I love what I read today in Lectio-365.
Carlo Carretto lived for more than a dozen years as a hermit in the Sahara desert… Milking a goat for his food, and translating the Bible into the local Bedouin language, he prayed for long hours by himself. Returning to Italy one day to visit his mother, he came to a startling realisation: His mother, who for more than thirty years of her life had been so busy raising a family that she scarcely ever had a private minute for herself, was more contemplative than he was.’ Theologian Ronald Rolheiser observes that ‘The mother who stays home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world. Her existence is certainly monastic… Her time is not her own… Years of this will mature most anyone… There are different kinds of monasteries, different ways of putting ourselves into harmony with the mild, and different kinds of monastic bells. (Ronald Rolheisser, Domestic Monastery (London: Darton, Longmand and Todd, 2019) pp17-23