Faith, family, and the home

spring

May 11, 2017

Blessed Eastertide! What a glorious, springy Easter we had this year! It reminded me of photos we took when I was a child, in our Easter dresses by the daffodils and crocuses in our front yard. I grew up in a church that didn't make much of Easter, but since becoming an Anglican it's become more and more meaningful to me every year. Everyone always seems to be trying to find new ways to experience things like Easter in a meaningful way, but we don't need to reinvent the wheel. The work has already been done for us; it's all there in the liturgy and the church calendar, the great tradition of two millennia of faith. We just need to step into the river and get caught in the current.

sickness, weather, lenten quietude

March 24, 2017

In February, an awful cold virus was going around and took us all out one by one (perhaps it was going around where you live, too? The one with the residual cough that lasted for like three or four weeks). Ephraim had it the worst, making my gradual night-weaning attempts fly out the window (hello all night nursing sessions!) Poor baby.

Children and Beauty

January 18, 2017

Charlotte Mason says,

About the child hangs, as the atmosphere around a planet, the thought-environment he lives in. And here he derives those enduring ideas which express themselves as a life-long kinship towards things sordid or things lovely, things earthly or divine.

I think that “atmosphere” is made up of everything that surrounds the child: the actions, moods, routines, words, and yes, even the physical things. It’s easy to assume that the only material things that matter in the raising of our children is that their basic needs are met, and to think that their spiritual formation is somehow divorced from their surroundings. If we suffer from such thinking, we must admit to our Gnosticism! As persons, we are embodied; we are physical beings.

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