Love2learn Gathering

It's funny how hopping from one thing to another (California trip, Chesterton conference and Love2learn Gathering) have made me kind of quiet on the blog. There's just too much too blog about right now.

But really, the dash from one thing to the next left me in the middle of processing the last thing and thus there's many things from the California trip that I haven't had the chance to blog about yet - like a lovely visit to Melissa Wiley and friends in San Diego and a sad, but yet beautiful funeral of a sweet little boy that I attended while visiting my in-laws in Santa Paula.

I only put together a few of my thoughts on the Chesterton conference (including a post on Geir Hasnes' talk that I didn't manage to quite finished and subsequently unpublished) before our wave of Love2learn visitors began arriving. It was really a quite incredible week/weekend and it was amazing to see God's hand in the planning. (My father-in-law commented afterwards that he was amazed at how well we were doing with all that we had going on, but I had to explain that I had a particular "method" that made everything work out well. For a month or so before our trip to California, I worked on an article on hope and trust! It was good for me and something I need to be reminded of over and over again - particularly as I tend to get hit with a wave of depression and doubt AFTER good and beautiful things like our gathering.) We had a family from Oregon and two families from South Dakota join my local reviewers from Love2learn for a weekend of socializing, an incredible fireworks show, an amazing barn dance, an awful lot of mosquitoes and a bit of real work too.

Kathy Bridge, Elizabeth Yank, Mary Daly and I are talking through what is important in good reading; making distinctions (for the purposes of reviewing and organizing things on Love2learn) between literature and fiction and things like that...



It wasn't all work! Ana Braga-Henebry and Suchi Myjak enjoy a game of Scrabble.

And speaking of Literature, Suchi brought this wonderful quote from Dorothy Sayers' Creed or Chaos to illuminate our discussion:

The only Christian work is good work done well. Let the Church see to it that the workers are Christian people and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work, whether it is Church embroidery, or sewage-farming. As Jacques Maritain says: 'If you want to produce Christian work, be a Christian, and try to make a work of beauty into which you have put your heart; do not adopt a Christian pose.'

He is right. And let the Church remember that the beauty of the work will be judged by its own, and not by ecclesiastical standards. Let me give you an illustration of what I mean.

When my play The Zeal of Thy House was produced in London, a dear old pious lady was much struck by the beauty of the four great archangels who stood throughout the play in their heavy, gold robes, eleven feet high from wing-tip to sandal-tip. She asked with great innocence 'whether I selected the actors who played the angels for the excellence of their moral character?'

I replied that the angels were selected, to begin with, not by me but by the producer, who had the technical qualifications for selecting suitable actors - for that was part of his vocation. And that he selected, in the first place, young men who were six feet tall, so that they would match properly together. Secondly, angels had to be of good physique, so as to be able to stand stiff on the stage for two and a half hours, carrying the weight of their wings and costumes, without wobbling, or fidgeting, or fainting. Thirdly, they must be able speak verse well, in an agreeable voice and audibly. Fourthly, they must be reasonably good actors.

When all these technical conditions were fulfilled, we might come to the moral qualities, of which the first would be the ability to arrive on the stage punctually and in a sober condition, since the curtain must go up on time, and a drunken angel would indecorous. After that, and only after that, one might take character into consideration, but that - provided his behaviour was not so scandalous as to cause dissension among the company - the right kind of actor with no morals would give a far more reverent and seemly performance than a saintly actor with the wrong technical qualifications.

The worst religious films I ever saw were produced by a company which chose its staff exclusively for their piety. Bad photography, bad acting, and bad dialogue produced a result so grotesquely irreverent that the pictures could not have been shown in churches without bringing Christianity into contempt.

God is not served by technical incompetence; and incompetence and untruth always result when the secular vocation is treated as a thing alien to religion.

I love it!

P.S. For me, physical activity can be very helpful part of shaking off the shackles of doubt. For example, today I learned how to ride a tandem bicycle with a certain blind relative, who hasn't been on a bicycle in about 25 years. Woohoo!!!

Tolkien on Beowulf with a little help from Lewis Carroll

This is way too much fun not to share (from Tolkien's essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics")...

It is not surprising that it should now be felt that a view, a decision, a conviction are imperatively needed. But it is plainly only in the consideration of Beowulf as a poem, with an inherent poetic significance, that any view or conviction can be reached or steadily held. For it is of their nature that the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture, flitting from one tum-tum tree to another. Noble animals, whose burbling is on occasion good to hear; but though their eyes of flame may sometimes prove searchlights, their range is short.

