For the Family's Sake E-Book

Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 481

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999

Beschreibung

For many of us the word home brings warm thoughts and happy memories—far more than the dictionary's simple definition of "a place of birth or one's living quarters." For many of us, home is where the heart is. Yet it is even than that. It is the secure environment that allows our hearts to develop. A haven of growth, quiet, and rest. The place where we love and are loved. Sadly though, this kind of home is beginning to disappear as our busy society turns homes into houses where related people abide, but where there is no "heart." With a desire to help you nurture your family's heart, Susan Schaeffer Macaulay presents a clear blueprint for constructing a home that survives the variety of situations that you face in modern life. With Jesus Christ as the foundation, using tools such as common sense, realism, and traditions, you can build a secure, loving environment where every member of your family can flourish.

Leseprobe

For the Family’s Sake

Copyright © 1999 by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

Published by Crossway Books a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by USA copyright law.

Cover design: David LaPlaca

Cover illustration: Debra Chabrian

First printing 1999

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture taken from The Holy Bible: New International Version®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Scripture verses marked PHILLIPS are from The New Testament in Modern English, translated by J. B. Phillips © 1972 by J. B. Phillips. Published by Macmillan.

Scripture references marked KJV are taken from the King James Version.

Scripture verses marked AMP are from the Amplified Bible. Old Testament copyright © 1965, 1987 by the Zondervan Corporation. The Amplified New Testament copyright © 1958, 1987 by the Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Every effort has been made to contact owners of copyrighted material quoted in this book and to secure permission.

__________________________________________

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Macaulay, Susan Schaeffer    For the family’s sake : the value of home in everyone’s life /Susan Schaeffer Macaulay.            p.       cm.    Includes bibliographical references.    ISBN 13: 978-1-58134-111-9 (alk. paper)    ISBN 10: 1-58134-111-3     1. Home—Religious aspects—Christianity.    I. Title.  BR115.H56M33       1999  248.4—dc21                                 99-33107

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This book is dedicated , with thanks to the Lord and with love , to Philip and Abigail.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface

1 Who Needs a Home?

2 Home—the Best Growing Ground for Children

3 Free as a Bird, Dutiful and Humble as the Angels

4 This Is Where I Put My Feet Up and Thank God

5 The Home’s Weight-Bearing Beams

6 Taking Time and Care to Create the Home’s Atmosphere

7 The Glory of the Usual or Jack of All Trades

8 The Infrastructure of Routine

9 Of Beds, Balance, and Books

10 Contentment, Thanks, and Enjoyment

11 Choose Wisely and Leave Time for the Daily Rhythms

12 Early Days, Vital Days

13 Homes and Life in Community

14 A Look at the Everyday All Around Us—All Year Long

Appendix

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Without the work of Elaine Cooper, my friend and the administrator of Child Light, this book would not have been possible. We all thank you.

Thank you also to my husband, Ranald, to my children, and to my grandchildren for their support and encouragement at a personal cost to themselves.

Thanks to L’Abri Fellowship, which has allowed me to devote so much time to writing.

Thanks to the members of the Charlotte Mason College Association, who welcomed Elaine and me to their reunion in Ambleside. We appreciate their generous friendship and the many conversations with us that helped us to understand their student experience at Scale How and the Parents’ National Education Union (PNEU) schools they taught in during their professional careers.

Thanks to Miss Eve Anderson for the generous gift of her time and energies in helping us all as we seek to apply the PNEU ideas in homes and schools today.

Thanks to Phil Matthews for the hours spent telling me about Amy Carmichael and Dohnavur and also to Margaret Wilkinson for the long telephone conversations and the loan of letters. Thanks to the Dohnavur Fellowship office and Jean van der Flier for her help.

I thank my mother and my father for my early childhood and for so much more than could ever go into a book. Thank you, Nancy Barker, for my beloved Sunday school class when I was four and five years old. Her teaching forged for me a lifelong link with the Bible.

PREFACE

This is a book about life at home. Just as the use of the word homemaker has fallen into an uneasy past, the concept of having time for rich home life is also being relegated to history. I’m referring to a time when friends would congregate in threes or fours on front porches to laugh and chat while children played outside in the twilight, when neighbors knew each other and would pause to exchange words and events over the back fence.

HOME. Do we have to give it all up? We, whoever we are—the unmarried professional, the single person devoted to a vocation teaching inner-city children, the parent left alone to bring up children, the widow wondering how to go on and make a life that still has shape and meaning, the elderly person making decisions about everyday life patterns, the postgraduate student facing several stressed-out years, the Christian worker with never a spare moment, parents of all sorts and in different circumstances—we all need a fresh look at what we are aiming for at home.

Women ask whether it is worthwhile to give generous time and energy to the home. Is it necessary? And what should the home look like? Is it possible to find a map that shows? Can we see a stabilizing infrastructure that will clarify our priorities as we wade through details?

What do the most vulnerable of persons, little children, need? In our real-life circumstances, how can we give them a satisfying childhood? What does that look like?

This book will address these questions and more. Of course, because human life is anything but obvious, getting to the answers takes some telling! The questions are like icebergs floating in a deep sea. To give worthwhile answers, you have to look deeper than the obvious. Is there a big picture beyond the details, a reality below life’s surface? Christian believers think so. If the Judeo-Christian Scriptures are reliable, they offer a view of our lives that explains matters and directs us. Hopefully, we can discover a balance in our practical lives that is life-giving and works well. For hundreds of years people have found life-giving ideas this way.

