Lift Up Your Hearts!

The question of the day is, why have I been writing mundane book reviews when I could be telling more grandchild stories?

This one is again about Joseph.  I wish I could have recorded the moment, but there's no more certain way to break a mood than to bring out a camera.

While Vivienne naps, Joseph takes a rest in which he doesn't need to sleep, but must play quietly by himself for two hours.  This is a lovely, creative period for him and he has no trouble filling the time with activity.  When quiet time is over, especially if Vivienne is still asleep, Janet usually goes in and they enjoy some one-on-one time together.  Joseph particularly enjoys working on the blackboard that was his "gift from Vivienne" when she was born, and that's what they were doing when I walked in on them yesterday.

The room was (no surprise) a mess, and Janet was helping Joseph pick up.  She would write on the blackboard, "Please bring me the sheep"; Joseph would read the sentence, go get the sheep and put it where it belonged, then wait for Janet to change the sentence:  "...the other sheep" or "...the boy and the dog" or "...two hens."  Not a very efficient way of picking up toys, but totally delightful to Joseph—and to Grandma, who never tires of watching this barely-three-year-old blow her socks off.

(All our grandchildren blow my socks off.  This is why I am usually barefoot.)

The next time I came into the room they were writing numbers.  Janet would write, say, 3,725,304 and Joseph would read the number.  (He crowed with delight at 111,111.)  Then it would be Joseph's turn to write.  After a while, the game morphed into Roman numerals.  At one point, Joseph wrote vii, and I explained that that was the lower case version, whereas VII was uppercase.  But when Janet wrote VII, she drew the top and bottom lines all the way across, as I was taught in school.  The game then transitioned into Greek letters, and Joseph wrote an alpha, added lines above and below, and announced it was an upper case alpha.

I did not overtly correct him, but exclaimed over his logical thought processes.  Janet, however, noticed that he was quite aware from my reaction that he had done something "wrong."  He didn't fuss about it (though sometimes he does when corrected), but grew quiet and tentative for a while as they continued writing the Greek alphabet.  No wonder she and Stephan prefer not to correct him, but to let him adjust his own model of the world over time.

After the journey from reading to large numbers to Roman numerals to Greek letters, it was back to cleaning up, then playing with/fighting over the Brio train set with his sister.  Which event is "normal"?  Around here, both of them.

Oh, one more quiet time story.  Joseph had been disobedient and surly over some issue, so Janet told him I would not be able to help him pick up after quiet time.  When cleanup time came, he was distressed, and kept begging, "Count in French!"  (When I'm helping, I count each piece of the train set, or the Legos, or puzzle, as he and Vivienne put them away.  Depending on his mood and mine, I count in English, French, or High German.  We all miss Dad-o, who would count in Dutch for them.)  Finally, I took pity on him, and told him, "Joseph, I can't count in French for you today, because you disobeyed and had a bad attitude.  But, you know, you can count in French."  At which revelation he picked up all the toys, cheerfully counting past 50 in that language.

3 Theories of Everything by Ellis Potter (Destinée Media, 2012)

It’s a good thing this little book is only 111 pages long, and easy to read to boot, because with our whirlwind sightseeing schedule—or what passes for whirlwind when 1.5- and three-year-old tornados are involved—there hasn’t been much time for reading.

The author is a former pastor of my son-in-law’s church, and that’s all I know about him because there’s no author blurb and I’m writing this “blind”:  we’ve had no Internet for two days.  And when it comes back I’ll be too busy/lazy to change the above.  [Correction:  I did find this short bio of Ellis Potter that covers a good deal.]

As I said, it’s a quick read, but well worth the attention.  Potter’s search for absolute reality took him all over the map, so to speak, two of the notable stops being as a Buddhist monk and as a Christian pastor.  3 Theories of Everything is a brief and admittedly greatly simplified look at Monism, Dualism, and Trinitarianism, its strongest point being the obvious respect Potter has for all three, despite having decided that Trinitarianism comes closest to describing the true nature of the universe.

