November 10, 2021 Newsletter

Parents,

Henry Adams (1838-1918) said, “I had rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth than of holding all the offices that capital has to give, from the presidency downward.”  

I have a great truth-speaking talk I heard this week.  I’d like to share it with you.  It’s an easy listen while you commute or otherwise listen on-the-go.  I highly recommend this solid lecture.

Ryan Evans, school administrator in Seattle, recently offered it and it's refreshing, practical and direct talk about the fundamental nature of parenting.  It’s a podcast, “Trinity Church,” in Seattle.

The title of his talk is, “Parenting is easy…until you have children:  Strategies for Discipline and Discipleship.”  He addresses many things and at the end, cell phone usage and dating, (briefly) and knowing what you will allow as parents is important to have clear when kids are in single digits.

Some of the basic structure for his talk is as follows: 

A)     Presuppositions about Parenting

Some general notes:  -The Bible has far more to say about parenting than we might realize.  -“Discipline is not a substitute for the gospel.”  Spankings don’t save obviously.  However, gracious parenting does not exclude high standards and correction.  -As parents, we have to take seriously the way we were raised/trained.  These were woven into us and we mostly default to the general patterns with how our parents raised us, and this of course can be positive habits or negative.  -Avoid arguing with your children.  The easiest method of correcting children is often not the best, like yelling.  Do not wait until you’re irritated before correction begins, this leads to discipline from anger.

B)     Biblical Training

We can overreact against the abuses of parenting we might have experienced as a child.  For example, if we were struck in anger then we might throw out corporal punishment altogether, even if it were done judiciously and in love.  Why?  Because we can’t separate the practice from our negative association.  

C)     Principles and Methods

He gives examples of highly problematic parenting ruts that become destructive:  The Negotiator, (bartering and cajoling) The Tyrant, (yelling, stare-downs, everyone’s on egg shells in the home.  The home ceases to be a place of peace).  The Abdicator, (passive and lazy parenting that ignores the heart attitudes of the disobedient child).  The Advisor and The Pacifier, (discipline is too harsh. “Grace doesn’t punish.”  Truth and righteousness are sacrificed on the altar of being “nice” and not wanting the child to be angry at them.  Parents in this rut have to always be “buddies” with their children.  The Excuser (expectations of children are way too low, loose, and unstructured).  The Unbeliever (parenting is just a random, you-never-know-what’s-going to-happen-with-your kids … giving up.

Fundamental Principles:  -Insist upon prompt and cheerful obedience.  What we permit – we promote.  “We will get more of what we subsidize, less of what we penalize.”

-Use the “rod” Prov. 13:24.  -Saturate them in love, and this includes discipline.  Grace and discipline are not mutually exclusive.  -Correction must be firm, fair and consistent.  -Children must see affection and secure love in their parents’ marriage to flourish as God intends.

Enjoy the talk!  May God bless you and your family.

Mr. Alexander

October 31, 2021 Newsletter

From the Headmaster’s Desk 

October 31st –

Anno domini nostri ‘Iesu Christi

Two Thousand Twenty-One

“Ceremony is the solution.” Joshua Gibbs 

Our annual Reformation Day is coming up on Friday October 29! Wahoo! 

Theme this year? All Hallows Eve in Germany, England and Scotland 

I would like to give a historical backdrop behind the dates October 31 and November 1 and how this relates to our Reformation Day celebration. I’ll speak to what a “holiday” even means. Historically, it means “Holy-day.” If you want to know what your kids can dress up as and the heart of our theme this year, then read on! 

As the world around us is rather confused, divided and frustrated it is a relief to know that the Lord sits on His throne, lofty and exalted with Seraphim and a multitude of celestial beings continually worshipping Him, crying out: 

“Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory…” 

Jesus Christ, the LORD God omnipotent, reigns here on earth from Heaven. All authority in Heaven and on earth belongs to Him. Our world is still full of glory because of the rule of Father, Son and Spirit. He is stable when we are not. 

The practice of celebrating fellow Christians who have gone before us, our Christian history and the consistent regularity of the seasons is to remember that God is on His throne, He directs history and He is faithful.  

We celebrate “The Reformation” here because it was a time of great renewal and life for the Church in the 16th Century. It was a time of great upheaval but incredible fruit rose above it all as history pressed into the ensuing centuries. There is a good deal of rather interesting history behind October 31 (Halloween) and Nov. 1 (All Saints Day) and below will serve as background for why we love this season.