In a short book like this, the big view can only be sketched briefly. Many questions can’t be answered. There is an appendix at the end of the book with suggestions for further reading and a list of addresses that may be useful to you. There you’ll also find a short description of people and organizations mentioned in the book— Charlotte Mason, Amy Carmichael, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, and L’Abri Fellowship.

1Who Needs a Home?

If you were to stop and ask a miserable refugee, “Who needs a home?” he or she would not think it a question worth answering. The cold winds of winter and gusting rain make the covering of canvas provided by a relief agency a poor shelter, and it is too noisy for conversation anyway.

Turn to a sophisticated young business person in any city, and you might be rewarded for using such an old-fashioned word with a supercilious gaze. That person might also be speechless. “Home! ” the gaze seems to exclaim. “That word isn’t in my vocabulary or life. Nor is marriage. My parents used those words, and they are retired in a backwater.”

The dictionary tells us that home is the place where we live, whether we are single, married, young, or old. The definition also includes the idea of a family or another group living in a house. Further, it says that home is the place we are at ease.

What is a tree without its roots held deeply in the soil? What is a cup without its saucer? What are letters if they aren’t put into words and sentences? What is a child’s life like if there is no home and no family to belong to?

Most people agree that children need stable, loving homes. Are homes then a temporary arrangement for their care and development? Or, as many people seem to think, do homes only go with marriage? Novelist Jane Austen didn’t think so. She lived in a little Hampshire village and made her home with her sister.1 This gifted writer stayed unmarried, but it never prevented her from having a balanced life within the ease of home and community. She wrote:

Our Chawton home, how much we find Already in it to our mind; And how convinced that when complete It will all other houses beat That ever have been made or mended With rooms concise or rooms distended.2

We all need to think hard, or we may find ourselves rootless and drifting whatever our age. For many the very words family, home, commitment, and neighborhood convey agonies, fears, and questions. Others dream romantically about a warm, settled, creative, and satisfying life. But they find that nothing in the cold light of the everyday, the ordinary, can even begin to resemble the dream. They can become hopeless, bitter.

On top of this, for children there are special considerations. As fewer of the routines and less of the atmosphere of everyday life can be taken for granted, the resulting confusion has caused uncertainty about how children thrive. They are like little seedlings, and they do need a particular environment to do well. The more we’ve learned about children’s development, the more we realize that the hours and days from birth onward are the most formative in the whole of life. We now know that whether the child’s brain will be fully utilized or not depends on early care. We know that children’s emotional balance for life grows out of early relationships.

The main reason I am writing this book is that we all need homes. And, as we are made in a particular way, this life and home must suit human beings. There is a basic pattern that fits us, holds us, serves us.

It is too easy to make excuses about why we cannot follow these patterns. It is easy to excuse ourselves from working at our everyday lives with the words, “if only . . .”

“If only I were married.”

“If only I were married to another person.”

“If only we could leave this miserable home and have a nice place.”

“If only my spouse had not died/left me.”

“If only I had more money or a better job.”

“If only I had more time/energy/ideas.”

“If only I’d had a good childhood model.”

Homes are for everybody—single persons or families with children, young or old, people with good jobs or bad ones. Homes are not a romantic idea to dream about wistfully; homemaking needs to be put into practice as a priority. A good home life is too basic a human need to whine and fuss about with the plaintive words, “if only.”

It is essential that older adults have the rootedness of a home. Probably those who are single have an even greater need to consider what goes into making home life for themselves and “neighbors” or friends than do families for whom homemaking might seem more obvious. For instance, widows often have to be reminded to cook nutritious meals again for themselves after being left alone. It can seem hardly worth it “just for me.” We more naturally follow good patterns when we are caring for others.

Sometimes life is too hard, and we go down. And that experience should find its place in this book too, for that is real life. It is also real life to find a way to go on. Today we expect so much that many of us are dissatisfied with simple basics in every area. We can also be confused about what matters and what does not. Commercial and media pressures mislead us there and breed discontent.

It is helpful to remember that we don’t have to do everything or have everything. What are the basics exactly? What is most important when we can’t have it all or do it all? What ingredients make up a good home? I believe that a mixture of common sense, realism, traditions that have worked, and a look at how different kinds of people have made a success of life will provide an excellent map to help us in our individual circumstances. Today we have so overcomplicated and stressed our lives, minds, and bodies with the “too much” that we’ve lost a “pearl of great price”: the basics of wholesome everyday life at home. A balanced life.

As we rush along this way and that, we may find an echo of our own dreams when we read the following Irish poem:

AN OLD WOMAN OF THE ROADS

O, to have a little house! To own the hearth and stool and all! The heaped-up sods3 upon the fire, The pile of turf against the wall!

To have a clock with weights and chains And pendulum swinging up and down!A dresser filled with shining delph, Speckled and white and blue and brown!

I could be busy all the day Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor, And fixing on their shelf again My white and blue and speckled store!

I could be quiet there at night Beside the fire and by myself, Sure of a bed, and loath to leave The ticking clock and the shining delft!

Och! but I’m weary of mist and dark, And roads where there’s never a house or bush And tired I am of bog and road Amid the crying wind and the lonesome hush!

