Humility

–Humility does not think much or little of itself; it does not think of itself at all. C.M.

My Charlotte Mason book club just came to the close of 'Parents and Children'. We certainly ended with a bang, or rather Charlotte did. I think the above statement is a new rather big idea that she has given me. This is the third book I have been blessed to study through in the two years I have been a part of this book club. It is such a joy to read through Ms. Mason's series on education with others. I have found her books to be so much more than instruction on how to teach my children. It is a devotional, a guide to life, a character training for me and a philosophy of life.

It seems like once or twice a year, I trip across a BIG IDEA somewhere in her writing. Last year it was this:

We become aware of an altogether unnatural and irreligious classification into things sacred and things secular. We are not in all things at one with God. There are beautiful lives in which there is no trace of this separation, whose aims are confined to the things we call sacred. But many thoughtful, earnest persons feel sorely the need of a conception of the divine relation which shall embrace the whole of human life which shall make art, science, politics, all those cares and thoughts of men which are not rebellious, sacred also as being all engaged in the great evolution, the evolution of the Kingdom of God.  vol 2 pg 130

I believe for the next little while, I will be meditating on humility. On what it should be in myself and how I should guard it in my children. I'll leave you with some more thoughts from Charlotte....

  It is a negative rather than a positive quality, being an absence of self-consciousness rather than the presence of any distinctive virtue. The person who is unaware of himself is capable of all lowly service, of all suffering for others, of bright cheerfulness under all the small crosses and worries of everyday life. This is the quality that makes heroes, and this is the quality that makes saints. We are able to pray, but we are hardly able to worship or to praise, to say, 'My soul doth magnify the Lord' so long as in the innermost chamber of our hearts we are self-occupied. vol 2 pg 285

The note of childhood is, before all things, humility.  This, if we think of it, is the state natural to children. Every person and thing commands their interest; but the person or thing in action is deeply interesting.