We all know this is the age of multitasking, of trying to do many things at the same time. Many times, we look pretty funny doing it. I was once at a business meeting at a television network, where of course they have televisions in every conference room, and they’re on; and all through this so-called meeting, all the network guys kept darting their eyes over to the screen, checking whatever was on their network instead of looking at whoever was speaking in the room. I’m not sure what they were looking for, but the result of all that eye-shifting was to make people who were already reputed to be weasels look even more weaselly. I talked with someone last week who swears to me that he was in a job interview with someone who, during the interview, was carrying on simultaneous conversations on a regular phone and a cell phone, plus reading his e-mail, and almost never got around to talking about the job or the person right in front of him. As they say, you can’t write this stuff.
Today’s gospel was written long before we had all this technology to indulge ourselves in. But this story of Martha and Mary seems familiar anyway. It is about work and busyness. It’s also about focus, and awareness.
This is a rather cruel story about Martha and Mary, since Martha gets a rather condescending reprimand just for doing what she and we have all been trained to do. Mary, Jesus says, has chosen the better part. That’s frustrating to hear for those of us who are always working or rushing in one way or another. But don’t imagine that this is some kind of a parable about the active life vs. a life of prayer, where the active life takes it on the chin, or about action and contemplation, where contemplation comes out as holier. Where would Jesus have been if people hadn’t welcomed him into their homes, and fed him, and housed him? He depended on hospitality, and in fact in Old Testament tradition there were few higher requirements than to welcome the stranger.
Listen to that first reading of Abraham who welcomed three visitors, three strangers, and seemed immediately not only to be willing to serve them, to run and get food and drink, but to insist on doing it. Many have entertained angels unawares, the scriptures say about why we should show hospitality to the visitor, and in this case of Abraham, of course, it was absolutely true.
Work, hospitality, busyness, making things right for the people around us, are good things. They are our job, and if we tire ourselves out doing those things, that’s all to the good. So what is wrong with Martha? Not work, but distraction. Not hospitality, but absence. She could no longer hear anything or anyone in particular. Not even the opportunity of her lifetime.
We know, deep down, that all our work and activity can turn from service and creativity to self-avoidance and resentment. Self-avoidance, because by work we create ways for ourselves to feel needed, to feel instrumental in people’s lives. If I stopped working, we think to ourselves, how would all this happen, where would we all be, where would my business or department be, who’d do it all? We gradually come to feel, even if we don’t say this out loud to ourselves, that work makes us who we are, we must somehow be earning our salvation and our worth through all this work. Martha here was her work, her work seemed more important to her than her actually being present. It was a way to avoid focusing on herself, to avoid focusing on one other person, to avoid hearing something that might challenge this idea she had about what made her worthwhile
But even worse than avoidance, we know how easily obligation and work can make us resentful, resentful of how hard we’re working for so little return, resentful of what other people have and we don’t, resentful of people who don’t thank us, my sister has left me to do all the work by myself, Martha says, tell her to help me. It’s the cry of someone who has taken a sense of obligation and duty and used it to withdraw, to be in the kitchen, the office, the car, instead of where the one thing necessary is, the place where God might come and speak to us.
If Jesus were in the living room, I like to think I wouldn’t be running to the store instead of listening. But it’s not that simple. It’s hard to look for this one thing necessary, to sit and listen to someone familiar or someone unfamiliar, to get involved in a conversation with God or with someone else that may have no purpose or may change our lives.
Thomas Merton was the famous Trappist monk who died in the 1960s, and if you read his journals and diaries you have the impression that he had to be the busiest contemplative in the history of the world. He lived in his monastery in Kentucky, in a hermitage by himself often enough, but he seemed to have a constant stream of visitors, he corresponded with friends and strangers, he wrote books and articles and diaries. But as a person of our time he saw what he was doing to himself, he saw that somehow the temptation of our time is to make accomplishment and activity the way we work out our salvation instead of attention and focus and listening. All his projects individually made sense; but all together he saw their destructive power. To say yes to all the projects that come to us, to constantly take on more, is a form of violence, he said.
Martha’s outburst complaining about Mary is her sign of that same violence, pushing her over the edge. We’re never going to stop working, we are working people, but our job is to know when that time arrives, every day, every hour, when it’s time to leave the dishes for someone else. Find the place where someone is waiting for you, not your work, and choose the better part.