I’ve had my fill of arguments that think to prove their premises by sketching a false picture of their opponent’s position and mocking it into oblivion.  What kept me reading this book, which had the potential to be just that, is that it isn’t.  Potter is not one of those preachers who sees nothing but irrationality and evil in other religious beliefs and practices, even though he feels strongly about the truth of his own.

Besides that, my favorite part of 3 Theories of Everything is the discussion of relationship as the heart of Trinitarianism:  God alone is God, and God is not alone.  Unity and diversity, relationship, love, service, obedience, and sacrifice existed in God Himself before the creation of the world, and thus are fundamental to the very nature of the universe.  Adam needed his relationship with similar-but-different Eve to be fully human.  We are not ourselves in ourselves, but in relationship with others.

Potter is annoying sometimes, a little too Baptist in some places and a little too patriarchal in others, but his humility makes this easy to forgive.

God Is Red:  The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China by Liao Yiwu, translated by Wen Huang (HarperOne, 2011)

After reading Liao Yiwu's The Corpse Walker, I knew I had to order God Is Red.  Being pressed for time Having grandchildren to play with, I'm going to take the lazy way out with this review and quote the dust jacket:

When journalist Liao Yiwu first stumbled upon a vibrant Christian community in the officially secular China, he knew little about Christianity. In fact, he'd been taught that religion was evil, and that those who believed in it were deluded, cultists, or imperialist spies. But as a writer whose work has been banned in China and has even landed him in jail, Liao felt a kinship with Chinese Christians in their unwavering commitment to the freedom of expression and to finding meaning in a tumultuous society.

Unwilling to let his nation lose memory of its past or deny its present, Liao set out to document the untold stories of brave believers whose totalitarian government could not break their faith in God, including:

• The over-100-year-old nun who persevered in spite of beatings, famine, and decades of physical labor, and still fights for the rightful return of church land seized by the government
• The surgeon who gave up a lucrative Communist hospital administrator position to treat villagers for free in the remote, mountainous regions of southwestern China
• The Protestant minister, now memorialized in London's Westminster Abbey, who was executed during the Cultural Revolution as "an incorrigible counterrevolutionary"

This ultimately triumphant tale of a vibrant church thriving against all odds serves as both a powerful conversation about politics and spirituality and a moving tribute to China's valiant shepherds of faith, who prove that a totalitarian government cannot control what is in people's hearts.

Because I can't resist and in order to make this a little more personal, here are a few quotations.

The surgeon's story is particularly interesting.

A critical skill of an ER surgeon is to diagnose fast and accurately, and then act.  You can't play games.  But as an administrator, none of the skills I had acquired applied.  They played by a different set of rules.  In my leadership position, I initiated some reform measures.  The school assigned me a ... car, but I asked the authorities to sell it and spend the money on the hospital.  I rode my bike to work every day.  I abolished the traditional big staff banquets during holidays and banned the use of public money for eating and drinking.  I also tightened up on reimbursing expenses.  All of those measures hurt the interests of other leaders; they hated my guts and conspired against me.  It was very frustrating and depressing. ... I got hold of a Bible.  I was examining my life at that time.  I felt extremely frustrated with my work as a deputy dean.  The Bible taught me to be in awe of God and to love, two important qualities that the Chinese people lacked.  Too many Chinese will do anything for trivial material gains and have no regard for morality, ethics, or the law.  How do we change that?  Can we rely on the Communist Party?  Can we rely on government rules and regulations  Apparently not.

Why does this description of the medical problems in Communist China sound just a little too familiar?

