Parent Review Articles - Jan 2024

The snow in our area prevented our January gathering so I decided to write some of my favorite passages from our readings down in this blog post.

Essentially, this blog is for me - a time capsule that I visit to look back on what we experience in our home education journey. I hope it can also be an encouragement to others on this journey too. If you're here and reading, thank you! I know how fast paced our culture is now and taking your time to sit and read something for more than a few moments is a commodity.

The readings for this month come from these three passages:
Miss Mason's Message to the Children
Women Must Weep
The National Mission

These articles were all written by Charlotte Mason during the time England was at war.

Miss Mason's Message to the Children

This is an article that I plan to share with my own children. We have memorized the Lord's Prayer and although we don't pray it every day, I think that sharing some of the heartfelt understanding of the words will help my children as they speak their heart to the Lord. Especially the encouragement that the prayers of children are effective and powerful!

"...we older people will have reason to be grateful to you if you perform it steadily. You must say your prayers, such wise-hearted loving prayers, so earnestly offered, that God will certainly hear and answer them generously and wonderfully; in this way a single child may bring down blessings on the whole nation.....What we have to do is to get up half an hour earlier in the morning and think of that prayer and ask the Holy Spirit to help us to pray it."

From there, CM outlines the Lord's Prayer within the context of the Great War. A lesson to me in this age is that even though we are night fighting a physical war like they were in 1915, our nation is still in great need of help that can only come from the Lord.

Women Must Weep

The first article outlined the Lord's Prayer for children. This article walks through the Lord's Prayer for the adults reading The Parents' Review. While I was reading it I wondered to myself if our nation feels the same sense of patriotism that England did back then? "..the men in the trenches are of good cheer, cockney wit and country humour play freely on things 'frightful.' We do not, at home or abroad, require to stimulate our courage or strengthen our fortitude with diurnal doses of Hate."

Then the powerful quote: "It would appear that there is a sort of resilience in human nature which calamity sets free." Yikes. I know from history that this is true - I would just rather live in a time where generations have learned from the calamity and we don't repeat it in order to have the resilient humans rise up. 

"...we begin to comprehend that, from the Divine point of view, the war with all its horrors may not be too great a price to pay for the liberation of the spiritual forces in men, tied and bound as these have been by the chains of luxurious custom and materialistic thought."

Are we still liberated? Or have we chained ourselves again through the last two generations?

CM then goes through an admonition to pray the Lord's Prayer for both our nation as well as our own hearts as people. "Then, how wonderfully and surprisingly the Prayer orders our desires, gives us a sense of proportion, teaches us to put the first things foremost in a way we should think insincere if the ordering of the petitions were our own, but which is the one means of allaying the restless hurrying to and fro of our thoughts and desires...'prayer becomes our native speech, and we know that answer to our prayers travels towards us from the moment the words are conceived in our hearts.'"

The "amplification of the Lord's Prayer" is so powerful and something I intend to practice in my daily quiet time.

The National Mission

CM often references people that have influenced her thoughts and writings. Frederick Denison Maurice was quoted in this article - "Repentance is God's choicest and deepest gift: Repentance for our habitual dreariness and coldness, for that shallowness of heart, which overtakes us, where we are surrounded with the tokens of His Presence, where we are partakers of the ordinances of His grace; which those very privileges seem to produce in us.....That one phrase of Scripture, 'turn to God,' contains, I think, all that we can say of it."

Hope is discussed in length to encourage the readers living in a difficult time of the war. I can imagine that it must have been very difficult to see news reports, wondering if those you loved who were in military service were alive, and questioning the effectiveness of the war must have drained hope from many people. I imagine CM's words of wisdom brought a light of hope to the reader's heart.

"Let us endeavor ourselves day by day not only to tell, but in the first place to learn the words and works of our Master. And perhaps in this connection it would be as well to avoid the excellent little manuals of comfort and counsel prepared for our uses while we are learning to regard ourselves as existing for His uses. It may be that there is no better way of taking our part in the National Mission than this of definitely studying our Lord from his own words, from the beautiful goings forth of his life among men, until we are consumed by that grand passion which is the destined part of everyone of us, the passion of Christianity."

Isn't that still the encouragement we need? I would hope we go to scripture first before trying to glean wisdom from the popular blogger, writer, influencer, pastor, etc. His words and life should be what I study. "..not only to TELL, but in the first place to LEARN the words and works of our Master."

In the section about forgiveness, CM writes a wonderful reminder: "..it is easy to say 'forgive the sinner but hate the sin,' but for the time being the sinner and the sin are one thing and not two; and it is only through the Spirit of God that we can yield that forgiveness which implies a constant and difficult act of discrimination on our part, a free yielding of our love to the offender and yet no, even momentary, making light of the offence. The power of forgiveness, also, is one of the choicest and most precious gifts of God, to be sought for as a gift through the cleansing of our own hearts and by supplication for our offending brother. What if through the war we are being promoted to a higher class in that divine school which is the blessed company of all faithful people, and what if the higher class implies more strenuous tasks? If it is written 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us,' it is implied that our forgiveness shall be like that of our Father in Heaven, a forgiveness which does not condone, but for the dear sake of the offender, exacts, at any rate, such penalties as shall make him aware that he has sinned and turn him also to Repentance."

I'm thankful that all three of these articles were unified in the Lord's Prayer and encouraged me in my prayer time. Even though these articles were printed over 100 years ago, they are still applicable to my life as I think about the future of the world for my children and the condition of my own heart. I hope you enjoy reading them too! All the articles we are reading this school year can be found here:
http://gcahomeschool.blogspot.com/2023/05/parent-review-articles-for-book-club.html