for his collar of brass.

It will then be answered, not without a sneer, "And what would you prefer? Would you go back to the elegant early Victorian female, with ringlets and smelling-bottle, doing a little in water colors, dabbling a little in Italian, playing a little on the harp, writing in vulgar albums and painting on senseless screens? Do you prefer that?" To which I answer, "Emphatically, yes." I solidly prefer it to the new female education, for this reason, that I can see in it an intellectual design, while there is none in the other. I am by no means sure that even in point of practical fact that elegant female would not have been more than a match for most of the inelegant females.

Fun to read in the context of Pride and Prejudice, where Lizzy and Darcy and Miss Bingley have a famous discussion about the accomplished female!

Dale Ahlquist writes about the quote here in Chesterton 101:

One of the most famous lines in all of Chesterton’s writings is found in this book: “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” For some reason, people puzzle on this. Or else use it to defend their own slovenly ways. But it is a ringing defense of the amateur, the person who does a wide variety of things out of love rather than one specialized thing out of mere professionalism. The person who best understands the “uproarious amateurishness of the universe” is the woman, the mother who has to be the first to explain the entire universe to a child. When the mother is pulled out of the home and made a specialist... the child is left to be raised by “experts.” Thus, both the mother and the child become narrower. And so does the whole society as the family of course is ripped apart.

Go to Sarah's Weekends with Chesterton Link-Up for more quotes from Chesterton!
Go here for a very simple and clear how-to dabble in Chesterton.   Every little bit is good!

Pray With Confidence!

Faith & Patience in Prayer


Excerpted from a very, very old book, with its cover missing,  The Faith That Never Dies or The Priest of God in the Catholic Home.   Highly recommended.........this advice is solid.

We must pray; it is the command of God; it is the clearly expressed will of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The man who prays saves his soul; he who does not pray lives without God, is no Christian, and will assuredly be lost.


But it is not enough to pray; we must pray with faith and perseverance. Sometimes men will begin to pray; but being fully persuaded that divine things are governed by the same law as human things, they immediately desire to find their answer to their prayer close within their reach. Seeing no result, they imagine that their prayer is useless, and thus fall into a state of discouragement. They do not know that prayer is an act of faith, and requires before all things that men should believe in its power, even when they perceive no immediate effects. How many earnest prayers, fully heard by God, have produced fruits for a very long time, and sometimes not until after centuries! At the last judgment, this mystery will be revealed to us, and we shall then see the marvelous effects that have been worked by Christian prayer.


Think of the prayer of Saint Stephen, when he was being stoned. This prayer wrought the conversion of Saint Paul, who was yet a Jew, and who took charge of the garments of his persecutors. Now imagine all the good that was done by Saint Paul, who converted whole nations by preaching the Christian religion throughout the world, and by instructing the faithful. And yet, may not all the good of which St. Paul was the author, and which still is developing century after century, be clearly traced back to St. Stephen, who by his prayer changed the persecutor into an Apostle? Thus, your prayers may perhaps be asked for the conversion of some young man who is living a very wild and reckless life. For this end, you pray with all your heart, recite several chaplets, visit some sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin, and make one or two good communions; after a certain length of time, very often without your knowledge, and even after your death, this young man returns to God, gives himself up to good works, cares for the poor, goes still further and becomes a priest or a missionary, converts a great number of souls, and during the course of a long life does an immense amount of good.


And is not all this the fruit of your prayer, that prayer which you were never able to see any effects, and which you were perhaps tempted to think of as useless? It is to you and to your prayers, that this young man owes his conversion, and you will share his reward. How great the loss, if you had not prayed, or if you had prayed badly!


Mothers of families, you have asked of God, in all your daily prayers, the gift of perseverance for your sons and daughters in the paths of holiness. Now, looking down the stream of time, behold them grown up and married, becoming in their turn the fathers and mothers of families, then bringing up their children in the right and Christian way; children who shall, later on, become themselves the centers of Christian homes, and thus ever on in endless succession. Mark the power of your prayer which reaches into numerous generations. Sometimes God appears to refuse what we ask of Him. Patience! The day will surely come in which we shall reap the hidden fruits of every holy effort, fruits of great sanctification for ourselves, for the long-continued prayer, apparently so barren, shall have caused us to persevere and to advance in holiness; and then, on the other hand, who can tell from how many sins, from how many occasions of falling, we may have saved the object of our prayers, though a perverse will may still form an obstacle in the path of complete conversion?



When we ask for our neighbor temporal good, health, or riches, or deliverance from some great calamity, there is yet one other striking reflection to be made. This sickness, this life of poverty, this grief, is precisely the means made use of by God to save the soul of him for whom you pray. Then is it not necessary for his true good, which is known to God far better than to you, that you should not obtain what you ask? Will your prayers therefore be lost? Far from it: they are, first for yourself, and then for your neighbor, an abundant source of graces far superior to those temporal blessings for which you have asked.



We might easily multiply examples, but the little we have said will suffice, I hope, to reanimate your faith in prayer. Pray with confidence; pray with deep human sympathy, and do not forget the counsel we have given when you lift your heart in prayer to God.


Advent Blessings,
        
                          Chari

To Remember: On the Heart and Education

"Education is a thing of the heart."

John Bosco -- Preventive System 

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”

-- attributed to Aristotle

“The question is not, -- how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education -- but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?”

  Charlotte M. Mason, School Education: Developing A Curriculum 

Ora Et Labora

         I have always thought that Saint Benedict was referring to the home gardener when he said:

 PRAY and WORK 

I am finally finding time to get out there to pull the weeds......

....it has been several weeks and they are out of control.

I thought I could drag my company out there to help.....but we have been too busy.

Willa and I finally got out there last night......see bottom picture.

I awakened to a gorgeous sunny day, with the perfect breeze.

The garden called to me.....and out I went.

(See top picture)

And there, alone with the earth, I find that lovely moment in time

where one can WORK and PRAY so well,

in the peace and quiet that the garden setting can offer.

Midsummer blessings,

                          Chari.......on this last day of Willa's visit  :(