Letters Mingle Souls by Karen Andreola

Letter writing has been part of my person culture, not just as a mother.  This is the first letter I wrote.  I was 8 years old at the time. When my grandmother passed away a few years ago, this was found in her few belongings. My heart was warmed to know that she deemed it important enough to save and move all over the country with her. When I left for college, I had a heavy shoe box full of the sweet notes and letters that I had received but has since been lost. When my fiancé was in Army helicopter flight school, we wrote letters. You can imagine what a treasure these are to me today! Even now I love getting missives in the post from so many that I have met from my Charlotte Mason speaking and activities; it’s like sharing a piece of your heart.  Friends such as Amy Vande  Hei, Bonnie Buckingham, Jesse Halverson, and others have inspired me with their lyrical and descriptive letters.
 
About 17 years ago, I reached out in a letter to the only person I knew to ask about applying the Charlotte Mason method in high school.  She wrote me back a thoughtful note and attached an article that I still have. That person was Karen Andreola, author of The Charlotte Mason Companion! She has written a new book, Mother Culture – For a Happy Homeschool that I am happy to recommend. Karen knew that I liked to write letters and has graciously allowed me to share this slightly edited version of chapter 28 from Mother Culture. I think it’s brilliant and so encouraging. I hope it inspires you to take up pen and paper soon, too!

Please wright back,

Love

Nancy

Letters Mingle Souls by Karen Andreola

Do you like to receive that rare handwritten letter, get-well card, or thank-you note? I do. Its rarity enhances its appeal. The politeness of paper surpasses that of an instant message because it offers your attention without immediately demanding a reply. One of my faraway friends presses a wax seal onto her envelope. Tickled by this antique touch I started doing the same.

“Letters mingle souls.”

John Donne

Handwritten notes are a way to sweeten relationships. I enjoyed writing little notes to my children. “Mommy Notes” can be left on a pillow, sneakily tucked in between the pages of bedside reading, or placed next to a napkin for the breakfast table. They say, “You are special to me,” while saying, “Thank you,” “I’m sorry,” “Get well,” “Fun day, wasn’t it?” or, “I know this was a sad day for you” (if a pet hamster dies, for example). After some years this cultural way of life caught on. The children began writing notes of their own.

This year, for my Mother Culture, I read Emily Dickinson, Friend and Neighbor, by MacGregor Jenkins. When the author was a boy, he lived down the street from “Miss Emily,” then in her forties. He was the son of Emily Dickinson’s pastor and a neighborhood playmate of her brother’s children, who lived across the road. Mr. Jenkins recalls how the children felt free to play in the back garden where Miss Emily could watch and hear their shenanigans from her second story bedroom window. She would frequently purloin treats from the pantry to feed them. At the window ledge would appear a basket. It was slowly lowered by a much-knotted string, from what seemed to be an incredible height. The children saw “a slender figure in white and a pair of laughing eyes.”*1 Sometimes gingerbread was in the basket—and sometimes notes. Miss Emily would send down messages on scraps of paper. Her notes were as pithy as her poems, her verse as mysterious as a riddle. Sometimes a single clover flower or a sprig of forget-me-nots came inside a letter. Such means of communicating was Miss Emily’s way of life.

What can take the place of a handwritten note in our modern world?

I cherish my children’s illustrated notes to me (saved in a hat box). The drawings in the notes are whimsical: a hedgehog in a kerchief, a guinea pig with a bow tie, or other critters anthropomorphized. Now I am writing my grandchildren and saving paper notes with drawings that they send me. I wish they lived closer. Sophia, their home teacher, now and again announces, “Let’s write Grandma and Grandpa.” This is where it starts. If we keep in touch this way periodically, perhaps one day they will write out of their own initiative rather than their mother’s suggestion.

“I like receiving a letter and knowing myself loved.”

