The Mission of Housekeeping

"Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me...

Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me." (Matthew 25:34-40)


"There is a tendency, I think, on the part of those of us who are well fed, clothed, and housed to imagine that the needy people to whom Jesus refers in Matthew 25 are people we don't know...


But housework is all about feeding and clothing and sheltering people who, in the absence of that daily work, would otherwise be hungry and ill-clad and ill-housed.


There is undoubtedly more to the merciful service that Jesus describes in Matthew 25 than caring for the daily needs of the members of our own households. Housework is a beginning, not an end.

But it is a beginning --

not a sidetrack, not a distraction, but a beginning, and an essential one at that -- in the properly Christian work of, among other things, meeting the everyday needs of others, whether those be our fellow household members, our near neighbors, or people who are more sociologically or geographically distant from ourselves."

From Housekeeping: The Litany of Everyday Life, by Margaret Kim Peterson