Living-Deliberately.com

by Sue Monk Kidd:

“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.

They’re in each other all along.”

~ Rumi

This is an article written approximately 5 years ago that some online friends are discussing. I found it very timely not only for what we are going through employment-wise but also in regards to how I view my own education, how we view our life-long learning, and what we hope for our kids. It also inspires me to hope better things for the millions of kids in public classrooms.

I’m posting it in parts, like I have with others in the past, due to length.

I’ve got new pretties in my sidebar!! Under Dave there is the link and logo for the Maryville Farmers’ Market, which I am so excited about I can hardly wait until Saturday!! And right underneath that is my “Recommendation of the Month”. Each month it will link you to one of my favorite books, music, movies, etc. This month it’s This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader, by Joan Dye Gussow. It was a wonderful love story, gardening tale, and food experiment and is one of my favorite gifts from David. I hope you enjoy it too.

Through the quotes in Joan’s book I first learned of Wendell Berry. Her life and loves truly are organic…she feels the earth, a good house, a plot of land. She lives her convictions and in writing about them, brings the reader in as well. There’s even recipes, which I found homey and comforting, bringing the trial of growing unfamiliar things full circle when the inevitable question comes, “But how do I eat this?!”

Here’s a gem for eating seasonally from Alice Waters:

The things most worth wanting are not available everywhere all of the time.

I heard of this family yesterday. The Duggar Family, with a large amount of children…based on the articles and the website it seems like 13-15 but I can’t get a clear answer.

She homeschools them all. They just built, with thier own hands and debt free, a 7000 square foot house, complete with cool features such as a laundromat, commercial kitchen, sewing room, playroom, etc. They drive around in a mini bus. All the kids take violin and piano. In a lot of ways, they are a typical example of those who are “Gothard Families”

Being a “Gothardite” is not something I necessarily recommend. Nor do I think that to be a mom worthy of holding up as an example must you have the most children, always homeschool every single one of them, or wear dresses all the time. Kathryn has better hair than the most recent picture I could find of Michelle Duggar. And, judging from the Duggar family recipe page, the Sansone’s eat a healthier diet. Every single recipe was full of MSG and I watched a video clip of them grocery shopping…truly full of nasties.

So no one’s perfect ‘eh?

What I appreciate about the Duggar family, the articles about them, the news clips… was disclosure. They aren’t standing up there pretending to be something they’re not. They aren’t claiming that everyone needs to follow thier example and do it their way because “they really do it all”, as Kathryn Sansone did. What her husband does, how they got where they are, and what a day at thier home really looks like is all laid out there.
Michelle doesn’t have manicured nails. Her hair needs an update. She doesn’t play competitive tennis, weight train, or take long trips away with her husband. What she does, and it’s obvious, is spend a tremendous amount of time actually mothering those 15 or so kids. Reading about her, I didn’t get the same creeped out feeling about her kids that I did with the Sansone’s, that there was a high chance that one or two little ones weren’t really heard or considered while on the media tour. I didn’t feel that dirty feeling I thought Kathryn’s friends must have after hearing her talk about them from Michelle, who didn’t do anything but actually encourage other women.

Most of all, I felt that even if I didn’t have 15 kids, I could still take away something from Michelle’s day and improve my own mothering. She has a truly wonderful laundry/clothing organizational tip on her website. I will never cook the way she does! Or wear prairie jumpers. But after reading about her, I cuddled my kids on my lap and felt edified in my role. With Kathryn Sansone’s material, I felt defensive and apologetic.

Michelle won “Young Mother of the Year” one year. I think she more than deserved it.

More on the subject of large families and a study in contrasting  presentations:

“Women First, Family Always“, by Kathryn Sansone, book review part 1 and part 2.

Want to read more about my journey to live more deliberately? Subscribe to my feed!

