The Better Part

Gospel: Luke 10: 38-42

Worry and anxiety are a part of every human life.  All of us face anxieties of life from meeting our responsibilities to cultivating our relationships with others to maintaining our health.  Life is especially anxious in our times when vulnerable people are threatened at home and abroad, and when the basic right to object is itself threatened.  So, it is quite natural to find ourselves sympathetic with Martha in this Gospel story.  

However, what Jesus is trying to teach us all is to rest and to just be present with another, listening attentively to them.  In this posture we do not have to do anything except to be present and to listen.  That is hard for us to do.  We get impatient if we are not occupied with some task.  We define ourselves by what we do, and we measure our success in terms of our activities.  Jesus is asking us to just be actively present and to listen to the voice of God within us.

Over time we will find our anxiety lessen if we undertake this discipline.  We can eventually find ourselves like Jesus asleep in a boat in the midst of a storm, upset only that we were awakened by the fear of others.  The authentic religious person will be a mystic who learns to just be present and listen, or they will not be anything at all.  This is the better part to which we are all called by Jesus in this Gospel scene.