The most potent force in political life

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/10/culture-matters-more-than-politics

Kiernan and I enjoyed discussing this.

Bryna to Daddy: You know, the Spaulding/Nelson mix is the best. It can get you out of any bad situation. :-)

Preserving the Old Ways

Lyrics:

We are the Village Green Preservation Society
God save Donald Duck, Vaudeville and Variety
We are the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society
God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do
We are the Draught Beer Preservation Society
God save Mrs. Mopp and good Old Mother Riley
We are the Custard Pie Appreciation Consortium
God save the George Cross and all those who were awarded them
We are the Sherlock Holmes English Speaking Vernacular
Help save Fu Manchu, Moriarty and Dracula
We are the Office Block Persecution Affinity
God save little shops, china cups and virginity
We are the Skyscraper Condemnation Affiliate
God save tudor houses, antique tables and billiards
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do
God save the Village Green.

Holy God save us. Have mercy on us.

Temple Grandin

This is a wonderful video about "different kinds of minds."

Get the film about Temple Grandin. Wonderful.

Why Homeschooling Works

This is a great description of the Industrial model!

Charlotte Mason understood this over 100 years ago.

Knowledge of a little history helps

To this day, I remember something I read in the preface of this book. "In my experience, most Evangelicals who have any knowledge of Church history tend to think and speak as if it began on October 31, 1517. This was the memorable day when Martin Luther nailed up his 95 Theses, thus unwittingly sparking off the Protestant Reformation...But as for what went before Luther's protest -- Evangelicals often know nothing about it, and dismiss it all as a period of total darkness. (The footnote here says, "...but with a few flickering lights here and there...including Augustine of Hippo.) Of course, this means dismissing the overwhelming bulk of the Christian story: writing off the first 1,500 years in favour of the last 500."

A few lines later I read, “Among the precious promises of God’s Word are these, spoken by the Saviour Himself: “I will build My Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). Christ’s spiritual kingdom is indestructible and perpetual; He has always had, and will always have, an uninterrupted succession of believing people on earth...”

So I asked, What happened? Did the church go wrong after the last apostle died and didn't 'get right' again until Luther? Where was the evidence of the Holy Spirit's work during the first 1500 years? Where is that church?

I had assigned the above book, actually part of a set, by N. R. Needham, to Kiernan and Jillian in high school. It was one of the first books to help me ask some new questions and get outside my little world. Over the years, the questions kept coming, and I enjoyed digging for answers. A couple of early books I read on the subject were Becoming Orthodox by Peter Gillquist and The Orthodox Church by Timothy Ware.

There are several things I slowly learned to keep in mind as I read, though. One was that, for the most part, all of the history we have learned is from a Western perspective, through a Roman Catholic grid. As much as Protestants like to think that they have separated themselves from the Roman church, everything is in reference to them. Consequently if we read something about sacraments or Mary, or even the word “Catholic,” we automatically think, "Roman Catholic." Or if we read something about Church Councils, or Bishops, we think, “Roman Catholic.”

(I'm sounding awfully anti-Roman Catholic, and I honestly don't mean to. I do believe that the RC has some erroneous doctrines, but I don't believe that they are the great evil that I have heard preached from Protestant pulpits. I am merely trying to point out that I - and I believe many others - reject learning more about the early church because, as Protestants, we automatically think it is Roman.)

Tip #1: Roman Catholics are not the same as the Eastern Orthodox.

When we read something that was written in 110 AD, we Protestants think, “But this is Roman Catholic, so it must be wrong.” Actually it is not Roman Catholic. It is Orthodox. The entirety of the Christian Church for about the first 800 years was Orthodox. If you or I became a true Christian (right-believing, Nicene-believing) in 400 AD, we would have been Orthodox. There were conflicts leading up to the Great Schism, but, according to the RC church, and most of the history of the church that we learn in the West, the break came in 1054. (The Orthodox would put the date of the break a little later, but we'll talk about that another time.)

