Ep 06 | Moms Are (Born) Persons Too
We spend a lot of time thinking about the best habits for our children, but what about us moms? We’re (born) persons too, you know. But I’m not here to get into the specifics of habits you should or shouldn’t add into your rhythms. (Note: those are conversations best had with people who know you in a fuller, deeper context.) I am, however, here to talk about one of my favorite principles behind the heartbeat of habits: beauty.
Episode Notes
Continuing Education Picks
Ep. 06, Ratio and Intellectus, Classical Stuff You Should Know
‘Meditations in a Toolshed,’ C. S. Lewis
‘The Mere Presence of Your Smartphone Reduces Brain Power, Study Shows,’ UT News
30 Poems to Memorize (Before It’s Too Late), Circe Institute
‘If You Don’t Have a Commonplace Book, You’re Missing Out,’ Dani Weiss
Classical Heavyweights
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
_____
So, now you know, it’s not only my children who memorize poetry around here. I wanted to kick us off with a little Gerard Manley Hopkins but please know that memorizing poetry is still a new-to-me habit I’ve worked on over the last year, and I do think it’s a worthwhile way for any mom to spend her time.
But why do I think that? Is it because memorizing poetry exercises your mind? Is it because poetry, as Miss Mason wrote, is the first rank of intellectual culture? Is it because poetry just sounds oh so classical?
Nope.
When thinking through habits for the classical mom, I wasn’t exactly sure what angle I wanted to take. I like to talk about principles, especially when I don’t have a real-life context with the person I’m talking to. But habits are one of those things people want to know the specifics on. And I get that. There’s a time for specifics--I want to hear about them all the time myself--but I don’t think the internet is the best place to start looking for them--and that includes my podcast.
Principles, in my opinion, offer a mom direction and freedom to apply those truths to her family in her own way. It reminds a mom of the end goal and equips her with a vision. Specifics, without real knowledge of the speaker, can be...burdensome. Think about it. Who hasn’t seen the option to buy morning time plans, habit trackers, nature studies, and any other possible resource from your favorite homeschooling mom online? It can be great to get a peek into what someone else is doing, how it works, or how you might improve, but often, it becomes more letter of the law than not. When you combine the tiny peeks of someone’s life online, which are usually the parts most likely to get double taps, with their specific steps for this or that, we no longer see helpful tips but instead, see a way to get some part of their ideal life as our own. We start to think about how I really should be doing more of this, and why can’t my kids do that, and before you know it, you’ve completely missed the born persons sitting in front of you because you’re trying to force someone else’s best-case scenario into your ordinary life.
But a principle. A principle can be a real gift because it’s the heartbeat of the why behind the things we do. It calls us back to the real point of habits: habits are how we embody our identity. It’s not mainly about what we do, but who we are. A principle reorients us back to the truth at work, who God says we are and what we ought to do, and then we’re free to live it out in the differing habits that best fit us and our homes.
Which, takes me back to poetry. Why kick off a mom habits episode with poetry? What’s the working principle?
It’s beautiful.
A few weeks ago, a woman told me I demean women because I made the hierarchical distinction between Bach and Cardi B. Perhaps you remember episode 2 but my point was that the aesthetic world is not a flat playing field and it matters how you spend your time: Bach is better than Cardi B. Which means there must be a framework to assess the beauty or lack of beauty in the things around us. How else could I say that Botticelli’s Venus is better than a postmodern toilet art installation?
The fact that we shift uneasily in our seats and feel compelled to say that while we like these composers, artists, and writers but others don’t need to, is evidence that we, as a culture, have missed the mark in education. I was recently reminded in an article that it’s the untrained mind that lacks an objective value system. The world grows dim and ugly because we don’t understand how to really see beauty; we haven’t been trained towards it. It takes more effort, attention, and time to understand and enjoy Milton’s Paradise Lost or to really study a Monet. Flipping on Netflix or pinning pretty clothes is significantly easier, and, really, who am I to tell you that one is better than the other?
Maybe you’re thinking this subjectivity isn’t too bad. We all have preferences. And that’s, of course, true when you’re choosing between Shakespeare and Dickens. But what happens when we repeatedly choose between the lasting and the superficial, and the superficial keeps winning? What happens when we regularly feast on the songs, books, shows, and images that won’t be remembered in 100 years, if even remembered beyond the next Instagram scroll? It shapes us in detrimental ways. As my best friend, Clive Staples Lewis, said, it will leave us as men without chests. By which he meant that a loss of objectivity in aesthetics, or beauty, creates a lack of courage.