Barzun is a writer whose name I have frequently heard mentioned in the the classical education circles but one I have never personally read. In fact, I didn’t know he was still alive, from this century (or the last), or anything really about him. I wouldn’t have gone looking for one of his books or works in the library. Thankfully, David is someone who would. And, that he would know from page one that we’d just found someone whose writing would strike such a chord that we would gleefully giggle over the stretching of our minds. In fact, as it turns out, Barzun is the kind of writer who takes what I was trying to articulate and does so with such excellence that I’m not only dumbfounded to read *exactly* what I was trying to say, but am blown away with his genius and skill in doing so. The first essay in the book, Toward a Fateful Serenity, he brilliantly excites with the following:

On things done well:

Growing up before the first World War in an artistic milieu in Paris and also a conventional one in Grenoble, furnished the mind of the child I remember with two main perceptions. One was that making works of art by exerting genius was the usual work of adults; the other was that such a life was hedged about by traditions, manners, and prosperity.

Needless to say, neither of these notions was explicit–or abstract as in the retelling. But faith in thier reality encouraged a precocious interst in all subjects, persons, ideas, and words half-understood. The joy of being was the joy of being there: the zest for life was tied to the spectacle of good things being done with confident energy.

Take your pick: the following quote hit my school/educational musings on head, applies to my dread of rote worship and mega-church infrasructure, and is precisely why I fight against putting my faith in systems:

Where, then is the enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drugery but where human judgement abdicates. …”methods” substituted for reading books and judging art are a perversion of what belongs to science and engineering: “models”, formulas, theories. Specialism too turns machine-like if it never transcends it’s single task. The smoothest machine-made product of the age is the organization man, for even the best organizing principle tends to corrupt, and the mechanical principle corrupts absolutely.

On maintaining perspective and the benefit of studying history:

History is concrete and complex; everything in it is individual and entangled. Reading it, mulling it over does not weaken concern with the present, but it brings detachment from the immediate and thus cures “the jumps” –seeing every untoward event as menacing, every success or defeat as permanent, every opponent as a monster of terror.

Elsewhere online, I’m considering the difference between being a “joiner” and a “skeptic” and the suggestion that one is either one or the other. Feeling inside that there has to be more to this but not being sure why or how to exactly say it, I was happy to read this resonating thought by Barzun:

A sense of “how things go” in history –how they came and go– also protects against the worst among machines: the bandwagon. To keep from climbing on is harder than ever since that other machine, the media, has been installed. So many projects, attitudes, and “concepts”, as they are quaintly called, are launched with all the trappings of true ideas that holding aloof looks like egotism or the sulks (or, my note, skepticism?): but it is not sulking to stare as the lemmings rush by; it is self-defense.

On history and it’s study leading to more than just defensiveness but on admiration, and let’s hear it for those who are so entrenched in the everyday living of life, raising little ones in all its thankless glamour, that you have a story worth the telling:

The past is full of men and women (and children too) whose lives and deeds are worthy of honor, wonder, and gratitude…lives of this kind confirm or reinstate a just estimate of life itself. The modern dogma that art is the only redeeming feature of the much-pitied “human condition” rejects nine-tenths of life, and with it those not dedicated to the highest pursuits. Faulkner in that mood said that one of Keat’s odes “was worth any number of old women”. Such literary conciet is also bad logic. Life is good because it is the source and container of everything we value. It is old women, not Grecian urns, that have in thier time borne Keates and Faulkners.

I of course have much more to share but The One Who Found This Book is clamouring to come read to him…..;-)

I’m in the midst of reading Raising Right Brained Children in a Left Brained World. Very good book! I think what I like best about it is that it doesn’t trudge through philosophy or diagnosis but spends the bulk of it’s time on stratedgy for playing up to a thinker’s strength’s and developing thier weaker connections. I’ll have lots more to say about it when I write up an actual review but I’ve already started implementing alot of the author’s suggestions and I think this is going to end up being one of my more helpful reads.