Beowulf and Strep

That's pretty much what we've been up to this weekend.

Two parents and three kids on antibiotics, but I was well enough today to take Gus to our lit discussion (on Beowulf this afternoon). Ria and John listened in via Skype. (Made for a very interesting discussion! They listened in and typed their responses which were read aloud by two girls who were taking care of the lap top. It was often hard to tell whose opinions were whose - which was quite funny!)

One of the nice things about being sick (and it's way too cold to go out and do much anyway) is that we had the leisure to spend a LOT of yesterday reading aloud various translations of Beowulf, watching some pertinent parts of a literature series we own from the Teaching Company and the Story of English series from the library.

Ria and Gus had listened to the Seamus Heany translation on audio (we picked this up at a rummage sale somewhere along the way). Then, yesterday, I read aloud the Bethlehem Books edition. AFTER that, I realized that I hadn't read anywhere near the whole thing and didn't have anything else in the house. Fortunately, I discovered a very decent translation online, which was quite enjoyable as a read-aloud.

We delved a bit into the connection between Tolkien and Beowulf and dug up some rather interesting-looking links (not a lot of time to read through them yet, though).

Overall, I think it was a great start and I hope that many of the students will be inclined to read the story again. Certainly the connection with Tolkien helped a lot. Next on my list to read is Tolkien's essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" which we unsuccessfully looked for on the web last night. It does turn out that one of my students had a Beowulf book (the Heany translation as a matter of fact - which we only own on audio) that has this intriguing essay in the back. She lent it to me and I can't wait to dive in.

I really like this way of studying lit together. With Beowulf (and Sir Gawain too), we all (three or four or five families) read the books on our own, did some research as we were able and brought our ideas and findings together for the discussion.

The Gawain Green Game

We're reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (translated by J.R.R. Tolkien) for our teen literature discussion this week. Like Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse, it's a story/poem that begs to be read aloud and so I've been doing just that.

According to our T.C. lecture on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it's written in "alliterative verse". Put more simply, we've been delighting in the fun alliteration (repeating of the same first letter in numerous words) and the kids have made a game of me asking them randomly what letter showed up in the previous line. Bernie (almost 8 years old) has taken a particular delight in this and it's rather funny how it's kept everyone interested in the read-aloud. (Even Kate is attempting to get in on the act and has made some actually progress in figuring out what sound comes first in a word).

And now the storyline has gotten just a little more complex. I think I'll take a peek before I share it with all of them. :)

Some Quotes and Links about Literature

"The highest outcome of an interest in literature is a finer interest in life; and bad literature as well as good may throw a light on life, if we have learnt to know light from darkness."

G.K. Chesterton (found in the most recent issue of Gilbert Magazine)

The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

C.S. Lewis' Introduction to St. Athanasius "On the Incarnation"

This is almost an accidental, automatic fault. It can be overcome, as Fr. Groeschel points out, by reading good literature and opening your eyes to the plight of the poor and intentionally entering into solidarity with the poor by divesting one's self of some of the incidental benefits of a devout life.

"Two Traps for the Pious"

"Two Traps for the Pious"

I found this post at Robert Gotcher's Classic Catholic (with a number of thoughts from a book by Fr. Groeschel) both interesting and enlightening.

Unfortunately piety has a bad name, primarily because there are a lot of people in the world who try to conform their lives to the manifest will of God in a way that simply kills charity in their souls. We've come to call them pharisees and we are fools if we presume the proper pronoun is "them" rather than "us."

I also thought it was fascinating that Fr. Groeschel recommends great literature as one of the potential antidotes to a lack of charity (I think because it both gives us an opportunity to "walk in someone else's shoes" for a time and tends to help us better understand human nature). This makes sense to me, but I had never thought about it in quite this way before.

This is almost an accidental, automatic fault. It can be overcome, as Fr. Groeschel points out, by reading good literature and opening your eyes to the plight of the poor and intentionally entering into solidarity with the poor by divesting one's self of some of the incidental benefits of a devout life.

Read the whole post here

This also reminds me that I've read and not-yet-reviewed an excellent book of Fr. Groeschel's called The Virtue-Driven Life. He covers each of the theological virtues (faith, hope and charity) and cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice) in detail of a very practical and understandable sort. I particularly appreciated his distinctions between each virtue regarded naturally and supernaturally.

