For the twenty-two years I have been in Madonna House, I have believed the incarnational truth our foundress Catherine Doherty taught us—that doing little things well for the love of God has tremendous spiritual significance and fruitfulness. For twenty-two years, I have tried to live it, but I had never experienced it quite as I did that day.

I was absorbed in cleaning mud off a shovel. The water felt warm; the mud pleasantly smooth and silky. Lovingly I watched the tool emerge from its earthy weight and ran my hands over the wood of the handle. I felt pleasure in stewardship, in caring properly for this instrument of God and man.

How right what I was doing felt! And I knew that I was feeling this pleasure from the outside in. It was God`s pleasure I was feeling. His divine stewardship flowed into me—his loving concern for the lowliest insect, for the tiniest sparrow, for each hair on my head, for each breath I take.

I thought about him in the Garden of Eden bending over clay, his attention on every detail, his feeling the mud moving, taking shape, being transformed, and then his breathing on it giving it life.

That day, somehow, as I touched the water and stroked the wood, I knew that God was touching and stroking them through me.

I knew I was sharing in something so simple and so profound. I was being given a share in Redemption. I was a co-worker with the Father, a restorer of all things in Christ.

Perhaps by now you are saying to yourself, "All this from washing a shovel?"

But this is exactly what our foundress Catherine Doherty had been trying to pass on to us, explain to us, instill in us for so many years.

She gave her life passing on this divine truth: that God is present in every moment, that there exists a sacred order, that we are sharers in his divine work, that this tiny act that we are doing, that anyone is doing, no matter how mundane, if done for love, contains within it a salvific dimension.

We at Madonna House call this way of living "Nazareth," because when Our Lord lived in Nazareth, he did these little things for thirty years.

As I washed the wooden handle, I wondered if God thought about Adam’s hands as God was creating them. I wondered if he was thinking that these were the hands his Son would have one day.

Feeling the wood in my hands, I felt Adam’s hands in mine. I felt the hands of Christ the carpenter lift the wood. I felt the Cross, felt its weight, felt humanity the world over, felt eternity…

The moment passed, and ordinary reality came rushing back. I was standing in a windswept yard full of leaves and broken branches, a yard that I would have to sweep and tidy up the next day.

I was covered from head to foot in mud, and I would have to rush to shower before prayers. Later on I would have to wash my mud-soaked clothes by hand.

By evening, a couple of situations overcame me, and I lost the peace and joy that I had experienced that afternoon. That "moment" seemed so long ago and far away. I sighed. That’s how life goes.

But I still carried that "eternal moment" within me, that moment when, as Catherine would say, the "veil" was pulled back and for an instant I glimpsed the divine.

In truth, that glimpse was all I needed. It was enough to keep me going for a while longer.