The Invitations of Mary Series
©MS 2026

Surely the Mother of God had at least one task that made her think, “Not this again.”

There is a particular kind of dishonesty hidden inside the way we sometimes imagine Mary.

We allow her to work.

But only beautifully.

Mary may spin wool, provided she does it serenely.

She may bake bread, provided sunlight falls across the flour at precisely the right angle.

She may carry water, provided the jar rests gracefully against her hip and she looks contemplatively toward heaven while doing it.

She may sweep.

But apparently she must sweep prayerfully.

I have questions.

Because Mary did not live inside a devotional painting.

She lived in a household.

And households are relentless.

You finish washing something and someone uses it.

You prepare food and everyone eats it.

You sweep the floor and somehow there is dirt again.

You fetch water and then, unbelievably, the household requires more water.

Two thousand years have passed and domestic labor remains fundamentally disrespectful of accomplishment.

So surely there was something Mary hated doing.

Not something she refused to do.

Not something she did badly.

Just one chore that, when it came around again, made something inside her sigh:

Oh, not this.

Maybe it was fetching water.

We romanticize that one particularly well.

A beautiful young Mary walks gracefully toward the village water source carrying an earthenware vessel. Perhaps this is where she encounters neighbors. Perhaps she pauses beneath an olive tree. Perhaps the whole thing becomes an image of purity and life.

Except water is heavy.

A liter of water weighs about a kilogram.

A household needs quite a lot of it.

And there was no faucet.

Water used for drinking, cooking, washing and household needs had to come from somewhere and be transported somehow. Depending on the household, the season, the source, and who shared the work, obtaining it could be an ordinary and repetitive physical demand.

Maybe Mary hated the walk back.

The jar was full then.

Perhaps the strap rubbed the same place on her shoulder.

Perhaps on hot days she could feel sweat running down her back while carrying water she wasn’t supposed to waste.

Maybe she reached home, set the vessel down, stretched an aching shoulder—

and discovered they would need more later.

Or maybe she hated grinding grain.

Now there is a candidate.

Bread was ordinary food, but flour did not arrive in a paper bag from the grocery store.

Grain had to be processed.

Grinding grain by hand could be repetitive, physical work. Archaeology has left us grinding stones from ancient households, silent evidence of the countless hours—very often women’s hours—spent turning grain into something a family could eat.

There is nothing particularly romantic about repetitive labor.

Push.

Pull.

Turn.

Grind.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Perhaps Mary could do it almost without thinking.

Maybe that was precisely why she hated it.

Some chores are unpleasant because they’re difficult.

Others become unbearable because you’ve done them ten thousand times.

Maybe Mary occasionally looked at the grain waiting for her and thought:

I swear I just did this.

And somewhere, across twenty centuries, every person standing in front of a full laundry basket whispers:

Exactly.

Maybe laundry was the one.

There were no washing machines.

No stain remover.

No dryer.

No perfectly measured capful of detergent promising “mountain freshness.”

Clothing and household textiles had to be washed by hand, worked, rinsed and dried.

And people were considerably closer to dirt than most of us are now.

Dusty roads.

Animals.

Smoke.

Cooking fires.

Sweat.

Mud.

Children.

Especially children.

Jesus may have been without sin, but sinlessness does not repel mud.

I feel very confident about this theological distinction.

A five-year-old Jesus could presumably come home with filthy knees without compromising the Incarnation.

Perhaps Mary looked at him once and said the ancient Aramaic equivalent of:

What happened to you?

And perhaps Jesus began explaining.

There had been a puddle.

Naturally.

And another child.

Of course.

And somehow a stick was involved.

Mary closed her eyes.

She loved him beyond measure.

She would also now have to wash that tunic.

Again.

Maybe she hated cleaning cooking vessels.

That would be understandable.

Cooking over fire leaves soot.

Food sticks.

Oil coats things.

Water is precious.

And unlike our kitchens, where dishes can disappear into a machine and emerge sanitized while we do something else, cleaning remained another piece of physical household work.

Scrape.

Rinse.

Rub.

Dry.

Put away.

Repeat tomorrow.

