Beginning to Create Exams

Here is the master sheet where I start each year's exam questions. I tweak it (leave out things or add things) depending on the year and student.



AO Year __ Term __ Exam

NAME * SCHOOL YEAR * Grade __ * DATE OF EXAM



BIBLE
1. In your own words, tell about your favorite character that you read in your Bible reading this term.
2. In your own words, tell about your favorite event that you read in your Bible reading this term.


WRITING (handwriting and cursive)
Write 2-4 lines of a poem that you memorized this term.
Copy a sentence into cursive.


DICTATION/SPELLING
(read sentence or paragraph for child to write)


COMPOSITION FROM LITERATURE
1. Describe your favorite scene or character from the Shakespeare play you read this term.
2. Tell a story about --
3. Tell a story about --


GRAMMAR
Underline the subject and circle the predicate in the following quote:
(Text to be included)


HISTORY
Include Century Book (timeline)


GEOGRAPHY
Include Map Notebook


NATURAL HISTORY/SCIENCE
Include Nature Notebook


READING SKILLS
Father or friend to select a passage for student to read aloud.


ARITHMETIC


FOREIGN LANGUAGE


PICTURE STUDY
Describe your favorite picture from this term's picture study.


SINGING
Sing this term's folksong and a hymn, which the father may choose from the three learned this term, in front of parents.


HANDICRAFTS
Show some work in handicrafts from this term to someone outside your family.


COMPOSER STUDY
Describe your favorite story from this term's composer study.


CITIZENSHIP/GOVERNMENT
(Plutarch)

Ambeside Online Year 02 Booklist - Modified

I have taken the Ambleside Online year as my core and then tweaked it a little bit depending on what books I already have and what I've gleaned from others.


http://amblesideonline.org/02bks.shtml and http://higherupandfurtherin.blogspot.com/2006/12/year-2-program-and-booklist.html

*Term 1, **Term 2, ***Term 3, no * means book will be read through all three terms

BIBLE:
New Testament - reading from the Bible and Children’s Bible
Tiger and Tom by JE White
*Wisdom and the Millers by Mildred Martin
** A is for Adam by Ken Ham
***George Muller by Benge and Real Heroes Wear Jeans by Tim Hansel

HABIT TRAINING
Laying Down The Rails
**What the Bible says about being a Girl/Boy publ. By Pearables

HISTORY
TERM 1
An Island Story ch 22-32 (1066-1189, Harold II Henry II)
Lief the Lucky by D'AulaireA
Child's History of the World by Virgil Hillyer ch 47, ch 49-53, 1000 AD Charlemaigne, Vikings Peter the Hermit; 800-1100
TERM 2
An Island Story ch 33-50 (1189-1399, Richard I Richard II)
A Child's History of the World by Hillyer ch 54-57 Richard I-John I Magna Charta, 1189-1215
TERM 3
An Island Story ch 51-61 (1399-1553, Henry IV-Henry VII)
This Country of Ours ch 2-5 (Columbus, 1492-1497, Henry VII)
A Child's History of the World by Virgil Hillyer ch 58-61 (Marco Polo-Joan of Arc; 1275-1456)

AMERICAN HISTORY
TruthQuest Vol 1

HISTORY TALES AND/OR BIOGRAPHY
Trial and Triumph by Richard Hannula (selected chapters)
* ** The Little Duke by Charlotte Yonge
*** Joan of Arc by Diane Stanley

GEOGRAPHY
* **Tree in the Trail by Holling C. Holling
** ***Seabird by Holling C. Holling
** How we Learned the Earth is Round by Patricia Lauber

NATURAL HISTORY/SCIENCE
The Handbook of Nature Study by Anna Botsford Comstock
The Storybook of Science - finish in the summer
Explore Creation with Botany (2nd half)
* What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs (spend 6 wks)
* ** The Burgess Animal Book for Children by Thornton Burgess
**Christian Liberty Nature Reader #2
*** Pagoo by Holling C Holling

MATHEMATICS
Math U See
**The King's Commissioners by Aileen Friedman (ILL)
Math computer game CDs
Math Songs CDs

POETRY
* Walter De La Mare
**Eugene Field and James Whitcombe Riley
*** Christina Rossetti

