8/19/2011

An Ordered Plan of Love


This is my favorite encouraging message to mothers of young children.  It is a beautiful, spiritual gem.

***

To a young child home stands for God.  In it he learns to see and touch the gifts of God.  If his mother is wise she will make his home beautiful.  She will copy the world's creator and make a tiny new Eden.  She will bring in flowers and give the child animals and feed the birds.  The food on the table will be clean and simple and good.  It will not only taste nice, it will look nice . . .

It is in his home that the child should assimilate the Sermon on the Mount, not as if it were being drilled in his brain by words, but as if he were breathing it in his whole being like the air . . .

The ordering of time, which seems so simple, really requires great skill and energy from the mother.  It has tremendous importance, above all if it is related (as it obviously should be) to the rhythm of day and night and is interwoven with prayer.

The child should wake to the singing of the birds (and they sing in the cities as well as in the woods).  Give his heart to God, when light is young, play for long hours when the world is awake and lively.  He should form habits of regular hunger and thirst, so that food and hunger come together, and his grace is a real thanking.  With twilight there should come stillness in the house and he should be lit to bed by the stars.

From such ordering of time he will learn unconsciously, though it may be years before he thinks this out, that he is not part of that chaos that man has made of this world, with its fearful abuse of time, but part of an ordered plan of love.
~ Caryll Houselander



5/08/2011

Happy Mother's Day




Something of God
comes into our world
with every child that is born.
There is here with the newborn child
a divine spark, a light within . . .
~ Rufus Jones

3/05/2011

Peace

Between Christmas and New Year by Carl Larsson

. . . whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are honest,
whatsoever things are just,
whatsoever things are pure,
whatsoever things are lovely,
whatsoever things are of good report;
if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise,
think on these things.

. . . and the God of peace will be with you.

~ Philippians 4:8 . . . 9 
   


2/18/2011

Gracious Living


Truly gracious living is a by-product of gracious thinking and doing, and in material things is expressed in "what is simple and beautiful".  And true simplicity is not the rejection of beauty in our surroundings, but the refusal to allow concern for things to clutter our minds . . .
~ Edgar B. Castle, 1961

1/02/2011

A New Year

Anna S by Carl Larsson

Make it your ambition and endeavor to live quietly and peacefully, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands . . .
~ 1 Thessalonians 4:11