Why stand for something whose worth you can’t know? What is there to defend when nothing truly matters?
And this is the reason why I’m taking this angle of habits born of beauty. From what I can tell: homeschooling is not for the faint of heart. It requires conviction, sacrifice, and suffering long for love. We need noble and definite ambitions. To be moms of virtue and wisdom, those women who are filled by and pour out truth and goodness in order to journey with our children into a true education, well, we need a steady interaction with...beauty.
Beauty is what attracts us to truth and goodness. It captures our imagination, develops our tastes, and allows us to see God’s work in the world. It trains us toward delight and touches us with the emotion of the gospel story. Beauty orders the things around us; it points to God and calls us to repentance, which is of course, the starting place of true education. Beauty is the marked measure of grace, a basis for courage, and a principle for forming habits.
Beauty is how we learn this, not that. It’s how we live as keepers of truth and goodness, how we grow in character.
And, as we already know, character is formed through habit.
Habits for a mom are a lot like habits for your kids. We want them to turn us towards what’s good for us on a deep, soul level. They aren’t necessarily about what feels ‘best’ for me right now (ie. lazily listening to a YouTuber review skincare products), but more about what is best for me in the long-term as I grow as a person (ie. reading and meditating on Proverbs as you get to bed on time.)
I’m guessing you’re already thinking about ways to bring more beauty into your rhythms. In my mind, the type of mom that leans towards classical education is probably already bookish with an interest in snobby things like art, language, and history. You probably dance party to classical music.
I’m just kidding. That was too far. Even for us.
But I bet you’re already connecting the need for beauty to your normal rhythms, and that’s as it should be. As born persons, we were made to pursue beauty, but it’s important to note two characteristics of the pursuit.
First, it’s not always done through the uncommon things of beauty. Uncommon beauty would be Mozart and Da Vinci and Dante. These are exceptional artists and works of art; they’re exquisite and a feast all on their own, but they’re also...a lot. If you’re feeling kind of overwhelmed at the idea of only ever spending your time on the classical things of life, you should. It’s an overload of immense beauty. We’re just finite creatures; we can’t stand such uncommon glory all of the time. But not being made for the uncommon beauty doesn’t mean we were made for the cheap imitations. (Ahem, looking at you, terrible music and toilet art installations.) The necessary complement to the uncommon things of beauty is the common things of beauty: a Sunday church service, singing a hymn with your kids at home, really good soup with freshly baked bread; a fairytale, a sunrise, a prayer book. Commonplace beauty is all around you...because God remembers our frame; he knows we’re dust--and he speaks beauty to all parts of the image bearer in the uncommon and the common things.
Which leads to the second point: this pursuit of beauty should be done in tension with ordinary life. This is one of the main ways pursuing beauty through rhythms is distinct from the modern idea of ‘self-care.’ You may certainly find ways to pursue beauty that overlap with self-care activities, but while many self-care conversations revolve around me-time and getting away and special things, pursuing beauty is a means of grace in the middle of cleaning bathrooms and afternoon read-alouds.
This actually has a fancy name in the classical tradition. The pursuit of beauty--as well as truth and goodness--in education, philosophy, or theology is called scholé. The basic idea is that pursuing these things just for the sake of it was a proper type of leisure for the soul. It’s truth-seeking, over profit-seeking, so it fills us and shapes us rather than being mastered by us for our own purposes and ends. And while intellectual pursuits were considered part of one’s ordinary duty, they were also done within the tensions of normal life, meaning it was also one’s duty to lay them aside to meet the needs of others. So, you, as a mom, have a duty to continue to pursue beauty but not in a way that ignores your duty to care for a child. You wouldn’t really be a lover of beauty if you ignored the beauty of service in motherhood, would you?
This tension, or need for wisdom, leads me straight into the Charlotte Mason world of Mother Culture.
Have you heard of it? Don’t Google it until I finish here. Like the self-care conversation, there’s more bad than good out there.
The idea of mother culture was mentioned in an article in the Parents’ Review, which Miss Mason edited but she didn’t write on the idea. Essentially, the writer, named only as A, encouraged moms to continue their own education in the midst of the work at home. She cut off moms who told themselves they didn’t have the time for it by poking at their false sense of self-sacrifice that resulted in them starving their own minds.
If you look around now, Mother culture has grown into a sort of catch-all for CM self-care talk, but originally it was actually something quite simple: reading for about thirty minutes a day.
