A Classical Home
by Nikki Boyle
Feast of St Irene the Great Martyr
Anno Domini 2020, May 5
The Boyle family
IS CLASSICAL
education just for school and for those who really like books? Can you be classical at home, even when life seems chaotic?
These real questions apply to real people. Our family is a busy family. Not only are there a lot of us, but both my husband and I work, our kids practice sports and music, and we’ve found great joy being active socially as well.
Sometimes, though, it’s too much. Things can get lost in the shuffle. There’s little time for homework; the neighbor-boy is disappointed with no one to play; and we can’t read together as often as we’d like. So, what do you do?
Well, I’ll tell you what we do, at least. Let me start by saying that we’re nowhere near perfect! Sometimes we’re just too exhausted or busy to cook a proper meal. Sometimes homework doesn’t get done. And sometimes a TV show or movie is needed. But what we’ve found is that those ‘sometimes’ should be exceptions, rather than rules.
Where to start? Well, let’s work backwards:
- Bedtime. We try hard to have a consistent bedtime. We shoot for lights out by 8:30pm (later than we’d like, especially for our younger children, but realistic). This means showers, tooth-brushing, and our evening prayers need to start by 8pm.
- Before the bedtime ritual (an hour or two, typically), and depending on the day’s schedule, we sit as a family and read. We just finished The Mitchells: Five for Victory by Hilda Van Stockum. We can’t read every day, but it’s a majority. We’ll also finish any homework. If it’s nice, they’ll play outside.
- We typically eat dinner between 5-6pm (depending on basketball practice, Sisters of Sophia at EDI, or evening meetings). One rule is that we always eat together. There are exceptions, but very few. At dinner, we talk. First, we thank God for the food. Then, between bites, we each say our “goods” and “bads” for the day, which can take our conversation in many directions. Whether we like the food or not, we all eat it anyway. Then, it’s the older girls’ job to do the dishes.
- Between the end of school and dinner is basketball practice for some, piano lessons for others, and general play for the rest. We empty lunches, put away backpacks, change clothes, and ask ‘Alexa’ to play whatever song we heard someone talking about at school. It’s also time to tell Dad how we did on our spelling tests…
- Before school is a rush! Dad makes sure everyone is awake by 6:45am. Then it’s a mad dash of changing, breakfast, packing lunches, and grabbing a snack. The point here is consistency: it’s important to wake up and go to sleep at the same time each day.
Okay, so what’s ‘classical’ about this?
First, you’ll notice that, as a rule, there’s no time scheduled for TV. Play time is first outside, second with board games or whatever they find inside (legos, velcro darts, etc.). Admittedly, with five children there’s not much need for directed play. We don’t have phones or iPads for the kids either, so that’s not even a temptation. As new studies are consistently showing, screen time for children has negative impacts on cognitive and social development. Kids need to run and move and figure out how things work and push the boundaries. We keep the boundaries firm, of course; and yes, they get in trouble. But it’s good for them to discover. Let them be bored: they’ll end up exploring, and learning to teach themselves — that’s classical.
Secondly, eating together is classical. You don’t need to recite Latin at the table (though, sometimes that actually does happen…thanks, Mr. Wagner…). Eating together is just a human thing to do. It’s a place for conversation and joy and honesty. As a rule, it’s more classical to make your food than not, and that can be done together, too, but sharing meals is a key way for keeping families strong.
Third, we read. Individual reading is good. Reading aloud as a family is better. It sounds antiquated, but actually it’s immensely rewarding. It gives a common story with all the joys and sorrows. Books allow imaginations to work, while TV shows do that for us, leaving us passive. Books invite you to provide color and shape and accent—they even let you in on what the character is thinking! And families can talk together about their impressions, anticipations, questions of the story they’re reading.
Finally, there’s a structure. Even with the busy-ness of life, it’s a structure we work hard to keep. Like I said earlier, we’re not perfect, not even close. But this discipline of ordering our daily lives intentionally, particularly with a focus on what’s good for our family, is what classical education is all about. It cares about the formation of real people, who exist in real families.
So, let me encourage all of you who also have busy families. You can do this! Whether it’s limiting screen time, or arranging your schedules to eat together, or finding a family book, there are little things you can do to make your family more classical, which simply means, more family. May the Lord bless you as you bring your family to focus on the true, the good, and the beautiful.
*This reflection originally appeared in a newsletter from Christ the Savior Academy, a classical school in Wichita, KS where Mrs. Boyle teaches.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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