I couldn't work [at the big government-run hospital] out of conscience.  Say a patient, tortured by illness, sits in front of you, staring at you, hoping you can find a cure for him.  What kind of medicine should you prescribe?  Many meds do the same thing, but their prices can vary sharply.  I would prescribe the cheapest and most effective.  But if I continued to do that, the pharmacy and the hospital would be upset because I have undermined their profits, disrupting the cozy deal between pharmaceutical companies and hospitals.  When you break hidden rules and harm the collective interests of hospitals and doctors, you find yourself very alienated. ... As a Christian, I have to tell my patients the truth.  I cannot lie to get more money out of them.

American television isn't all bad.  Who'd have thought M*A*S*H could be an answer to prayer?

I told the minister that I would do [breast cancer surgery] for free, that I had done far more complicated surgery than what was required here, and he needed to trust me.  He looked at me in disbelief, as did the villagers gathering around us.  I'm not sure which of my assertions they had the most trouble believing.

I wanted to take the woman back with me to Kunming so I could use a proper operating room, but she didn't want to leave her home.  That night, I knelt and prayed, and as I was praying, an old American TV show popped into my mind—a team of cheerful doctors doing surgery while cracking jokes, a mobile army hospital, tents in an open field, the war in Korea. ... I felt inspired.  The next day, I bought some basic surgical instruments to supplement the ones I carried with me, and we did the operation in her bedroom.  Her bed was a wooden plank; no table necessary. ...  The room was very dark; even after we opened all the windows, it was still pretty bad.  I tied four flashlights together and had the grandpa hold them as operating lights.  That grandpa was strong and in great health.  He stood there for hours without moving, holding the light steady. ... It was a sweet feeling to be there with the poor villagers and to do God's work, though I never thought I'd ever have to perform surgery in quite those conditions.

From another man's story of life under Chairman Mao, evidence that if some of China's ills aren't that far from ours, some are almost unimaginable.

You are too young to understand what it was like.  We were treated much worse than animals.  People would torture us whenever they felt like it.  During the peak of the campaign, the government work teams fanned the sentiment of hatred.  Even the nicest and kindest peasants began to wave their fists and slap or kick us.  Toward the end, revolutionary peasants didn't need a reason to kill a landlord.  At public denunciation meetings, people became carried away with their emotions and would drag someone out and shoot him on the spot. ... Nobody questioned this ruthless practice or took responsibility. ... The work-team members didn't dare ignore the voice of the people.  Once people became brainwashed by Communist ideology and by Mao's propaganda, their thinking became chaotic.  All humanity was lost.  At its peak, even the work team found it hard to rein in the fanaticism.

Let me explain.  In this area, it was rare to find anyone who was not addicted to opium or gambling.  Only those who had embraced God had the stamina to kick their habits.  When I was a kid, I remember that people in this area didn't grow crops.  Instead, they grew poppies. ... They also gambled heavily.  This was a very strange phenomenon.  People's wealth switched hands very quickly.  In the afternoon, the person might be a rich landowner.  By evening he was homeless, having gambled everything away—his land, his house, even his wife.

When the Communists came, they banned opium smoking and gambling, and they banned Christianity.  Apart from working in the fields, people didn't have anything else to do in the evenings.  Political campaigns turned into a form of entertainment. They devoted all their extra energy to beating up people, killing people, and confiscating the property of others.  Those homeless drug addicts and gamblers suddenly became loyal revolutionary allies.  They didn't have to pay off their debts; their gambling and drug habits, their poverty, the practice of pawning their wives and children for drug money, their homelessness, everything was the fault of landlords exploiting poor revolutionaries.

Poverty became a badge of honor, and the children of the poor became the offspring of the true proletariat.  They felt superior to everyone else and were well fed and clothed.  They didn't even have to take any responsibility when killing someone at public denunciation meetings.  That was more fun than smoking opium and gambling, don't you think?

The Communist Party's policies might have been well meant, but the people who implemented them took a lot of liberties and interpreted them in their own way.  Random killing was quite liberating.

