Well, and why? Because it's speaking to us as mothers, that's why. Moreover, it's speaking to us as mothers who, like our children, are born persons with hungry minds. Giving birth to another born person doesn't magically make us non-persons – though we often treat ourselves as if it did. And when we do, as this article points out, we "stop growing."
"There is no sadder sight in life," says "A.," the anonymous author, "than a mother who has so used herself up in her children's childhood, that she has nothing to give them in their youth."
This calls to mind something a confessor of mine used to say: "You can't give what you don't have."
He was talking specifically about the spiritual life and the resources of prayer. And naturally, he was right. If you don't pray and do spiritual reading, if you don't engage in spiritual practices, if you don't ask God for His help every day and nurse on His grace as a baby would nurse, then yes, you will run dry yourself. If you don't feed on God's love, then the love you have to give will be a lot more paltry.
I think, though, that there's another aspect to feeding ourselves spiritually, which Charlotte Mason's principle's highlight. Principle 9, for example, notes that the mind is a "spiritual organism." It's not something separate from the soul. Soul and intellect are all bound up with each other, integrated into the life that is in you, that makes you who you are. Thomas Aquinas refers to the "intellectual light," and suggests that its hunger, which Charlotte Mason also notes in Principle 9, is ultimately hunger for God, the Source of all light. He has given us this light in ourselves so that we can search, find, and recognize His light. Moreover, that light is made to want to meet its source.
Think again about this fresco, pictured above, in the Spanish Chapel of the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Novello, which I have previously discussed. In the fresco, as you can see, Thomas sits enthroned above figures representing the branches of learning. He holds the Book of Wisdom in his hand. What you can't see in this picture is that just above this fresco, in the vaulted ceiling of the chapel, is another fresco depicting the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, enlivening the apostles with His grace. The juxtaposition of the two frescos suggests a particular reading, in which Wisdom, figured as a book, is meant to trigger an association with the Holy Spirit. Wisdom is both one of the names and one of the gifts of the Spirit. This parallel indicates that just as the Holy Spirit fills the apostles with the necessary grace to grow in themselves, to recognize Him, and to preach His Gospel, so too he inspires the branches of learning. To learn is to accept this gift of "intellectual light," to help it to grow and make room for more of God's own light. To learn, in other words – to pursue more knowledge about anything – is to grow toward God.
So when we talk about Mother Culture, ultimately we really are talking about the same thing my confessor was talking about, even though he wasn't telling me to go read some history. Again, he wasn't wrong to tell me to pray more, to feed my soul with spiritual reading, and to make a retreat. He was absolutely right about all that. But I think that all too often, as Catholic mothers, we forget that everything we do offers us a way to grow in our faith, to feed ourselves, and to have something to give. If we feed our intellects, this is simply another aspect of that one crucial thing. That's not instead of going to Mass, receiving Christ in the Eucharist, and all the other ways we set ourselves before God as He offers Himself in the sacraments. But His opportunities are inexhaustible, and He Himself is without limit. He is present in everything He has created, which would cease to exist if He ceased to be present in it. There's literally nothing you can do, that you do with sincere desire for Him, that won't in one way or another be suffused with grace and grant you grace to turn around and give. We might begin by talking about the intellectual life, and about the importance of being a lifelong student, but in the end, really we're just talking about the spiritual life again.
This "Mother Culture" article focuses on reading, which makes sense. The entire Charlotte Mason conversation is about living books, about the mind's hunger for the ideas they contain and how they present the best medium for imparting those ideas. Again, like our children, we're born persons. If their minds are hungry this way, so are ours. We might, however, have managed to dull our own minds' hunger through fasting. It's pretty easy to instill intellectual anorexia in ourselves. And it's pretty easy to tell ourselves that we're doing a heroic thing, serving our children with every minute of our lives. But in truth, we're not doing anything noble, any more than we're doing anything noble when we starve our bodies and abuse our physical health. We're just destroying what God has given us, that's all, and maybe calling it martyrdom. None of that is healthy. It's not good for your body when you do it to your body; it's not good for your mind, either – the very mind God gave you, as a free gift, for you to steward – when you refuse to feed it. But when you're in that position of being so hungry you don't even know you're hungry anymore, how do you even begin to feed yourself again?
