A Tour of the Madonna House Training Centre

“Manual Labour is Holy”

Catherine Doherty writes in praise of work:

We have lost, it seems, all sense of direction. One of the directions, the truths of God, that we have lost, is that of work. Its theology, needless to say, utterly escapes us. Its beauty, comeliness, joy, fruitfulness, creativeness, its powers of healing, restoring, making whole again have become unknown quantities to us.

In our day and age, manual labour, what the world today calls “menial work,” is very much looked down upon by those who do not know Christ the carpenter, Mary the housewife, Mary the laundress and weaver, and Joseph who taught Jesus carpentry. Nor do such people know the endless rosary of saints, male and female, who delighted to be humble, lowly and menial workers. They understood that, because they did everything out of love, they were the nobility of heaven and the aristocracy of earth.

Worse than this lack of understanding of manual labour is the fact that we use the intelligence which God has given us to invent thousands of ways to avoid what little work we have to do. We excuse this heresy by saying that by this ‘inventiveness’ we give ourselves more time. Time for what? Time to waste on baubles. Time for temptations to become rooted in us, eventually to flower into sins.

All work is holy. Through it, we walk the royal road of Christ. Thus it was decreed from the beginning of time. There is no other way to God except through work.

Notice how the Church uses (or used to use) this hallowed word — the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. These works encompass prayer and sacrifice, intellectual and physical labour. The summit of all work is the Cross on Calvary on which hung a Carpenter who worked with his hands — God, who worked with his perfect creative mind in a flame of love.

All work is holy, but we seem to have forgotten this. Especially have we forgotten that manual labour is holy. Perhaps it is because so few of us read or pray the Psalms during these hectic days: ‘Let your work be seen by your servants and your glory by their children; And may the gracious care of the Lord our God be ours; prosper the work of our hands for us! Prosper the work of our hands!’

How can we restore manual labour, work — all work — to Christ?

Let us ask the Lord to show women the fullness of the life at Nazareth. Pray that he might lift the veil of years and sentimental piety and present his own mother as she really was — a housewife, a mother, a spouse, a woman busy at the sublime creative work of her kingdom, his home on earth.

Instinctively, we imagine Nazareth's house to be spotless. But do we know today what goes into that kind of spotlessness? Have we experienced the utter joy of scrubbing a floor? Do we know how to make it a prayer, a song of love and gladness? Have we recited the litany of dusting and sweeping, whose goal is a home bedecked with cleanliness? Or are these humble tasks irritatingly monotonous to us?

Have we experienced the exhilaration of creativeness in cooking a meal or making a loaf of bread fit to eat? Do we understand the sublimity of service — humbly, daily, constantly repeated? Or do we dream about more gadgets to take all the zest and creativeness out of life so that we can be free for long hours of leisure that only serve to lead us ever further from God?

Jesus, the Carpenter, bends down to us and takes our hands into his own. He feels in their roughness his own roughness. Thus, two sets of work-worn hands become entwined — one pierced with nails, the other wounded with service. They meet in utter love. Lord, help us to see the beauty, the creativeness, the joy, the power of manual work!

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