Manifestation of God's Love - A Great Literary Example

In our teen catechism group, we've been discussing how people can be manifestation of God's love to others. This was a significant topic in Pope Benedict XVI's Deus Caritas Est and Sacramentum Caritatis. I came across a lovely example of this in Uncle Tom's Cabin. George is a runaway slave who has been welcomed into a Quaker farmhouse...

It was the first time that ever George had sat down on equal terms at any white man's table; and he sat down, at first, with some constraint, and awkwardness; but they all exhaled and went off like fog, in the genial morning rays of this simple overflowing kindness.

This indeed, was a home, - home, -a word that George had never yet known a meaning for; and a belief in God, and trust in His providence, began to encircle his heart, as, with a golden cloud of protection and confidence, dark, misanthropic, pining, atheistic doubts, and fierce despair, melted away before the light of a living Gospel, breathed in living faces, preached by a thousand unconscious acts of love and good-will, which, like the cup of cold water given in the name of a disciple, shall never lose their reward.

Curiouser and Curiouser

I keep thinking about Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, a lot. I read it aloud to the older kids this summer and since picked it up for them on audio tape (they've listened to it a lot - Gus actually has a routine where he recites parts of it in a Gollum voice - it's pretty funny!).

I don't ever remember having a book "grow" on me in quite this way before. I'll try to explain more of the whys and wherefores some time later.

In the meantime, I'd like to share that the Library tree is a great success so far. They've sold about half of the books already and have asked for some additional ornaments! I'm going to include some of Melissa Wiley's Little House prequels and some picture book biographies in the new list (I'll post the list sometime in the next few days).

I'm off to clean the house for our December teen discussion night tomorrow and I have to re-read the Gospel of Luke for the occasion. Happy first Sunday of Advent! (even if it is a little early)

Death Comes... A Beautiful Scene

There was one chapter in Death Comes for the Archbishop that particularly moved me. I want to preface this by saying that, although Latour is a great character, Cather makes him very personal; someone we can really relate to. One December night, during a time of coldness and self-doubt,

"he was lying in his bed, unable to sleep, with the sense of failure clutching at his heart. His prayers were empty words and brought him no refreshment. His soul had become a barren field. He had nothing within himself to give his priests or his people. His work seemed superficial, a house built upon the sands. His great diocese was still a heathen country. The Indians travelled their old road of fear and darkness, battling with evil omens and ancient shadows. The Mexicans were children who played with their religion."

Wow - who could't relate to that? Moms in particular, I think, tend to really knock themselves out and yet always feel guilty in many of these same ways. Isn't it easy for us to think that our job is very small and we still can't seem to succeed? What a beautiful, comforting picture to see that self-doubt is a normal (at least in the sense of common) part of attempting to accomplish what is actually an enormous job (remember Chesterton here too, of course).

But this is only the beginning of this beautiful segment. Father Latour felt a longing to go to the church to pray and yet fought it for a time before "despising himself" for avoiding it just because it was cold. It turns out there was someone waiting for him - an old Mexican woman who was a slave in a Protestant American home. Her owners were very hostile to her faith and wouldn't allow her near a church or priest. But in the winter, she slept in the woodshed and this once she got up the courage to go to the church. He brought her into the church to pray and learned that it had been nineteen years since she had been inside a church. Cather beautifully portrays her deep devotion and faithfulness and the impression this makes on Latour. You have to read this chapter yourself as it is impossible to do justice in a summary, but here is a little more to leave you with for now.

Never, as he afterward told Father Vaillant, had it been permitted him to behold such deep experience of the holy joy of religion as on that pale December night. He was able to feel, kneeling beside her, the preciousness of the things of the altar to her who was without possessions; the tapers, the image of the Virgin, the figures of the saints, the Cross that took away indignity from suffering and made pain and poverty a means of fellowship with Christ. Kneeling beside the much enduring bond-woman, he experienced those holy mysteries as he had done in his young manhood. He seemed able to feel all it meant to her to know that there was a Kind Woman in Heaven, though there were such cruel ones on earth. Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness. Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.

Not often, indeed, had Jean Marie Latour come so near to the Fountain of all Pity as in the Lady Chapel that night; the pity that no man born of woman could ever utterly cut himself off from; that was for the murderer on the scaffold, as it was for the dying soldier or the martyr on the rack. The beautiful concept of Mary pierced the priest's heart like a sword.

