Breadth

*I wrote this awhile back and am posting this now while in the midst of finals to remind myself why I like my school and my major.

Some of you have probably heard me rave my Schaeffer inspired ravings about Christianity and culture. You've heard me rant that "Christian music" and "Christian fiction" are not confined to Janette Oke's novels or to WOW Worship music, although they have their place. You have probably accidentally started me going on this topic and have been unable to stop me....

This subject is one I am passionate about, and yet, I have had a little bit of a problem. I haven't attained a level of excellence myself in any of the fields I want to see changed. I can write, but not better than those I critique. I can play the violin, but not exceptionally well. I don't know how to draw, though I am trying to learn. I do want to excel in each of these areas, though, and that is the problem. I am hungry, so hungry, to learn more about each of these and other fields, that I hate the idea of specialization, because I want to learn EVERYTHING!!! (yes, I have a problem.)

This inconsistency--craving excellence and yet hating the focus and specialization required to attain it in any given area--- has bothered me. Or at least it did bother me until I read the following excerpt from G.K.Chesterton's book What's Wrong with the World.

Note: I was going to put a whole lot of disclaimers here, in case I make someone mad with my anti-feminism, but I'm not going to bother with any, except for this one stating that I thought of it. Oh, and this isn't a cop-out either. I still believe in working hard.


In other words, there must be in every center
of humanity one human being upon a larger plan; one who does not "give
her best," but gives her all.Our old analogy of the fire remains the most workable one.
The fire need not blaze like electricity nor boil like boiling water;
its point is that it blazes more than water and warms more than light.
The wife is like the fire, or to put things in their proper proportion,
the fire is like the wife. Like the fire, the woman is expected
to cook: not to excel in cooking, but to cook; to cook better
than her husband who is earning the coke by lecturing on botany
or breaking stones. Like the fire, the woman is expected to tell
tales to the children, not original and artistic tales, but tales--
better tales than would probably be told by a first-class cook.
Like the fire, the woman is expected to illuminate and ventilate,
not by the most startling revelations or the wildest winds of thought,
but better than a man can do it after breaking stones or lecturing.
But she cannot be expected to endure anything like this universal
duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty of competitive or
bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive cook;
a school mistress, but not a competitive schoolmistress;
a house-decorator but not a competitive house-decorator; a dressmaker,
but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not one trade but
twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her second bests.
This is what has been really aimed at from the first in what
is called the seclusion, or even the oppression, of women.
Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow;
on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad.
The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness,
a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs.
It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman that she
was enabled to play at five or six professions and so come almost
as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades.
But the woman's professions, unlike the child's, were all truly
and almost terribly fruitful; so tragically real that nothing but
her universality and balance prevented them being merely morbid.

This is why I am majoring in "classical liberal arts," PHC's education major designed to train students to write curricula, teach at classical schools, or homeschool. This is why I am going to college--to learn to be a better mother. I believe my craving for a breadth of knowledge is God-given and a gift from God to help me be what He has designed me to be. Oh, and if I never have a chance to teach my own children? I can still be a librarian, a vocation that would suit me to a t...