Why I am here

As quoted on Magistra Mater:

[After opinion is asked--and received--about their orders, a subordinate asks Major Whittlesey]

"Why are you here?"

"Life would be a lot simpler if we could choose our duties and obligations. But we can't. We shouldn't. That's why I am here."

~ Major Charles Whittlesey in the DVD Lost Battalion

Website recommendation

I've enjoyed reading Magistra Mater's weblog on occasion over the past few months. Carol writes well, relishes interesting books and the beauty of nature, and displays a sense of wisdom in her entries. I've appreciated her recent posts of excerpts from letters written by her mother to her father.

When I first came across her site, Carol had just written an entry about her Plymouth Brethren roots, which caught my attention, having been raised at a PB boarding school.

The ever-improving path

Sometimes the coincidence of conversations and seemingly random Web or book browsing is just too, well, coincidental. A quote from A Circle of Quiet:

Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path... But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.

*Winston Churchill*

"Ever-improving"—either the path itself or the effects of the path on the person climbing it.

Path to Freedom in the news

For all three readers who still might stop by here occasionally, check out ABC Nightline tonight to see a story about Path to Freedom.

Edit 5/16/08: The story may now be viewed online.

Approved Unto God

"Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." 2 Timothy 2:15

If you cannot express yourself on any subject, struggle until you can. If you do not, someone will be the poorer all the days of his life. Struggle to re-express some truth of God to yourself, and God will use that expression to someone else. Go through the winepress of God where the grapes are crushed. You must struggle to get expression experimentally, then there will come a time when that expression will become the very wine of strengthening to someone else; but if you say lazily - "I am not going to struggle to express this thing for myself, I will borrow what I say," the expression will not only be of no use to you, but of no use to anyone. Try to state to yourself what you feel implicitly to be God's truth, and you give God a chance to pass it on to someone else through you.

Always make a practice of provoking your own mind to think out what it accepts easily. Our position is not ours until we make it ours by suffering. The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, December 15.

Homegrown Revolution at Path to Freedom

If you've not yet seen this video about the dangerous occupation of growing your own food, dangerous because you are on the way to becoming free (to paraphrase Jules Dervaes), I'd highly recommend it. It just might change your life.


For more on the philosophy behind Path to Freedom, that a step backwards is progress, read this interview with Jules Dervaes at Celsias.

Home School

Whilst rummaging in my garage for something else, I came across a file of messages from early 1994 from a LISTSERV called Faith-Learning. I was working at a Christian university at the time as a transcript evaluator, and this e-mail list gave me a glimpse into some of the higher thinking regarding educating college students.

Someone posted an article by Gerard Wegemer titled, "Thomas More on the Liberal Arts and Virtue," originally published in The University of Dallas Rostrum, Fall 1993. Thomas More, who lived in the sixteenth century, "homeschooled" his three daughters (via tutors from Oxford) and believed that, as important as the liberal arts were, "education in virtue" was primary and best achieved at home.

Wegemer writes (and quotes More):

More's favorite metaphor to illustrate education in virtue was the traditional one of cultivating the garden of one's soul. What must be planted in this garden are good affections and principles, while "the nettles, briars, and other barren weeds of pride and deceptive pleasures are carefully and consistently rooted out." [...]

True virtue is essentially a freely chosen and fervently cultivated love for the highest and most enduring goods, not for fleeting goods and passing pleasures.

Some of the ways More cultivated the "gardens" of his daughters' souls were through good conversation and the use of playful irony; daily prayers and spiritual instruction; reading and discussing books together; creative punishment; and caring for the poor.

Just a couple more quotes about the importance of conversation:

[More] saw every conversation, even about apparently trivial things, as a way of cultivating the garden of that child's soul. Not only did these conversations cultivate reflection and self-knowledge, they provided the best opportunities for planting and cultivating those precepts and principles which each soul needs. [...]

Often...family readings took place before dinner since More made a special point to see that dinner conversations were a good mixture of the serious and the entertaining. Visitors like Erasmus marvelled at how well the children could follow an argument and participate in sustained conversation; they also marvelled at the cheerful atmosphere of this large and busy household.

I admire this portrait of More, who, in spite of all the other demands on him, gave such personal importance to the complete education of his daughters.

(Add to movie list: A Man for All Seasons.)