For the Family’s Sake #3
I’ve done some sorting out on my Substack. Read along posts now have their own section. Other sections are Home Education, Charlotte Mason, Bookish (e.g. classics, children's literature, non-fiction)
The title of this chapter, ‘Free as a Bird, Dutiful and Humble as the Angels,’ is part of a larger quote by Charlotte Mason which may be found in Essex Cholmondeley’s book, The Story of Charlotte Mason:
‘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’
Macaulay observes that permissive educators would applaud Charlotte Mason’s initial idea of a full life, but they would shrink from the next part of the quote:
‘Life – dutiful and humble as the life of angels’
“Dutiful?” “Humble!” I hear the typical shocked, questioning exclamation. “Surely not. Where does duty come in? Surely I and all persons have a right to our personal choices!…And humble—honestly! Are you suggesting being a doormat? What about self-esteem?”
Duty has become a dirty word. It means doing what is required of us, doing what we ought to do. It limits our choices and we don’t want to have limitations imposed on us!
I’ve read Corrie ten Boom’s book, The Hiding Place, three or four times and am always inspired by her and her sister Betsie’s lives of faithfulness and obedience that prepared them for their ministries during World War 2. The book tells us about their lives beginning with their quiet, dutiful, hidden lives in Holland, to their involvement in the Resistance Movement, and then their capture by the Gestapo and subsequent time in a German Concentration Camp. Betsie didn’t survive the camp but Corrie
did and returned to Holland after the war, where at the age of fifty-three, she began a ministry to those who suffered during the war. Her speaking engagements eventually took her all over the world.
As Macaulay points out, duty and rules is not about legalism. Duty and rules are not designed to crush us but to provide the structure that holds through the storms of life.
When the author was a child, her dad took her and her sister to see the Mississippi River in flood. She remembered looking out across the water with the feeling that she was standing at “the edge of infinity.”
‘To be beautiful, the river needs its boundaries, or the waters actually become like the muddy Mississippi flood. So with our lives.’
Eastern Australia has been hammered by record-breaking rain and widespread flooding this year. It’s not a pretty sight to see submerged roads and houses and people being evacuated from their homes. It causes chaos and distress to those directly affected and has a ripple effect into other areas. When we overextend our moral boundaries and just do what we feel like regardless of anyone else, we don’t just affect our own lives.
‘No one is ever called to design the pattern of right and wrong. We are asked to fit in…To many it would seem that these two balancing sides to life’s path are plain contradictions. But within the Judeo-Christian design, both are essential. Tip over too much on one side or the other in any area of thought or practice, and you get disasters, rather like the flooding of the “free” Mississippi on one hand or the asphyxiation of life by a hard, mindless legality on the other.’
Children growing up today in the same place where Macaulay grew up fifty years ago don’t ride their bikes around the streets by themselves anymore. The neighbourhood school is still there and providing ‘a ray of light’ for many of its students. The children feel safe…a police unit is based in the school near the entrance door:
‘The easy freedom I knew of coming and going without a care in the world is lost as more and more persons do whatever they feel like doing, rather than obeying life’s basic rules.’
Earlier in this chapter, Macaulay tells of the time her parents took her to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. She was seven years old and she ‘met’ Rembrandt’s Night Watch for the first time. Her parents stood back and let her connect with the painting herself. They displayed “Masterly Inactivity.” I touched on this in my post on Chapter 2 that mentioned ‘play based learning.’ Play initiated by adults is totally different from the play that occurs naturally when the adults stand back and don’t interfere.
Masterly Inactivity was an idea that became popular in Britain in the 1860’s. I’ve seen it used occasionally in older novels and it is an idea that was used in medicine and politics. (I’ll post a link below that explain the concept in more detail) It referred to letting things alone, not micromanaging, but also not being indifferent or neglectful. In medical situations the favoured therapeutic method could be just waiting and seemingly doing nothing while being ready to act if need be – ‘first, do no harm!’ In a political situation it might be not rushing in but allowing the parties to sort things out themselves – a ‘wise passiveness.’
‘They are free under authority, which is liberty; to be free without authority is license…’
-Charlotte Mason
A child who is aware of his parent’s authority; whose parents are confident as to his comings and goings, enjoys freedom. Masterly Inactivity doesn’t happen if the child is not under his parent’s authority. There’s the balance again – authority and freedom.
‘I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.’
John 10:10
Further Reading/Listening
Masterly Inactivity vs. Micromanaging – an interesting podcast
The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom
I note the point in the chapter as I re read this time that in order to be rooted, and bear fruit, which is what we want as Christians, we must accept limitations. Those limitations might be moving a lot, or a little, in a rental house or in a home we don’t like. It was such a good point. I also agree about perseverance and how we must endure when it is bleak. I’ve had so many of those times but now I can see that they formed me and allowed me to be useful to God. A great chapter.