And I am praying to God on high.And I am praying Him night and day, For a little house—a house of my own— Out of the wind’s and the rain’s way.4

PADRAIC COLUM

Pity the tiny child who never has the peaceful comfort of the “humdrum” everyday home life described here. Watching such a child is like seeing a plant designed by the Creator for a sunny patch in the garden put instead into a chemical dish under a glaring light. The plant may sprout and put out leaves, but the roots wander miserably looking for . . . home.

This book is intended to be a practical help in creating homes that work well in a variety of circumstances. The special thrust is to encourage us all gladly to take the time and effort making a home requires. There are few shortcuts on the essentials—homemaking has to be a chosen priority in life for men and women. To create welcoming homes requires thought and then action.

Many kinds of “winds” blow on all of us in our generation. There are multitudes of lonely, tired, weary souls tramping through various sorts of mires or bogs. Although Prozac-type medications help in medical depressive states, no quick pill can substitute for the satisfaction of a contented life based at home. Why not look back and harvest the wisdom of past days? Our human makeup, needs, and nature have not changed. And so here is a book about the foundational place our homes have in our lives.

The primary example and references included will be to young children’s needs in home life. Home is the first part of our educational path; it is the place where our characters and personalities develop.

Writing about such a subject, I knew I’d draw on my own life, thoughts, and ideas. My husband, Ranald, and I have been making a home together since our marriage in 1961—thirty-seven years at the time of writing. And of those years, thirty-six have included children. We still aren’t finished with parenting! We had four children born into our family. During the years while they were fairly young, we also included other children occasionally who needed the shelter and the care of an established home. The three who shared our family life like this stayed for times ranging from three months to one and a half years.

Then twelve years ago two children for whom we were guardians were suddenly bereaved and needed “stand-by” parents to swing into action. Thus we found ourselves once again being mother and father to young children when our previous youngest one was a teenager. So it is that while some of our friends have empty nests, we have steadily continued the routines that go into making a family home. Of course this has been of benefit to us all. We were not tempted to give up on homemaking! Such a personal lifetime story could not help but become part of this book.

However, I’ve wanted to refer to other wise guides also. It was nineteenth-century educator Charlotte Mason’s writings that first gave Ranald and me a theory that explains how a child’s life “works” in practice and a clear educational philosophy. Charlotte Mason valued home as the primary setting for a child’s life and relationships. Just as she said that “education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life,” so we can say that the home is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.

As I write, I feel that I am saying, “Miss Mason, let us together sit down in the drawing room of your home in the Lake District.” The evening light comes in through the window; the peace of the lake and mountains is refreshing. “This is a good place to talk together about our primary concerns and insights.”

“First things first,” I can almost hear both of us saying, a century apart. “One of the most important aspects of life is the home. And then communities of homes.”5

My imaginary conversation between Charlotte Mason in, say, 1898 and Susan in 1998 will be in these chapters. Other people whose writings, choices, or examples are applicable will also “join in.”6

I hope that a clearer map for our homes and lives will emerge. May we be rooted and live generous lives. That is good.

2Home—the Best Growing Ground for Children1

Before plunging into this book about home and the lives of people who make them, I would like you to have a picture of the home and community I lived in as a little girl. An author’s thinking comes out of a life, and my life will especially be part of this book.

The 1940s neighborhood where I rode my tricycle along sidewalks and played with friends in the vacant lot is now part of inner-city St. Louis, Missouri. In that era my friends and I were not warned not to trust grownups we didn’t know. In fact we were told the opposite. We were instructed to obey grownups along the way and turn to them for help if we were hurt or in need.

Our mothers hung out their washing in the yards while we played. We had a lot of freedom—going in and out of each other’s houses wherever our play led us, occupying long free hours in our own ways. We were, however, always under the caring eye of some grownup in the neighborhood.

Our homes were different. On one side was a Catholic family with one adopted child; on the other, a Jewish home full of children. We believed different things as families, but we as children had more in common than we had differences.

Neighborhood children were called in to supper at about the same time. We’d sit down with family arranged around the table. Most of us were read to before bedtime. There was no television. If we did wrong, we had to go and apologize to the neighbor. Sometimes this was very hard. I’ll never forget my despair at having to face my neighbor and apologize for picking her tulips!

When we were old enough, we walked to school. There the teachers expected the same sort of obedient behavior as our parents and neighbors. I, like so many others, loved school. There I could learn how to read; this I wanted to do very much. I also enjoyed art and games.

Our lives had form and freedom—routines and moral framework on one hand and yet a rich and generous childhood of safe freedom with many hours of play, fun, friendship.

Church was important, for my dad was a pastor. But I didn’t like sitting still at all. In fact, although graying Grandma Susan now enjoys certain church services immensely, there are still times when I can find myself more like the four-year-old Susan and can struggle to follow what seems a dreary grind!

Yes, I do understand myself as I look back. When I was really small, I sometimes deeply and urgently longed to stand up in that quiet place and make a huge, exciting noise, shouting and surprising everybody into good cheerfulness. One of our playmates, the young son of an elder, did call out in a clear, shouting voice in the middle of the hush of Communion. He then made a rapid escape, crawling out under all the pews. From then on, starting in my fourth year until much later, he was my hero.