On October 31st, the eve of All Saints, All Hallows Eve (shortened Halloween) came right before "All Hallows Day"  (Nov. 1, AllSaints Day). In the Medieval period, festivities would begin around that time, mocking the realm of demons and the triumph of the saints and their souls’ freedom. 

All Saints Day was the day to recognize so many martyrs slaughtered by the wicked. So many Christians had been martyred by the 300's AD that they chose the first day after Pentecost to honor all of them. The day was moved to Nov. 1 at the dedication of the Chapel of All Saints in Rome in 741 AD.

We’re remembering this year the saints from the Reformation era in England, Scotland and Germany. So when we celebrate Reformation Day (even though it’s on Oct 29) we’re also celebrating All Saints Day dressing up as Christians from this period: reformers, peasants, churchmen from all sides of the era, or martyrs of old who died and whose deaths symbol Christ's death overcoming the world.   

The more folks dress up the better! The costumes can be many things but they need to be limited to 1500’s England, Scotland or Germany. These are the particular countries and saints from these countries, we’re remembering. So, study up on a particular person from this great era and have your kids come as such! 

Halloween is not a religious holiday, it's a kitsch one. Sure, there are neo-pagans that dig deep into witchcraft and try to make a big deal out of it, but that's not the norm. We celebrate not Halloween, but All Hallows Eve. The Reformation finds its decisive beginning with Martin Luther in Germany on Oct. 31st, in 1517. We’re rejoicing in all of God’s saints from this particular era and place. Okay, we’ll throw in Scotland and England too. Bring on the St. George costumes, Calvin, Augustine and Aquinas (our four Houses) are fine too. Bring on the kilts!

So, Christians don't fear demons. They see it for what it is and they mock it by the victory and celebration of Christ Jesus. 

Pagans have long since attempted at turning Christian holidays into lame attempts at their own holidays. The best way to counter secular attempts at a rival celebration is not to hunker down and be known for rejection of celebrations.Why would a Christian reject celebrating "Easter" because others out there are making a bid deal about Easter bunnies and not saying anything about the resurrection of Christ? We would want to say that our  feasts should be way more fun, more loud, more cool, more … everything. We model the day to all showing what it both is and should be all about. 

The world revolves around the Christian calendar, at the very least: All Saints Day, The Feast of Christmas, Epiphany, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension Day, and Pentecost. 

So, seize the opportunity to be neighborly this week. Give out more and bigger candy than everyone else on the block! Be warm. Get names. Offer some cider to strangers. Carve your pumpkins more creatively than anybody. 

Remember, there is a reason why Martin Luther nailed the “95 Theses” on the church door in Wittenburg on the very date, October 31, 1517. He was saying something against the kingdom of darkness. He didn't hole himself up in his study with the glory of God in Christ Jesus and turn the lights off.. 

Let's show the difference of real culture here at Saint Abraham’s, the culture of Christ! 

Mr. Alexander

October 7, 2021 Newsletter

From the Headmaster’s Desk

Grace and peace parents,

Read down through below to get a snapshot of a day here at St. Abe’s! Here are my own thoughts about just what Christian classical education is: It is the most historic and time-tested educational philosophy of Christian culture. It is a holistic, harmonious and integrated method of inculturating the mind and the heart in a historic liberal arts education of our broad western civilization. Classical ed. refers to a philosophy and a methodology of schooling. This educational approach is doing everything above with Jesus Christ at the heart and center of it all.

--

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” Plutarch

How are we firing your children up to transform the world for Jesus Christ? Here:

-I hear daily call-outs from teachers that promote an eager and joyful response to authority.

-I sat in on upper school math courses today and I assure you ... your students are getting

first-rate mathematics here.

-In 11/12th grade English the students are learning to write from a published author.

-In singing school today the students are able to sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” in four part

harmony.

-In mid-day chapel this week the students were reminded about three lies that erode people’s

lives. First lie: I am what I do (career). Instead, we are what Jesus has done for us. Second

lie: I am what I have (possessions). Instead, we are what God has given to us. Third lie: I

am what other people think of me. No, instead, I am what God says about me in Jesus

Christ. The students were reminded that they are totally complete in Christ – Col. 1:27,28

-In apologetics, the students learned (some were just reminded because they’ve learned this

in their outstanding science here) that the conflict between Galileo and the Roman Catholic

Church was not a war between science and religion. You’ll remember that Galileo revealed

that we live in a heliocentric not geocentric universe (earth orbits sun, not sun orbits earth).