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

It's funny how busy family life can sometimes be quite complimentary to reading a book somewhat slowly, but savoring and appreciating it. This week John is in Taiwan again (on very short notice), Gus went to Hannibal, MO (Mark Twain's birthplace) with his grandparents and in the midst of this, those left at home had a wonderful, if brief, visit from the Henebrys. (I have met Ana, who is on my love2learn board, before, but we finally got to meet the whole family and we felt like old friends in no time - our common Portuguese background didn't hurt - finally someone in the Midwest who knows what Linguica is!).

Anyway, these busy times seem to be good for my enjoyment of good books as well. A little time to chat about favorites with friends over a glass of wine, a little quiet time after the kids are in bed - whatever it takes.

I seem to be reading a string of books about priests in the wilds of the Americas lately. First Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory and I just finished Death Comes for the Archbishop yesterday. Now I'm already digging into John O'Brien's Saints of the American Wilderness, which is looking quite good (readable and with good scholarship from what I can see so far). I want to write more about The Power and the Glory later (so much to write about, so little time - and so much more I'd like to read), but for now I want to remember some of my impressions from Willa Cather's wonderful story about Bishop Jean Marie Latour, the first bishop of New Mexico.

Latour came to New Mexico in 1851. He arrived in his new diocese after nearly a year of travel - starting in Cincinnati, down the river to New Orleans, by boat to Galveston, across Texas to San Antonio and into New Mexico along the Rio Grande valley. At this time, a decade before the Civil War, the railroads ENDED at Cincinnati! His journey was filled with accidents and injuries and when he finally arrived in Santa Fe after all of these difficulties, the Mexican priests refused to recognize his authority!

Thus begins the long and interesting careers of Bishop Latour and his faithful friend Father Joseph Vaillant.

One thing that struck me about the book was the remarkable connection between the author and Bishop Latour in their love and appreciation of what is good and beautiful about this wild and untamed land and its native people. This gives the book a wonderful flavor and fullness that makes it unique and .... persuasive.

Here is a sample of this "flavor" that I so enjoyed...

In New Mexico he always awoke a young man; not until he rose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older. His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one's body feel light and one's heart cry "Today, today," like a child's.

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.

Putting on False Faces

I'm back to reading Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. I thought the following was interesting, particularly after seeing the movie Crash...

The truth was, Jacinto liked the Bishop's way of meeting people; thought he had the right tone with Padre Gallegos, the right tone with Padre Jesus, and that he had good manners with the Indians. In his experience, white people, when they addressed Indians, always put on a false face. There were many kinds of false faces; Father Vaillant's, for example, was kindly but too vehement. The Bishop put on none at all. He stood straight and turned to the Governor of Laguna, and his face underwent no change. Jacinto thought this remarkable.

Diane Ravitch on Literature

I've been slowly making my way through Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn by Diane Ravitch for many months. It's important, worthwhile, eye-opening and even good for the occasional laugh (certainly many gasps of astonishment). But this paragraph is simply delightful to read, particularly coming from a modern day teacher and thinker...

I began this quest with a strong belief that schools are supposed to lay a foundation for love of literature by exposing children incrementally, based on age appropriateness, to the best writings of our common language and, to the extent possible, to the best writings from other cultures. There are so many superb novels, short stories, poems, plays, and essays to choose from that it is impossible for any student to read them all. But this fact makes it all the more important that teachers make the effort to identify the writers and works that will broaden their students' horizons beyond their own immediate circumstances and reveal to them a world of meanings far beyond their own experiences. Great literature is "relevant" not because it echoes the students' race, gender, or social circumstances, but because it speaks directly to the reader across times and cultures. A child who is suffering because of a death in the family is likely to gain more comfort from reading a poem by John Donne or Ben Jonson or Gerard Manley Hopkins than from reading banal teen fiction about a death in the family.

I finished two Chesterton books today...

You don't know how amazing this is for me, who tends to think of myself as someone who has difficulty finishing books; someone who had difficulty talking much in my college classes (seminar style) and got completely lost in Senior Philosophy.

