You cannot stop God from speaking. Jesus said that if the children's praises were silenced, the rocks would cry out in their place. I read that although Bibles were confiscated in Russia under Communist rule, the authorities forgot to ban some of the country's great novelists, like Dostoevsky. "For example, a character in one of his novels meets a young peasant woman with a baby. When the baby smiles for the first time, the woman makes the Sign of the Cross. When asked why she made this sign, the woman answers: ``All the joy that a mother feels when she sees her child smiling for the first time... God feels every time He sees... a sinner praying to him from the bottom of his heart." (found here)
God's voice has a way of capturing our hearts, inspiring deep reactions and also actions. We learn to listen for that voice, and to see it as well. We may seem to hear and see most clearly at certain times, at certain places, or through the words of certain authors that seem to bring us through magic doorways (sometimes found at the back of old wardrobes). Mark Patrick Hederman calls those times and places "thresholds, where the very pores are kept open between the visible and the invisible."
And as teachers, what does all that have to do with the way we want students to learn?
We encourage the relationship between authors and readers. We direct students to the doorway, but we don't shove them through it.
We use lessons as an instrument for building relationships.
We allow grace to come as and when it will. "Grace is not so poor a thing that it cannot present itself in any number of ways,' writes Marilynne Robinson in Gilead.
We count on delight.
And in this way delight is necessary for happiness. For it is caused by the appetite being at rest in the good attained ~~ St. Thomas AquinasTomorrow: one last post about L'Harmas, Charlotte Mason, and what happens when CM homeschoolers meet up.
1 comment:
I love listening for whispers from God although sometimes He needs a megaphone to reach me.
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