A Monk Helps a Mom
Written by Marcie Stokman, Well-Read Mom Founder and President
The following blog is adapted from Well-Read Mom Founder Marcie Stokman’s book, The Well-Read Life Copyright © 2024 by Marcie Stokman and Colleen Hutt, used with permission.
“Mom, I can’t study in our house,” my teenage daughter informed me. “It’s too messy. I need to go to the coffee shop.
“Really? You can’t find a place to study here?” But I glanced across the house and realized that Emma was right. Papers lined the counter and miscellaneous items were scattered everywhere.
At that time, I was reading Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain. In Merton’s autobiography, I became aware of his obedience to his superiors. Even in the little seemingly insignificant and mundane monastery tasks, obedience mattered.
As I read, my eyes were opened. Was I running from my vocation? It is easy for me to avoid the little tasks of homemaking thinking, “Surely this banal work of sorting this and organizing that isn’t important.” But I was coming to realize, obedience in the little things would bring more order, and increased order would bring greater calm to our home. Maybe then all of us could study and think and enjoy our life together in the house.
I wouldn’t have thought that reading a biography of a monk in a monastery would help me with my own vocation, but it did. Again and again, reading literature connects me to meaning in my days and helps me live my vocation with intentionality. In The Reed of God, Caryll Houselander writes,
There are many people in the world who cultivate a curious state which they call the ‘spiritual life.’ …The only time that they do not regard as wasted is the time they can devote to pius exercises…
Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria, 2020), 26.
All the time spend in earning a living, cleaning the home, caring for the children…cooking, and all the other manifold duties and responsibilities, is regarded as wasted.
Yet it is really through ordinary human life and the things of every hour of every day that union with God comes about.
When reading literature is part of our ordinary life, it brings us into the deeper realities and mysteries of life. What is good is a treasure like St. Augustine’s Confessions or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre if we never find the time to work our way through it with focused attention? We won’t be able to receive the treasure. In order to experience the transforming wisdom available to us, deep reading and time are essential.
About Marcie Stokman
Marcie Stokman, M.A., is founder and president of Well-Read Mom, an international movement and book club. As a former clinical nurse practitioner in mental health and longtime homeschooler, she writes and speaks to encourage women and share the power of reading. She and her husband, Peter, have seven children and 20 grandchildren. Marcie is the author of The Well-Read Mom: Read more. Read well.
About Well-Read Mom
In Well-Read Mom, women read more and read well. Our hope is to deepen the awareness of meaning hidden in each woman’s daily life, elevate the cultural conversation, and revitalize reading literature from books. If you would like to have us help you select worthy reading material, we invite you to join and read along with us. We are better together! For information on how to start or join a Well-Read Mom group visit our website wellreadmom.com