Side note: this is the article that started the CM idea of having three books going at all times: a novel, a moderately easy read, and a stiff read.
But yes, in the middle of all the things, you can still grow in virtue through reading for about half an hour. It allows you to mentally wrestle with characters, actions, and how to deal with them while you clean up blocks and cook dinner because you’re regularly engaging in beauty, conviction, and action through story. And it prepares you for what’s to come in your home education.
As our kids grow and wrestle with the ideas we bring to them in this generous feast of a curriculum, we need to be able to discuss and foster wisdom. How can we do that if we moms haven’t fed our own minds? How will our soul’s rational, spirited, and appetitive parts have formed if we’ve spent our pockets of time on our phones for ten years? How can we train our kids’ eyes toward beauty if we haven’t dwelled in it ourselves?
Reading excellent books is the foundational habit born of beauty. Miss Mason did write about how words are beautiful in themselves, that they are a source of pleasure, and worthy of honor. She also notes that a beautiful word deserves to be beautifully said--and for that point, what could be better than poetry?
Now, of course, to some 30 minutes sounds like no problem and for others, it sounds like a great feat. But I think everyone may find, at some point, that it can be hard to pay attention to a book, especially an old book. We live in an entertainment society; it’s just true. From news to your friend’s life updates, most of what we consume is packaged up to be flashy and eye-catching, which can make almost anything that doesn’t present itself the same way feel dull. Stick. With. It.
Think about all the reasons why you want your children reading Pilgrim’s Progress and Lord of the Rings instead of watching TikTok reels. They’re probably the exact same reasons you should be reading.
I know I’ve said it before: but we were made for story. Of course, there are other ways you can think of to pursue beauty--time outdoors, feasting with friends, and so on--but I think the anchoring habit is a well-read one. I’m not surprised the idea of mother culture took off in the CM world or that classicists regularly defend the need for scholé as leisure over our modern way of, as Neil Postman named it, amusing ourselves to death. Good books grapple with the questions of life that every person deals with. They explore the nuance and complexity of love, of sacrifice, of consequence, of duty. They show you your blind spots and force you to examine your own weaknesses. It’s hard to hide from or remain unchanged by a good book.
I read The Hiding Place a few months ago--it’s the story of Corrie Ten Boom--and it has since captured my imagination and attention. I was in awe of the beauty of her story: God’s faithfulness was piercing and Corrie’s faithfulness, inspiring. I had knots in my stomach when officers arrived at the house unannounced, I hoped for protection when each new person arrived at the Ten Booms. I cried when Corrie and her dad were separated on their way to the camps. I spent my afternoons thinking about the Ten Booms’ courage, prudence, and faithfulness, which means I spent afternoons assessing my own character...and I was forced to recognize that I’m...not that courageous. The book didn’t allow me to think that maybe I’d be courageous in the right circumstances. No, I knew in what parts of her story I would’ve faltered; the story made my weaknesses more clear to me in light of her strengths. And that’s a good thing.
Because not only am I aware of it now but I’m also captivated by Corrie Ten Boom. I can’t stop thinking about her life and my life and living as light in a dark world. That’s what a book ought to do. It should open a new way of seeing things, examining things, re-evaluating things. It should nestle something beautiful deep into your mind so that the contours of your inner thought life adjust towards a more clear picture of what’s good. The soul, or inner thought life, is like a hall of mirrors dim, constantly reflecting back the images and ideas you contemplate. When you fill your mind with beauty through stories of faithfulness, love, gentleness, joy, truth, and so on, you behold these things. You turn them over and try to mimic them and feel encouraged by them. You try to become like them. This imitation is key in the classical tradition: and of course, it works both ways. No one turns into Corrie Ten Boom when the Nazis arrive if they’ve been zoned out on their phone for the better part of their life. You must have a deeply set conviction of objective beauty to defend to be like a Ten Boom. What are you feasting on? That’s what you imitate.
So my mom habit principle for you, my friend, is to fill up on beauty and to start by committing to your mother culture of excellent reading. Lose yourself in stories worth remembering, worth imitating. Let beauty form you to be a woman of character, whose feet are firmly rooted and built up in Christ and whose heart overflows with thankfulness and conviction. Let your habits be full of uncommon and common beauty, but not cheap imitations that dull your soul. Start first with the story of God’s redemptive work in his creation, and move on from there. When it comes to imitation, there is only one ideal type, only One who is goodness, truth, and beauty.
But he does play in ten thousand places.
I’ll see you guys in two weeks.