I thought I would post some charts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ChristianityBranches.svg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Protestantbranches.svg

http://saintignatiuschurch.org/timeline.html

One item of significance to me about the first chart, however, is that the gray line leading up to the Great Schism split shows the red line as Roman Catholic and the blue line as Eastern Orthodox. What the Orthodox claim is that they are actually a continuation of the gray line - no changes. Just holding to the original faith passed down from the Apostles and the early Church Fathers.

Do you believe them? Does it matter to you?

The Pattern of Things in the Heavens

There is a worship that continually occurs in the heavens, a worship of the undivided Trinity. I love liturgy because when I enter the sanctuary I am entering the worship that is already going on and has always gone on and will always go on, together with all the angels and other believers, of our King, Christ Jesus. (Heb. 9:23; Rev. 4; Heb. 12)

From the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, chanted every Sunday:

"Illumine our hearts, O Master Who lovest mankind, with the pure light of Thy divine knowledge. Open the eyes of our mind to the understanding of Thy gospel teachings. Implant also in us the fear of Thy blessed commandments, that trampling down all carnal desires, we may enter upon a spiritual manner of living, both thinking and doing such things as are well-pleasing unto Thee. For Thou art the illumination of our souls and bodies, O Christ our God, and unto Thee we ascribe glory, together with Thy Father, Who is from everlasting, and Thine all-holy, good, and life-creating Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen."

Why Orthodoxy: Questions

Something I do not want to imply in telling how we are moving toward Orthodoxy is that it's a reaction. This is not a reaction against what happened to us in a previous church.

Nor is it a statement against any of the churches or people we have been privileged to know.

This is not a moving away from something so much as it is a moving toward.

As I went through my past week, I was trying to remember all of the things that brought us to this point. I thought I would list them as well as I can remember them, and then try to talk about them one by one.

Key questions and issues that kept coming up in our thoughts and in our conversations over the last ten years and more:

1. Where is the early 'pure' church that we were trying to find in our home church experience?

2. Tradition - do we make up our own? Do we pick one? Are we handed a tradition to past down?

3. What is Truth? (Because I've got to teach it to my children!)

4. Concerns about the disparaging and denial of the importance of the Physical that I was seeing in Protestant churches

5. And related...a misunderstanding of Beauty and its importance

6. Worship - Does God even care how we do it? What kind of worship pleases God?

7. A new growing appreciation of a healthy structure for authority

8. The role of women in the church

9. Predestination and Arminianism - I was sure that there had to be a 3rd view

10. An emphasizing of the Intellect and not balancing it with mystery and the unknowable

11. Logical reasoning and not taking into account its limitations

12. Is there more meaning to communion and baptism that I thought?

13. Holiness - What is it? How can we be holy?

There are many more things, of course, but this is what came to mind. I hope to expand on these items in the coming days.

Why Orthodoxy

While the majority of our loved ones have not questioned our exploration of the Orthodox Christian Church, a few have asked about it. Therefore, I decided I would share how we have come to this point. With this post, I endeavor to create a situation that could lead to understanding.

I was raised to respect, indeed believe in, the Holy Bible. And I was raised to understand the Bible through Protestant and Baptist traditions of interpretation. My husband was raised Lutheran. I had learned a contempt for liturgical worship services. It’s so rote, after all. People who go to liturgical churches don’t even take their Bibles to church, right? So, I had no desire to attend or raise our children in such a setting. Therefore, we mostly attended Baptist churches in our moves around the country.

I had also learned to be suspicious of hierarchy.

We met and made friends with some of the best people we will ever know in those churches. We also experienced things that made us question what was being taught.

It was while we lived in a Midwest town that we experienced something that, although we didn’t see it at the time, would become a major turning point. We attended a church where the pastor ruled with an iron fist and lorded over his congregation. My husband and myself (and our teenage daughter) began to be very concerned when we kept hearing (from the pulpit, etc.) that we, as a congregation, could not question the pastor. He was led by the Holy Spirit and so to question him was to be in rebellion against God.

