A Book of My Own by Melanie Walker

Recently I gathered my class of eleven third and fourth graders for our new “Tales” selection.  While I read aloud the first chapter of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, I was aware of the familiar but ever new hush that fills the room when the listeners, one by one, enter their own “flow”- captivated, engaged.  Bodies relax, eyes meet with a knowing nod, a delicious aroma of camaraderie and shared joy seems to seep like a slithering genie over and around the schoolroom.  The phrase “reading assignment” conjures up and carries a hint of ‘outside-in’ obligation, while this sort of reading is nothing short of a gift.

By the end of the morning’s selection, I realized that we did not know if the daughter would survive the morning.  But, our time for tales was over, and it was time to move to the next reading.  The children began to beg.  “Please keep reading.  You CANNOT stop here!” This is the scenario that teachers and parents dream about.  But the added gilding on this moment’s glory was that I was now able to hand out a new copy of the book I had been reading from to each child.   Their eyes widened to saucers.  “We get our own book? Is this one of the ones we get to keep?  Can we read ahead?”  I said that they must make a solemn vow.  With their hands veiling their faces, I asked them to repeat after me:  “I solemnly swear that if I read ahead to the next chapter, I will not reveal what I discover to anyone else in the class.”

Our little school is in its sixth year and growing at a snail’s pace.  Although we acknowledge the priority of the living book and the abundant, liberal feast, we have generally only purchased one copy of our selections for the teacher to read aloud or had class sets of titles that stayed in the room from year to year.  This year, in spite of a flailing economy and an anemic budget, we decided to take the plunge and use each child’s entire supply fee towards the purchase of personal copies of books the student would use during the year.  This, along with the purchase of beautiful materials the children could use to design their own notebooks, has added a fresh sense of personhood and honor to the atmosphere.  ‘You mean this is mine?!  I can write my own name in it?  Can I make notes in the margin?’

I was unprepared for the amount of enthusiasm this would generate.  I have noticed my students taking special care that their corner on the shelf is neat and orderly.  Affection and even a sense of reverence characterize the treatment of their books.  In our age, when the latest electronic gadget usually trumps any pen and paper it is gratifying to see this responsible posture and sense of ownership for a book.

Our dream is that when a child leaves our school, she will possess a bookshelf of all the living books she has read and pondered through her years at Red Mountain Community School.  I imagine Heroes of Asgard and Mrs. Beesly’s Stories from the History of Rome holding an equally endearing spot as Swiss Family Robinson or Little House in the Big Woods.  Owning books in a variety of genres in the areas of knowledge of God, knowledge of Man and knowledge of the Universe speaks subliminally to our appetites for all kinds of knowing.

The New York Times has published several columns this year asking serious questions about education.  David Brooks’ article, “The Medium Is the Medium” noted that when 852 disadvantaged students were given 12 books of their own choosing to take home for the summer (over the course of three years), those student’s reading scores rose significantly.  “It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact…. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library.  They see themselves as readers, as a members of a different group.”  (This was set in contrast to children whose self-perception is based on heavy doses of home internet usage.)

Long before I became a student of Mason, I read a book entitled Honey for a Child’s Heart.  Author Gladys Hunt notes that parents nourish children with milk for their bodies and honey for their spirits.  Mason’s ingenious practices insure a similar diet of  ‘milk and honey’ in a way that forms the intellect, will and loves.  We are finding that the simple practice of book ownership repeats the theme that ‘process becomes content.’  The way we do something says as much or more than what we do.  By trusting the children with the actual book we give value to the book as well as the child.

As food is to the body, so ideas are to the mind.  Real, living books are the “solid meals” that our students not only need, but hunger for.  It is not our hope that our children will leave our school with a nice bookshelf.  The real treasure will be the experience of having feasted on the books and making ideas their own.

© Melanie Walker 2010

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The Thaw by Lisa Cadora

Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Allegory of the Sciences by da Firenze

Despite the fact that we live annus domini, “in the year(s) of our Lord”, those of us who call ourselves Christians continue to label ourselves and the world as “fallen”, viewing ourselves and the world with a suspicious and wary eye, lamenting and apologizing for our ever-prevalent sinful natures, and strategizing ways in which it can be tamped down, manipulated, rebuked, politically consensus-ed or will-powered away. How can this be?

I think of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, in which one reads the phrase “the thaw has begun”. I think of Jesus’ parable of the leaven in the loaf, the treasure in the field, the wine in the wineskins. I think of a song from our Catechesis of the Good Shepherd atrium: “The Kingdom of God is neither yea here, nor yea there. The Kingdom is among us!” The signs are everywhere! Can’t you hear the “drip, drip, drip” of the Sunshine melting the ice? Yet we continue to identify so much more with the Fall of Man rather than with the Redemption of Man. We’re keen on ferreting out the imputed sin of Adam, but reluctant to embrace the imputed righteousness of Christ, the new Adam.