I’ve got a kindred spirit here in Tim Richardson (shout out to Tim!) www.timrichardson.com. Being that we are both creative right-brained thinkers who will wander away from a partially unloaded dishwasher because something else occurred to us that needs immediate doing, he handed me the following survey questions:

“How often do you have difficulty keeping your attention on what people say to you, even when they are speaking to you directly?”

“When you have a task that requires a lot of thought, how often do you avoid or delay getting started?” (see my I’m not a Stupid-head post!)

“How often are you distracted by noises or sound around you?”

“How often do you feel overly active and compelled to do something, as if driven by a motor?”

“How often do you find yourself overly talkative in social situations?”

That’s just a sampling of what I can answer “very often!” to, as I’m sure Tim can as well. Tim and his wife Adele (a born cheerleader and encourager if there ever was one and probably, the wind beneath his proverbial wings) are partly why we are even here, in this town. They moved here from Florida a couple of years ago and were the ones who cheered us on as we tried what most of the world would consider a cliff-jump into the unknown. Thier enthusiasm and motivation is infectious.
As I read this book I frequently think of Tim as the example in my mind of someone not hampered by being a different kind of thinker than this left-brained world. He’s creative and daring and spontaneous and successful because he’s chosen a path that requires all of that; a good example of someone who is playing their strengths even if the world is more conventional. We need right brainers!! Tim is also my son’s cubmaster and father to one of his friends, which not only makes birthday parties and pack meetings totally fun, but also helps in that my little right brained kiddos are not viewed as “problem kids” by a left brained leader. I suspect our pastor is a right brained guy as well. A newly discovered wealth of positive role models, of successful people who aren’t necessarily conventional, seems to abound.

It’s occurred to me that one of things that makes this new environment so totally healthy for our family, even as we are homesick for the known world, is that it does play to our strengths and excersize our weaknesses, with encouragement abounding as well. We’ve broken our own molds right along with the ones others had planned for us and we’re finding our new skins to be quite vibrant with potential. Who knew?

Saturday, rather than fields of daffodils in Cades Cove, brought us the library instead. After getting selections for school such as our composer of the month (Hummel), artist (Reynolds), biography (Patrick Henry), and fun reads on pottery, figure skating, and Van Gogh’s Table, I also picked up Raising Right Brained Children in a Left Brained World.

But I need a little break from Relational Aggression. Mean Girls Grown Up is still a good read; better when I skim over some of the testimonials and just stick to the author’s input. My mind has shifted to analyzing almost every conversation I can observe or be a part of, and picking out where RA is present. I needed a respite.

The cookbook section is generally where I head for a such a time. Big cookbooks, the kind with food and regional chat in them, for real reading and not just cooking experiments. We had cheeseburgers and fries on our evening menu because after a day of hiking (like we’d planned) we always want a big heavy meal. What I really wanted was one of my dad’s grilled onion burgers and his perfect fries. One of those days where he’d pop off the couch and heat up the fryer, dump in some perfect potatoes and we’d sit and ponder over sci-fi if the fry makes the ketchup warm or the ketchup makes the fry cool?

John T. Edge’s little book, part of a series, called Hamburgers and Fries jumped out at me. I started it in the car and finished it while David snored on the couch.  i’d made our cheeseburgers for dinner: sauted mushroom and havarti on top, with toasted buns. And the fries: double dipped wonders made with fresh potatoes and just perfect.

Edge was thorough. What Schlosser did with Fast Food Nation and Spurlock did with SuperSize Me, he’s done with greasy-spoon burgers. He ate  alot of them. Not a McDonald’s fan, he briefly touched on gourmet burgers running over $50 apiece, topped with truffles and made with foie gras, and then spent the majority of the book on every variation possible in regional diners.