My husband and I did question him, however. And the results were that he bullied my husband and myself with pastoral power to silence us about the abuses we saw. This ‘pastor’ and his wife were responsible for lies and gossip told about my family and myself, telling others to stop being friends with us (some thankfully did not listen), and most unforgivably, he tried to divide and conquer by trying to turn my husband and myself against each other. (Thankfully it backfired and strengthened us.) But it nevertheless was a very difficult time.

We have spoken to other families since then who experienced similar things at his hand. It is heart-breaking.

Around this time, this ‘pastor’ broke off from any governing body that was in place(such that it was), effectively leaving no one to turn to for mediation. He was basically a despot, and it occurred to us that a hierarchy would have been helpful.

At this point, we began to house church with a few other families. We desired to have the simplicity of the early church. We just wanted to worship God and teach our children to love the Lord. But, here, although we weren’t aware of it at the time, we also lacked leadership, structure, and a common approach to Scripture and worship.

Then we moved to England. We attended an Evangelical, non-denominational American church plant. Again, we met some of the most wonderful, loving people there.

When we moved to our current state (back to the Midwest, but not the same state), we visited many churches over a two year span, including Baptist, non-denom, a quasi-Methodist mega-church, and even a couple of visits to a Presbyterian church. These churches are filled to the brim with people wanting to worship God in spirit and in truth.

But I was not at peace. Neither was my husband nor our oldest two children.

Then we visited an Anglican church. No one was more surprised than I when I actually liked a liturgical service. There was something about it that my soul responded to that cannot be put into words.

I had many conversations with the priest, a godly and loving man. We talked about sacraments and godly structure. We talked about mystery and the via media. We talked about salvation and predestination.

Predestination was a recurring theme that began years ago in the previous Midwest state and continued up to our time in the Anglican church. We read and studied this Calvinist doctrine and had many conversations with friends who believed it was a central tenet to the Christian faith.

We, however, have found it to be contrary to what we read in Scripture (even with all of the logical arguments for it) and contrary to the nature of things.

Our priest, however, did not preach it from the pulpit and assured us that there was room for many views on the subject.

We were happy and content. We all decided to become members of this church.

Unfortunately, at the same time that we were wanting to commit to this church, I had a niggling concern in the back of my mind about some of the tenets of the Anglican faith, particularly predestination. We realized that the great problem was that even though our church didn’t emphasize it, another Anglican church might. What if we moved? We wouldn’t be able to count on all Anglican churches being the same.

A watershed moment for me was when I looked on the Anglican Church in North America website to learn more about the Inaugural Assembly that occurred in the summer of 2009 in which the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in America was invited to speak about seeking unity between the two churches. I watched the speech given by Metropolitan Jonah and I liked what I heard.

This is getting quite long so I will close now. I will write Part 2 next chance I get. I plan to write what we are learning about the Orthodox Church itself.

Jared's School 2010-2011 9th grade

This will be in the format of Norms & Nobility:

1. MATHS AND SCIENCES

A. Geometry: from here

B. Biology: from here

II. ARTS AND LANGUAGES

A. Fine Arts: CADD for Architectural Design: from here (scroll down)

B. Performing Arts: Kettering Children’s Choir/Capella Choir: here (Jared is seated in the front row, far right :-)

C. Greek 2: from here

Latin 2: from here

III. HUMANE LETTERS

N&N Year 9 booklist - Creation through the Romans (will go into Yr. 10)

Literature: The Redemptive Novel - from here

Classical Writing: from here

Memory Work - N&N list

IV. Physical Education: Golf (with his Dad); soccer (with a local private school);

Horsemanship lessons - from here

For his high school Health credit - classes/reading from here (I agree with much of the information here, however, some of the metaphors used -as shown in the second video- I am not in agreement with :-)

And, lastly and most importantly: Bible -

He will continue to read straight through the Bible - he is currently in Isaiah

Also, I am having him read (and discuss with me)

The Orthodox Church - by (Kallistos) Timothy Ware and

The Open Door - by Frederica Mathewes- Green

(because he has questions about iconography)

[I've done this over and over trying to get the formatting correct and blogger won't let me. Argh!]