Virginia Woolf

The mother of the youngest member of my Beautiful Girlhood gatherings told me something sweet. Her daughter regularly received a handwritten letter from her grandmother that included a reminiscence. This was Grandmother’s way of preserving and handing down stories from the family tree. Grandmother lived in Canada and didn’t get to see her granddaughter as often as she liked, but a relationship was sustained that found a place in each of their hearts.

Loneliness is a heartache that only close fellowship can dissolve. God never meant for us to go it alone. Bouts of loneliness are not unusual. Many a home teacher longs to relate to a like-minded homemaker or two. This is not the 1950s, when mothers chatted over the fence while hanging up the wash. Neighborhoods seem deserted now.

A great many women get in touch with other women through comments shared online. This tells me that the desire for fellowship is strong. When my children were small, during a string of household relocations, when our family set about visiting new churches and felt like outsiders until we were eventually grafted in somewhere, my prayers for Christian fellowship were uttered with longing. The Man-of-the-House was regularly out of state on business, an aspect of his work not to his liking or mine. In those days I kept in touch with family and friends through paper letters. I still enjoy communicating this way.

Several years ago, our mailbox was vandalized. It was broken and left for dead. There it lay, covered in snow. This was not the first time such was its fate. The foolhardy vandal of course, never stopped to consider what a meaningful symbol the mailbox has been to me. It was, for most of my life, my primary means of parley over the garden fence. With the spring thaw the Man-of-the-House made sure it was given a new post and was securely rooted back in the ground.

“Like cold water to a thirsty soul,

so is good news from a far country.”

Proverbs 25:25

My courtship in the 1970s with the Man-of-the-House was a long distance one through paper letters and by telephone. For married couples, little notes on the pillow are a way to stay in love. A wife can leave a note for her husband where he will find it, in a briefcase or suitcase, in a dresser drawer on top of his clean handkerchiefs.

“A friend’s writing on an envelope lifts the heart on the rainiest morning.”

Charlotte Gray

To find an envelope in your mailbox with your name handwritten on it is pure delight to most people. The moment you read a handwritten note is the moment loneliness is dispelled, for the time being. A certain widowed friend I left behind in Maine reminds me of this, kindly, in her letters to me.

The nice thing about a letter received (although this does require self-control) is that it can be placed invitingly on a windowsill or near an easy chair, until it can be read with leisure, something to look forward to and savor after a string of time-sensitive chores are completed. It is a similar pleasure to “lose oneself” in a reply. Correspondence is one way to cultivate the soul.

Jane Austen was an avid letter writer. One letter to her sister Cassandra in 1808 opens with, “Where shall I begin? Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?”*2

The essence of the blog comment, a penned letter, or a thank-you note isn’t flattery, but rather it is a sense of appreciation, of community, and a genuine desire to encourage. Similar joys are expressed, similar concerns and aspirations are shared, and similar interests are enjoyed. I should note, however, that media can unintentionally be a wedge in developing face-to-face relationships (including the family circle) when people connect each to their own worlds for long hours (which mysteriously never seem long while one is absorbed).

“See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand.”

The apostle Paul, Galatians 6:11.

The loneliest experience in all of history was also the friendliest act of all. God communicates it to us in the Gospels, His letters to us. While our Lord Jesus hung on the Cross, His Father turned His face away. The Son cried out in unfathomable loneliness.*3 Out of obedience to the Father, Jesus gave His life unreservedly to ransom the souls of many.*4 We who were once far off are brought near to be His friends, forever.*5

Now we, God’s friends, may be the only epistle some people ever read.

You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all.” The apostle Paul, 2 Corinthians 3:2

The apostle Paul, 2 Corinthians 3:2

*1 MacGregor Jenkins, Emily Dickinson—Friend and Neighbor (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1939), p. 40.

*2 Jane Austen—Poems, Letters and Prayers (Springfield Gardens, NY: Palmera Publishing, 2015), p. 98.

*3 Mark 15:34.

*4 Mark 10:45.

*5 Ephesians 2:13; Colossians 1:20-23.

Bible verses are ESV.