Which brings me to the mistitle of the book. Fries get a mere 1/8th of the book. He believes their high point to have not yet come, for their history is not nearly as long as the burger’s. Well, okay, but in the field of variations out there, and when he quotes one restaurant as having had worked 8 months on getting thier fry recipe “just right”, it would seem more of the book could have covered it. McDonald’s even has it’s own fry research fascility, and one could argue, built thier chain on fantastic fast food fries.

Still, his venture into the world of burgers is amazing. He goes from every region: steamers in the North East, bean burgers in the Southwest, so called “Slug” burgers in the deep south, and the real classics everywhere in between.  There are a few recipes along the way, and cooking techniques should want to try to emmulate some of these concoctions. There are also TONS of big vocabulary words and big food words, foreign words, strange words. True, I was still tongue-tied from having read a long theological article out loud to David on Friday over the phone, but I”m no food writing neophyte; it seems to me that John T. Edge likes to have his thesausus handy and that some of the launguage was every bit as pretentious as those $59 burgers stuffed with gourmet ingredients, just to prove they could do it.

My burger was great and I learned a bit about the history of the American classic to boot. “Break Time is Over” as dad would say, and today, it’s back to RA.

This one is taking me longer than I thought. It is SUCH a thought provoking book, bringing to my mind each and every female relationship I’ve had, both good and bad. Specifically it’s a look at Relational Aggresion, frankly put, the catty ways women go at each other. In alot of ways the book is compilation of stories and experiences, dividing women into three categories: the Queen Bee (the bully), the Middle-Bee (her go-getter), and the Afraid-to-Bee (the victim).

The opening sentence: “It happens when you least expect it: the sudden, painful sting that hurts deeply, because you thought you were in a safe place, with other women immune from harm.” Relational Aggression is: “the use of relationships to hurt another, a way of verbal violence which words rather than fists inflict damage”. Far from stopping in high school, the author shows how this can continue on into adulthood. What it looks like between mothers, co-workers, etc.

The thought that continually runs through my mind is this: This (Queen Bee stuff) is what happens when women are wounded. It’s what happens when there is a void of Godly older women showing younger women how to maturely relate to one another.

The author, Cheryl Dellasega, is clear that the damage can be undone and behavior can be changed, even after a long time of one pattern and she begins that point right in the first chapter. It’s good to be reminded of as the book goes on. Right now though, I’m in the thick of the descriptions and the explanations of “why” and “how”. Here are a few quotes:

“When we go into battle, our ammunition is our prestigious careers, our brilliant children, our better homes, cars, clothes, and vacations, even our illnesses and shortcomings (my note: women are REALLY good at false humility when competing for who has it hardest!). As long as we have the biggest and the best, we can outshine everyone else and, in some twisted way, legitimize ourselves.”

Security seems to play a huge part, as in this testimonial:

“We celebrate the similarities of our intrests as writers, painters, and middle-aged women who have known each other since undergraduate school, but this did not come to us until we dropped the expectations of each other that kept us unsecure, poised for disappointment, and always competing for a place in the other’s life that we could not trust we already had.”

“Women of all ages develop thier identities in the context of relationships. Who they are and how they feel about themselves often come from friendships and partnerships. ”

“Bullies rarely recognize themselves as such, which is part of the problem. The women…described themselves as “take charge”, “too direct”, “needing help with interpersonal skills”, “high achiever”, and “having ultra-high expectations”. “They…won’t admit they’ve made a mistake despite logical and reasonable rebuttals. They…have an uncanny ability look good to peers and superiors. They…may turn on subordinates who support them. They…act on perceptions rather than reality. (And then) thier vicitims of the attack may search for flaws in thier own behavior that explain the assult.”

I’ve just gotten into the Middle-Bee section, which for all intensive purposes seems to describe the “busy bee” behavior that has been preached and taught against most of my life. What is like a lightbulb moment for me is the discovery that such ‘going in between’ stuff is not just destructive to a situation or the victim involved, but also the affect it has on the middle bee herself and the enabling it does to the Queen. The old admonishions of “don’t gossip or tell tales” play into a complexity that is bigger than that because women themselves are more complex. It’s precisely the lack of “black and white” in women’s relationships that make them tricky to navigate.

