The Spiritual Value of Housekeeping

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"Everyone enjoys a well managed house, well cooked meals served on time, heating apparatus, lighting fixtures and window shades that work - in short a well padded life that gives the minimum of jolts.  What is not so generally recognized is the spiritual ministry of these conditions. The atmosphere produced, like all other atmospheres, is experienced rather than seen. . .  

Orderly rooms make for orderly thinking and orderly manners.  A well regulated house thus ministers to a fundamental spiritual need.  The house is our families world - where we are most truly at home.  A well administered household frees the spirit of every one in it. . .

And what of the housekeeper herself whose activities bear so intimate a relation to the inner lives of others. Her work is considered narrowing.  However, the housekeepers work presents more than the usual opportunities for self expression.  A painter is able to put upon canvas the thing he sees in his soul and we call it "art".  When a woman is able to achieve in her housekeeping a similar expression of her ideals, why should it be called drudgery?

The housekeepers work is a ministry - and that she knows.  Her deeper comfort is that her work, when rightly done, makes her life richer and she can afford to give herself generously and joyously to her work. For by means of it she adds to the life of those about her and her soul gets its message over into the souls of others."

- Good Housekeeping Magazine, April 1918