The crisis was Aristotle’s geocentric universe that the church came to believe as dogma. The

tension was between good science and bad science, not religion vs. the “brave” atheist.

Galileo was a devout believer.

I could go on and on. There are good things happening in every classroom, every day. We love your children and it is our joy to be serving them.

Mr. Alexander

September 24, 2021 Newsletter

"The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful."  Plato

It is our great delight to point our students, your children, every day, to that which is truly beautiful.  Beauty is linked to truth.  We teach that which is true which leads to the beauty of God.  The power of beauty is that it persuades like nothing else.  It is the kindness (we might say beauty) of God that leads us to repentance and life!

There's no way to do this but through a genuine Christian education.

Mr. Alexander

August 17, 2021 Newsletter

It’s almost launch time!

This final post, a series on the stages of maturity in the Bible and with our children finishes off with this letter and I especially appeal to you to read this series if you haven’t. Here is a conceptual model for growth in the Bible and in our lives, parts 2 and 3 below:

Grammar — Knowledge — Priest stage
Logic — Understanding — King stage
Rhetoric — Wisdom — Prophet stage

The next stage from what we’ve covered is this logic/understanding/king stage. Middle schoolers want to understand the things they’re taught. They are taking truth and applying it. Israel’s kings in the “king stage” of redemptive history were required to write out their own personal copy of the Torah. They had to know the basics of the “grammar/priest” stage of the Mosaic law and the intention of Torah so they could apply it to situations where there were no explicit directives from Torah.

The classic case here is Solomon with the dispute over the prostitutes and the child; there’s nothing in Leviticus about that! Solomon knew the law and he knew the intention of it – this is more advanced maturity and it’s what our young adults need. They need to know the Bible and know the intention from the heart. The last stage in this progression of redemptive and personal maturity is the rhetoric/wisdom/prophet stage. When our 18 year olds leave home they should have very little rules. They should have wisdom. They must have internalized the gracious and good law of God. In later Israelite history, post David and post Solomon, the prophets not only knew Torah and knew wisdom, they conferred with God in council and deep prayer. They “reasoned” with God and man. They knew how to teach the nations and like the sons of Isaachar, they knew the times, and they knew what Israel should do…

Do we have this kind of maturity? Do we know the times and know what we should do? Does modern Christianity today have the wisdom to teach the nations how their government should work? Not just how to organize a Bible study but how to give counsel on complicated ethical and societal challenges?

That’s the aim of St. Abraham’s. Graduating students who are on the pathway to become “Renaissance Men and Women.” Well rounded; all knowledge unified and harmonious in Jesus Christ. They should have a coherent, rich and complete worldview and know how to apply all of Christ, for all of life, for all the world. The prophet Micah predicted a time when the nations would hunger after the people of God that they may learn from them how to live (4:2).

Graduates of our school should not only know how to live holy, joyful, and mature lives but know how to lead others younger than them in it as well. Many dread the teenage years like a root canal. They believe there’s nothing you can do … it will be horrible. Does that always have to be the case? Is that true?

Young adults are still very young. They will learn much from their own mistakes and failures, as we have. And if you were not able to seize the early years of parenting – then peace be still. Cling to repentance. Ask forgiveness. Model integrity. Addressing the challenges of latter years/messy teenage parenting is a post for another time. Nevertheless, many parents underestimate the maturity that their young man or woman can have by 18-20. All of this must begin at 6 mos old. If young parents have a very clear picture of a robust 18 year old in their mind’s eye – then that will help in aiming for it year by year.

Dads – lead your wife in these things. Ask your wife how things are going with the children every day. Take responsibility. Initiate. Change the diapers. Do the hard stuff. Like a good volleyball game say, “I got this!”

Dads – say, “Don’t worry Babe. I’m all over this.” And then with winsome joy lead the whole family to love Jesus and treat each other well … especially in respecting their mother.

I have a “call-out” for the students this year. A “call out” is a line that I say to the children and then they finish the statement by responding. I will say, “I will treat my mother … (students complete it by saying) “as a queen!” In a subsequent email I will send the entire list of call-outs to you so that you can enjoy them at home. We will be using them much here at the school.

Remember, parenting should never be merely reactive. Mature parents are proactive and deeply studied in how to do it. Fathers – be involved with the decisions and the challenges in regards to your child’s education. It will pay dividends I assure you.

You and me … let’s study how to be a parent after our Heavenly Father. It is our central mission as adults with children. If I could only be successful in life in two areas – I would want it to be in my marriage and in my loving fatherly ways with the children God has given me. We partner with you in this great task and we need you.

