Homemaking and Drudgery

Here is an excerpt from one of my favorite books, Holiness for Housewives (and other working women) by Dom Hubert van Zeller.

In the chapter entitled “The Emancipation of Domesticity” in his book What’s Wrong with the World, G. K. Chesterton writes as follows: “. . . I cannot, with the utmost energy of imagination, conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery . . . the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home—as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then, as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors, and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, books, cakes, and boots; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene, I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman’s function is laborious; but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task, I will never pity her for its smallness.”

       The first necessity is to find in your soul a respect for your vocation. Once you have this sense of mission, this sense of dedication to a cause more worthwhile than any purely personal claim, the rest can follow. Prayer, self-sacrifice, loyalty, perseverance, and in fact the whole list, come spontaneously to the soul who concentrates upon the vocation immediately present and refuses to look at the vocation over the hill. These virtues come spontaneously—that is to say, they are felt to be the appropriate thing—but, of course, this does not mean that they come easily. Little in the spiritual life comes easily. Temptation comes easily; resisting temptation does not.

        Another thing about this “drudgery,” which we are all so afraid of and so eager to avoid: it can promote not only holiness—in fact that is what it is for—but happiness as well. By taking it up, by working ourselves into the rhythm of it, we find the same sort of happiness in it that is found in the performance of the Divine Office. It becomes the apt expression; it brings peace. If only people searched harder for the dignity that is hidden in labor, and worried less about the drudgery that inevitably accompanies it, they would have time to look about them and see what kind of happiness it can be made to bring.

   Oh yes, I know all about monotony, stress, exhaustion, and all the other horrors.  But these are only some of the accidental effects of any given vocation. What you need to get hold of, and examine, and pray about, and give thanks to God for, and not allow to go to waste, is the substance. It is the vocation itself about which you must be sure: when you have got the cause right, you will not have nearly so much difficulty in squaring up and sanctifying the effects. You will begin to see a pattern about your life. It will not be a muddle of dreary duties that are mercifully interrupted every now and then by pleasures: it will be a related whole; it will have a unity. . . . Thus if your state in life is really the wrong one for you, you will never find happiness in developing it.