The Sacred Appeal of Household Labor

In the early days of motherhood, I found myself taking an interest in the steady stream of ads and apps that promised to help my husband and me stay on top of our piling-up chores. Seemingly every household task could be subcontracted for a fee — offers to pick up, clean and fold our laundry; handymen to put together new furniture; sleep experts to sleep-train our toddler; a bevy of meal-kit purveyors, each vying for my attention with promotional postcards and sign-up bonuses.

I was becoming immersed in a self-help world of books, essays and podcasts that encouraged busy parents with full-time careers to outsource as much as they could to optimize what truly mattered to them — in my case, being really good at my job and having the maximum level of quality time with my family and friends. I no longer wanted to return home after a long day of work to cook a meal for the family (or have my husband do it either). And if outsourcing domestic labor meant having less money, it also meant doing less of what I didn’t want to do so that I could do more of what I did want to do.

We have a modern-day obsession with efficiency. Market research projects that 80 percent of dual-income households in America will use some kind of cleaning service in the coming years. And though there have been precipitous fluctuations in growth rates, share prices and usage statistics (especially during and after the pandemic), the gig economy, which includes convenience platforms like Grubhub, TaskRabbit and Instacart, has seen consistent growth in recent years.

It wasn’t until I read “The Wisdom Way of Knowing,” by Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopal priest, that I began to wonder if something was getting lost in our culture’s emphasis on time management. In the book, Ms. Bourgeault describes her rationale for how she organized a retreat for participants seeking to deepen their spirituality: “On Eagle Island, certainly, we could have doubled the instructional time and hired out the cooking and chores. It would have been vastly more efficient. The only problem — at least if the road maps we were following are correct — is that none of the sacred alchemy would have taken place.”

Such an idea isn’t new; it finds its roots in many ancient spiritual traditions, including the Christian tradition of the Benedictine monastic order. Indeed, it lies at the heart of the unofficial Latin motto of the Benedictines, “Ora et labora” (“pray and work”).

As Western Europe fell into political and cultural disarray during the early Middle Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire, some scholars claim that the Benedictines served as a steady but silent pillar through their devotion to “Ora et labora.” The Benedictines introduced cutting-edge agricultural methods that their neighbors were unfamiliar with, helping them to cultivate wastelands for food and welfare. And during a time when a majority of the continent was illiterate, the Benedictines promoted literacy and preserved classic manuscripts, laying the foundation for European universities. When the monks weren’t laboring in the fields or copying manuscripts, they were engaging in their regular spiritual practices of chanting, lectio divina(a contemplative method of reading the Bible) and meditation.