Although the church service was a weekly test and trial for me (and more for my poor young mother as she coped with an unruly child), I was blessed with the immensely interesting and foundational Sunday school teaching of Nancy Barker. She told stories vividly, and when we acted them out, I felt as if I too had been called and was following the Lord Jehovah Himself.

Indeed, her teaching is still something I mull over with thanks. It was life-changing for one naughty little child. How can you not be affected for life when you had actually marched out of Egypt, had walked through the towering Red Sea pushed back for a path to escape from the terrible might of Pharaoh, and a few weeks later had found yourself camping under Mt. Sinai? Any child who has experienced that before the age of five or six obviously still shivers when remembering the holy cloud fearfully blotting out the higher levels of the mountain.

Why, I’d even had to watch out so that the family animals did not stray too near, or they’d have been zapped dead! And I was old enough to know what death meant in reality, unlike children today who encounter death only on TV screens. In my St. Louis life, I’d known people who had become ill. I had visited them with my dad in the hospital and later had gone to a few funerals. In that place and culture, I had sometimes seen the dead body.

Yes, of course in the Israelite camp I’d kept well away from that mountain so powerful that mere mortals died if they strayed too near. But Moses was especially called by God into the cloud, and so he was protected as we watched him disappear from sight. We still trembled though as we watched him trudge up to the mountaintop.

Upstairs in church there were recompenses. One of the elders always shook our hands after church, and he’d leave a yummy wrapped caramel in our palms. Also, my dad would sometimes let me choose one of the hymns for the whole church to sing. I loved the organ and singing. Usually I’d choose “Holy, Holy, Holy.” I liked to be “in” the brightness of the early morning rays approaching the tremendous might of the Lord God, just as Nancy Barker and the hymn described. God is powerful and yet all-shining and beautiful with light and total goodness and love.

Of course, when I started singing, I knew my full-hearted voice was praising God in another place as well as in the city church with its pews. I’d have a sort of “Narnia excursion” as I sang, joining in with the wonderful throng about the heavenly throne. I didn’t see them very well, but I “saw” their light, and I loved sharing in the wonder of doing something along with those who were in heaven right now. For I knew that reality was not only in everything I could see. The unseen was all around, just behind the edge of what is visible here. And I knew that my final destination would be through the seen barrier, right into this singing, enjoyable, great place. In fact when I was small, I’d pray I could get there before the next dreaded visit to the dentist!

Anyway, while I remembered Moses and the great throne in the heavenlies at church, I came to know the everyday Lord Jesus within the intimacy of a truly homelike home. My mother often sang songs of gladness about the goodness of Jesus as she worked around the kitchen. I could see He made her glad. Or on Sunday evenings when Dad went back to church, we’d be alone in the kitchen listening to a program on the radio that had lots of Christian singing. I think that because it was a special once-a-week program, it never disappeared into background noise for me. We’d sing along, happy together and cozy.

One warm spring St. Louis evening, Mother started whirling and dancing gaily as we both sang about the greatest love in all of life—our sweet Lord Jesus. This love sparkled and was enjoyable and gave gladness. I laughed as I joined in the dancing with a joy that can still bubble up. I’ll always remember this lovely young mother, the atmosphere and home I grew up in, and that special scene.

Other times I had nightmares or was sick in the night with croup or measles. But this meant all-night comfort when my mother sat near me. Sometimes my dad would stumble into my bedroom and rock me in his arms in the rocking chair as he sang his favorite song, “Jesus loves me, this I know.”

There is so much more that I could tell, for I was taught Bible stories clearly, even in those years when I was six years old or under. So I knew this Lord Jesus by word, by song, by hugs and comfort, by forgiveness and faithfulness and meals all together, blessed with prayer.

A childhood home like this is a very great and godly gift. Such a legacy does not come from perfect parents, thank God. In fact perfect parents could not prepare us for a life that is to be full of our own and other people’s failings. My parents were always open about the fact that they weren’t all that good. Anyway, all children see parents as they are!

How could anyone dare to suggest or say that working at the huge task of making a home and carrying on through years and years of ups and downs is not one of the very few truly worthwhile ways to spend our energies and gifts in human life?

We cannot start with homes. We have to begin with the people who make and live in them. We are part of a generation and culture that has forgotten the very framework and the truth of who persons are and why being human is special and wonderful. With this loss, personal self-understanding also disappears, along with a sense of purpose.

Having forgotten or turned aside from these roots, we’ve gone on to throw out the fruits that grew on the tree of this understanding. Our culture has changed rapidly. Fundamental knowledge of right and wrong is disappearing, and in the subsequent confusion, people sell their souls for a “mess of pottage.” Our schools, workplaces, houses, and apartments are filled more and more with lonely people seeking someone who will love them and not just use their bodies. Counselors are kept fully busy as persons seek “self-worth” and try to decide who and what they are.

Good relationships grow out of the lives of persons who have roots and who are living in a balanced way. Relationships have always needed perseverance, compromise, consideration, priority, enjoyment, forgiveness, and unself-centeredness. So of course, with so many persons unsure of who they are, relationships dwindle and start evaporating like the morning mist on a hot day.

Without a clear sense of purpose or firm self-confidence, myriads of young people have given in to peer pressure and to pressure from the money-making media to give up their fresh virginity and try to win the crowd’s acceptance. Too often adults have stopped protecting these immature young persons, and many youths have suffered the long-term abuse of having been pushed into trading their souls and bodies for someone else’s temporary satisfaction. I think girls have suffered the most abuse, as resulting pregnancies have frequently been terminated by powerful adults who override the teenagers’ maternal feelings.