The stories of those whose faith saw them through the impossible years is humbling and inspiring.  As in The Corpse Walker, Liao Yiwu is careful to place more blame on past administrations than present, but he does give a glimpse into the struggles of the modern Church in China, including the friction between the official, state-controlled churches and the house church movement.  Perhaps the attitude of this new convert is also eerily familiar.

[T]hree religions are practiced in our home.  Everyone does his or her own stuff.  Why can't they form a uniform family religion so we don't have to fight all the time?  It's kind of strange.  As a kid, I would go with my dad to Buddhist temples and mimic the gestures and facial expressions of the Buddhist statues. ... When I was with my mom, I would attend services at an old church.  People sang hymns.  It was kind of grand and cool.

I prefer Christianity.  Buddhism is too regional, secular, and not cool.  Those old men and women, those wealthy businessmen or government officials, go to the temples, burning incense and praying for trivial stuff, such as more money, more promotions, and more luck.  Taoism is way too highbrow, not attainable.  I think Christianity is the only one that's all encompassing. ...

People in your age group are too political.  You guys are too interested in politics.  It's different with my generation.  Sometimes it bothers me.  I attended a house church one time.  When we were reading the Bible, a minister or a church elder suddenly stood up.  Without getting everyone's approval, he started to deliver a political statement and then asked eveyrone to pray for so-and-so who had died for the Lord, and then so-and-so who had been arrested by the government.  He also asked us to pray for the sins of the government.  He totally changed the mood of the gathering, making it depressing and tragic.  Several members started to cry after hearing his political plea.  I guess I was too young and didn't have that much experience.  I felt awkward.  I thought, Why don't we let God do God's work and Caesar do Caesar's?  Why do we always mix the two?  The government wants to politicize religion, and some Christians are doing the same thing.  These things kill my spiritual appetite.

For all those anxiously awaiting news of the next grandchild:  not yet.  But my prediction in the Baby Pool is for tomorrow, so I'm hopeful.  Not that I've ever gotten the date right....

I'm not sure, now, whether Hooker and Company... is a favorite picture of Joseph's or just a favorite name. He seems to have a preference for long phrases, or at least he practices them more. During today's naptime I overheard him repeatedly reciting (while playing with trains) the Albert Anker title, Heinrich Pestalozzi and the Orphans in Stans.

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous post is how absolutely clear and distinct is Joseph's diction, which I find unusual for someone just a month past his third birthday.  It makes me feel guilty for my own sloppy speech!

I also catch myself using unnecessary "child speech"—not baby talk, but the simple way adults usually talk to beginning speakers, such as, "say 'please.'"  Like any three-year-old, Joseph needs to be reminded to ask politely, but it appears to be just as easy for him to say, "Please, Grandma, may I have some more milk?" as simply, "please."  And now that he has caught on to that, the reminder, "what do you say"—or a pause, or similar actions that parents use to get their children to say please—will often evoke the whole sentence, with "milk" swapped out for the appropriate word.

When did "different" come to require a diagnosis?

The child who once was an energetic boy now has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.  The shy kid who likes math and science more than his classmates do is "on the autism spectrum."  We have conflated normal-defined-as-average with normal-defined-as-free-from-disease, and view with suspicion anyone who strays too far—in any direction—from the common herd.  It's a very contemporary diagnosis, too:  today's hyperactive child would likely have been an admired leader in Viking society.

We are learning, possibly too late, of the dangers of narrowing the once-vast diversity of life on our planet, especially in agriculture, where nearly every Thanksgiving dinner is dependent on a single breed of turkey—turkeys so stupid as to be unable to reproduce without human intervention—and where one variety-specific disease could wipe out nearly every existing banana plant.  I believe we have a similar problem in the human population, where for all we talk about the importance of diversity, we are identifying more and more people as abnormal—people who would in an earlier day have been considered merely quirky, or even honored for their differences.  We then attempt to "cure" them by squashing them into standardized boxes, the most common of which is school.