“If you remove all the difficulty, you remove the accomplishment.” Easy to apply that to about 101 situations this week!

Dear Husband is reading a FANTASTIC book that I continally sneak peeks at over his shoulder. It’s called All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture by Kenneth A. Myers.

When he finishes it and I actually get to read more of it myself (and underline all my favorite parts… the true sign that “Tia’s been here”) I’ll post a more thorough review. But for now, I offer this, a section of the book that contrasts “using” art versus “recieving” it and extensively refers to a book by C.S Lewis called An Experiment in Criticism. Here’s my favorite quote:

A work of (whatever) art can be either “received” or “used.” When we “receive” it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern by the artist. When we “use” we treat it as assistance for our own activities. The one, to use an old-fashioned image, is like being taken for a bicycle ride by a man who may know the roads we have yet never explored. The other is like adding one of those little motor attatchments to our own bicycle and then going for one of our familiar rides. The rides may be in themselves good, bad, or indifferent. The “uses” which the many make of the arts may or may not be intrinsically vulgar, depraved, or morbid. That’s as may be. “Using” is inferior to “reception” because art, if used rather than received, merely fasciliates, brightens, relieves, or palliates our life, and does not add to it……We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you can not possibly find out).

I finished yesterday and much of my sentiments from the first half remain, albeit sadly. It’s best summed up with the publisher’s description in the jacket:

“Happily married and the mother of ten, Kathryn Sansone is centered, fit, organized, and beautiful. But Supermom? Absolutely not….”

Written from the vantage point of publishing execs, who, if they are women, do not stay at home (!!) I can see why they’d look on this author with admiration. She *is* beautiful. And she’s very considerate and respectful of her husband so I’m sure she’s happily married. She’s obviously fit and organized to the nth degree.

But having read the book, I think she’s more self-centered than centered in general and I won’t be joining her club, as the quote goes on to petition.

Early on she has an insert about the contrast of moms who work outside the home and those who stay at home. Whether or not it’s best of the kids, she thinks that this choice is all about what make the woman happy. Hence the title I supose. She also says that there is equality in work and stress levels for both.

I didn’t get that. I think working women have it much, much harder. They have to juggle more balls and look good doing it. They must spend a good deal of time feeling torn about how much effort each area gets. When someone gets sick, they can’t just have a “jammie day”. No, I didn’t get that.

But then she describes her days. 8 hours in the car…in traffic! Multiple kids in sports plus her own. By her own admission she doesn’t “stay at home” much and that’s very clear. There’s just not enough hours in the day. With the way she juggles things I can see how relating to someone who works outside the home would be applicable.

As I did yesterday, I still don’t think there’s much I could apply. David said, “she’s not very immitatable, is she?” And how. She’s the uber-soccer mom, Stepfordish suburbanite, shopping often, cooking with gourmet foods, and decorating ala the pottery barn catalog. Yes, I admit to strong envy hearing her describe her mud room, where each child has a cubbie with thier photo, seasonal sports equiptment, and daily needs all neatly hung in a row!

That doesn’t make that beautiful system a “word of wisdom I can use in my down times”. Sigh.

I’m kind of sorry she’s put herself out there. No one, or at least not I, would have critiqued her way of doing things if it wasn’t out in print, encouraging me to apply her “wisdom”. She lives with alot of people and out of necessity manages them. For thier lifestyle, I’m sure she does a “good” job. It’s just not how enough of society can emmulate to make it worth pages and a binding.

What saddened my spirit most was something in the end, when she’s talking about how the kids go down for the night: “I never sat in a room with a child and rocked them to sleep.”

I think Kathryn Sansone has missed out on a whole dynamic of mothering entirely.