We have also witnessed the disappearance of trust and neighborly goodness in epidemic proportions. Often because of the parents’ fear, children today are not allowed to walk to school alone, not allowed to play Cops and Robbers around the neighborhood in the dusk and finish with catching fireflies. Many of the elderly people endure terror as they live alone, and they walk as quickly as they can with sideways glances when they go anywhere.

Children no longer have the security of knowing that the houses on the streets where they live are mostly “all-day homes”— homes peopled by known neighbors and friends. Children may, in fact, only know the inside of their own home, and for too many that is a lonely place as well.

In Rochester, Minnesota, a few years ago I saw a leaflet for parents telling them what a child should be told to do when they go home to the empty house after school. “Don’t touch the stove.” (So no hot drink on a bitterly cold Minnesota winter day.) “A young child should have several telephone numbers to call.” There is a daily surge on the nation’s telephone system as schools close for the day. That surge is the nation’s children calling a parent, usually Mom. A phone call is different indeed from Mom’s lap, her welcoming comfort and preparation of food, her meeting children’s needs! These children experience fear too.

I am writing this because there is a primary need in human life. We all need a home. Home is the place we return to when we are old enough to go out. For a baby and toddler, home is the world. Home, the place where a person belongs. The place where we each live the rhythm of life with its joys and duties. A shelter, a growing place; a place to be alone and private, to share friendship, fun, and conversation; the place for quiet rest and sleep; the place we love.

We need input on what is essential for making a home for ourselves, other adults, our young, and our elderly. Amid the welter of advertisements and fragmented points of view confronting us, we need to sit down to think while we let confusion clear. Often someone is trying to make us spend money. Or people have a political agenda. Or they are destroyers of reasoned, balanced, whole thinking. We are left with ideas that are not usable or clear.

In contrast, it is possible to make and enjoy a home that is “good enough” in spite of flaws. Good enough for what? Good enough to provide a home that, as Charlotte Mason said, “would be the best growing ground for children.” A good-enough home too for contented life for any person of whatever age. We all need a place for the creativity of life to take root and flourish. We need a home ground that is secure.

Yes, just as a house needs its infrastructure, so homes need certain basic patterns. Yet as long as the necessary basic routines and patterns are in place, all sorts of variations and adaptations will grow. In such a diverse world, to be good growing places or living places homes must adapt to actual persons, places, and situations. There is no one model. But certain qualities will be found in all these good-enough homes. What are these elements? How do we make good homes for ourselves and/or our children?

Charlotte Mason was a single woman. In contrast I have been married since I was young and have had a family to care for as the top priority in all the many interesting responsibilities of my life.

Not much about Charlotte Mason’s childhood is communicated in her writings or in books about her. But we find enough to know that her early life was in what today would be termed “disadvantaged” circumstances. Her great advantage was a loving home where, among other things, books were read aloud to her. Thus, like many others, we find a great person coming from a situation where all needed courage just to survive. As for Charlotte, she enjoyed a great love of life always. The light and strength of that still shines on when we get to “know” her from her books.

I enjoyed a secure childhood with respected parents. But although so different from Charlotte Mason’s early life, mine was not the scene of ease and plenty people expect today! Charlotte and I both loved and trusted the Lord God as the center of our lives. We both have understood that this is not an imaginary or mythical hope but the unifying truth that explains the mystery of all reality, all that exists. We accepted (and I still accept) the claims of Christ as revealing to all persons, including ourselves personally, the love and “rescue” of God. We believed that this was not “got up” as one mere human idea among many such ideas, but that God’s Word, the texts of the Old and New Testament, are a true communication from the God who exists, a God who actually “is there.” We both based our lives and work on this belief, as have the countless numbers of believing Christians in history before us.

Of this Jesus, Charlotte Mason wrote in the introduction to her book The Saviour of the World (Vol. 2): “That ‘He is Lord of all,’ the dominion, supremacy, the universal authority of our Lord appears to be the salient idea in this second volume.” She wrote the book in poetry form because she thought that form would be more vibrantly influential than prose in her readers’ lives. Later on in the book, she explains the only way this knowledge is learned:

Once more; The Scriptures search ye— These are they Which, line on line, tell out the history Of Jesus, Virgin-Born, of men denied. . . . 2

She points us to the source of this knowledge—the Scriptures, God’s Word. When Charlotte Mason, who so valued historical knowledge, uses the word history, she means just that—something that happened in space and time.

Her biographer Essex Cholmondeley writes, “The love and knowledge of God, of Jesus Christ the Saviour of the world, of the Holy Spirit as supreme educator of mankind, these themes are never absent from her thoughts.”3

At the beginning of this chapter we read, “Any attempt to tell the story of Charlotte Mason must lay stress upon that ‘life hid with Christ in God’ upon which she based her teaching. . . .” And a bit further on: “There was only one word underlined in the prayer book which Miss Mason used: ‘This I know’ (Psalm 56:9).”