I officially gave up on the psychiatric profession's labels when I discovered hyperlexia:  "the precocious ability to read words without prior training in learning to read typically before the age of five."  If children aren't reading by the end of first grade, schools and parents begin to worry, and yet reading before kindergarten is a problem?  What's with that?

The proximate inspiration for this post was observing grandson Joseph, age three, as he is learning to speak.  His speech is much more echolalic than I am accustomed to, and because that is yet another psychiatric diagnosis, I was wondering if I should be concerned—though it's difficult even to think of a child who speaks two languages as being "behind" in speech.

Now that I'm where I can observe Joseph directly and interact with him I can laugh at any concerns, though I doubt that would stop the psychiatrists from labelling him.  His speech is definitely different from that of the average child his age, and so is the way he is figuring out language patterns.  But it's not bad; it's just different.  And fascinating.

Instead of repeating words and short phrases that he hears from other people, then gradually putting them together into longer and longer verbalizations, Joseph remembers, and repeats, entire sentences and long passages, such as the name of one of one of his favorite Frederic Church paintings:  Hooker and Company Journeying through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford in 1636.  Really.  With such things as these as his basic language building blocks, it's not surprising that his approach to speech is unusual.  Instead of creating phrases of increasing complexity by a more additive method, he starts with a long sentence, takes it apart, and puts it back together.

Recently he and I were watching the people walk up and down a main street in Zermatt; more precisely, we were observing their dogs.  "Here comes a dog," I said, and Joseph repeated, "Here comes a dog."  Then he expanded with, "Here comes a white dog."  Later, he proclaimed, "Here comes another dog," and still later, "Here comes a little, white dog."  Same pattern, expanded from the inside out.

It is my totally unverifiable theory that Joseph started out thinking in large chunks of language.  For example, "put your shoes on" is associated, as an entire sentence, with the act of putting on his shoes.  Thus, whether describing his actions or asking for help, "put your shoes on" has been the phrase of choice (sometimes modified to "no put your shoes on").  Gradually, however, he is dissecting these chunks and discovering the recombinant possibilities.

It's fascinating to observe.  It's different.  It's not normal-defined-as-average.  But it's certainly not a disease.

Be warned:  as usual, when we get more grandchild time, you get more grandchild fare.  Here's a Joseph story from our trip to the Swiss Transport Museum in Luzern, about which I hope to report more later.

Near the space travel hall there is a wall of curved couch-like segments that kids love to climb on, over, and around.  A couple of somewhat older children—I'd say aged 10 or 11—were also there.  One of them, clearly revelling in some newly-acquired foreign vocabulary, flopped down on a curve and exclaimed, with a heavy accent, "What da f***?!"

Joseph, our tape-recorder child, promptly flopped himself down in imitation, and loudly proclaimed his own interpretation:  "What da fun?!"

I had a wonderful belated birthday celebration here in Switzerland, including a long, leisurely mother/daughter breakfast of pastries and free-ranging conversation at a local bakery while the guys and kids played at home.  Both Vivienne and Joseph made me birthday cards, all cute in an adorable 18-month- and three-year-old grandchild way.  Then again, one of Joseph's was cute in a decidedly not-three-year-old grandchild way.  He refused to write "Happy Birthday," or "I love you," or "Grandma," or even "Joseph."  But when Janet suggested that he could write numbers instead, he went to work with alacrity.  Here's one page of his unprompted, unscripted response:

July 14

Come, Christians, Join to Sing arr. Carlton R. Young

I'm sorry I can't find an example of anyone singing this arrangement, but the link will show you a sample of the sheet music.

July 21

O Great God by Bob Kauflin, arr. Joey Hoelscher

What I Saw In America by G. K. Chesterton (originally published 1922)

In 1921, G. K. Chesterton embarked on a lecture tour of the United States, and "everybody who goes to America for a short time is expected to write a book," so he did.  This is no travelogue, however, but a set of serious essays inspired by Chesterton's observations.