Maybe Mary hated sweeping because sweeping in a dusty environment occasionally feels like attempting to defeat the earth itself.

You sweep dirt out.

More dirt comes in.

You sweep again.

Someone walks through.

Congratulations.

The dirt has returned.

Maybe Joseph was the someone.

Maybe Mary had just finished.

Maybe she watched him walk directly across the area she’d cleaned.

Joseph stopped.

Mary looked at the floor.

Then at Joseph.

Joseph looked at the floor.

Then at Mary.

There are moments in marriage requiring no spoken language whatsoever.

Perhaps the righteous man of Matthew’s Gospel quietly went to find the broom.

I hope so.

But there is another possibility.

Maybe the chore Mary disliked wasn’t especially difficult at all.

Maybe she simply hated mending.

Or sorting lentils.

Or tending the fire.

Or cleaning something particular.

Maybe she disliked one task for no profound reason whatsoever.

That matters to me.

Because we have a tendency to turn every imagined detail of Mary’s life into a lesson about virtue.

If Mary carried water, we make the water symbolic.

If she made bread, the bread anticipates the Eucharist.

If she spun thread, perhaps we’re already thinking about the seamless garment.

If she swept the house, we can probably construct a metaphor about cleansing the soul before we’ve reached the end of the sentence.

But maybe sometimes Mary swept the floor because the floor was dirty.

Maybe she hated doing it because sweeping is annoying.

And maybe there doesn’t need to be a theological lesson hiding inside the broom.

There is something freeing about that.

Mary’s holiness did not depend upon enjoying everything required of her.

Obedience is not enjoyment.

Service is not enjoyment.

Love is certainly not enjoyment every moment of every day.

You can love the people you feed and still be sick of cooking.

You can love the home you maintain and still hate cleaning it.

You can love your child beyond comprehension and still look at the mud tracked across your freshly cleaned floor and experience an extremely human moment of:

Are you kidding me?

We sometimes imagine saints as people who somehow acquired a supernatural affection for inconvenience.

Perhaps some did.

I suspect most didn’t.

Holiness might have looked less like Mary smiling blissfully while performing every unpleasant task and more like Mary doing what needed doing even when she didn’t particularly feel like doing it.

That version feels much more useful to me.

Because I know that experience.

There are things I do because they matter.

There are things I do because people I love need them.

There are things I do simply because adulthood has apparently decided they are my responsibility.

And sometimes I resent the hell out of them.

The dishwasher needs unloading.

Again.

Laundry has reproduced mysteriously.

The trash needs taking out.

Something in the refrigerator has become biologically ambitious.

None of this makes me feel particularly holy.

But perhaps holiness isn’t always accompanied by the feeling of holiness.

Maybe Mary discovered that too.

Maybe one morning she woke and remembered:

Today is washing day.

And groaned.

Maybe she procrastinated for ten minutes.

Maybe she found another small task that suddenly seemed remarkably urgent.

Maybe she eventually caught herself doing it and laughed.

Then she gathered what needed washing and got on with it.

Not because she loved laundry.

Because eventually everyone needed clean clothes.

Including Jesus.

There is something wonderfully grounding about imagining the hands we fold so elegantly in statues doing that work.

Mary’s hands would not always have been perfectly clean.

They worked.

They prepared food.

They handled wet cloth.

They carried things.

They touched dirt.

They cared for a child.

They probably became dry and rough.

Maybe she had calluses.

Maybe she occasionally had a cracked fingertip that hurt every time it touched water.

Maybe she finished her least favorite chore and looked at those hands with satisfaction because at least it was finally done.

Until next time.

And perhaps that is one tiny piece of Mary’s humanity worth recovering.

She did not need to love every moment of her life in order to love her life.

She did not need to enjoy every act of service for that service to contain love.

She did not need to find profound spiritual meaning in every repetitive task.

Sometimes work was simply work.

Sometimes the floor was dirty.

Sometimes the clothes needed washing.

Sometimes somebody had used the last of the water.

And perhaps, somewhere in Nazareth, the Mother of God looked at the empty jar and thought:

I really do not want to do this today.

Then she picked it up anyway.