In less than 24 hours I will be on my way to the Circe Conference, A Contemplation of Creation. I am almost packed and very excited. I get to drive there with one of the best teachers in the world and spend time with a group of the smartest women in the world and some almost as smart men. I get to hear Wendell Berry and David Hicks whom I have never heard before and John Mason Hodges and James Daniels who always offer hope and excellence.
You would think it would be discouraging for us regular folks to be around such luminous people but it never is. Instead, I always come home from the Circe Conference with a renewed vision. The vision isn’t to work harder and faster, to whip my students into shape by every means possible. On the contrary, the vision is to return to first things first, to seek first God’s kingdom, and watch what happens. It really is the one true thing. In my own Circe talk I hope to encourage moms that they can have it all if they get the order right.
I love this idea of Ordo Amoris so much I keep this quote ever before me:
“St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful.” C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
And as if all that were not enough, Louisville has a Graeter’s Ice Cream Shop. Chocolate Coconut Almond Chip waffle cone, here I come!