LITERATURE
Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb
Pilgrim's Progress Book by John Bunyan
Among the Farm Yard People by Clara Dillingham Pierson
The Children’s Book of Virtues edited by W. Bennett
* Teddy's Button by Amy LeFeuvre Written in: 1890
** The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
*** Robin Hood by Howard Pyle (this book may be continued into the summer if necessary to finish)

ADDITIONAL BOOKS FOR FREE READING - these are books that no child should miss, but rather than overloading school time, these can be read during free time. No narrations need be required from these books. Parents should explain to students that historical fiction, while often well-researched, is still fiction, and contains the author's ideas of how things might have happened.(Books with asterisks pertain to that term's historical studies)
Heidi by Joanna Spyri (J SPY)
A Wonder Book by Nathaniel Hawthorne (292 HAW)
Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne (808 HAW)
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney (J SID
Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales
Pied Piper of Hamlin by Robert Browning
Abraham Lincoln by Ingri D'Aulaire
Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit (J NES)
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting
Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers (some versions say "revised" because P.L. Travers revised chapter 6 herself in 1981 to get rid of some rather nasty racist things.)
Brighty of the Grand Canyon by Marguerite Henry (J F HEN)
Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard Atwater
Otto of the Silver Hand by Howard Pyle (J PLY)
Chanticleer and the Fox - Barbara Cooney's is one version (E CHA)
Along Came A Dog by Meindert De Jong (Clarkesville-J DEJ)
The Door in the Wall by Marguerite De Angeli (J DEA)
The Matchlock Gun by Walter D. Edmonds
Twenty and Ten
A Lion to Guard Us

Art/Drawing
from nature and from history/literature tales
I Can Do All Things


Children's Play
Literature SelectionThe Children are writing and directing the play as a present to the adults on Christmas Eve.


Copywork and Cursive
Transcribe (copy) simple phrases from Bible, Poetry, GW Rules, and Literature
Pictures in Cursive Primer by Queen Homeschool


Grammar/Spelling
Language Lesson by Queen Homeschool and Spelling Wisdom by J. Fulbright

Examinations the Charlotte Mason Way

If it wasn't for Linda Fay I would still be struggling to do exams. Here is the link to read what she says http://www.charlottemasonhelp.com/2009/07/examinations.html.

I also received help for some of these questions from http://www.amblesideonline.org/ExamAOExams.shtml and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AOExams/?yguid=374109584.

One more recent blog post that got me motivated to work on and post my exams is http://ohpeacefulday.blogspot.com/2009/11/charlotte-mason-and-exams.html.

Barb at Harmony Art Mom wrote a good post about Exams with more links:
http://harmonyartmom.blogspot.com/2010/01/charlotte-mason-style-exams-resources.html

Charlotte Mason Method

Here is a blog that is doing a great job of introducing readers to the Charlotte Mason Method of homeschooling.



Simply Charlotte Mason: http://simplycharlottemason.com/home/blog/



Here are the introductory articles.



A System or a Method?: http://simplycharlottemason.com/2009/07/16/a-system-or-a-method/


Making the Transition to the Charlotte Mason Method: http://simplycharlottemason.com/2009/07/22/making-the-transition-to-the-charlotte-mason-method/


Stage 1, The Basics: http://simplycharlottemason.com/2009/07/29/transition-to-cm-basics/


Stage 2, Once A Week: http://simplycharlottemason.com/2009/08/05/transition-to-cm-once-a-week/


Stage 3, Check Up: http://simplycharlottemason.com/2009/08/12/transition-to-cm-check-up/


Stage 4, Add In: http://simplycharlottemason.com/2009/08/19/transition-to-cm-stage-4-add-in/

Hymn - And Can It Be That I Should Gain?

St. Peter Freed from Prison by Pier Francesco Mola

Written by Charles Wesley http://www.wholesomewords.org/biography/biorpcwesley.html

(Listen here on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQeIGbKqiw8 )

And can it be that I should gain

An interest in the Savior’s blood?

Died He for me, who caused His pain—

For me, who Him to death pursued?

Amazing love! How can it be,

That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

Amazing love! How can it be,

That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

’Tis mystery all: th’Immortal dies:

Who can explore His strange design?

In vain the firstborn seraph tries

To sound the depths of love divine.

'Tis mercy all! Let earth adore,

Let angel minds inquire no more.

Tis mercy all! Let earth adore;

Let angel minds inquire no more.

