Becoming Real: Education as Relationship, Part 2

Part 2 of a talk by Laura E. Wolfe, given at the St. Basil Center for Orthodox Thought and Culture’s Orthodoxy and Education Conference on October 17, 2025.

If you haven’t read the first part of this presentation, check it out here!

Here is where Charlotte Mason comes back in: Her principles of education naturally create the conditions for this kind of positive disintegration and reconstruction.

Remember, Mason defined education as “an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life”. These three pillars are the framework for development and relationship at any age, for cultivating the deepening of the self that is part and parcel of multi-levelness, for creating conditions for encounter.

Atmosphere is the very environment of our becoming. Our environments form us, often without our conscious awareness, and they are the actual spaces where we do our relating.

So what are the patterns of atmosphere that support this?

Of course, any time we talk about patterns, I think of Christopher Alexander’s Timeless Way of Building, a tool that’s been transformative for me in thinking about atmosphere. Alexander discovered that certain physical environments have a special quality that makes them feel alive, whole, and comfortable. This “quality without a name” is the aspect of atmosphere that supports human flourishing, encounter and relationship in its living forms.

Further, Alexander believed that everyone can sense these patterns intuitively, especially when they are paying attention. So elements like “light coming from two sides of a room” or a “porch offering a transitional zone to an entrance” or “a sequence of sitting spaces”– these patterns work not because of externally applied, arbitrary aesthetic rules, but because they align with deep human needs for connection, transcendence and relationship.

Atmosphere itself can be usefully divided into a tripartite arrangement that reflects our lived experience: the embodied physical environment, the more abstracted mental and relational environment, and the noetic, spiritual environment.

The physical environment itself isn’t about having a perfect Pinterest home—though beauty does matter, because we’re embodied beings and there is no easy separation for us between the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of our existence. Cultivating physical atmosphere is about recognizing the patterns that actually support human flourishing: natural light over artificial, fresh air over stale, living things that remind us we’re part of a fabric of relationships.

In Charlotte Mason education and in life, spending time outdoors in non-negotiable. It’s good when our building environments are full of life, at home or work or wherever– but we also need to form relationships with the larger natural world. This need is profound in our society, where it’s far too easy to disappear into an internal abstracted reality such as the internet always has to offer us. We need a real relationship with the real, physical world to anchor us.

The more abstract mental atmosphere has to do with what ideas we allow into our mental and physical spaces, as well as the quality of communication we practice in our relationships. How do we speak to one another? How do we handle conflict? What do we watch on TV, what podcasts or music do we listen to? Do we tell the truth, to ourselves and to others, with kindness? Or do we default to brutal honesty or superficial peace? Are we truly present, or are we distracted?

The greatest force of temptation and danger that works against a life-giving mental atmosphere is, of course, our digital devices.

And then, of course, there is spiritual atmosphere, which is about purposefully creating regular encounters with the Holy Trinity, with the saints and angels, with the world-as-sacrament, with the wisdom of God written into the fabric of our existence. Physically, as Orthodox Christians, this means prayer corners and icons and candles and observed liturgical rhythms that orient our days towards ultimate reality rather than immediate demands.

Charlotte Mason knew that atmosphere can’t be forced or faked. It emerges from authentic attention and real relationship. It’s not enough to hang an icon on the wall if we never remember to look upon it and bless ourselves, to pray the Jesus Prayer and intercede for others as part and parcel of every moment’s existence. Atmosphere, when it is working for us, should call us constantly into prayer and bring us into relationship with other people, with the world around us, and with the ideas that animate and scaffold our growth.

It’s easy to get excited about this, to imagine ways that we can creatively interact with our environments. There are several traps to look out for, though:

We can waste energy arranging the environment instead of paying attention to what actually helps learning, relationship, and prayer happen, in our actual lives.

We can exhaust ourselves creating “Orthodox atmosphere” instead of living Orthodox life, or by rigidly conforming to practices that “look good” but are not prescribed by a spiritual father who knows us.

We can spend more energy curating the perfect book collection, the perfect reading list for ourselves, the perfect curriculum for our students, than actually engaging thoughtfully and meaningfully with ideas, relating authentically and lovingly with the people around us, and bringing those two kinds of relationships together in real life.

There is no system that will do the work for us. I can’t give it to you. Instead, we must each know ourselves, know the people who will be participating in our environments, and we must exercise our God-given powers of creativity and relationship to make the atmosphere we know we need.