God bless you!

Mr. Alexander

July 16, 2021 Newsletter

Hello Parents!

We are getting more and more excited about the upcoming school year. Your quote on education: “One of the goals of classical education is to discern the appropriate manner by which the mistreated and oppressed can challenge their oppressors without destroying their civilization.” ― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America

This is an excellent sentence by Veith. The Apostle Paul counseled the same in the classical /1st Century world. The distinction that matters in desiring change in a society is the difference between reformation and revolution. Christians are to be reformational (bringing change through patient gospel means) non-Christians tend to be “revolutionary” (bringing change by force, coercion, impatience, the protest and violence.

The mindset of Christians should be reformational. -- In my last newsletter I spoke of expectations for maturity in our children’s discipleship. I said it will be a series that I’ll build upon in the newsletters. Here is part two. Schooling, in so many ways, is parenting, it’s shepherding. Parenting is schooling. This is why what you do at home and what we do with your children here at the school are linked.

I spoke last time of the very common problem with parenting where parents are too lax and undefined with their small children and then get reactive and strict when their children go off the rails as teenagers. No. Teenagers should have more freedom and more responsibility than the single digits. They are to be a greater blessing in your home in those teenage years.

One pastor says this about parenting, “we get more of what we subsidize and less of what we penalize.” So what are we allowing our children to do that we shouldn’t, and also at the same time how can our home be more filled with playful joy and eager love? These are two questions that should work simultaneously. If not, then a home can be too strict without grace or on the other hand, too indulgent with poor standards that lead to lackluster young adults. It shouldn’t be “either/or,” rather “both/and.”

A mature human being is one that does not see a contradiction between God’s law/rules and God’s grace. As Charles Spurgeon said on another matter, “why reconcile two concepts that are already friends?” Maturity is loving true biblical holiness from the heart, not a fake legalistic appearance of holiness, but the genuine article. There is a progression for maturity in the Bible and it relates to above. It is a movement towards more freedom and more responsibility. It corresponds with the classical trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric stages).

Today I’ll list out the progression but only cover the first grouping of three on the left:

Grammar — Knowledge — Priest stage
Logic — Understanding — King stage
Rhetoric — Wisdom — Prophet stage

Perhaps you have heard of this model before. It certainly isn’t unique with me, scholars have noted it. The first grouping of three on the left above is the earliest stage of development in redemptive history and Christian growth (grammar, knowledge, priest). We all learn the basics when we are little children, the fundamentals. What is the fundamental? “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,” the Bible says. Children must learn their “ABC’s,” the fear of God, how serious sin is.

The priests of old had to learn the law of Moses “line upon line,” letter for letter. They had to go by the book, everything was spelled out for them. Likewise, parents should have very clear expectations for their young little “priests” at home. They should expect first-time obedience. They should not tolerate whining, fits of anger, and manipulative pouting … to name just several.

Your home must not be a culture of griping, siblings griping with each other and esp. problematic is kids griping with you. This is no bueno… These are the basics. Parents should be all over these sins in their young children and discipline for bad attitudes not merely bad behavior. We’re after the heart, their affections, not just the outward action. In biblical, redemptive history as well as our own Christian growth … there is a progression of maturity. Israel under the Mosaic administration was in the “priest stage.”

The Torah is laid out very plainly, so should our parenting. Obedience and disobedience are very clear and Israel needed the “ABC’s” of the law for the challenges to come. Parenting is not cookie cutter. It isn’t mechanistic, you do “xyz” and your children will turn out perfectly. However, we shouldn’t throw our hands up when we’re perplexed with our children, and we definitely should not point fingers at them. We should get on our knees more. We should look within more. We must turn to God more.

Friends … as one pastor says, “God picks us up where we’re at, not where we should be.” We don’t clean up our act in order to be accepted by God. He meets us in the present, graciously leading us to repentance and saving grace. God meets us in the trenches of life, in the mud and the blood and the mess.

This is where we meet Jesus. If you feel that things are in bad shape at home – God does “bad shape.” Jesus Christ is the friend of the broken. I will wrap up the model in the next newsletter but lastly I want to say that the most important thing we can do for our children is to truly live the faith in front of them everyday. Parental lecturing and wordiness and rules lose all their meaning and can become utterly embittering if we ourselves are not living in integrity by the power of the gospel.

God bless you,

Mr. Alexander

July 9, 2021 Newsletter

Happy July St. Abe’s Community!