He left His Father’s throne above

So free, so infinite His grace—

Emptied Himself of all but love,

And bled for Adam’s helpless race:

’Tis mercy all, immense and free,

For O my God, it found out me!

’Tis mercy all, immense and free,

For O my God, it found out me!

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,

Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;

Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—

I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;

My chains fell off, my heart was free,

I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

My chains fell off, my heart was free,

I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

Still the small inward voice I hear,

That whispers all my sins forgiven;

Still the atoning blood is near,

That quenched the wrath of hostile Heaven.

I feel the life His wounds impart;

I feel the Savior in my heart.

I feel the life His wounds impart;

I feel the Savior in my heart.

No condemnation now I dread;

Jesus, and all in Him, is mine;

Alive in Him, my living Head,

And clothed in righteousness divine,

Bold I approach th’eternal throne,

And claim the crown, through Christ my own.

Bold I approach th’eternal throne,

And claim the crown, through Christ my own.

Depression Era Cooking

Growing Up During the Great Depression

Clara hopes that none of us ever have to experience what she did during
the depression.

Over the years Clara has imparted her Great Depression experiences to
her grandchildren as she cooked meals from the era. The meals were simple and
delicious, the stories were a mixture of misfortune and comedy, and in the end
Clara kept us both entertained and stuffed to the gills.

The magic of Clara is that she can turn lemons into lemonade and
potatoes into just about everything else. She had a childhood that most of us
can’t imagine, but she was able to make the best of it and turn those trials
into lessons we can all learn from.

Click here http://www.youtube.com/user/DepressionCooking to see the videos of Clara on YouTube as she prepares meals and shares stories with us.

She reminds me of my grandma except my grandma was Irish. She died at the age of 94 when I was 28 years old. I miss her.

Hymn - My Hope Is In The Lord

Author:
Norman J. Clayton, 1903-1992

My hope is in the Lord
Who gave Himself for me,
And paid the price of all my sin at Calvary.

Refrain:
For me He died, For me He lives,
And everlasting life and light He freely gives.
For me He died, For me He lives,

No merit of my own His anger to suppress.
My only hope is found in Jesus' righteousness.

And now for me He stands Before the Father's throne.
He shows His wounded hands and names me as His own.

His grace has planned it all, 'Tis mine but to believe,
And recognize His work of love and Christ receive.


http://www.desiringgod.org/Blog/1676_if_you_want_to_become_a_christian/

http://stonesofremembrance.blogspot.com/2007/09/my-hope-is-in-lord.html

Hymn - How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds

http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/h/s/hsweetnj.htm

By John Newton http://www.reformedreader.org/newton.htm

based on Song of Solomon 1:3 “Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth.”

1. How sweet the Name of Jesus sounds
In a believer's ear!
It soothes his sorrow, heals his wounds,
And drives away his fear.

2. It makes the wounded spirit whole,
And calms the troubled breast;'
Tis manna to the hungry soul,
And to the weary, rest.

3. Dear Name, the rock on which I build,
My shield and hiding place,
My never failing treasury, filled
With boundless stores of grace!

4. By Thee, my prayers acceptance gain,
Although with sin defiled;
Satan accuses me in vain,
And I am owned a child.

5. Jesus, my Shepherd, Brother, Friend,
My Prophet, Priest, and King,
My Lord, my life, my way, my end,
Accept the praise I bring.

6. Weak is the effort of my heart,
And cold my warmest thought;
But when I see Thee as Thou art,
I'll praise Thee as I ought.

7. 'Til then I would Thy love proclaim
With every fleeting breath,
And may the music of Thy name
Refresh my soul in death.

© Bill Moore Music. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Bread

I never liked cooking. I still love to go out to eat, I never get tired of it. But now after being married 15 years I am starting to get the hang of cooking (meaning I'm starting to not burn everything and I'm making more things from scratch!!!) and actually enjoying it. Thanks to a few friends and the Food Network.

I just read this post http://suzannemcminn.com/blog/2007/12/19/the-keeper-of-the-bread-2/ and it made me want to blog about baking bread.

I was an art major in college. My favorite class was pottery using the wheel. I loved creating pots with my hands. Even though I loved it I didn't have the discipline to get good at it and I always felt like I was creating more clutter. I guess I'm too practical to be a true art major. Anyway! Now I find my satisfaction in weeding and planting lettuce which is another post all together. Most recently, this past year, I have found immense satisfaction in baking bread. So far I only have one recipe http://busycooks.about.com/od/yeastbreads/r/honeywheatbr.htm that has turned out great every time.