And in order to do this, we need Mason’s second pillar, the tool of discipline. This is not behavior modification or sheer willpower. This is instead the purposeful cultivation of habits and routines that serve as rails for the train of our lives– they are structures that free us to journey towards our destination rather than constantly having to navigate every decision from scratch. Discipline is the difference between just saying your morning prayers and having to remember and decide to say your morning prayers every day. Discipline is very often the right use of a working atmosphere– in the case of prayer, when the atmosphere is one of accessible prayer that is used frequently, it makes the discipline of prayer easier to practice.

Just as with atmosphere, discipline can also be divided into three parts. Our physical habits are those that honor our embodied existence. Movement, nourishment, and rest of a quality that treats the body as a temple rather than a machine. There is obviously no one-size-fits-all approach to human physicality, but I’m willing to bet that everyone knows something good they could do, a habit of physical discipline that they know they need.

Then there are our mental habits that frame how we engage with the abstract and exercise our ability to use our attention.

Most of us have to fight a state of constant fragmentation– we’ve been hacked. We’ve been trained to multitask, to consume information rapidly, to respond immediately to every digital ping. But the growth and life require what Mason called a “single reading”—the capacity to give full attention to one thing at a time.

It’s harder than it sounds. We become so easily accustomed to the constant stream of pre-programmed noise, of other people’s thoughts and opinions, that we can easily forget the sound of our own heart’s voice. And, of course, the cacophony drowns out the still small voice of God.

And finally, there are spiritual habits, the tools that enable us to practice partaking of the divine Life. This all connects powerfully with the Orthodox understanding of ascesis, or spiritual training. It’s not about punishment or adding in extra suffering. It’s about the right use of the tools of our selfhood. We practice small disciplines like prayer and fasting and almsgiving not to earn God’s love, but because these practices grow and stretch us, free us, enable us to live a life that can receive the love of God and also respond to it.

The purpose isn’t to check holy boxes, but to constantly re-enter into relationship with God, the source of all other relationship.

You see, when atmosphere and discipline work together, they are life-giving.

They lead to the third pillar, which is what Mason called “life”– and by this she meant a person’s total capacity for relating: To God, to other people and within the Self, to the ideas that feed the mind and shape the soul. She understood that we become what we think about and engage with consistently, that ideas have consequences for personality and character formation.

Living ideas spark connection, growth, transformation. They relate to reality and lead to action. They nourish the whole person, not just the intellect. Dead information, on the other hand, fills space without creating change. It’s the mental equivalent of junk food—satisfying hunger without providing nourishment.

Most of us are tempted by both literal junk food and a diet of dead information. Outrageous news, embittering social media, mind-numbing entertainment– these things actively work AGAINST real relationships, and we are watching the fall-out of this in real time.

What good will an education do us, if we believe some quote-unquote “right things”, but cannot engage in real relationships with the people around us? Will our opinions and learning serve as the whitewashed tombs that contain dead hearts that cannot love?

Education is not the mere imparting of facts but the formation of the soul. Every idea we encounter doesn’t just inform us—it forms us. When we treat education as data transfer, as downloading the right information into ourselves or others as passive recipients, we’re missing the fundamental reality that ideas shape character, that depth of character is directly related to depth of relationship, and that the young people in our charge need us to lead them into these depths so that they can experience Real Life and Relationship for themselves.

Think about it: When we read the story of Saint Olga of Alaska, we’re not just learning historical facts—we’re encountering a pattern of life that can awaken similar possibilities in our own souls. When we—or our students– study the mathematical elegance of the golden ratio or the migration habits of shorebirds, these aren’t merely academic subjects—they’re encounters with beauty, truth, and goodness that slowly form the interior landscape of our being.

This is why we ultimately can’t separate intellectual education from spiritual formation. Every book chosen, every conversation held, every idea contemplated is either drawing ourselves and our students toward Real Life or pulling us away from it. We’re not filling empty vessels—we’re cultivating living souls, encouraging a multi-leveled experience of personality and life that promises a spiralizing deepening of relationship throughout the fullness of time.

And here’s where Mason calling education the “science of relations” illumines precisely how education is atmosphere, discipline and life. Everything connects to everything else. Your physical health affects your spiritual capacity. Your intellectual growth impacts your emotional maturity. Your character formation influences all your relationships. And all of the ideas you hold together within yourself and offer up to God become woven together in the great fabric of Reality. We become Real People, alive in the Real Cosmos.

