Not long ago, a group of us who share the vision of Classical Education decided to take on the name “Classical Consortium.” Sounds serious, doesn’t it? Well, mostly it’s been another nice way to deepen our relationships academically and personally.

One of our projects has involved “sofas.” Not in our houses, but at the conventions. For conventions that we all attend, we set up a booth for the Classical Consortium and stock it not with curricula, but with sofas. The goal? To make a comfortable reading nook—a quiet place where anyone at the conference can sit, review materials, contemplate, or simply stare into space. (If you’ve been to these marathon conferences, you know the point about Day 3 when “staring into space” is all a person can do.)

It’s interesting to see how the sofa-booth has developed. First, it’s fun to observe attendees as they turn the corner to find a miniature living room beckoning them. Many smile and say, “We’re going to need this later, for sure!”

But we also get occasions to sit down. Being on your feet 10-12 hours in an exhibit hall is hard. The chance to sit down on a cushy sofa is absolutely restorative.

But that’s not the best thing about the sofas. The sofas offer a change of dynamics. Visiting on the sofas with a potential student or family, we’re no longer salesmen poised over racks, but friends discussing needs, hopes, and ideas.

There was a particularly dear moment at the Great Homeschool Convention this past weekend in Ontario, California. Two young moms joined me on the sofas after a talk I’d given called Beauty Over Decadence: Winning the War over Pop Culture. It’s a new talk for me and has forced me to dig deeper into ideas that are very much on my mind, starting with the general ugliness, rudeness, and crudeness in our modern life. Part of this talk examines the strands of hate that fill our popular culture in music, advertising images, and film.

The topic has touched people’s nerves and brought forth passionate responses. I won’t go through the details of the discussion we three women had on the sofas—two young mothers in the throes of raising and homeschooling a family, and I, the retired professor and grandma, removed from their daily stresses, but still able to understand them. Our common theme was the redemptive and transformative role of Beauty. Beauty, one of the Three Transcendentals (Truth, Goodness, and Beauty) is overlooked or dismissed as unimportant in our lives. Yet, it is a critical factor in spiritual life. The Psalms name it as a quality of God (“How Beautiful Upon the Mountains”). The Church Fathers and generations of theologians have explained its irreplaceable role in shaping our human character and spiritual nature. The texts of these explanations can be complex and take time to dissect and digest.

And yet, Beauty itself is immediately and constantly present to us, whether seeing the sun glint off the red plateaus of the New Mexico hills, or discovering a decorative insert of patterned glass in the door of a conference room in Virginia.

Beauty certainly was present in the faces of my two sofa-pals. Yes, we became very connected that afternoon. Would we have done so as quickly without the sofas? Well, maybe. But sitting together on those sofas gave us time to rest, deepened our discussion, and helped ignite our new friendship!

Sofas. Time together. Discovering and recovering Beauty. I’ll have a lot more to say about that in the up-coming weeks.