Anyway, I finished reading The Man Who Was Thursday aloud to Ria and Gus this afternoon. This was much more engaging and engrossing than I ever expected. Certainly it will be worth additional re-reads in the future (and I should say that at this point in my life, I seldom have the desire to read a book twice). This experience also reminds me of how helpful reading stories aloud can be to the reader and the listener(s). It often brings out more meaning (I think of this especially with Shakespeare which we've read as a group on occasion) and makes things more interesting as well as promoting conversation afterwards.

The other book I finished (these things happen when you end up reading three Chestertoon books at once)is Orthodoxy. These are hard books to review and sum up, though I will make an attempt to do so at some point. For now, I'll take the easy way out and share a quite lengthy quote (part of which I quoted in a post late last year after discovering it on another homeschool mom's website):

I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only miserable about everything - they were quite jolly about everything else. I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at peace about everything - they were at war about everything else. But if the question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos, then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody streets of Florence than in the theatre of Athens or the open garden of Epicurus. Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides, but he lived in a gayer universe.

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This is what I call being born upside down. The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstacies, while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again he knows it. Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down in a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heaven is too loud for us to hear.

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this resepct, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.

On a tangentially related topic - you know your keyboard is going when the word "earth" consistently comes out "ear".

..."a voice that made men drop drawn swords."

We're reading Chesterton's The Man Who was Thursday aloud (well, I'm reading it to Ria and Gus), and I loved that phrase so much I just had to share.

Evelyn Waugh on Education

Yesterday I found this interesting little snippet from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (written in 1945 though the novel is set mostly in the 1920s and 30s) which makes me want to read more of Waugh on education...

(he puts these words in the mouth of a priest)

"The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed." (from Part II of "Brideshead Deserted")

I always found C.S. Lewis' introduction to St. Athanasius On the Incarnation interesting because of his exhortation to read old books in order to take ourselves out of the limitations of modern errors. It is part of the reason I have enjoyed Chesterton so much as well, I think and makes me that much more interested in what Waugh has to say.

Some thoughts on offense and conversion

I woke up this morning before the children and decided not to just surf the Net. Age quod agis. But what should I do? There are dishes, laundry, website work, etc.

I finally settled on a little spiritual reading and pulled out Cardinal Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity. Good choice. Just what I need right now.

Here is a little story I want to share from the book. I love how Ratzinger shares a Jewish story in a book introducing Christianity. That in itself is interesting and wonderful for a lot of reasons. But here is the story (in the first chapter on "Belief in the World of Today.")

An adherent of the Enlightenment [writes Buber], a very learned man, who had heard of the Rabbi of Berditchev, paid a visit to him in order to argue, as was his custom, with him too and to shatter his old-fashioned proofs of the truth of his faith. When he entered the Rabbi's room he found him walking up and down with a book in his hand, wrapped in thought. The Rabbi paid no attention to the new arrival. Suddenly he stopped, looked at him fleetingly and said, "But perhaps it is true after all". The scholar tried in vain to collect himself - his knees trembled, so terrible was the Rabbi to behold and so terrible his simple utterance to hear. But Rabbi Levi Jizchak now turned to face him and spoke quite calmly: "My son, the great scholars of the Torah with whom you have argued wasted their words on you; as you departed you laughed at them. They were unable to lay God and his Kingdom on the table before you, and nor can I. But think, my son, perhaps it is true." The exponent of the Enlightenment opposed him with all his strength; but this terrible "perhaps" which echoed back at him time after time broke his resistance. (pgs. 20-21, cited from M. Buber, Works, Vol. III, Munich-Heidelberg, 1963, p. 348)

It contains a great deal of truth in itself, but also reminds me of some other tidbits about conversion - like Evelyn Waugh's "Tug on the Thread" from Brideshead Revisited and even this little piece I was reading today from Barb Nicolosi's blog. Her blog has a tendency to keep my perspective in check. She's a little feisty, perhaps, and I'm sure some take offense at her strong opinions. But I think it's easy today to become a too-comfortable Christian with lots of leisure to be offended by things. We're not going to win the culture war by being offended and boycotting organizations that offend us. A particular organization may choose not to offend us in the future, which isn't a bad thing, but no hearts will be changed and moved by this.

I think we need, on occasion, to swallow some of that offense in order to look at what other people need and see what we can do to change the culture, even in a very small way. If we can stand having an open, honest discussion with someone who doesn't believe, or who doesn't see the world the way we do - one in which we do a lot of listening and trying to understand - we can perhaps just plant a little seed. But maybe that seed will turn out to be a mustard seed, eh?

