idden and insignificant, the village of Nazareth lay nestled in the hills of northern Palestine. It was the scene of a life of almost thirty years of obscure and humble toil by our Divine Savior. This life so hidden, so ordinary, was as much a part of our Redemption as the crowning anguish of His Passion and Death. Without His Passion there would have been no Salvation yet His mission was also to teach men how to live so as to profit by that Salvation. There in Nazareth, God Himself, lived a simple ordinary life, consecrating all ordinary lives with the pains and burdens that fill them.

n Nazareth, the Incarnate God did not disdain to labor as a village carpenter, concentrating all His energies on planing a board, sawing a line, or driving a nail. God Himself earned His “bread by the sweat of His brow.” Thus sanctifying labor by His touch and by His sweat, bestowing on it a sacred dignity.

ince a monk desires above all else to imitate Christ as closely as possible, he chooses a life of solitude, obedience, poverty, and labor as the best means of giving glory to his God. That is why manual labor is one of the principle occupations prescribed by Saint Benedict for his monks. The kind of work for the monk, as it was for Christ, is a matter of indifference since he is not preoccupied with a career or attached to a certain craft for his own satisfaction. He does not treat disdainfully any work as beneath him nor does he hurry through it the sooner to be done with it. He is not satisfied with ‘good enough’ but only with the best he can do. This work is not only performed to keep the monastery running smoothly, it is done out of love for Christ in a spirit of penance and reparation. And this work, being an act of love for God, calls for his best energies and demands in its sphere equal perfection as with liturgy itself. The monk, whether bowed profoundly at the Gloria Patri in choir or bowed down digging a hole, is in worship and adoration of the God in Whose Presence he lives and to Whom his every breath, his every movement, is consecrated. This spirit of adoration for the Divine Majesty gives nobility to his smallest acts, making each a prayer. To live with this intention is the only real life, the only life worth living.

oing silently through the various duties of his day, the monk’s simple life resembles the life of Christ in Nazareth, for Jesus did these same things and in the same simplicity. The monk’s life is the simplicity of Christ’s Nazareth – the same homely exterior, the simple everyday duties, silent, unnoticed, monotonous even to the casual observer, yet this life veils a deep interior life of divine worship and supernatural love.