Here is what I want to try next: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/Artisan-Bread-In-Five-Minutes-A-Day.aspx

Farming Videos

This is a list of videos of people who are inspiring us to farm.

Joel Salatin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5496QhWIWU
We went to his farm twice. He was the reason we got moving from talking about wanting to farm to actually starting. Here is his web site: http://www.polyfacefarms.com/

Joel Salatin on how to eat well and save our planet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2FHc0tjMuk

A demonstration of the Whizbang Chicken Plucker *don't watch if you are squeamish!* : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OMO73yFZ4s You can get the plans here: http://whizbangbooks.blogspot.com/ Here is Herrick's blog: http://www.thedeliberateagrarian.blogspot.com/

Part of the movie The Real Dirt on Farmer John: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ8arrB_MzU and his web site: http://www.angelicorganics.com/index.html

The Urban Homestead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIFPFpxBFVE Here is the Dervaes' web site: http://www.pathtofreedom.com/

Here is a short video on Will Allen's Growing Power http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHE_rVBG4CE and the web site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHE_rVBG4CE

Who is Charlotte Mason and what is her Education Philosophy?

“Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.” -Charlotte Mason

My idea for this series of posts is to send you to different people who are using the Charlotte Mason method in their homeschool so you can see their method in action. But I want to give you some background on what I am going to be talking about.

I first learned about Charlotte Mason when my oldest son was 2 years old; he is now 10 years old. Every year has been a progression in understanding this method. The reason I say that is because I was so excited with the ideas that I wanted to skip the why and get right to the “how to” and in doing that I was missing the whole reason why I was attracted to Charlotte Mason in the first place.

I know trying to learn the method is overwhelming at first because it is a way of life, it doesn’t fit into a block of time during your day, but it is worth it. Even if you just start with one subject or point (which you will learn soon) and gradually take on anther one or two as you become comfortable, you will see why it is worthwhile to take the time to understand the philosophy behind the method.

What have you come for?

“I have come to learn to teach.”

You have come to learn to live.

–Charlotte Mason

The first place to point you to is the source, of course. Charlotte Mason wrote a 6 book series called The Original Homeschooling Series. You can read it online here: http://www.amblesideonline.org/CM/toc.html Notice that you can read it in the original language or our modern language, plus there are a bunch of other options.

Which has to lead into introducing the wonderful ladies at Ambleside Online http://www.amblesideonline.org/AOstory.shtml who are homeschool mothers that have volunteered their time to help each other and us learn how to use this method. Here is their introduction to Charlotte Mason: http://www.amblesideonline.org/WhatIsCM.shtml and one other page about what a Charlotte Mason education is and is not: http://www.amblesideonline.org/FAQ.shtml#aboutcm

Charlotte Mason listed 20 principles that summarize the foundation to her method: http://www.amblesideonline.org/CM/20Principles.html

Lindafay at Higher Up and Further In has been a huge inspiration to me and here is her explanation of why she has chosen this method. http://higherupandfurtherin.blogspot.com/2006/06/why-charlotte-mason-education.html

Deborah Taylor-Hough and Catherine Levison at Charlotte Mason & Home Education give us a good summary of Charlotte Mason: http://charlottemasoneducation.wordpress.com/charlotte-mason/who-is-charlotte-mason/

Jessica at Established Works tells us How I found Charlotte Mason and Why we use it: http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Creativemommy/651515/

Lynn B Hocraffer gives us her notes as she read the original Charlotte Mason Home Education Series. Here is her introduction and some history on Charlotte Mason: http://homepage.bushnell.net/~peanuts/SeriesStudy.html

Art, a homeschool Dad, reflects on how a Charlotte Mason education has affected him: http://childlightusa.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/a-dangerous-adventure-by-art-in-kenosha/ You can read more of his thoughts at Le jardin Feerique: http://lejardinfeerique.blogspot.com/

Here is a brief summary of the why and then the how of a Charlotte Mason education. It is an article by Cindy Rushton. http://www.texashomeeducators.com/acharlottemasonprimer.htm

There are many more articles I could post but this topic can be overwhelming so I will stop here. I hope this gives you a good start to understanding the big picture of what it means to use the Charlotte Mason method in your homeschool, pubic or private school.