Hers was not just a belief in a distant intellectual truth; her beliefs were part of her life. She gave her practical, everyday life a lot of thought. This way her routine included the spaces needed to practice the presence of God—time to read His Word, ponder it, and pray. She set aside her very best hour of the day for “Bible reading and earnest prayer.” She chose the time when she said, “I feel quite fresh,” so that she could give the Gospel “that full gaze of the mind we call attention.”4

Rain, snow, or shine would find Charlotte Mason walking down to the village parish church for morning and evening services every Sunday. The rest of the day was also a true “day of rest unto the Lord,” which was a delight.

My own life has also been based on the central truth/belief in the historical Judeo-Christian teaching. Trying to put it into practice is a lifelong challenge! When I was eighteen, the reason I allowed myself to look toward marriage with Ranald was because I knew he meant it when he wrote, “I have set my face like a flint because the Sovereign Lord helps me.”5 That was to be our life’s base, road, light, and help. For me, the thought of marriage could only be considered with such a person.

When our oldest daughters were doing their A-level exams,6 I was able to write a book about Christian belief for their generation.7 Their peers, like mine, asked then and still ask lots of questions. The majority of people do not believe that Christianity could have the authority of truth. When the Christian faith is respected at all, it usually is viewed as an experience of “personal faith” in some unclear myth-like belief that, people think, can vary. The content per se doesn’t matter—”but it is nice to have faith.” For many people this vague conception has now given way to the hopeless idea that there is no truth at all! In contrast to this, understanding Christians have throughout history believed that “in the first place, Christian faith turns on the reality of God’s existence, His being there.”8

“True Christian faith rests on content. It is not a vague thing which takes the place of real understanding, nor is it the strength of belief which is of value.” “The true basis for faith is not the faith itself, but the work which Christ finished on the Cross.”9 This Jesus, Son of the living God, was born a flesh-and-blood person so as to win “mercy to me, the sinner” (as Christians have prayed for nearly 2,000 years now, and all have meant the same thing).

There is a wonderful unity of thought and understanding of life among these believers over two millennia. Often we are only struck by the diversity, or we have been scalded by corrosive arguments between groups of believers. Of course, it is in our collective history that the purity of truth again and again is clouded over through incorrect interpretations and practices.10 We do tend to go down side lanes, forgetting essentials; we add rules and ideas. Sometimes even the basic core of belief was/is obscured.

However, the believer who honors God’s Word as holy truth and His Son as an actual historical person has more in common with other believers than he or she has differences. The Judeo-Christian view of history means that there is a “before,” “present,” and “after” in space and time. We all learn from those who have walked ahead of us, even if only to disagree with some details in their ideas or practices. But we all regard God’s Word as His speaking/ telling us the truth; the Bible is (or should be) our shared, unchangeable foundation.

This viewpoint is now past history for the majority of people in the Western world. We live in a post-Christian culture. When C. S. Lewis gave his inaugural lecture at Cambridge University,11 he called attention to this transformation. He first spoke of that earlier cultural shift from paganism to Christianity that took place as Antiquity gave way to the Dark Ages. This is where we find the fall of the Roman Empire, the invasions by barbarians, and the coming of Christian belief to Europe.

Lewis points out that our ancestors thought this “christening of Europe” was irreversible. Instead we are witnessing “the opposite process.” He discerns three major periods in our history—the pre-Christian, the Christian, “and what may reasonably be called the post-Christian.” The coming of this last stage has made a “momentous difference” in our culture. Values have changed; new values have in turn changed our lifestyles, and our whole society has been transformed.

According to Lewis, it is wrong to think that “Europe can come out of Christianity . . . and find herself back where she was. . . . A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce.” What we have in this post-Christian world, Lewis argues, is far worse than paganism.

You may wonder why I’m quoting from a university lecture while beginning a book dealing with the most everyday, ordinary concerns in life—home life and the children in our homes, especially in the early years. A good question!

The profound truth is that the way we as persons live every day is based on our belief about who we actually are and what life is about. For instance, if I am an accident of probability in a universe with no rhyme or reason and no right and wrong in an objective sense, then how am I to live? What will a culture be like when people believe that there is no truth, no purpose, no meaning—that there are no moral absolutes?

This kind of thinking devalues life to such an extent that many younger people (and older ones too) now lack motivation and la joie de vivre (the joy of living). Holding this life-denying post-Christian view, many are ignorant of the value and joy of having an everyday life rooted in a home and community. The ordinary for them becomes boring or like a prison. The media and advertising reflect and intensify this warped view. Is it any wonder such life-cheated persons (for so they are) cannot enjoy simple delights and satisfactions?

Charlotte Mason was finishing her work in the first part of the twentieth century. She died in 1923. She saw the agony of World War I and the growing confusion of thought. Because of her beliefs, she was not disillusioned. For if there is truth, people can always enjoy with integrity the goodness and glory of God and His creation. In this way, individuals can return to the original “marriage” with their Creator. They can experience the true gold of abundant life itself. Their lives can be redeemed.

So can cultures be redeemed. If enough people live according to the truth of who they are in relation to God and His goodness, then goodness spreads like a light. It can grow again like a spring after the harsh winter of disaster.

Like all other believers, Charlotte Mason, Susan, and indeed C. S. Lewis thought (and I am still here to put that into the present tense!) that everyday, ordinary life lived faithfully is where the glory of God is best reflected—in our homes, communities, jobs, our art, charitable enterprises, and so on. Of course, truth is told and believed first (truth has content), but after that comes the actual living, being, and doing.

