Day 11 Awe

Photo via Independent Schools Victoria

“The flowers, it is true, are not new; but the children are; and it is the fault of their elders if every new flower they come upon is not to them a Picciola, (novel by Joseph Xavier Boniface) a mystery of beauty to be watched from day to day with unspeakable awe and delight.”

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“He should not be able to recall a time before the sweet stories of old filled his imagination; he should have heard the voice of the Lord God in the garden in the cool of the evening; should have been an awed spectator where the angels ascended and descended upon Jacob's stony pillow; should have followed Christ through the cornfield on the Sabbath-day, and sat in the rows of the hungry multitudes––so long ago that such sacred scenes form the unconscious background of his thoughts.”

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“All we find out may (in our studies of Nature) be old knowledge, and is most likely already recorded in books; but, for us, it is new, our own discovery, our personal knowledge, a little bit of the world's real work which we have attempted and done. However little work we do in this kind, we gain by it some of the power to appreciate, not merely beauty, but fitness, adaptation, processes. Reverence and awe grow upon us, and we are brought into a truer relation with the Almighty Worker.”

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“In our Training College, the students are not taught how to stimulate attention, how to keep order, how to give marks, how to punish or even how to reward, how to manage a large class or a small school with children in different classes. All these things come by nature in a school where the teachers know something of the capacities and requirements of children. To hear children of the slums 'telling' King Lear or Woodstock, by the hour if you will let them, or describing with minutest details Van Eyck's Adoration of the Lamb or Botticelli's Spring, is a surprise, a revelation. We take off our shoes from our feet; we 'did not know it was in them,' whether we be their parents, their teachers or mere lookers-on. And with some feeling of awe upon us we shall be the better prepared to consider how and upon what children should be educated. I will only add that I make no claims for them which cannot be justified by hundreds, thousands, of instances within our experience.”
 
 
Examen: When have I been full of awe lately?  Do I understand awe as a trail to the Almighty Worker?  Where might I be getting in the way of that? 

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The flowers, it: Charlotte M. Mason  Home Education, 1:53.
He should not: Charlotte M. Mason,  Parents and Children, 2:108–9.
All we find out:  Charlotte M. Mason, Ourselves, 4:101–2 Bk.II.
In our training college: Towards a Philosophy of Education, 6:45.
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 Day 11 Awe meditation/100 Days copyright Laurie Bestvater 2025

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