This to me is part of the joy of homeschooling. I can teach my children (with the assistance of God's grace through prayer and the sacraments) to enjoy and appreciate the fullness of the Church's teachings and the Unity of Truth, the "marriage" of faith and reason. They can appreciate Science partly because it is learning about God through his creation (and partly because it's fun and interesting - why should we be surprised at that when God is ALL goodness). They can see how great works of literature, sometimes inadvertently, will tend to confirm timeless teachings of the Church. They can build their own "skeptometer" in order not to be swayed by everything they read, but to "test everything and hold fast to what is true" (I'm paraphrasing here). And perhaps someday, they will go out into the world and be more interested in planting seeds (ESPECIALLY mustard seeds! [grin] ) than being angry and frustrated that other people out there don't agree with the Church already.

Much Ado About Shakespeare

We had a Shakespeare reading at our house yesterday afternoon. About 25 of us (ages 10 through adult, including a blind relative with her parts in Braille) read Much Ado About Nothing followed by a spaghetti dinner/potluck. We sure had a blast.

Usually John and I pawn the big parts off to others in the group, but we had a smaller group than usual (this is our fourth Shakespeare reading over the course of the last year or so), so we did Benedick and Beatrice. What fun! (And I had just enough breaks to the manage the food in the kitchen.)

It's amazing how much Shakespeare comes to life in this informal setting (with a wide variety of reading talents). My ten year old son and his cousin of the same age enjoyed listening to the entire play (and had small parts to read themselves). They certainly are made to be read aloud rather than to oneself.

Using the handy-dandy medium of e-mail, it's an easy party to plan and I assign parts ahead of time so that they can be read-through beforehand. It's easy to print up copies of the play from the web (we cut and paste into Word and then each family member highlights their own parts and prints their own copy). Try it some time. Great experience and a lot of fun.

By the way, I should credit some of my tutors from Thomas Aquinas College, who hosted Shakespeare readings for students on occasion, for sparking the idea in the first place. For those, we weren't assigned parts, people would just grab a part and run with it.

I'm reading the Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton...

In order to review the corresponding "Catholic Great Book Study Guide" by Julie Collorafi (Guadalupe Press, available from Catholic Heritage Curricula)

I haven't tackled the study guide yet, but I'm halfway through the ballad and I'm totally loving it (and I don't consider myself to be very poetically inclined).

It is written in the form of an epic poem - the sort that would have been performed aloud to an audience in days gone by.

The story is about King Alfred battling the Danes in 878. It is an interesting mix of history, legend, and allegory. I'm especially enjoying the mix of truth and beauty in many "nuggets" of wisdom within the ballad. I keep reading passages aloud to my daughter (we will be studying it more throughly together next year) and she likes it too.

Here are a few samples...

"The men of the East may spell the stars,
And times and triumphs mark,
But the men signed of the cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark. " (230)

[I first came across this quote in Shadow of the Bear by Regina Doman.]

"When God put man in a garden
He girt him with a sword,
And sent him forth a free knight
That might betray his lord;

He brake Him and betrayed Him,
And fast and far he fell,
Till you and I may stretch our necks and burn our beards in hell.

But though I lie on the floor of the world,
With the seven sins for rods,
I would rather fall with Adam
Than rise with all your gods." (305-310)

"That on you is fallen the shadow,
And not upon the Name;
That though we scatter and though we fly,
And you hang over us like the sky,
You are more tired of victory,
Than we are tired of shame." (330)

"Our monks go robed in rain and snow,
But the heart of flame therein,
But you go clothed in feasts and flames,
When all is ice within;

Nor shall all iron dooms make dumb
Men wondering ceaselessly,
If it be not better to fast for joy
Than feast for misery." (350-355)

"Therefore your end is on you,
Is on you and your kings,
Not for a fire in Ely fen,
Not that your gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things.

For our God hath blessed creation,
Calling it good. I know
What spirit with whom you blindly band
Hath blessed destruction with his hand;
Yet by God's death the stars shall stand
And the small apples grow." (370-375)

What Brideshead Revisited character are you?

You are Lady Cordelia Flyte. You are loving and
loyal. You're not a sentimental dowdy
however: you have a lively sense of humor and
keen intellect.
What Brideshead Revisited character are you?
(found this on Barb Nicolosi's blog)