Hubert van Zeller - Holiness for Housewives: And Other Working Women

Dom Hubert van Zeller

Holiness

for Housewives

(and Other Working Women)

Formerly entitled:
Praying While You Work

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS
Manchester, New Hampshire

Holiness for Housewives (and Other Working Women) was first published in England by Burnes Oates, London, in 1951 and in the United States by Templegate Publishers, Springfield, Illinois, in 1951 under the title Prating While You Work. This 1997 abridged edition has been edited to eliminate anachronisms and to correct infelicities in grammar and style. New subtitles have been added, and the order of topics has been changed.

Copyright 1951 Burns Oates, 1997 Downside Abbey
All rights reserved
Jacket design by Lorraine Bilodeau

On the cover is Mary Cassatt's The Family, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Sophia Institute Press
Box 5284, Manchester, NH 03108
1-800-888-9344
www.sophiainstitute.com

Nihil obstat: George Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D., Censor Deputatus
Imprimatur: E. Morrogh Bernard, Vicarius Generalis
Westmonasterii, November 17, 1950

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Van Zeller, Hubert, 1905

[Praying while you work]

Holiness for housewives (and other working women) / Dom Hubert van Zeller.

p. cm.

Formerly entitled: Praying while you work.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

ISBN 0-918477-47-6

1, Housewives Prayer-books and devotions English. 2. Women Prayer-books and devotions English. 3. Catholic Church Prayer-books and devotions English. 4. Holiness. 5. Prayer Catholic Church. 6. Spiritual life Catholic Church. 1. Title. II. Holiness for housewives.

BX217O.W7V3 1997

242'.643 dc21 96-29549 C1P

(and Other Working Women)

Other books from
Sophia Institute Press
by Dom Hubert van ZeLler:

How to Find God
Holiness: A Guide for Beginners
Spirit ofPenance, Path to God

Why every housewife needs a book like this

Books should not in the ordinary way need to be explained. This one, unfortunately, does. It is written for a particular public, and to catch a particular mood. And so, in fairness to the prospective buyer, its purpose has to be explained.

Those who are addressed throughout these pages are women living in the world, who, although burdened with the cares of a household, are anxious to serve God seriously and advance in the practice of prayer. Wives and mothers, then, are envisaged souls who are anchored in their God-given vocation, and who, nevertheless, are conscious of their parallel vocation to the interior life. It is in an effort to show the compatibility, indeed the essential unity, of the two calls that the following prayers and considerations are composed.

The particular mood to be considered here is the mood of exhaustion and frustration. Women working in their homes are discovering a weariness of body and mind they had never dreamed of before. This book is designed to show such people how to correct their very pardonable disen-chantment and rebellion, and how to turn the whole thing into a directly vocational service of God. It is not their fault that the line "men must work, and women must weep" is no longer true. Women at present have no time to weep even at having to work.

Perhaps the best way of explaining the need this book tries to meet is to quote from a letter urging me to preach and write for the benefit of the wife-general:

I suppose that older women [says my correspondent], or those without children, would complain chiefly of monotony. But when the family is young, life is anything but dull not monotonous enough in fact. Even washing up gets interrupted and becomes a hazardous operation if the infants get into the kitchen or wherever you are. And if they happen to be in the nursery or the garden, then they are probably hitting one another or breaking things. So younger wives are much more likely to feel harassed and frustrated than bored. A quarter of an hour's peace and prayer would put things in perspective but we never get it. Let me just give you a picture of a housewife's life today, which is not a bit exaggerated.

Here is just a specimen bad day. The baby is screaming. He wants to be picked up, changed, soothed, have his gums rubbed. The telephone rings constantly. It is laundry day, and you have not even begun to sort it. The postman arrives with a C.O.D. parcel, and while you are looking for money to pay him, the milk boils over. You put on more milk (if there is any more) and start mopping up, and your second oldest child starts on a long and involved story and as an understanding mother you must listen when all of this is interrupted by the third child wanting to know if some school friends can be brought in for tea and whether she can go riding tomorrow. You weakly say yes anything to get the whole lot out of the kitchen and no sooner have you persuaded the more responsible ones to go around to the stables than you remember that they ought to be writing their Christmas thank-you letters....

This is an honest illustration of life for people with young families in 1950. But it is fun really, I suppose, and how dull it will be when the children are grown up! Anyway, I would rather be myself now than one of the older women. I am simply existing, spiritually, on those lines of St. Teresa: "See, He is only waiting for us to look at Him ... if you want Him, you will find Him." Oh no, it isn't all awful by any means, but we of this generation do need some rather specialized training in spiritual things.

Training in spiritual things cannot be done by me or by anyone else. It can be done only by the combined activity of God and yourself. Neither the considerations nor the prayers in this book can do the work for you; at best they can only put you in the way of it. Prayer books are not intended to do the praying for you: they indicate the approach; they smooth out an avenue toward God. It has to be you who prays.

The principles of practicing holiness in this book may provide your prayer form just as suitably as printed prayers do. Both are meant to relate directly although in a greater or lesser degree, according to the subject matter to God. It is a common mistake to imagine that only formally arranged prayers are to be prayed. Anything can be prayed even a novel.

And if you can pray while you are reading, you can pray while you are writing. And if you can pray while you are writing, you can pray while you are doing pretty well anything. This brings us to the use of brief, spontaneous prayers and to the practice of the presence of God, which is what this book is all about.

Dont be misled by a false notion of holiness

Too often, we make a mental picture of what we think the service of God ought to look like and, fascinated by the artistry of the conception, we fail to see what true religion really is. No sooner does the force of religion strike us than we stumble out in search of it. We run about, groping. But, of course, it has been sitting in our lap all the time, and that is where, if we would only calm down and look, we are most likely to find it.

You cannot visualize God correctly. He is beyond the rim of your experience. You can adore Him, but you cannot picture Him. Your picture is bound to be true if it is real adoration; your picture is bound to be false if it is really pictured. So your only chance of conveying the quality of your adoration to the service you render to God in religion is to eliminate as far as possible your mental images and concentrate on the service of the will. If adoration is most perfectly performed when there is little or no material element in its expression, then the nearer religion gets to a willed and not an imagined service, the better. But this is one of the most difficult things for people to understand.