As I go about my daily life in the world I often think about the cloistered religious who, throughout the day and night, answer the monastery bells calling them to put aside their ordinary tasks — cleaning, cooking, laundry, study and recreation — and come to “praise God and pray for the whole world.”
I have long been enchanted by the idea of enclosure — of living a life ordered around time spent in contemplation of Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist — and as the mother of young children I have found that my life is remarkably similar in some ways to the life of a cloistered religious. I have the same ordinary, mundane tasks to do: laundry, dishes, housework. None of what I do is significant in and of itself (and most of it just has to be done again in an hour or day anyway) and I am always about to be interrupted by a little person who needs me. But these interruptions are not impediments to the real work of my life, rather they are the real work of my life and in the same way that a Poor Clare or a Cistercian or a Passionist nun leaves her chores, her leisure and even her bed to answer the bells that call her to adore the Eucharistic Christ, I am learning to hear the needs of my children — especially those that occur in the middle of the night — as my “monastery bells” calling me to worship by responding lovingly to Christ in my little ones.
The goal of every vocation is holiness, the gradual conforming of one’s will to the will of God. For the consecrated religious this process is helped along by obedience to a rule which specifies when they will sleep, wake, eat, pray and work. The parents, especially the mothers, of infants and young children are called to obedience of a different sort, obedience to the needs of the little ones in their care, but the result of these two forms of obedience is very much the same.
In her beautiful book, The Little Way of the Infant Jesus, Caryll Houselander writes of the way in which a little child transforms his parents through the love he demands and inspires:
The first giving of this love to a newly born child is the reshaping of our whole life, in its large essentials and it its every detail, in our environment, our habits, ourselves. The infant demands everything and, trivial though everything may seem when set out and tabulated, the demand is all the more searching because it seizes upon our daily lives and every detail of which they are built up…. In this rendering of our life, this resetting of it to the pace of the infant’s life and the new simplicity imposed on it, we ourselves are made new; we are restored to the lost wonder of childhood…. In and through a little child we become as little children, and while still on earth we enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
May we be always aware of the living Christ Who dwells in His little ones and ever more willing to serve and adore Him there.
Sara Fox Peterson is a wife, mother and writer. You can read her (more or less) regular column at http://www.catholicmom.com/nfp.htm.
