The House of the Heart: Love, Justice, and Humility

Patterns for Life audiobook Chapter 7

In Charlotte Mason’s model, love and justice balance each other the way mercy and fairness balance each other. Like two sides of the same coin, the tnesion between the two opens up a space for the practice of what the Orthodox Church calls economia: the spiritual discernment involved with the proper application of a rule. In much the same way that economia in spiritual matters shoehorns us out of the letter of the law and back into the Spirit, the balance in matters of the heart is why Mason believed that education needed to avoid becoming a system. The goal in exercising economia in education is not to produce a product, but to promote relationship, with God and with others.

Patterns for Life, Chapter 7