It was only after graduating from college that I began to have an appreciation for the study of history.  During my school years, the world was divided into "math/science people" and "English/history people." Being both good at math and an avid reader of science fiction, I was clearly one of the former.  The reasoning behind this idea that one should not be good at, nor even interested in, all of the above escapes me as much as why I allowed myself to be so labelled.

While I would still choose reading and mathematics as of all the school subjects the most important for a child to master "early and often," I'd now put history a close third.  I know of no other way to counter what C. S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery."  It is far, far too easy for us to assume that progress only goes in one direction, that we have come "sooo far" from our predecessors socially as well as technologically.  Reading history—especially writings that were current at the time—is the best way I know to understand that the people of the past were human beings like us rather than incomprehensible, unenlightened savages.  To use an extreme example, it is easy to hate Adolph Hitler, almost as easy to revile the German people (and others) for not rebelling wholesale against the evil he brought on, and pathetically easy to assure ourselves that we would never let anything like that happen today.  But never in all my schooling did I experience a serious attempt to understand historical events and situations as they were seen at the time by intelligent, thoughtful, normal people.  We are appalled when Hitler speaks of the "Jewish problem," but don't make the effort to figure out what it was about the circumstances that made the Jews a particularly acceptable scapegoat.  We're taught, as I was in school, that white southerners were evil to resist having their children bussed across town to attend black schools; I never had an appreciation for the many non-racially-motivated reasons not to place your child on that sacrificial altar until I spoke with someone who had lived through it.  By no means do I subscribe to the theory that in the attacks of September 11, 2001 we "got what we deserved," but if we—or at least our policy analysts—had been in the habit of looking at ourselves and our actions through other eyes, we at least would not have been so surprised.  

What I Saw in America is a great antidote.  Chesterton is so insightful that it's easy to think of him as outside of his cultural and historical surroundings, but he was writing nearly a century ago.  Think for a minute of what the world was like during his 1921 American tour.  (Maybe you do this kind of thinking all the time, but it's new for me.)  The Civil War was closer to 1921 than the Korean War to 2013.  Arizona and New Mexico had only been states for nine years, and last of the Indian Wars were but a few years past.  Prohibition was new.  Harding was the newly-elected president.  The Panama Canal was a mere seven years old.  Chesterton's essays glow with the perspectives of both another culture (British) and another time.

I don't claim Chesterton is always easy to understand, especially for someone who knows little about America in that era, and who doesn't possess the everyday knowledge he expects to be common to his British audience.  But he's always worth reading, nonetheless.  Very thought-provoking, but alas, not further-post-provoking at this time.  Life calls.

This quotation from an interview with Anne Fine set me to thinking.  (H/T Stephan)

[I] hate the way that we have weeded out the things that I remember made my heart lift in primary school, and were transforming in my secondary education. I mean, we did so much singing when I was at school – folk songs, hymns, we sang everything. But now that seems to have gone, along with the language of the Book of Common Prayer and so much classic poetry. And school days are horrifically long if pretty well everything you are doing lacks colour and style, just for the sake of 'relevance' and 'accessibility'".

Music was a big part of my own elementary school, though not being British we missed out on the BCP.  Music lessons started in grade four (of six) for strings and in fifth for band instruments.  Chorus started at about the same time, and in two of the three schools I experienced, we were singing three-part harmony.  (Occasionally four, as in one school we had a set of older boy twins whose voices had mostly changed.)  These musical activities were optional, but what stands out most in my mind in contrast to today is that nearly every classroom had a piano, and many of the teachers could play it.  (So could some of the students, and we were allowed to use it some ourselves outside of class.)  We sang patriotic songs, folk songs, hymns, Negro spirituals, and children's songs.  And most of these we read out of music books.  Not that we were specifically taught much in the way of reading music, but we were expected to absorb basic skills simply by observing the relationship between the printed notes and what we sang.

