by Cornelia Oprea
My child, just read!
In the Prologue of Ochrid, St. Nikolai tells a story of a monk talking to St. Arsenius about reading the Holy Scriptures. If you want to read the whole story, you can find it in the reflections for May 8th. The exhortation given by St. Arsenius to the monk is to “just read.”
The centrality of our educational philosophy parallels the ethos of this same idea. While the exchange centered on the power of scriptures despite our lack of understanding, it has a similar mechanical process to the way we learn in general. We put in the work, and the results will come.
“Commit thy works unto the LORD, and thy thoughts shall be established.” (Proverbs 16:3)
Reading well-written books works as the seeds in the Parable of the Sower. They are the seeds we sow with a proleptic view of our children as grown servants of God. As such, their academic performance is not dependent on a benchmark imposed by a restrictive set of skills arbitrarily delineated, but a thorough guidance to a way of thinking and behaving that is aligned with the will of God.
Our homeschooling is not tied to a room at home, or a set of materials per se. We take our books with us no matter where we are, and we explore libraries or bookstores that we discover along the way. Our boys equally learn from museums, interactions with people we encounter along the way, hikes where we explore God’s creation. These habits we maintain whether we are home or traveling.
One of the most beautiful parts of the path we are on is that we can learn through discovery. And what could be more beautiful to discover than Orthodox communities across the United States. As part of our logistical travel planning, we look up churches that we can attend. I send out a quick email to the priest letting him know who we are and when we would like to attend. More importantly, we let him know if we are prepared to receive communion or not. Most of the time, we have a few options to choose from, and we tend to pick parishes that have services in English.
This has been the most humbling part of our adventures: while in different jurisdictions, with many or few parishioners, multiple priests or traveling priests, every single parish we have visited, every community we have encountered, received us with open arms and showed us beautiful hospitality.
Lessons learned, for now
Besides the inevitable lesson of learning to trust God, the biggest lesson we have learned is that our sins follow us no matter where we are.
We struggle with our prayer rule at home, we do so on the road as well. We struggle fasting, we do so on the road also.
But as we move towards salvation with any struggle, any fall is just an opportunity to rise and try again. So I will share with you a few safeguards we have put in to help with said falling.
God loves order, and so do I
Most that know me know that I live by my handy-dandy notebook, with my lists and schedules. And here we are, uprooted from routine, never knowing from one day to another what will follow. For a while, I had to fight the temptation to give in. Traveling can be chaotic. At home, we have our prayer corner and the habit of starting and ending the day congregating by our icon corner. Traveling, our established routines get removed, and we are faced with forcing the will. Thank God for technology! A friend taught me to set an alarm. So, we do. If my husband is traveling by himself, we facetime and say our prayers together, which also helps him stay grounded.
Fasting on the road is another challenge. Living on a steady diet of gas station food, while appealing on vacations, loses its appeal when you spend a significant amount of time on the road. We do not have an eiconomia from fasting, and while it took us a while to understand why not, the solution was simple. We prepare our meals and instead of grabbing whatever from wherever, we eat our hummus sandwiches and survive to say “thank God for another beautiful day!”
Overall, the solution to a balance between the chaos of the unknown and the order of obedience is flexibility. I still plan our days in 30-minute intervals, and while our home routine allows me to have a printed schedule with color coded intervals, on the road, I can adjust those 30 minutes to allow us to stop and enjoy the view and God’s creation. When you reach the peak after an intense hike, and you stop and look into the vastness of the horizon, the beauty of His love overwhelms you not just in a spiritual sense, but in a palpable, physical sense. Such a sense of joy I have only felt in one other instance: in those rare moments when you are not just attending, but where you live the liturgy in the presence of our brothers and sisters in Christ and of all the Saints.
Abraham never went back to Ur
As Abraham never once looked back on all the comforts of living in the greatest city of his time, we hope to allow our children to never look back at their childhood without a sense of having grown up in a family of sinners that traveled to adjust themselves to a continual search for Christ.
To Him be the Glory!