Being "There": Mary, Martha, Moses, and Me

Saturday was the first day of vacation for me, and so I awoke to come downstairs. Marcia made coffee today, which is one of the most wonderful things she does for me. When I hear her hit the coffee filter against the wall from inside the Shop Rite paper-inside-plastic garbage bag to loosen the used grounds from the day before, I know she is giving me a gift and I feel loved. She was then off to run with her friend Nancy, so I got up at 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning to an already-made pot of coffee and a quiet house. Saturdays have a special stillness to them for me that makes getting up early desirable. The house is quiet with just a few birds sing-songing each other outside in the neighborhood and an occasional car driving by can be heard through the open windows. No one revs up a lawn mower at this early hour. It's as if we are a Jewish neighborhood on this Shabbat morning.

Today I read the Mary and Martha passage in Luke 10:38-42 this morning on my journey through  A Harmony of the Gospels, a book that takes the four gospels and "harmonizes" them by putting them both in sequence chronologically and side-by-side when the gospel writers recount the same event. In the story, Martha is the older, hard-working, distracted sister who is busy preparing the meal for a special guest, Jesus. He is visiting and Mary is sitting on the floor at his feet, listening to him. One sister is a whirling dervish of activity and the other is just sitting quietly soaking up her time with Jesus. One is anxious; the other is at peace. This passage also perfectly describes the temperaments of Marcia and me.

I love to tell people we are both descendants of Midwestern farmers because it is true. Marcia fits this ancestry because she is hardworking, independent, patient, and unflappable. She is a lot like Martha in the story. But I am someone who believes listening to music is doing something, an activity. For Marcia, music might play in the background sometimes, but it is not a thing you do. Not even close. So she tends to think we Mary types are lazy, and I tend to think Martha types need to calm down, relax, and enjoy life a little. Marcia can easily get lost in doing things for others, and I can easily get lost in myself. Overall, we complement and balance each other's natural tendencies. These tendencies play out in the passage, too. Mary takes advantage of the rare opportunity to sit and listen to Jesus. Martha is missing the opportunity in the midst of all of the doing to make everything good for Him. This is what Martha types do: they get busy doing and get upset with everyone else who doesn't feel as compelled to work as much as they do.

A couple of years ago our video recorder stopped working and we still have not replaced it. I realized that we had rarely gone back to watch the videos we had recorded in the past.  Besides, I also realized that by fumbling with the recorder during some special event, I mostly would miss it the first time through trying to capture it on video. The opportunity came, but I was distracted trying to record the moment so I could see it later. This is my tip of the hat to Martha, a time when doing overtakes the time to just be there and enjoy it. This reminded me of the Jewish commentary that I read in a little book I got two years ago called Jewish Spirituality: A Brief Introduction for Christians by a rabbi named Lawrence Kushner. The passage was Exodus 24:12, "Come up to Me on the mountain and be there." This was a command to Moses when God was preparing to give Moses the Torah. The commentary noted the unusual phrase, "and be there."

 "If God told Moses to come up on the mountain, then why did God also say, 'be there'? Where else would he be?" The answer . . . is that not only did God want Moses to be up on the mountain, God also wanted him to pay close attention, to be fully present. Otherwise, Moses would not really be there. Often people are physically in a place, but because they are not paying attention, they might as well be somewhere else (Jewish Spirituality, 24). 

 During the past two years I've stopped trying to record events so that I do not miss them the first time.

Over twenty years ago, long before the world was wired and our attention was divided exponentially, Richard Foster opened the first chapter of his classic book, The Celebration of Discipline, by saying:

"Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant gratification is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need for today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people (Celebration of Discipline, 1).

Depth does not develop in people whose lives are fraught with activity and its resulting superficiality. Depth develops in those who can engage and “be there” when those special moments of opportunity come along, just as Mary did and Moses was asked to do.

I've now finished my second cup of coffee. Marcia came home from running and is now off to the grocery store to get eggs and make French toast. Ava is up now and reading a book. My moments of bliss have ended, and now I need to get ready to go out. The van needs new tires. Even Mary’s like me have to be Martha’s sometimes.