Studying to be Quiet: One Hundred Days of Keeping

"I realize the impossible enormity of Charlotte Mason's claim. But there it is: 'God the Holy Spirit is Himself the Supreme Educator, dealing with each of us severally in the things we call sacred and those we call secular.' God. Always speaking. All subjects. It reminds me of the old children’s joke: 'How do you know when there has been an elephant in your fridge?' 'You see his footprints in the butter, silly.' Theologian Henri Nouwen writes that while very few of us ever hear an audible voice of God or experience, like the saints, an angelic presence, or can ever point to something as life-changing as Mason’s Great Recognition, 'God will let himself be suspected.' Wouldn’t we then, want to try to keep track of those suspicions?" Find here a smidge of Wordsworth, some wonky liturgical math, and a glimpse of one notebook keeper's keeping in an invigorating, “as you go” primer of Mason’s world-reading method and a practical meditation on “that one of the mysteries we call education.”