The question asked at our last conference — “Do constructivists believe in God?” — reveals the assumption, commonly held by Christians, that ideas that emerge from the “secular” realm are automatically suspect, especially when they challenge existing paradigms our faith communities hold as sacred. In the case of constructivist thought, we too quickly assume that the realization that humans have limited and necessarily skewed access to reality must question, at its logical end, the existence of an objective reality. While this may be the unfortunate conclusion of some constructivists, we impoverish ourselves by not standing beside them, seeing what they see, and adjusting our own existing ontological and epistemological doctrines to account for what a fellow image-bearer has happened upon.

Knowledge is visited upon those who bend their knees and bow their heads to Him and to those who don’t. It’s the nature of grace, and the nature of living in this “now-but-not-yet” time of the tares growing up with the wheat. Do we believe that there will be a harvest? Do we believe that, in spite of the presence of tares, the wheat is flourishing as well? I choose to, and I think that Charlotte would agree.

Consider this from Parents and Children:

In the first place, we divide education into religious and secular. The more devout among us insist upon religious education as well as secular. Many of us are content to do without religious education altogether; and are satisfied with what we not only call secular but make secular, in the sense in which we understand the word, i.e. entirely limited to the uses of this visible world.
The Great Recognition––Many Christian people rise a little higher; they conceive that even grammar and arithmetic may in some not very clear way be used for God; but the great recognition, that God the Holy Spirit is Himself, personally, the Imparter of knowledge, the Instructor of youth, the Inspirer of genius, is a conception so far lost to us that we should think it distinctly irreverent to conceive of the divine teaching as co-operating with ours in a child’s arithmetic lesson, for example. But the Florentine mind of the Middle Ages went further than this: it believed, not only that the seven Liberal Arts were fully under the direct outpouring of the Holy Ghost, but that every fruitful idea, every original conception, whether in Euclid, or grammar, or music, was a direct inspiration from the Holy Spirit, without any thought at all as to whether the person so inspired named himself by the name of God, or recognised whence his inspiration came. All of these seven figures are those of persons whom we should roughly class as pagans, and whom we might be lightly inclined to consider as outside the pale of the divine inspiration. It is truly difficult to grasp the amazing boldness of this scheme of the education of the world which Florence accepted in simple faith.
This great recognition resolves that discord in our lives of which most of us are, more or less, aware. The things of sense we are willing to subordinate to the things of spirit; at any rate we are willing to endeavour ourselves in this direction. We mourn over our failures and try again, and recognise that here lies the Armageddon for every soul of man. But there is a debateable land. Is it not a fact that the spiritual life is exigeant, demands our sole interest and concentrated energies? Yet the claims of intellect––mind, of the æsthetic sense––taste, press upon us urgently. We must think, we must know, we must rejoice in and create the beautiful. And if all the burning thoughts that stir in the minds of men, all the beautiful conceptions they give birth to, are things apart from God, then we too must have a separate life, a life apart from God, a division of ourselves into secular and religious––discord and unrest. We believe that this is the fertile source of the unfaith of the day, especially in young and ardent minds. The claims of intellect are urgent; the intellectual life is a necessity not to be foregone at any hazard. It is impossible for these to recognise in themselves a dual nature; a dual spirituality, so to speak; and, if there are claims which definitely oppose themselves to the claims of intellect, those other claims must go to the wall; and the young man or woman, full of promise and power, becomes a free-thinker, an agnostic, what you will. But once the intimate relation, the relation of Teacher and taught in all things of the mind and spirit, be fully recognised, our feet are set in a large room; there is space for free development in all directions, and this free and joyous development, whether of intellect or heart, is recognised as a Godward movement (emphases mine; Mason, 1904).

Few Christians would eschew the discoveries of 21st century medicine or modern marketing, not because we acknowledge that all knowledge—that of both secular and sacred truths—come from the Holy Spirit, as we learn from the fresco in the Spanish Chapel in Florence, Italy via Charlotte Mason and John Ruskin. We do this because our highest ideals are utilitarian, not moral. We live the “separate life, the life apart from God, a division of ourselves into secular and religious.”

We’re quick to embrace discoveries about the physical world—the visible world as the definition of ‘secular’ tells us—yet we shrink back when it comes to less empirical, more abstract categories such as epistemology and ontology– the study of what constitutes knowledge, and how it is that things exist.  But “the Thaw” is all-pervasive. “Drip, drip, drip …” Do you hear it?

We are the body of Christ now, here on earth, to care for, to heal, to speak the truth, to bear each others’ burdens, and to continue to cultivate and develop what was interrupted by The Fall. I adjure you, fellow Christians and CM devotees, to look for the wheat amongst the tares, to trust that good and redemption are the rule of the day now that Christ has come and we are in annus domini—the years of our Lord—living by faith in our efforts to steward the earth and fellowship with the Father.

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