You’re probably fly fishing in Idaho, camping, or working like crazy right now. Enjoy and God bless your July. I have a few thoughts today.

In a letter to his wife Abigail, John Adams wrote about independence from the Great Brittania on July 3, 1776 – 245 years ago: “I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

I hope your celebration of July 4 was filled with “acts of devotion to God Almighty” in church and you also had “sports, guns, bells, bonfires and Illuminations” (!) If you’ve never read/listened to David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, perhaps summer is a great time to read it. He and especially his wife Abigail, are some of my heroes.

Your Classical Christian Education quote this time is related to the development and opportunity with our children: “Time is more valuable to young people than to any others. They should not lose an hour in forming their taste, their manners and their minds; for whatever they are to a certain degree by eighteen, they will be in greater and lesser degree all the rest of their lives.” — John Mason

Your home, your church and your children’s school all make up the primary development of your child. And raising godly children is probably one of the hardest things we will do with our lives. The greatest thing you could do for your family culture and for the teachers of our school is to practice deep Christian virtue in your home. Parents across the country regularly ask what they can do for their children’s school. Here it is: Live the faith before them, love them deeply and expect much from them by way of obedience and healthy attitude – at home. This is the greatest thing you can do for our school.

Over the next month I am going to talk about expectations for maturity with our children’s development. It will be a series that I’ll build upon in the newsletters. This is to get us started: Many parents will be indulgent of ill behavior in their child when their sin is rather “cute” or silly because little people are, well, cute in almost everything they do, especially toddlers.

However, when the child grows up the sin is no longer cute and the parents get reactive in their parenting instead of being proactive. They scramble for control when that gracious mastery over the child should have been seized when they were toddlers. The tendency is for parents to all-of-a-sudden get super strict with the teenagers because at that point they are capable of doing much damage to both themselves and also the family.

Instead, parents ought to be lovingly strict when their children are small and give them more and more freedom as they grow older. But how many parents will do the opposite, giving too much freedom early on and not enough when the kids are older? It is this tricky progression that I will address in forthcoming newsletters. Parents, be intentional, be consistent and have high standards for your children when they are small. It will pay dividends down the road.

The Lord bless you!

Mr. Alexander

June 2021 Newsletter

Dear St. Abraham’s Community,

It is a great honor to take the helm of this school. It’s a community that the Lord God Almighty has clearly blessed and preserved now for 12 years. I can’t wait to learn who you are, every family, every story.

Your teachers, myself and the whole team are excited about this upcoming school year. It’s time to jump back into community life again, and what has made St. Abraham’s such a wonderful place … building the kingdom together, shoulder to shoulder and in person! You can feel the excitement and relief of our broader community as well as folks are seeing people again and realizing afresh the gift of actually being able to see/enjoy that smile behind the mask.

The logic and rhetoric school program on board will be enviable. It will be robust, intimate, fun and your young person’s soul will be incredibly blessed. More details soon.

With every newsletter I will be contributing a piece entitled, “From the Headmaster’s Desk.” In it I will include an encouraging quote on classical Christian education or shaping souls and a word from myself to build you up as parents. Parenting is tough. “Baskets of fruit”, someone said, “are heavy.” Your children are your fruit and they are a glorious and weighty gift. I want to encourage and inspire you in this critical mission that we have.

For this week:

“Children are not a distraction from more important work, they are the most important work.”

C.S. Lewis

I read this recently: “Seven hours. Five days a week. Where is your child? Schools are in the business of shaping children. Shaping what they know. Shaping what they think. Shaping what they believe. Shaping what they learn to love. Shaping who your child will become. Where you send your child to school makes all the difference.” To what end?

This one: Seeing and loving this world as being created and sustained by a loving, living, personal and triune God. And having found God’s imprint in all things, we are to turn towards the goal of all education, which is doxological.

St. Abraham’s Community,

--Our school will only be as great as our faithfulness and dependence upon the Lord Jesus Christ--

The future is bright.

Amor vincit omnia. Non nobis Domine, Mr. Alexander

How Much is the World Too Much With Us

It’s sometimes easy to smile cynically at the Romantics of the nineteenth century, to dismiss their desire to receive the “greatest delight which the fields and woods minister.” But there were plenty who even over a century ago felt the need to slow down, to go into the woods, “live deliberately,” and “drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms.” The unbridled desire for things has a cost in any epoch. And when those desires are misguided, it is actually worse, as Boethius suggests, if one should obtain the object of his desire.

