A Martha Heart

Duck leg quarters roasting with sage in the oven. Shitake and walnut dressing toasting, yam rounds cooking, waiting to be finish-fried in the rendered duck fat. The only thing remaining is to roast the cauliflower with sage and smoked paprika, pour the wine, and eat the whole. What else to do but catch up with the blogosphere?

Today's gospel reading was Mary and Martha. Jesus shows up to hang out with Lazarus. Mary, L's older sister, bustles around making dinner and making sure the house is in order. Mary sits to listen to Jesus. Martha asks Jesus to make Mary help out, and Jesus chastises her, saying that Mary is right and Martha is wrong.

Except...that's not exactly how the story goes. Fr. Scott gave a great homily about how we all need to be a little bit Martha and a little bit Mary; to get the work done, but to know when it's time to stop and listen to God in your presence, talking to you. He was trying to remind us that we get so busy, we forget who we're supposed to busy ourselves for. That we need time for chores and for contemplation, working and waiting on the Lord to reveal himself. He poked us a bit, being a former Protestant minister, that Catholics don't generally seek the Word of God for themselves, but wait for it to be proclaimed to them once a week, and and poked everyone else a bit more to see how many things intrude on the Sabbath. How many times we let sports, and chores, and fishing trips, and working weekends, and mindless surfing steal little by little the only day God truly asks us to give to him. It was a great homily.

I got prodded to Mass this morning. It would have been so easy to sleep, but someone wouldn't let me. And because of that, because I was sleepy and thinking of all the things I had to do, but I was there, I heard the story a little bit differently this morning than I might have at the end of the day.

I always pictured Martha as the spinster sister, old and haggard, looking not dissimilar to Kathy Bates, while Mary was both voluptuous and virtuous, usually looking like Audrey Hepburn or Elizabeth Taylor, and always with a British accent. Max-von-Sydow-Jesus is a bit of a pill, and I always side with Martha--I mean, really. Your brother's friend brings 12 or more guests, you're supposed to feed them all on top of everything else you're supposed to do, and the only person who can help is in hanging out, and Jesus says you're the one with the problem? That's messed up.

Today, though, I realized that Martha and Mary were both still living with their brother, meaning they hadn't been married off yet. Which means they hadn't bled yet. Which means that Martha was 13, 14 max, and her sister a year or two younger than that. Martha is a teenager, willing to do her share, but not if her sister's in chatting, where she desperately wants to be, too. She probably thought that if Mary just came in, they could get dinner fixed in a flash, and then they could both listen. Or maybe she wanted to be the one in listening, but had the responsibilities of making sure her brother wasn't shamed by her hospitality. She was a kid, possibly more mature than a modern teenager but still a kid, and she was doing the best she could. And so was Mary--when you're 12 and someone says something worth hearing, you stay to listen to it.

The other thing that caught me was that Jesus didn't chastise Martha. Not at all. The gospels are pretty clear when Jesus is rebuking someone for being a pill. Not here:

The Lord said to her in reply,



"Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.


There is need of only one thing.


Mary has chosen the better part


and it will not be taken from her."
 
You can practically see his understanding smile at the efficient perfectionist coming out from the kitchen--"Lord, don't you care that I have do this all by myself? Do you really not care about me as much as Mary? Do you not care if I get to hear you, or did you even notice that I was gone?"  I can see him shaking his head, perhaps bending to eye level, and teaching--you're spending so much time trying to feed the guests that you're forgetting to enjoy their company. And there's something unspoken there: I didn't trap you in the kitchen, and I won't send Mary back to help you. But if you come sit with me, that time will not be taken from you, either.
 
It was like all the parties (usually the ones I'm hosting) where the hostess is so busy making sure no one's having a bad time that she doesn't have a good time.  All the times throughout the week where I'd like to sit with Jeremiah but there's simply to much to do--dishes, or laundry, or planning for the wedding. And he accepts that's how it is--he goes about his business, and tries to make life a little less stressful wherever he can. Those things, the laundry, the wedding planning, the budgeting, the chores...they're all important. They are not foolish concerns, or frivolous activities, and Jesus didn't think so, either. Jesus knew that Martha couldn't just drop everything. But he also knew that she had missed the one most important thing: that he was there, and not in the kitchen waiting for supper, but in the living room waiting for an attentive ear and some good company.
 
Today, I ran around after Mass. I went to two Fred Meyer and New Sagaya, looking for duck. Jeremiah loves it, and I wanted to make it for him; to recreate our Thanksgiving dinner as a small weekend gift. I spent two or three hours running around, tyring to find the duck and finally had to go for duck leg quarters. He had to go help my brother move his refrigerator, so I stayed home and, exhausted, napped with the cat for several hours before getting up to make dinner. We moved in our own spheres, bumping hamster balls occasionally for a quick kiss but otherwise divergent in orbit. And it didn't quite turn out as I wanted. The duck was beautiful but slightly overcooked, the dressing underseasoned, and the yams burned. The cauliflower was nixed for want of oven space, and the salad smelled a little too vinegary while undressed to merit actual eating, though it did look nice on the plate before we saw that it was inedible. Once we were finished, every dish in the house was once again piled on the counter, and there are still a million things to do around the house. But there was a movie on and a broad chest to cuddle against. My one thing was on the couch, waiting for me, and the dishes seemed far less important in comparison.