Copywork Monday
This week, we are introducing a new feature on the blog. As you send them in, I will post them. I am looking for quotations or passages that you’d like to share with other moms to use for copywork.
Here’s this week’s entry from Rhonda in GA:
Hey Julie — I just ran across the most beautiful piece of copywork. I wanted to share it with you in case you might wish to consider it for a future Arrow publication. I hope you don’t find me too presumptuous!
It’s from the book I, Juan de Pereja by Elizabeth Barton de Trevino. Page 138, third paragraph:
I knelt a long time, for I had much to offer up to God, and I placed before Him countless thoughts, so that He might winnow them like a thresher, leaving me the wheat and blowing away the chaff with the breath of His mercy. When I rose my knees were stiff and I felt tired and old, though I not not then completed forty years. But I was strengthened in good resolutions and at peace, and so I gave myself the pleasure of strolling from altar to altar in that enormous, impressive church. I paused a long time before the sculptured Virgin, sorrowing with her dead Son in her arms; it was a Pieta of Michelangelo, so moving and tender that it brought tears springing to the eyes.
I think this paragraph is a good example of the capitalization of anything related to God — as in “He might…” and “placed before Him….” and “the breath of His mercy.” There is also the capitilization of the title of Mary, the mother of Jesus and an object of art along with the name of the artist.
And besides, I just love the spirituality of this passage! Listen to how Juan de Pareja gives his thoughts and concerns over to God and what He expects God to do with them! Beautifully written!
Just wanted to share this….I had to read it aloud three times to my girls because I loved it so much!
I just wanted to add that the current convention for referring to God in the “he” form in writing is to not capitalize. There are times when some writers prefer to use capitals to reference God as a way to emphasize the importance of God or the writer’s personal faith or for some other reason. However, it is not wrong, in other words, to not use capitals when writing “he” for God and, in fact, is often preferred in most published works today.