I should note that these were not "music magnet schools" but ordinary public elementary schools in a small village/rural school district in the late 1950's and early 60's.

Our own children had a fantastic music teacher in elementary school, there's no doubt about that, and their musical education outside of school was far greater than mine, with the availability of private music lessons, youth orchestras, and excellent church choirs.  And being in the South, their high school chorus still sang the great Western choral music, which had already been all but banned in the schools we'd left behind in the North because it is largely church music.  So I'm not complaining about that.

But something great has been lost in general education if there's no longer daily singing in the classroom, children graduate knowing nothing of the music of the past and without the most basic music-reading skills, and adults would rather attend a concert or plug into an iPod than raise their own voices in song.

I don't think, based on the interview, that I would like Anne Fine's books.  But she's spot on in the quote.  "Relevance" and "accessibility" are two of the dirtiest words in the educationist's vocabulary.

What were your musical experiences in the early school years?  How have they affected your adult life?

I'd rather be with family than almost anywhere, but it's a pity that we only manage to spend Independence Day with the Greater Geneval Award Marching Band about every other year.  This is what we missed two days ago.

I've written more extensively about the band before, so I won't reiterate, but if you ever want to experience the true spirit of American Independence Day, visit Geneva, Florida on July 4th.

Is College Worth It? by William J. Bennett and David Wilezol (Thomas Nelson, 2013)

It is the best of times and the worst of times for education.  From preschool through higher education, there has been a steady decline in the quality of public education in at least the half-century I’ve been observing it.  If my father is to be believed—and he was always a very reliable source—it’s been declining for a lot longer than that.  He was frequently appalled at my generation’s ignorance of basic history, geography, and literature.  (He’d have said the same thing about basic arithmetic, but he was surrounded by engineers.)  It doesn’t take much observation to realize that today the average American’s grasp of those subjects makes me look brilliant.

At the same time—and my father would concur—in some fields, for some people, knowledge and ability has soared.  As a science fair judge, he was blown away by the scope and quality of the research done by high school students.  His own high school had offered no math beyond trigonometry, and it was rare among high schools to offer even that.  My high school offered only one Advanced Placement course—and that for seniors—whereas our children had at least a dozen to choose from, beginning as freshmen.  And yet only a few students were actually prepared to take advantage of the generous offerings:  back in fifth grade, I would have said the expectations of their teachers were well below those of my own, and far below those of my father’s.

Despite the best efforts of educators to mush us all into a sameness at any level—better all low than some higher than others—there has always been an upper class and a lower class when it comes to education, and there always will be.  What I’ve been noticing is that the highs are getting higher, the lows are getting lower, and the middle class is rapidly descending—much as is happening with economic measures.

I’m hoping the economic situation does not lead to revolution, but there’s a crisis and a revolution coming in education and I say, bring it on! (More)

I've been told it's a peculiar affliction, but I've always enjoyed listening to beginning Suzuki music students.  There's a warm place in my heart for the Book 1 repertoire, both piano and violin.  I'm not a music teacher of any kind, but recently I had the privilege of introducing my six-year-old grandson to pre-Twinkle and Twinkle on the violin.  He has been taking piano lessons with his other grandmother for a year, and his mother laid the foundations for violin playing with him, so I was able to step in and reap the benefits of a prepared and eager student.

It was glorious.  I can't begin to describe how much fun it was.  He's very responsible with his half-sized violin, and the need to put it away carefully did not deter him in the least from getting it out several times a day, begging me to teach him something new.  He has a good ear and an observant eye, and catches on very quickly.

His excellent violin is a gift from his aunt—it was hers during her Suzuki days—and has only a first finger tape on the fingerboard, she having passed the beginning stages with a smaller size.  When it was time for him to learn a song involving the second and third fingers, I explained that he could use his ear to help him find the right finger placement, or I could put on some additional tapes.  He asked for the tapes.  While I was searching the house for appropriate materials, I suggested he listen to the piece and see what he could figure out on his own.  As I was returning with scissors and tape, I could hear him playing:  playing the whole phrase in perfect tune.

