I’ve posted so many quotes and reflections on religious topics in the last many months! As useful as it’s been for me to get some of these deliberately into my consciousness — and down on electronic paper — there’s a silliness about the whole endeavor. The wisdom there, I really have no right to touch.

A variety of images of come to my mind about what it’s like to be a new Christian. My new favorite is that of a small fish in a very large ocean. Here I am flapping my little side fins and flailing my tail frantically about trying to “go somewhere”. I keep opening and closing my mouth, slurping up water for breath and nourishment, and casting my google eyes hither and yon at the surrounding murk. So much energy expended! All the while, little beknownst to myself, there’s a huge ocean out there, with tidal swells and global currents and unfathomable depths stretching beneath me, carrying me who-knows-where, in and out of perils, closer and nearer to things I don’t even know exist. All my little fishy efforts are truly no more than a very small tempest in a very small teacup poured into the vastness of the Pacific.

So… I’m sure I won’t be able to resist posting some religious-type items now and again, but I am thinking I’ll try going back to educational topics. I’m not even sure any more that “education” has a lot of meaning, or even goodness (see quote below), but perhaps it is a realm (a pond, not a vast ocean) in which any meaning or goodness that does exist can be more easily grasped.

I’m looking through some old email that I sent to my favorite classical homeschooling list (of which I’m no longer a member). I see there are a number of things that I could put up here. I think I’ll try that for a while. I would probably disagree with my old self in many cases, but we’ll see if there might not be something worth posting.

That quote:

A subject of my constant reflections and observation: the psychology of sin or, to be more correct, the psychic mechanism of fallen man. Intuition is replaced by rational processes; a fusion with objects, by five blind senses (truly ‘external’); a grasping of the whole, by analysis. Primitive men with powerful instincts, incapable of analysis and logic, are much closer ot the image of Eden. How sinful is the process to which we subject children, developing in them all the traits of the fallen soul.

~ Alexander Elchaninov, Diary of a Russian Priest, p. 138