Ordinary home life matters for everyone. How we arrange for children’s lives matters terribly. Starve them physically, emotionally, or mentally; cheat or abuse them in the formative days, and we will throw away their opportunity to develop properly. We can and will destroy lives. And this is a most terrible thing. Not only will their personal lives be damaged, but if that damage involves enough young human beings, the culture will become distorted.12

Most of us now feel we live in distorted communities. Many people are already so scarred that they can no longer enjoy the simple things of life—such things as nature, a good conversation with friends with laughter punctuating thought-provoking discussion, a meal enjoyed in leisure, the company of a child, the peace and quiet of gazing at the afternoon sky as one rests after work, lingering over a cup of tea. For C. S. Lewis, it was a tramp along lanes with a friend and a welcome pint of beer at the village pub along the way. For Charlotte Mason, it was also a row on the lake or the joy of seeing the first flowers of spring. For all of us, it can be the company of great minds and interesting lives through books.

These sorts of joys are another reason I link Charlotte Mason, the pioneer in education, with myself in order to write on our combined viewpoints about home, childhood, and life itself. We both always found special refreshment in the beauty of nature. This love of nature was not only a personal feature of the educator’s life, but she guided children and their teachers to appreciate the natural world too. One hundred years apart in time, she and I both have enjoyed the glory of the Hampshire countryside.13 We have soaked up the song of the skylark over the Downs.14 We have tramped through bluebells in woods near Alton.15

In my childhood I had enjoyed myriads of wild flowers in the Alpine meadows I loved.16 In Charlotte Mason’s time, English hedgerows were likewise jeweled with a rich variety of color. She wrote vividly descriptive books about this Hampshire countryside.17 Ranald and I with our children were to crisscross the same paths a hundred years later. Only after that did we discover Charlotte Mason.

I, like Charlotte, enjoy children. We have appreciated children as valuable persons—different from each other, fascinating, often with amazing thoughts. We both believe that the care and education of children is one of the greatest tasks any human being can have.

Both Charlotte and I had a desire to work with children. At eighteen years of age, she went into teacher’s training at a time when this was a new initiative in the United Kingdom. I went at eighteen to a college for occupational therapy near Oxford with the goal of specializing in the care of children with special learning needs.

Charlotte was unable to finish the training as a resident in the college, possibly due to financial restraints or her fragile health. She went to teach in a small school in a seaside town on the south coast of England.

My plans changed, and I withdrew from my college after my theory exams, as I was by then engaged to be married. I taught a class of English-speaking children in a Swiss school that year—children aged four and a half to twelve in one class. I also taught high school biology plus Bible classes for all ages. Then Ranald and I were married and blessed with the birth of children.

Charlotte Mason taught and loved the children in her first school. Many of her ideas were formed there. In her “free” time, she carried on with her studies to finish the courses sent to her by the London college—we’d call it distance learning today. So she accomplished her work for the exams and certificate from the Home and Colonial Training College in London.

Much of Charlotte Mason’s childhood education had been at home, as was usual at that time. Her mother and father taught her for most of her childhood, although she also attended a “board” school for a limited time and was probably a monitress18 with some teaching experience before she went to college at eighteen. As we saw, this was also a fairly brief spell, for she finished the course “by correspondence” while teaching; most of her higher education was self-taught.

I went to school first until seven years of age in the United States of America. (And once again for a year when I was twelve.) Otherwise, I was in small classes in Switzerland taught entirely in French. However, at the age of thirteen, I developed rheumatic fever. From that time until I was seventeen and went to the University of Lausanne (to matriculate in the Ecole de Français Moderne), I taught myself from an excellent school course that came in the mail. First I studied this much-loved Calvert School course19 and then later high school correspondence courses from the University of Nebraska.

In fact it was through the use of the lesson manuals on my own that I developed the discipline of study. My experience brought the satisfaction of self-taught accomplishment and a growing love of learning for its own sake rather than to make a teacher happy. Thus Charlotte and I both profited from self-motivated learning—an ongoing habit in life! Like her, I know its value, and I desire that children in my care should likewise love learning and books.

Charlotte Mason spent time living in the home of a friend who had children. Therefore she knew what it is to be a loved and intimate member of such a family. She wrote in her Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education:

While still a young woman, I saw a great deal of a family of Anglo-Indian children who had come home to their grandfather’s house and were being brought up by an aunt who was my intimate friend. The children were astonishing to me; they were persons of generous impulses and sound judgment, of great intellectual aptitude, of imagination and moral insight.20

Charlotte next described a particular incident and her own reaction to it:

Such incidents are common enough in families, but they were new to me. . . . I had an elementary school and a pioneer Church High School at this time, so that I was enabled to study children in large groups; but at school children are not so self-revealing as at home. I began under the guidance of these children to take the measure of a person and soon to suspect that children are more than we, their elders, except that their ignorance is illimitable.21

Thus in her clear analysis of what is necessary for a strong educational framework, method, and life and of how children (and all of us) learn with understanding, she realized that it is in the family home that children can best be seen for what they are—persons. She knew that the home is fundamental for a child; it is the first priority in their life and development. She gave lectures and wrote books to encourage parents to give thought and time to creating good homes for their children.