Let’s picture another student, a young man on the edge of the the second level of personality. He’s been raised in the Church, can recite the Creed, reads voraciously, thinks deeply, and lately has started asking questions that make the adults around him uncomfortable. Not rebellious ones– just honest ones. “Why do we say we believe in communion with the saints but never talk to each other about anything real?” “If God is love, why do I feel like church is mostly about not doing things wrong?” Sunday school offers a crash course in apologetics, his parents remind him to pray. Someone online suggests that he might be depressed and need screening.

But what if, instead of getting programs and products from the people around him who are themselves looking to screens and scripts for answers, what if something is different. What if our young man has a mentor, a teacher, a godfather, a friend, who doesn’t panic when he asks these questions. Who says, “I’ve wondered the same things, too. Let me tell you about when I nearly lost my faith after my first girlfriend broke up with me…” Who can sit with tension and ambiguity without rushing to resolve it. Who holds complexity, doubt and genuine faith together. Our boy will still struggle, but he will do so in a different way, in a way that invites deeper integration and growth. The difference isn’t the student. It’s the adult.

Now, here’s where this gets deeply practical for those of us who are parents, teachers, mentors—anyone responsible for guiding younger souls on this journey. Dr. Philip Mamalakis puts it perfectly: “We teach our children how to struggle by the way we attend to our own struggles.”

Think about what this means. Our students—whether they’re our own children or those entrusted to our care—are watching how we handle our own moments of disintegration. When we encounter ideas that challenge our assumptions, when our comfortable patterns get disrupted, when we face the gap between who we are and who we’re called to become—how do we respond?

How often are we defensive, or reach for a quick fix and easy comfort? Do we blame external circumstances instead of struggling within our own hearts? Or do we hold on with faith to the experience of multilevelness, allowing our struggle, our podvig, the Crosses that we are given to bear, to transform us from darkened mirror to countenance of glory?

Personal growth, whether it is spiritual or psychological or hopefully both, comes from struggle. The spiritual fathers tell us this repeatedly, whether it is Elder Aimilianos or the Optina Elders all the way back to St. Polycarp or St. Paul.

The Way requires that we wrestle, that we live out the creative tension between who we are now and who we are called to become, without facile resolution and easy coping mechanisms. This is why our own personal growth through the relationships in education, our work through the three pillars of atmosphere, discipline, and life, isn’t optional—it’s the very foundation of any authentic education we hope to offer others. When we’re reading challenging books that force us to wrestle with new ideas, when we’re establishing and re-establishing habits that require genuine discipline, when we’re creating environments that call forth our best selves—we’re not just practicing shallow, selfish kinds of self-care. We’re modeling for the young people around us what it looks like to be lifelong learners, people committed to growth rather than mere comfort and conformity.

I believe that our society is in a crisis of relationship, friendship in particular. For far too many, what passes for relationship can only come with various level of conformity to exterior patterns. It is incredibly urgent that we become the kinds of people who can be and relate truly and authentically, that we become not modern hyper-individuals, but hypostatically Real People capable of the kind of communion that begets genuine relationships capable of translating to eternity.

The culture will tell us that we can have instant transformation if we just buy the right course, follow the right guru, implement the right system. But the real work—the work of becoming a person rather than a product—happens slowly, quietly, through ordinary faithfulness to Jesus Christ, to the Way He shows us to human flourishing, to continuing to show up in relationship to others.

We cannot give what we do not have. We cannot draw from empty wells. If we want to nurture authentic growth in our students, our children, our younger brothers and sisters in Christ, we must first be filling the wells of our own selfhood with constant growth, with holy struggle, with the inexhaustible Love of Christ. When we commit to our own ongoing formation, when we allow ourselves to be challenged and changed by not just living ideas but living relationships, when we create atmospheres that call forth our authentic selves and establish disciplines that align us with our deepest values—we live, fully alive, embodying the glory of God.

Charlotte Mason gave us a blueprint for this work. Not just for educating children, but for educating ourselves into a fullness of life.

The question isn’t whether we have time for this work. The question is whether we have time not to do it. Because at the end of our lives, we’ll either be on the path to becoming the people God created us to be, or we’ll be someone else’s idea of who we should have been, thinking someone else’s opinions, quoting their passions and mimicking their lives.

We must become Yupik, Real People, brothers and sisters of St. Olga of Alaska and her Lord.

I’d like to close today by inviting you to contemplate the quality of relationships in your lives. Being an educational conference, let us think deeply about what kinds of relationships we can hope to model and participate in for our charges, and how our atmospheres and disciplines can scaffold those relationships for eternity. The hardest work of education is that no system can replace the day-to-day, one-on-one labor that this requires of us.

Thank you.