"A." responds to that question in some detail, but this paragraph particularly delights me:
The wisest woman I ever knew--the best wife, the best mother, the best mistress, the best friend--told me once, when I asked her how, with her weak health and many calls upon her time, she managed to read so much, "I always keep three books going--a stiff book, a moderately easy book, and a novel, and I always take up the one I feel fit for!" That is the secret; always have something "going" to grow by. If we mothers were all "growing" there would be less going astray among our boys, less separation in mind from our girls.
Hers is a pretty good rule. Above you see my current "stiff" book, which is "stiff" mostly because it's so long. It's really quite entertaining reading, especially if you already like British mysteries and spy stories. I picked it up because a) I'm addicted to shows like Endeavour and Foyle's War, and b) one of my sons had left it here. It's fascinating so far – I'm up to the British Fascism of the 1930s – though I have to take it fairly slowly, because there's so much detail. My habit here is to read at bedtime, roughly ten minutes. Maybe at other points during the day as I have breaks.
Other "stiff" books I've undertaken in the last few years include Christopher Dawson's Crisis of Western Education, which I read slowly over the course of a year and still chew on, not to mention Charlotte Mason's volumes, particularly Volume 6, via Karen Glass's Mind to Mind, which I continue to reference often in this blog (with much gratitude to the Ambleside Online Advisory for their work of making these volumes available online).
Trying to think now what I'd categorize as a "stiff" book versus a "moderate" one. There are, after all, novels which can be "stiff." I'd say Anna Karenina might be pretty stiff, or The Brothers Karamazov, or Middlemarch, or Kristin Lavransdatter. "Stiff" doesn't have to mean "nonfiction." It really just means "well outside your usual comfort zone." Possibly it means detail-dense, idea-dense, or simply "a project to read." One "stiff" book on my list to read sometime soon, like maybe after this MI5 history, is John Lukacs' Remembered Past, passages from which my husband has been feeding me, but which I really need to read for myself.
For me, "moderate" books might mean literary essays, or essays on literature, like Mark Jarman's Dailiness, which I've recently read and enjoyed: not scholarly essays dense with academic jargon, but writers writing about reading and writing, as they might talk about these things to a literate companion. Some things I consider "moderate" might be "stiff" books for you – and that's fine. For me, poetry, which I do read regularly, might qualify as "moderate, mostly." I read a lot of poetry, and I read it well, but it's definitely a heightened kind of reading, not like ripping through a page-turner. Poetry demands attention and thought, and generally demands to be read one poem at a time. If you're looking for poetry to read for yourself (and I would encourage you to do so!), I might commend new books by friends of mine: Jane Greer's Love Like a Conflagration (rhymes and is often funny); Margaret Ingraham's Exploring This Terrain (unrhymed meditations on nature, people, language itself); or, ahem, my own Motherland.
As for novels you can always turn to when you're too brain-fatigued for anything else, here are things I have enjoyed:
Anything by Barbara Pym, but especially Excellent Women.
J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country
My friend Marly Youmans' beautiful new novel, Charis in the World of Wonders
These, in any event, might get you started. You know yourself; you know what your "stiff," "moderate," and comfort-reading categories are. But I want to encourage you: don't neglect yourself. Don't neglect your reading. Do spiritual reading, but don't just do spiritual reading. If you're going to give your children a "wide and varied diet," do the same for yourself. Make yourself do it, just as you might have to make yourself eat and take a shower. God has given you your mind, just as He has given you your body, and these things are as spiritual as your soul. You can't single them out for separate treatment. PLAN not to neglect your mind, just as you plan not to neglect your children's education. While you're scheduling books for them, schedule three books for yourself, too.
You can't give what you don't have, my confessor said, and he was right. You owe it to your children, but you also owe it to yourself as a born person, to GROW.
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