“The world is too much with us,” writes Wordsworth. “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” It is hard to imagine he wrote this over a century ago; no loud cartoons, no ads flooding daily existence, no shopping malls, no Netflix series, no credit card debt. Yet the cost was real even then. “We have given our hearts away.” And if we are to teach our children anything it is that the human creature is more than a consumer. A life where getting and spending is the highest good quickly becomes a hollow and vacuous life, and school as schola is the medicine.

We are all familiar with the psalmist’s reminder to “Be still and know that I am God.” But we perhaps too familiar with it to grasp the fullest sense of that imperative. We have not merely lost leisure; we have forgotten our very need for it. If we are indeed too comfortable with the call to “be still,” then the Latin might render it a new verse entirely: vacate et videte quoniam ego sum Deus (Psalm 45:10). There is probably more to be said about St. Jerome’s choice in using these verbs, but the English derivatives “vacate” and “vacation” should be plain enough. Striking perhaps, but this vacation is not the sort that we find at Disney World or at Six Flags.

Joseph Pieper renders psalmists command thus: “Have leisure and know that I am God.” Leisure, then, is not present in the debaucheries of the frat party. Nor is it found in the riotous elations of the Gatsby mansion. And if any moral interpretation is to be gleaned from the life and works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, it is that leisure is not the same as pleasure. There is a true leisure and a false leisure. A life in restless pursuit of the American dream might be convenient, entertaining, and pleasurable; but this does not mean it is the good life. Even if we set our wills to achieving the Dream, we would be as “boats against the current” of infinite desire. This is why the full realization of failure to satisfy one’s own longings hardens and congeals into that modern disillusionment that was shared by Fitzgerald and his ex-patriot friends. There may be happy moments at the Gatsby mansion, but be assured in the end, it is not the eudaimonia that Aristotle uses to describe the abiding beatitude and lasting blessedness of a virtuous life.

Being human means that we are easily lead astray, and often times by our competing passions and desires. The Stoical chemotherapy is to then kill those passions. The hedonist indulges them. Plato speaks of the chariot of the soul and how difficult it is to progress when the lead horses are incompatible. For the man whose desires are distracted, the soul can seem to be drawn and quartered by these unequally yoked horses, pulling at the seamless joints of the tripartite soul. Recall that Plato describes the soul as a city of many members, and it is the primary goal of his Republic to draw out this analogy: that a just state is as a just soul (Plato, Republic, 368D). Most people understand that we can desire the wrong thing, but we tend to forget this also means we desire too much of the lesser goods surrounding us.

One of those goods that should be ordered higher in our educational programs is the attention given to Nature. Remember being outside? “They Used to Call It ‘Air,’” writes Esolen. Recall that “Method 1” of the Ten Ways to the Destroy the Imagination of Your Child is to “Keep Your Children Indoors as Much as Possible.” This is the other cost that Wordsworth warns about. It’s not only that we “lay waste our powers,” but that another kind of loss takes place: we retreat from the real world. Not the world that invites our “getting and spending” but the world of God’s creation, the green world of gratuity that makes no artificial demands upon us. In thoughtlessly consuming, “little we see in nature that is ours.” Our commitments as consumers and our inordinate desires lead us to Augustine’s inquietum and to the disintegration of the soul.

Many have lamented the increasing alienation of modern man to Nature. In Last Child in the Woods, journalist and bestselling author Richard Louv notes the emergence of what he calls “nature deficiency disorder” (10). Louv explains the cost of our contemporary indoor life, the therapy that affords, and the “Spiritual Necessity of Nature for the Young” (293). But again, all this we could have gleaned if we had popularly taken heed of the Romantics. Some have wrongly imagined that schola promotes loneliness or naval gazing. True leisure, however, lifts our gaze away from self and focuses our eyes to behold the other that is found in Nature and Neighbor (and supremely in God). This is yet another important question to consider in the classroom or in the home. Does our school or home promote a regard for the natural world? Does the course or pedagogy orient the student towards wonder at the created order? Does your contemplation of Spring, for instance, lead to the analogous contemplation of the Annunciation and the Incarnation, as it did for Hopkins?

A final thought. Yes, I am aware that if you are reading this, you are most likely inside, on the computer or tablet, and open to the indefatigable interruptions of the Net. But this is only a proof of my words. Go outside. Learn with your students there, “under the open sky, and list to Nature’s teachings.” Then we might not have to forfeit our Christianity to have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.