My wife and I don't watch much television, but we like to end our evenings with an hour or so of a nourishing series. However, we've become dissatisfied with what the networks offer. The shows are often coarse at best, sexed up, bizarre, and violent at worst. And most of the ads range from idiotic to salacious. Well. Except for the F150 ads. Gotta like them.
Casting about for alternatives, I remembered having been touched by some episodes of "Little House on the Prairie" back in the day. So much so that I wept telling about one of them in counseling - back in the day. Naturally, my counselor encouraged me to keep watching "Little House" And I did for a short while.
So, casting about, we found the entire series streaming on Peacock and began to watch it nightly. Good move. Then we began inviting homeschooling families over every couple of months to watch it with us. It was - is - a hit.
Then, we discovered that they - the homeschoolers - had all read all the books. One young woman read them all five times! We never had. We read a lot of books with our daughter, but completely missed Little House. How in the world did we miss that?! So, we got the books last year. My wife whupped through all nine in a week. I, instead, read just a chapter or two a day. Am midway in book four, "On the Banks of Plum Creek."
Michael Landon's television series and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books are completely different. Completely. They are both really good. The tv series, surprisingly, is more religious, very Christian.
But the books in particular dwell in just the spirit of poverty you are writing about here, Regina.
Again and again, the Ingalls's life is a dance - sometimes terrifying - between productive work and
radical poverty. In "Plum Creek," a plague of grasshoppers has just destroyed their first crop in Minnesota. They are, so to speak, plumb broke. What carries them through these crises, most of all, are their willingness to work very hard and their love for each other. All told through the eyes of a child.
The only thought I have to add of my own here is about the relation between work and poverty. Even in the early church, after everyone had given away their worldly goods to the poor and to the church, Paul soon enough found himself taking up collections for the starving church in Jerusalem. And St. Francis too depends completely on gifts from working people.
I'll have to let what you wrote rattle around in my mind for a while. Much food for thought. Poverty, however, seems to me only the half of it. Jesus's words certainly urge us to detachment and generosity. But the other half of it seems to me work.
I'll stop. Challenging post. Thoughtful, personal, well put. If I rock my head from side to side, I can hear it rattling around even now. :-)
My wife and I don't watch much television, but we like to end our evenings with an hour or so of a nourishing series. However, we've become dissatisfied with what the networks offer. The shows are often coarse at best, sexed up, bizarre, and violent at worst. And most of the ads range from idiotic to salacious. Well. Except for the F150 ads. Gotta like them.
Casting about for alternatives, I remembered having been touched by some episodes of "Little House on the Prairie" back in the day. So much so that I wept telling about one of them in counseling - back in the day. Naturally, my counselor encouraged me to keep watching "Little House" And I did for a short while.
So, casting about, we found the entire series streaming on Peacock and began to watch it nightly. Good move. Then we began inviting homeschooling families over every couple of months to watch it with us. It was - is - a hit.
Then, we discovered that they - the homeschoolers - had all read all the books. One young woman read them all five times! We never had. We read a lot of books with our daughter, but completely missed Little House. How in the world did we miss that?! So, we got the books last year. My wife whupped through all nine in a week. I, instead, read just a chapter or two a day. Am midway in book four, "On the Banks of Plum Creek."
Michael Landon's television series and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books are completely different. Completely. They are both really good. The tv series, surprisingly, is more religious, very Christian.
But the books in particular dwell in just the spirit of poverty you are writing about here, Regina.
Again and again, the Ingalls's life is a dance - sometimes terrifying - between productive work and
radical poverty. In "Plum Creek," a plague of grasshoppers has just destroyed their first crop in Minnesota. They are, so to speak, plumb broke. What carries them through these crises, most of all, are their willingness to work very hard and their love for each other. All told through the eyes of a child.
The only thought I have to add of my own here is about the relation between work and poverty. Even in the early church, after everyone had given away their worldly goods to the poor and to the church, Paul soon enough found himself taking up collections for the starving church in Jerusalem. And St. Francis too depends completely on gifts from working people.
I'll have to let what you wrote rattle around in my mind for a while. Much food for thought. Poverty, however, seems to me only the half of it. Jesus's words certainly urge us to detachment and generosity. But the other half of it seems to me work.
I'll stop. Challenging post. Thoughtful, personal, well put. If I rock my head from side to side, I can hear it rattling around even now. :-)