Homeschooling is an exercise in trust, an attempt at visioning an ideal education and then a commitment to the journey, the concept of journey, to get there. A journey isn’t a city bus route with a clearly delineated timetable and well-marked stops along the way. Journeys are more of a hard cheese and a baguette rolled into a bandana sort of travel. You are woefully unprepared for a journey, you just set out toward your lofty, unconventional goal – dump the ring! slay the dragon! save the country! raise a child to be a well rounded, kind hearted, emotionally regulated member of the community who gives more than takes and looks out for his fellow man. Lofty indeed. Anyway, patience while journeying is a skill most grownups need to hone in our world that prioritizes constant analysis and extreme efficiency, while wildly marketing to us the very items and toys that cause addictive distraction and extreme procrastination.
How do we journey through Lent? Lent is like the reading of a familiar novel, dog eared, spilled upon. The exposition feels a little tedious. The ending is no surprise. But between the pages of day one and day forty we reconnect with the familiar faces of other pilgrims, and with our own weakness.
It is strange to be sombre about a story with an ultimately joyful ending. Yet in story journeys, don’t we recognize Frodo’s fatigue and isolation, or sense the weight of Hermione’s over functioning as she and Harry leave their comfortable childhood world behind? The rural fishermen disciples bumble along, trying both to comprehend just what kind of cultic figure they feel inexplicably compelled to follow, while their wives at home with the kids are trying desperately to ride the emotional waves of not-enough-to-eat versus FISH FOR DAYYYYYYYYS! as their husbands tell crazy stories about a woodworker who talks to the seas and heals people with a touch, or with spit and mud, but only some people, sometimes, and not necessarily them.
We journey through darkness as we read the same old stories for the umpteenth time, in the same ways that we go about our daily lives – mundane trips to the grocery store, the commuter’s slog to work, and the terror of plain Jane anxiety, all punctuated with a few moments of light, of breathtaking insight, fleeting but just enough to sustain. The destination is always Easter but the road to get there is different every year.