Ep 11 | The End of Storied Souls
It’s time to end season four but let’s talk about what’s next.
Season five, Feminine Soulcraft, begins in the Spring of 2025.
Footnotes
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT
Hey there. If The Commonplace podcast has been a help to you this season, will you please leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts? It helps other moms find the podcast and bring their families through the classical wardrobe. You’ll find a link in today’s episode notes.
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At the beginning of this season, I asked, “Will you build worlds with your words?” And now that we’re at the end of the season, I find I’m still asking myself the same question.
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I can hardly believe we’re at the end of the fourth season but, then again, I’m a mother so I can hardly believe time at all.
With every conversation this season, I found my conviction over the importance of stories deepening. I would hear, in my own mind, questions like Will you build a world of truth, goodness, and beauty? Will you help them learn the language and practices to also build it? Will we live in awe, wonder, and worship together?
I hope so. I hope we all will.
Our children need rich stories like they need air and food and water. I think this season made that clear. But, we also need rich stories. One sneaky theme from this season was the importance of moms having rich literary lives too. We are persons too, you know.
But it’s not just stories this applies too. Most of classical education has an undercurrent theme that says: mom, you need this too.
It’s a little like the reminder on airplanes: please put on your mask before helping others with theirs. Mother-teacher, please feed your own soul before feeding others’.
And that’s where I want to go next: to the soul of a mother, or, the soul of a woman.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve realised you are not the classical woman you want to be or need to be to offer your children such a rich education. Certainly, you may love good stories and tea time and walks by the creek, but there’s a nagging feeling that you may not know a just sentiment from an unjust one. You may want a memory full of poetry and art but your memory seems sort of stuck on Taylor Swift’s 2008 album despite your best efforts. You want children who know how to love what must be done but, sometimes, you just can-not.
When you’re trying to recover the humanising ideas and practices of the Great Tradition, it’s…hard. I won’t mislead you. Instagram squares look dreamy but doing the work of reordering one’s soul is anything but quick and neutral-toned. It takes effort, grit, and most of all, humility. Realising you need to be re-formed and being lowly enough to seek help from those of More Authority is how you learn to love what they have called “generous, fruitful, and humane”.
But how, you might ask?
Well, if we learned anything this season, it’s the power of stories to clear our sight and show us the path forward. So, next season, we’re turning to books—my favourite books—to study the lives of some of my favourite women. We’ll find images of whole-souled women and the good life as we seek to nurture our own souls—from the rational to the spirited, and to the appetitive.
From those like Hannah Coulter and Lucy Pevensie, the Virgin Mary and Jane Eyre, we’ll walk with women who exemplify different parts of the feminine soul. The stories of a woman’s life are not dreamily quick and neutral-toned; they include suffering, malformation, humility, struggle, beauty, faith, and providence. They are worth study and imitation, and as they are in story form, we have the opportunity to inhabit these lives, these places, these sparkling glimpses of virtue.
At the beginning of this season, I said that stories help our children extend their alphabet so they can think and say truer and lovelier things about Reality than they can with only this world at hand. This is true for you too.
So let’s re-write a bit of our opening script here at the end:
“Thus, every woman called into the worlds of virtue and nobility leaves with her soul stretched and deepened, with her soul storied.
And with these stories etched into her very being, she learns to act, to embody, to love as liturgies acted out again and again until the practices of her life shape the desires of her heart.
A woman reading is magic because it is holy. She sets apart and points to that which is true, good, and beautiful.
She hears the whisper, ‘This way. Come further up, come further in.’”
It’s time to turn to our own souls and be inspired by the stories of feminise soulcraft.
I’ll see you next spring.
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