Update 8-1-09: Here is another good resource http://www.charlottemasonhelp.com/

Wisdom from Joni Eareckson Tada

Here is another great devotional I get in my email. http://www.joniandfriends.org/index.php I think this is perfect timing for the new year when we are thinking about all the good things we want to happen to us. Is God's plan in our plans?

Advancing the Gospel

Now I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel. As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ. Because of my chains, most of the brothers in the Lord have been encouraged to speak the word of God more courageously and fearlessly. --Philippians 1:12-14

My wheelchair is the cause of many crazy circumstances, as well as conversations. Especially in elevators. The other week a man standing next to me remarked, "Now what's a nice looking girl like you doing in that thing?" I looked up in surprise and replied, "Well, sir, I'm serving the Lord in this thing." I went on to describe how we were giving wheelchairs and Bibles to disabled people around the world. After we parted company, I thought of today's verse. What has happened to me really has served to advance the Good News. I may not be "in chains for Christ" like Paul, but I am in this wheelchair for Christ. My quadriplegia isn't a hindrance or a barrier; rather, like Paul's prison, my circumstances have created new and unusual opportunities for the Gospel. The jailer might never have heard about Jesus had it not been for Paul's imprisonment; that man in the elevator might never have heard about him either, had it not been for this wheelchair kickstarting an unusual conversation.

* * * * * * * * Your problems and difficult life circumstances, your health challenges, struggling marriage, or financial problems - your prison, your suffering - is not a hindrance to the Gospel. God has allowed these hardships in order to create exceptional occasions to talk about the power and the reality of the Lord in your life. How have your hardships given you an unusual platform from which to share the Gospel?

Lord God, I give you the "chains" in my life which seem so limiting. Help me to understand that my circumstances do not limit the power of your Gospel in my life.

Blessings,
Joni and Friends

Wisdom From Elisabeth Elliot

I receive a short devotional each day from Back to the Bible http://www.backtothebible.org/. It is made up of excerpts from books by Elisabeth Elliot. I thought this one was great.

