Feast of the Holy Rosary

Or Battle of Lepanto Day!! We'll be celebrating with an afternoon tea party and of course a reading of Chesteron's Lepanto.

The Rosary

I've been meaning to post about this little book since last summer when a very dear friend recommended it to me.Now that it is the month for the Rosary I can no longer justify further procrastination! The Rosary subtitled Keeping company with Jesus and Mary by Karen Edmisten is a wonderful book! How I wish I had it when I was learning to pray the Rosary. I wanted to follow Pope John Paul II's Rosarium Virginis Mariae and pray the rosary daily but oh how my mind wandered in those days (well, in these days, too) and Saint Louis De Montfort's True Devotion to Mary made me feel unworthy to even be in the same room as a rosary let alone pick one up. But I persevered and kept praying, telling myself that someday I would have more time and at least I would be in the habit...
This book addresses just that and much more in such a friendly way that the Rosary becomes a joy. Thank you, Karen, for such a beautiful little book!

Poetry Monday

I love October and not just because it is the most beautiful month. It's because it is the month of the Rosayr and that means it must be Lepanto season!

Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise

I've been reading Vasari's Lives of the Artists. This is one of those books I bought for my daughter when she was on a Renaissance binge and meant to read but.... Well, I finally have a little time to read and it is pretty good! Vasari is very readable and when I think I could skip an artist as too obscure he corrects me. I had never heard of Lorenzo Ghiberti but according to Vasari and Michelangelo he is "worthy of heaven, itself". (it was Ghiberti's vanishing points that got them all excited!)

Dum cernit valvas aurato ex aere nitentes
In templo, Michael Angelus obstupuit:
Attonitusque diu, sic alta silentia rupit:
O divinum opus: O janua digna polo!

When Michaelangelo the panels saw
Gleaming upon the church in gilded bronze
Amaz'd he stood; after long wonder thus
The solemn silence broke:'O work divine!
O door worthy of heaven!'

Zoo

Yesterday was one of those absolutely perfect autumn days that we could not bare to face Latin declesions. So we headed to the zoo. And if my dial up wasn't so horribly slow I would post pictures!

What we've been up to

We started school a few weeks ago and have been trying to establish a routine. It is going pretty well so far. We had a good routine going last year and it has been fairly easy to fall back into it. We are moving ahead in Latin with Latina Christiana II. I meant to add more English grammar but there doesn't seem to be enough time in the day so for now this will have to cover that too. I'm hoping to cover about 500 years of history--1500 to 2000--this year. However, the Renaissance is impossible to rush through! We'll see how it goes.
The high school years are looming ahead of me and I want to use as many of G.K. Chesterton's books on authors and saints as I can fit in. To that end we are reading (or are going to read) alot of Stevenson, and Dickens. Kipling, too. The hobbits are already familiar with St. Francis and St. Thomas Aquinas. And of course, Chesterton himself. More Father Brown, definitely and maybe some of his other fiction. Napoleon of Notting Hill perhaps. No point in over planning!!

The Very Quotable Charlotte Mason

I've been reading A Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason. I've dipped in to this book many times before but this is the first time I've attempted to read it cover to cover. I'm finding it irresistible. It accompanies me to the beach, to soccer. I'd take it shopping if I could. She is at her feisty best in this one. An example on a carefully prepared "child environment": "We had thought that the terrible succession of blows inflicted by the War had changed all that; but, no; the errors of education still hold sway and we still have amongst us the better-than-my-neighbor folk, whose function, let us hope, is to administer the benefits of adversity to most of us. What if parents and teachers in their zeal misread the schedule of their duties, magnified their office unduly and encroached upon the personality of children? It is not an environment that these want, a set of artificial relations carefully constructed, but an atmosphere which nobody has been at pains to constitute." Well, no fear of a carefully maintained environment here!