ABOUT

Hello, and welcome to The Contemplative Homemaker! My name is Lauren, and I am a Catholic convert, wife, and mother of three. After practicing law for nearly seven years, I "retired" in 2020 to more intentionally embrace my vocations of wife and mother in the roles of homemaker and homeschooler. As my husband is fond of saying, "It's the best thing we've ever done for our family!" 

 

Although I didn't launch The Contemplative Homemaker until I began staying home full-time, the initial inspiration for the blog struck me around the time of my conversion to Catholicism in 2017. I was at the office one morning when I somehow ran across a story of St. Francis of Assisi, and it radically changed the way I thought about my daily tasks. One day, while hoeing his garden, someone asked St. Francis what he would do if he knew he was going to suddenly die before sunset that very day. St. Francis reportedly replied, "I would finish hoeing my garden." 

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There is something deeply spiritual about the mundane, daily work of simply living. Rather than working through the spectacular and extraordinary, it is more often the case that God uses the ordinary, the hidden, and the quiet to draw us closer to Him. It has been so since the very beginning, when God settled Adam in the Garden of Eden for the purpose of allowing Adam to cultivate and care for it (Genesis 2:15). Then in the cool of the evenings, when the day's work was done, God Himself would seek out Adam to walk and talk with him in that same Garden, Face to face (Gen. 3:8-9).

 

After the Fall, God continued to sanctify the simple acts of daily living, ultimately elevating the realm of domesticity to the Divine with the Incarnation of His Son. Think of it! God Himself became Man just as we all do: through the womb of a Woman and as part of a family; a family, moreover, that only happened to be in Bethlehem at that time due to a temporal event as unpoetic as a census. The first thirty years of Jesus's life were spent "hidden" in Nazareth, learning the simple carpenter's trade. It was through this time of obscurity, quiet growth, obedience, and daily living that our Lord prepared for His salvific mission. 

 

Another spiritual father, St. Benedict, summed up this idea in the motto "ora et labora," or, "pray and work." Work, however, does not begin when prayer ends. Rather, prayer continues through our work: a life of contemplation in action; a striving to maintain that eternal gaze of the Father through the Holy Face of Christ, locking eyes with Him, beholding Him and being held by Him in all that you do. Whatever your vocation or stage of life, my hope is that this blog will inspire you to behold the miraculous in the mundane; to see that hoeing a garden is never just hoeing a garden: it's an invitation to perceive the Face of God.