I put the tape away.  He's not always perfect by any means, but if the note is off he's learning to notice and make the correction.  I find this awesome.

I know most people aren't as enamored of beginning violin music as I am, but there are some relatives who might enjoy the following.  The first is a pre-Twinkle piece called See the Pretty Flowers, and the second is the first Twinkle variation.  The videos were made after he had practiced the pieces maybe half a dozen times.

The sad part is that for most of the year we're 1300 miles apart, so teaching him is a rare and special privilege.  It's a relay, and I've handed the baton back to his very capable (though very busy) mother.  Too bad his aunt—who is both a music teacher and a violinist—is almost three times as far away as I am.

When Life and Beliefs Collide:  How Knowing God Makes a Difference by Carolyn Custis James (Zondervan, 2001)

As I mentioned before, I first read When Life and Beliefs Collide in personal circumstances that led to a great reluctance to tackle any of the author’s excellent subsequent books.  Only a few years previously, we had left the church which remains to this day both our best and our worst church experience.  Because James’ husband was in the leadership of what had become (or revealed itself to be; I’m still not certain which) an oppressive, even abusive situation, I had assumed that he and his family were in agreement with and partially responsible for the oppression.  This was confirmed in my mind when I read glowing, positive comments about “our church” in When Life and Beliefs Collide.  Re-reading it now, I’m amazed at how effectively that blinded me to the strengths of the book, how bold it was, and indeed how much of a risk James took in writing it.

This is a “women’s book,” written as it was in a situation where women, no matter how qualified, did not teach men, but as theologian J. I. Packer said, “[This] book seems to me to be a must-read for Christian women and a you'd-better-read for Christian men, for it gets right so much that others have simply missed.”  The heart and soul of James’ work is the importance of theology in the lives of everyone:  male and female, young and old.  Don’t let the word scare you into thinking this is a dry, academic subject:  as James says on the masthead of her website, the moment the word “why” crosses your lips, you are doing theology.

James makes many excellent points, every single one of which I missed the first time because of the prejudice I brought to my reading.  Mighty scary, that.

As usual in my reviews, the following quotations are not meant to be a summary of the book as a whole, but are instead ones that struck me for one reason or another and which I want to remember.

Many Christian men seek wives who know far less than they do or who have little interest in theology. The assumption is that a woman who knows less will make a better wife.  Her ignorance will be an asset to the relationship, or as another woman put it, “The less a woman has in her head, the lighter she is for carrying.”  This assumption leads women to conclude that the godly thing to do is hold back for his sake.  And so the age-old game carries on—a woman keeps herself in check to make a man look good.  It happens all the time.

How differently the Bible portrays women.  There they are admired for their depth of theological wisdom and their strong convictions.  Women in the Bible did not need anyone to carry them.  Their theology strengthened them to get under the burden at hand.  Contrary to current fears, these wise women did not demean, weaken, or overthrow the men.  They empowered, strengthened, and urged them on to greater faithfulness and were better equipped to do so because of their grasp of God’s character and ways.

Far from diminishing her appeal, a woman’s interest in theology ought to be the first thing to catch a man’s eye.  A wife’s theology should be what a husband prizes most about her.  He may always enjoy her cooking and cherish her gentle ways, but in the intensity of battle, when adversity flattens him or he faces an insurmountable challenge, she is the soldier nearest him, and it is her theology that he will hear.

Glory is the uncovering of God’s character—the disclosure of who God is.

I love that last quote.  I haven't thought much about it yet, but if it's a reasonable description of what is meant when the Bible talks about God's glory, many Biblical passages suddenly make a lot more sense, particularly the ones that appear to show God as a petty tyrant, concerned most of all with making himself look good at others' expense. (More)