Holiness for Housewives

I think this passage is applicable to everyone :)

The mother of a family will tell you that she would be able to give herself much more to religion if she did not have the children to look after. A factory worker will compare her chancees with those of a lay sister. "I would be very religious," says the girl in the post office, "if it were not so impersonal, and I could serve God in a family." Everyone creates an imaginary kingdom of God on Earth, and sits outside its walls gazing enviously in its direction. But the kingdom of God is within you. Your purpose is to "seek God and feel after Him...although he be not far from every one of us."

Imagined sanctity is no sanctity. A religion that exsists in hypothetical circumstances cannot endure the pressure of actuality. To presume to a service of God that the present framework of life does not allow is sheer pride. What sort of service can it be that has its only reality in someone else's vocation? How can obedience to God's will (which is all that religion amounts to) rest on a concept that is not being realized and may never be?

If the mother looks upon her children as obstacles to the prompt response to grace, she is missing the whole point. If the children look upon their mother as preventing their development in God's service, then they have not yet begun to love God. If the workers write of their employers as a sheer waste so faras religious perceptions go, and if the mistress looks upon the maid as hired labor and not as a soul redeemed by Christ, then theere is a want of balance.

Your occupations, associates, material surroundings, health, and strength are there, are real, are the solids, are the substance from which the here andnow house of God is to be built. There is nothing concrete in a dream vocation.