Echoes of Faithfulness
As the calendar turns and the new year presents itself, I find myself gazing at all the opportunity of the year ahead. While many begin with goals, resolutions, and lists there is also a reverent call to attention–can I continue the good work of tending the home, cultivating truth, goodness, and beauty, and faithfully doing the seen and unseen?
Reverence for what lies ahead and our role in it invites us to thoughtfully approach this year with hearts and hands ready to do the good and faithful work before us.
Introducing: The Living Echo
This year, I’d like to begin offering something new in these letters.
I often think of history not as a series of isolated lessons, but as a long and unfolding symphony—made up of great movements and quieter phrases, recurring themes and familiar echoes. What is first sounded in one age often returns later, transformed but recognizable, harmonizing with what has come before.
Each month, I’ll be including a small offering called The Living Echo—a single page meant to help us listen more attentively. It will draw our attention to one movement of history and a few of its echoes in place, poetry, art, music, or thought—not as a lesson to complete, but as a way of hearing the past as something living and present.
My hope is that, over time, these echoes will begin to sound familiar—that history will feel less like something to master and more like something we learn to recognize, attend to, and love. Oh and there’s a tiny booklist to help you get started in the seeing the beauty of Ancient Greece.
From the Press: Echoes in the Cloister
This composer study was a joy to research and write as it transported me to the hallowed halls of monasteries and cathedrals, where voices rose in a breathing cadence of worship and the very fabric of life was woven with the cadence of chant.
Echoes in the Cloister looks at the origins of Gregorian chant and early polyphony, the legacy of Hildegard of Bingen, and the beauty inherent in worship.
Like all Echoes of Beauty, this study includes 11 weekly lessons with listening selections and thoughts to guide your students to a deeper appreciation for the sacred sound of the Medieval World. It pairs beautifully with Nocturne, the volume of The Symphony of History that focuses on the Middle Ages (particularly with Term 1) but can also be used as a standalone composer study.
Use code CHANT10 for 10% of Echoes in the Cloister through Sunday 1/11!
Charlotte’s corner
“Education is the Science of Relations"; that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books, for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of-
"Those first-born affinities
"That fit our new existence to existing things."
In my past emails (read those here) I have shared more about who Miss Mason was, her 20 Principles of Education, the threefold aim of education, and the instruments of education afforded to educators. One principle beats at the very heart of the method, showing how children learn by personally connecting with living ideas and a wide curriculum. Principle 12 (provided in full above) is the center upon which the whole approach turns because it brings together all the truths: the personhood of the child, the vast feast of knowledge, the tools of atmosphere, discipline, and life–showing that education is not merely the transfer of knowledge but the formation of character, allowing for deep and living connections, and ultimately the ordering of affections.
Charlotte Mason tells us that knowledge is not memorization, not mere exposure, not utility—but relationship. To know is to care, to connect, to love. Karen Glass’s book In Vital Harmony is an excellent foray into a deeper study of the overarching harmony of Miss Mason’s principles.
Under the Laurel Tree: What we’ve been enjoying
Since we just celebrated Christmas I am sure there are myriads of book recommendations on your To Be Read list but allow me to add just one more – Scholé Everyday: How to Be a Thinking Mom by the Scholé Sisters. Favorite quote so far: “Our work should be an active service to God. Our rest should be a delightful enjoyment of God Himself.”
Beauty to Behold
I am excited to announce I was invited to contribute an article for the Spring issue of Keeping The Citadel magazine, a quarterly print (and digital) magazine dedicated to encouraging women in the high calling of Biblical womanhood. My article will focus on bringing truth, goodness, and beauty in the realm of education – Spring issue launching in March! You can preorder now until 2/15.
Mother’s Encouragement,
“Plunge every day of your life into the spring that quenches and yet ever renews your thirst.” – from The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, and Methods
May this be our posture as we begin the year—not striving, but returning daily to the Source that sustains us. The faithfulness of today is enough.
For the feast and the forming of hearts,
~Tiffany
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