Author: Elisabeth Elliot

Source: All That Was Ever Ours

Some of My Best Friends Are Books
I have almost always been surrounded by books. I wouldn't be surprised if my mother put some in the crib along with my toys, just to get me used to them early. The first house I remember living in was one of those double ones of which there are hundreds in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We lived in Germantown, in what was probably a cramped house (although to me as a child it seemed large) and there were books in the living room, books in the dining room, books in all of the bedrooms and tall bookcases lining the halls. My father came home at night with a briefcase full of papers and books.
Before I could read much myself I looked at picture books, like everybody else. I remember the lovely women and elegantly handsome men in Charles Dana Gibson's book of drawings. I went back again and again to an animal book which had a horrifyingly hideous photo of an angry gorilla with teeth bared. The beautiful little pictures in Beatrix Potter's books of neatly furred small animals gave me a delicious feeling of order and comfort. My mother read these aloud to me, and how eagerly I stooped with Lucie to enter Mrs. Tiggywinkle's laundry; or accompanied Simpkin the cat as he made his way through Gloucester's snowy lanes. Mr. MacGregor was a big, bad bogeyman to me. Mother read, too, the Christopher Robin stories, and I found myself identifying her with Kanga, my older brother Phil with Pooh, Dave with Piglet, and myself, alas but inescapably, with Eeyore.
Evenings at home were often spent with the whole family sitting together, each with his head in a book. Or at times my father would read aloud. He bored us to death reading passages from Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, or George Borrow. The Bible in Spain was ''good writing," he said, and he wanted us to hear it. He loved good writing, and as an editor had to read an awful lot of appallingly bad writing, but I am grateful now for his efforts to teach us the difference. He also read sometimes to us from Henry A. Shute's Real Diary of a Real Boy, which got the closest thing to a belly laugh I ever heard out of my sedate father.
A big dictionary was always within reach of the dining room table because it was there that arguments most frequently arose over words. He wanted them quickly settled, and made us look up the words in question.
A part of each summer was spent at ''The Cottage," a big old lodge-type house in the White Mountains built by my great-great uncle, who was, among other things, editor of the New York Journal of Commerce and a writer of books. His bedroom on the second floor, an enormous paneled one with a huge fireplace, had hardly been rearranged at all since he died, and one wall was still lined with crumbling leather-bound books. A rainy day in the mountains was a chance for me to pore over field manuals from the Civil War, great volumes on law, Mrs. Oliphant's novels, or a tiny set, tinily printed, of the unabridged Arabian Nights.
There were magazines on the bottom shelves, too--old ones, with advertisements of Pear's soap or Glen kitchen ranges, and I found in them serialized stories by Robert Louis Stevenson.
The first full-length book I recall reading was not a piece of great literature, but it had a great effect on my malleable mind. It was called Hell on Ice, the saga of sixty men who attempted to reach the North Pole by way of the Bering Strait. Only a few survived, and I agonized with them as they froze and starved on the icy wastes. I was carried out of myself and my pleasant porch hammock into danger, suffering, and death. I became aware of vulnerability, mortality, and human courage.
To my detriment I managed to go through four years of high school without reading more than two or three classics. I had a good freshman English teacher who made me see vividly the world of chivalry and heraldry through Ivanhoe, so that I still love to visit the medieval halls of museums. In my junior or senior year I very hastily skimmed David Copperfield in order to write a book report. I may have read one or two others which I have entirely forgotten, but literature was merely a requirement. No other teacher made me understand what it was all about. (B. F. Westcott said, "It is the office of art to reveal the meaning of that which is the object of sense.")
But of course there was the Bible, in a class all by itself. This was The Book in our home, and we heard it read every day, usually twice a day. The King James English was as simple and familiar to me, with all its "beholds" and "it came to passes," as Philadelphia talk (pronounced twawk). The resonance of the Books of Moses, the cadences of the Psalms, the lucidity of the Gospel of John, the soaring rhapsodies of Paul on the love of God, the strange figures of the Book of the Revelation, all sank deeply into my heart and mind. Everything in life, I believed, had meaning as it related to what I knew of The Book.
There were many books in our home by and about people who lived by the Bible. It was in Amy Carmichael, a missionary to South India, that I found the kind of woman I wanted to be. She was at work for the Lord (an Anglican, she had founded a place for saving little girls from temple prostitution), and she took time in the midst of this to write of her experience as she walked by faith in a place where almost no one shared that faith.
A friend gave me The Imitation of Christ when I was in college, and I read it slowly, finishing it the following summer during evenings in a university stadium where I climbed up to watch the sunset.
One year when I was tutoring I came across, in the library of my pupils, a dull-looking novel called Salted With Fire. I had never heard of George MacDonald, but his writing gave me a whole new vista of the love of God. There was a shining quality to it, and a deep humanity. C. S. Lewis, I later learned, had found it, too, and did an anthology of MacDonald's work.
The biographies of missionaries--Hudson Taylor of China, James Fraser of Lisuland, David Brainerd of early New Jersey, Raymond Lull of North Africa--influenced the course of my life. Sometimes, if we can catch the sound of music that other people march to, we can fall into step.
It was when I lived in the jungle that books were hard to keep. Mold, mildew, crickets, and smoke did their worst, and I did not always have a way to transport more than one or two books at a time, or a place to keep them other than an Indian carrying net hung under the thatch. But they became even more precious, more indispensable in times when I had little contact with English-speaking people. I got around to reading some great books then--Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Teilhard de Chardin's The Divine Milieu, Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa. Each spoke to me in some powerful, personal way.
Kafka said that books should serve as "the axe for the frozen sea within us." Tolstoy showed me my own vulnerability and need of redemption--as Flannery O'Connor does, too, in her "stories about original sin," as she describes them. De Chardin illuminated for me the immanence of God. Dinesen reveals majesty and dignity in human beings and animals as creatures of God, and the laughter at the heart of things. (In one book, Seven Gothic Tales, she touches the courage of the Creator, the power of women, a herd of unicorns, the reason for seasons, the dogs of God, angels and chamber pots, coffee and the word of the Lord, and Mary Magdalene on Good Friday Eve. Imagine the humor and courage it takes to put all that in seven stories!)
A reader understands what he reads in terms of what he is. As a Christian reader I bring to bear on the book I am reading the light of my faith. "All things are yours, for ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's," said Paul. Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi expresses it this way:
. . . This world's no blot for us, nor blank;It means intensely, and means good:To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
Copyright© 1988, by Elisabeth Elliot all rights reserved.