I’ve noticed that lately I’ve had a growing sensitivity about choices women make with selfishness at the core. I guess it’s always been around; for whatever reason my senses have a heightened awareness these days.

I guess I should start by saying I operate from a mindset that doesn’t think all choices are equal. Some really ARE better than others. If you have choice A and choice B and choice A has research behind it that shows it has benefits that choice B doesn’t have, that doesn’t necessarily make choice B “bad”…but it does still mean that choice A was better.

And, I can be an incredibly selfish person sometimes. Just ask anyone who’s lived with me and heard me rant about “needing my space”. So for a long time I’ve kept my trap shut on the issue because there is indeed a log in my eye.

Then I saw this book:

In the interest of full disclosure I’ll admit that I haven’t finished it yet. So may there’s still hope for me to glean something useful from it.

I was in the grocery store when I saw it, picking up a jug of OJ that I suddenly had to have on ice. The book had a 40% discount attatched; the cover photo shows her beautuful 10 kids. I”m a sucker for big families and the women who run them so I picked it up.

Besides, though I’m suposed to be reading Northanger Abbey right now, it hasn’t been holding my interest well and I wanted something light on my day off yesterday. I was hoping this read would be encouraging.

The author, Kathryn Sansone, was discovered by Oprah one day, while answering a question on fitness. At the time she was pregnant with her 9th baby and still doing her weight training regiment. Since then, she’s been in O Magazine, had several other interviews, and is on a special forum of women assembled by AOL. The book is her tips for “doing it all”. She makes several reminders that she is not perfect but that she is doing her best. Good so far.

And then….well a distance starts to form between her and her reader (me). I start realizing that she is undoubtedly upper middle class and white and her adivice isn’t that applicable to the majority of women I know, see, or could possibly relate to. Her central point is that you have to take care of yourself, be a good and strong woman *first* before you can be the best for your family. Point taken. We all need to nurture ourselves and a happy mom means a better mom.

Halfway through the book though and I realize her children seem to be a part of less and less of her day as we go along. For starters, she doesn’t homeschool them; they go to a parochial school. Not a block there. I don’t think everyone should homeschool thier kids and using a good system doesn’t necessarily mean the parent is abdicating thier resposibilty to educate thier children. But the thought did come to mind when she says, “yes, I am doing it all”.

She’s an admitted type-A personality and goes into the importance of making lists and planning the day. Getting enough rest (she naps in carpool lines and doctor waiting rooms–yikes!). She plays comptetive tennis and volleyball. Gets her hair cut and colored regularly, fingers and toes done monthly. Works out 4 times a week. Gets regular dates with her dashing hubby, little coffee breaks, occassional trips sans kiddos into Chicago, is on several boards and committees. OH, she’s also a personal trainer and serves on that AOL forum. And she wrote a book.

Halfway through the book I’ve heard LOTS about her and very little about how she acutally manages and parents 10 children.

She’s almost lost me with this one though…. “When I tell people I have never nursed a baby, they are frequently surprised….What’s best for me has always been feeding my babies formula from a bottle. This way my husband and older kids can feed the baby, I get back into the swing of things more quickly……”

There’s that pesky “choice A” and “choice B”. “What’s best for me??!” (emphasis mine). If nursing were just about mom, I guess I could go with that. What about what is best for baby though? It seems absurd to go into the extent of research that proves breastfeeding is better than formula. Maybe a little more helpful to point out that baby formula is one of the highest offenders with MSG; definately NOT “Just as healthy” as Kathryn would like to beleive. Formula has it’s place for certain; not everyone CAN nurse.