Charlotte Mason also developed a clear educational philosophy. After much lecturing and writing, she had an ever-growing influence in England. Many parents22 found guidance for their families through her teaching. It changed their lives; they saw their children benefit. They urged her to train teachers. Finally she moved to Ambleside, a village surrounded with hills in the Lake District. Here in a rented house the first students came to train as teachers.

Did she begin an institutional training college? No. Charlotte Mason spent her most productive years and gave much time and energy to creating a home and a balanced life for herself, some friends who worked closely with her, and the young adult students who came to study there. This was their “growing and learning place” for life, whatever they did later on.

Not long after beginning the work, she moved out of the rented house and purchased a distinguished home perched high on lawns that sloped down toward the lovely mountain-rimmed Lake Windermere. Charlotte Mason decided that this house, Scale How, was the God-given place for her training establishment. She did not have the capital, but she believed that God would provide. She quietly went forward in prayer and trust. The last payment on the house was made just before she died.

“God-given” is the correct designation. To begin with, she wanted to call it the House of the Holy Spirit. She, as a Christian, believed that the source of life is God and that all departments of life are governed and breathed into by the “Lord who is Lord of all of Life.” She knew that life cannot be divided into compartments with one labeled “religious”—the Lord made the whole of life, and He has a place in each part.

A friend persuaded her to call it the House of Education, for although Charlotte Mason understood her first designation, not everyone else would. Charlotte Mason was gifted with the strength of everyday common sense. Part of her wisdom was the knowledge that this should be a home and that all who came to be part of it were sharing a life—a rich, generous life. This philosophy is different from that in an institution teaching courses that are passed or failed.

In fact, once as a young student arrived in the cold of January to begin the course, Charlotte Mason asked her, “What have you come for?”

“I have come to learn to teach,” was the answer.

Charlotte Mason gave what may have been a startling response: “You have come to learn to live.”

Learning to live! How enviable is the person who succeeds in mastering the gift of a life well lived. And what is that? we might all ask. Whatever it is, all persons need to know and practice life. The sooner a wee baby is welcomed into such a life-place, the better. For the lessons learned endure, once they have become entrenched within, for a lifetime.

Charlotte Mason comments here on our Lord’s words in St. John’s Gospel: “Hath eternal life”—not a joy merely reserved for the future, but fullness of living now—”hath the full life.”23

Life. Our Lord appears to be speaking in this connection of that liberty of soul, that vitality and joyousness of spirit, of which He speaks again when He says: “I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly.”

It is more life and fuller that we want, that we crave sometimes with a sick craving . . .life of joyous, generous expansion, free . . . as a bird’s life, dutiful and humble as the life of angels— this sort of glad living is the instant reward and result of that recognition of the SON which we call faith. . . . 24

3Free as a Bird, Dutiful and Humble as the Angels

Children brought up in a home or school that practiced Charlotte Mason’s educational philosophy enjoyed a wonderfully varied and yet balanced life—on the one hand free and on the other carefully structured within the stable framework of Christian boundaries. There is sweet naturalness in this balance for persons of all ages.

We all need structure, a “shape,” that contains also areas “free” for choice and creativity, including first our own personal responses to life. The personal response of the child to an aspect of life can be illustrated in many ways. For instance, I remember going to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam when I was seven. Rembrandt’s Night Watch covered an entire wall. I still remember its power interacting with me. I stood and gazed, absorbed. Charlotte Mason would have been glad that no “educating adult” broke into my rapt response. For in such ways do artists actually speak to us—whether we are seven or seventy. No one tried to tell me all the facts about the painting. No one rushed me away. This painting alone met me that day, met me for life. How I remember! I can remember thinking to myself, “Ah, this is what kindergarten painting is to lead to!” Aloud I added, with a sigh my mother still remembers, “Aahhh. If only I had enough paint, this is what I’d do someday.”

This is a perfect example of Charlotte Mason’s theory and work—a child in direct contact with an original rich resource. In response a child’s soul expands, and the idea of what he or she can achieve also expands. Such an experience truly brings a joyous, soaring freedom for mind and soul, fires the imagination, and gives ideas inwardly to fuel later motivation. This kind of experience is what has to come first.

The individual’s joyous response is cut short by preaching/teaching explanations that get in the way. The direct two-way “conversation” between any person and the source is called by Charlotte Mason “Masterly Inactivity.” In this instance, my parents had taken me to the museum, but stood back to let me actually “connect” with the painting myself (experience a living relationship).

We don’t get excited by other people telling us how we should feel. (So if somebody had insisted at that point that I “notice how beautiful this is, etc.,” it would have been yet one more weary lecture for Susan. The magic moment would have been shattered. No, my parents displayed the “inactivity” that was masterly. They let ME be the important person. What I felt and thought mattered. It was my moment with Rembrandt. And I was left to drink it all in for as long as I wanted to.

“Oh,” I can almost hear readers sighing, “all well for a child taken to the great art galleries (actually only an occasional few in my childhood), but I live in (wherever). Nothing ‘original’ and ‘special’ is here.”

Do you have puddles where you live? Is there mud anywhere? Is there grass or trees, flowers or ants? “Small children want to do a lot of things that get them dirty, and those things are good for children too. They love to dig in earth and sand, wade in mud puddles, splash in water in the sink. They want to roll in the grass, squeeze mud in their hands. When they have chances to do these delightful things, it enriches their spirit, makes them warmer people, just the way beautiful music or falling in love improves adults.”1