Only two months since the last entry…
Homeschooling Journal
Lucy’s BD party was Sunday (the 5th), so cleaning, baking, pizza making, and socializing all occured.
Lots of dress-up, including one “queen” being chased by one “tiger”.
The manger scenes are out, and were in constant use for a couple of days. Lucy remarked several times that she “can’t wait for baby Jesus to come”, as the whole thing is a little empty without Him.
Trip to the zoo with Dad for Lucy’s actual birthday.
“The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint–virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if the wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. ’Blah blah blah,‘ hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by whole sale desires.”
“There was a time when good academic qualifications guaranteed a job, but not any more. One reason is academic inflation. In the next 30 years, more people worldwide will be gaining academic qualifications than since the beginning of history. But as more people get them, their currency value is falling sharply. A university degree used to be an open sesame to a professional position. The minimum requirement for some jobs is now a Master’s degree, even a PhD. What next? But there is a second problem. Many companies are facing a crisis in graduate recruitment. It’s not that there aren’t enough graduates to go around; there are more and more. But too many don’t have what business urgently needs: they can’t communicate well, they can’t work in teams and they can’t think creatively. But why should they? University degrees aren’t designed to make people creative. They are designed to do other things and often do them well. But complaining that graduates aren’t creative is like saying, “I bought a bus and it sank”.
“There is a natural and accepted view that one of the main purposes of education is to prepare young people directly for a place in the labour market. Obviously, general education should do this. But there are two complications. First, thinking of education as a preparation for something that happens later can overlook the fact that the first 16 or 18 years of a person’s life are not a rehearsal. Young people are living their lives now. What they become and what they do later depends on the attitudes and abilities they develop as they are growing up. Linear assumptions about supply and demand can and do cut off many potentially valuable and formative experiences on the grounds of utility.”
Merton is speaking of seeing his father in a hospital bed, unable to speak and disfigured by a brain tumor. He is 14 or 15 years old, and has no faith or relationship with God to speak of.
“Let us consider three typical examples: the aeroplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive. In a civilized community, in peace-time, anyone who can pay for them may use these things. But it cannot strictly be said that when he does so he is exercising his own proper or individual power over Nature. If I pay you to carry me, I am not therefore myself a strong man. Any or all of the three things I have mentioned can be witheld from some men by other men–by those who sell, or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of producion, or those who make the goods. What we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by. Again, as regards the powers manifested in the aeroplane or the wireless, Man is as much the patient or subject as the possessor, since he is the target both for bombs and for propaganda. And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those alread alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercied by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
So I apologize for that. Life is crazy, even though “busy” might not be the most appropriate term. Here’s the update, and I promise that I’m going to make an honest attempt to get back on the blogging wagon.
I’m frantically trying to finish two sewing projects, plus the mending of diapers, except that we managed to leave all our cloth diapers, except the ones the girls were wearing when we left, at home. And this week has taught me, in case I needed reminding, that I hate disposable diapers. There is a whole post in itself there. This is why I feel busy, despite spending most of my days at home on the couch. (Ok, not most, but as much as I can manage.)
This post made my day. Craig’s dad is growing strawberries, and we have been the beneficiaries of his bounty for the last month or so. We are exploring new and exciting ways to use them all, but Lucy still likes to eat them plain, preferably daily or twice daily. Craig’s dad has beautiful, neat, raised, mulched rows for his plants, but neglected strawberries for ground cover, now there’s an idea! The book list at the end of the post is great, too. I’m going to have to head to the library for a copy of Jamberry. That was one of my favorites growing up.
So I just finished The Long Loneliness which is a kind of autobiography Dorthy Day wrote back in the fifties. I highly recommend it, first of all. The first section about her early life is fascinating, the section about the birth of her daughter is moving (and should be required reading for mothers), and her depiction of Peter Maurin, who practically drove her to start the Catholic Worker movement, left me wondering why he hasn’t been canonized yet. There will be much, much more on The Long Loneliness as I re-read it in the coming months, but we started looking again at Maurin’s Easy Essays, and here is one for a taste. I suspect a similar feeling of unconnectedness to my experience in the world is what has caused me to drift away from my interest in formalized theology. (No offence intended, studiers of formalized theology, it’s just that I have found God more easily in my garden than in Aquinas lately.)
“The focus of our days is the dinner table, whether, as often happens in the winter nowadays, it is just Hugh and me or I am cooking for a dozen or more. When the children were in school I didn’t care what time we ate dinner as long as we ate it together. If Hugh were going to be late, then we would all eat late. If he had to be at the theatre early, we would eat early. This was the time community (except for the very small babies) gathered together, when I saw most clearly illustrated the beautiful principle of unity in diversity: we were one, but we were certainly diverse, a living example of the fact that like and equal are not the same thing.”
Loyola Kids Book of Heroes: Stories of Catholic Heroes and Saints Throughout History by Amy Welborn
The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks (Penguin Classics) by Unknown
The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day by Robert Ellsberg
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the by Sam Kean