But my biggest beef is both the motivation behind the choice “it’s all about what’s best for mom” and the contention that after having a baby, part of “getting back into the swing” includes that baby! Your swing pre-baby isn’t SUPOSED to look like your swing post-baby. It’s doesn’t look likes she’s “doing it all” to me. I’m still operating under the (mis)conception that motherhood often means “others first”. Isn’t that one of the great beauties of motherhood? Or heck, of simple “progagation of the species”? You put the child’s need before your own OFTEN. That doesn’t mean you neglect yourself but “self” isnt’ the core of the decision process.
The question that lingers is, “what happens when one of those 10 break rank?” What if one to come is born with Down’s or someone gets really sick or what about just ordinary teenage rebellion? When it’s all not so easy to “manage” while wearing a tennis skirt with manicured nails?

So, we’ll see. I still have half of the section on marriage and then the end, which is suposed to actually be about the kids to go. I may still find something of merit in there, something to make this purchase worthwhile. So far though, her “all choices are equal; do what’s best for YOU” mantra isn’t resonating.

For more on my thoughts of this book:

part 2 of the book review

a contrast: Michelle Duggar does “big family mothering” in a different way

want more thoughts on living deliberately? subscribe to my feed!

Apparently this compute likes to have it’s buttons stroked. After hours of trying to get the thing to admit it had a power source, I sat running my fingers over the external buttons on the CPU, trying to figure out how we were going to get two new businesses up and running without a computer, when AHA! On the lights came and the little beast woke up.

So , here I am, typing what occurred to me while I was driving to Knoxville today, taking Celia over to a friend’s home. Earlier in the morning my friend Jennifer and I were talking about the evils of grammar lessons and diagraming sentences. We were trying to figure out what possible purpose such a break down could have and pretty much came to the conclusion that avid readers didn’t need to have that kind of painstaking analytical reduction. We know what something is “about”.

And then, we compared our reading histories. We both love to read and both cut our teeth on serial fiction…Sweet Valley High, Nancy Drew Mysteries, etc. This is on the forefront of our minds here at the Graham house, as Andrew is old enough to want to latch on to these easy reads that hook and carry you along. And, I guess they have thier place….the reader gets the satisfaction of having completed a big book, which then hopefully gives them confidence to up it a knotch to something more difficult.

Or not. There are readers out there who never move on. Just like there are those who never eat more than junk food and sweets. Candy….”doesnt’ have to have a point” as they say in Willy Wonka. And, as my last post indicates, I think pointless candy, both mind and edible, has a place. But a steady diet of it makes the mind and body weak and sick.

What might a sick and weak mind look like? Well, that diagramming conversation and the seeming meaninglessness of it came crashing in. That kind of breakdown helps readers figure out WHO is doing WHAT and HOW. It helps with discernment. It helps to discover what something is really ABOUT, even if that isn’t immediately clear.

One tangent we got into in our book conversation today was how to determine the appropriateness of books for children. Harry Potter came up, so did all that sentimental serial fiction from our past, and so did other things like modern christian fiction, dark writing like the Flowers in the Attic series, and many others.

And it occurred to me: I’d rather have the clearly defined light and dark orphaned boy looking for love and salvation while at boarding school story of Harry Potter in my kids’ hands than some of that “light serial” stuff of my past with it’s subtle and disguised value influence…the pink and happy faces all scrubbed clean but with aspirations and lifestyles that are on a destructive path. Or take the repetitive formula of books like Nancy Drew. Read 3 of them and you can pretty much solve any case. It’s like taking a walk and being mindful not to work up a sweat. Some of the women’s fiction is just as quietly offensive…churning out whinning women who are melodramatic and overly emotional.

Books have incredible power. Any reader is no doubt gonna stumble on some duds along the collection of great ones. Candy has it’s place but so does meat, milk, and bread. Don’t forget fiber and vegetables full of nutritents. Real work outs that cause excertion and concentration. I guess we shouldn’t assume that just because something has a shiny, happy cover, claims to be christian, or even just relaxing that it’s necessarily good *or* harmful. Or, in the case of Don blankety-blank Quixote, that just because it’s a classic that it’s any good either! Stuff that looks dark may not be. Learn what things are ABOUT.

« Previous Page