Saturday yard saling: rummage sale season starts

Winter is a good time for church rummage sales, but there's also a bit of time for them between summer and Christmas bazaars. Today we visited two such annual events, and everyone scored something useful. Lydia found a suitcase to accompany her on an upcoming school trip; Mr. Fixit found a speaker, an 8-track player, and a couple of other fixity items.

I just found books, but a hardcover copy of Gilead and two Madeleine L'Engle memoirs seemed like pretty good rummage sale treasure.

Lila: A Novel, by Marilynne Robinson (book review)

Lila: A Novel, by Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 7, 2014)

If you've read Marilynne Robinson's earlier books Gilead and Home, you know who Lila Ames is; she's the second wife of an elderly, widowed, small-town preacher named John Ames. Gilead is his own memoir, written to their young son who will, presumably, read it when he's older. Home concerns John Ames' friend Boughton and his family. And this book is Lila's own story: where she came from, how she wandered into the old man's church, risked trusting him, and became an inseparable part of his life.

Without trying to give away too much, Lila had a very rough beginning, an alienated upbringing, and a mostly-horrible young adulthood; it's a miracle that she survived at all.  Soon after her arrival in the town of Gilead, somewhere around 1950, she "borrows" a Bible from John Ames' church, and begins reading from the book of Ezekiel: "In the day thou wast born thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to cleanse thee...No eye pitied thee." As she explores Ezekiel and, later, the book of Job, she discovers more images of loss and abandonment, and then redemption, large ideas that resonate with her own experiences. By the end of the book, life for Lila and "the Reverend" has changed in many ways; "she could make a pretty good meat loaf now and a decent potato salad." They have settled into their own version of "normal," which includes their new baby. But many questions remain, both spiritual and everyday ones; there are things that will never be known for sure, including the fate of the woman who raised Lila.  The time they will have together is also uncertain. Does it matter what can or can't be known, as long as love and grace are there? 
 
Recommended for those interested in thoughtful fiction by Christian writers. 

In this way delight (L'Harmas posts)

Some final thoughts from Laurie Bestvater's talk (I'm not cribbing here, just thinking about it)

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 Aquinas

Tomorrow: one last post about L'Harmas, Charlotte Mason, and what happens when CM homeschoolers meet up. 

A short Charlotte Mason thought

I've always liked that quote from For the Children's Sake, about asking yourself how, if certain famous thinkers sat in on your class (school, homeschool, Sunday School, whatever), would they be engaged or fall asleep?

So does it follow then that the job of a Charlotte Mason-style teacher is to make it interesting?

Yes, yes, yes...and no.  "I am not a Performing Bear," says Mary Poppins in Mary Poppins Opens the Door.

It's more like...let it be interesting.  Let it stay interesting.  Don't drain the interesting part out.

"This is an interesting planet.  It deserves all the attention you can give it."  ~~Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)