On the wall of my aunt's kitchen used to a poem which includes these lines, "If I must have Martha's hands/then let me have a Mary mind

Stephanie Van Horn

Oregon Writing Project

Summer 2001.

To Have a Mary Mind

Now it happened as they went that He entered a certain village; and a certain woman named Martha welcomed Him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who also sat at Jesus' feet and heard His word. But Martha was distracted with much serving, and she approached Him and said, "Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Therefore tell her to help me." And Jesus answered and said to her, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.

Luke 11:4, 38-42.KJV

Several wallpapers ago, a poem hung on the wall of my aunt's kitchen, beginning with these lines, "If I must have a Martha's hands/then let me have a Mary mind." Women like my aunt, raising four close-together children on a busy dairy farm, and all the other busy housewives of the era who hung that poem above a sink filled with dishes, struggled to find time to be Mary. The struggle continues, I think, even after the dishwasher is installed and pizza is accepted as a family meal. And the struggle is there for men, too. Our culture sets standards of accomplishment, and our accomplishments keep us busy preparing the meal we will serve the unexpected guest. We have not learned what Mary instinctively knew, that what we are busy with can be set aside, that the guest brings nourishment enough.

Jesus says Mary has chosen the good part. How often I say to myself, in Martha's voice, that I am too extravagant with books, that I waste time reading and daydreaming, and that I am childish to clutter a window with fragments from travel and Christmas cactus I sometimes forget to water. How often do I truly sit wholeheartedly with the unexpected guest of my creative or spiritual self? Women and men I know trust to retirement as the time when they can become Mary. In the meantime, all aspects of our culture reward the money we make, the perfect home, more bullets on the resume. My artist friend has been a successful workaholic in marketing for twenty years. Her husband asks her, "How much money is enough?" I drive myself from committee to committee, not because I cannot say no, but because I believe that the chores of Martha are overwhelmingly necessary and that I am indispensable to those chores. My friend and I have shelves of incomplete paintings, hers, and poems, mine. The men I know make similar choices. Like the rest of our hardworking, overachieving culture, we don't believe that time spent as Mary may be the good part of our lives.

I carry with me Martha's aggrieved sense of being put upon when I wash dishes at Thanksgiving and no one leaves football to help. The answer is as simple as my choices then, to honor the chance to be with family by watching football too, getting everyone to do dishes later, or else just dropping Martha's sour puss and enjoying washing dishes, which I prefer to football. The story of Mary and Martha asks that we choose family, perhaps choose paper plates, and certainly choose to give up the importance we give to Martha's role.

Giving up Martha's role means giving up the rewards that come from accomplishment. But notice that Jesus does not ask Mary to continuously be out of the world with him, although the sisters are supposed to be among the women at the Crucifixion. So Mary can, in the morning, put on her business suit and head up another committee. She can create the perfect home, as long as she remembers to be available to the teacher or the Beloved, the voice of the spirit when it sounds. She seems to have escaped the limited view that Martha takes.

Perhaps Martha, like me, has been conditioned by praise and judgment to fulfill her role and to fear and resent Mary's indifference to perfection. Family, husbands, the community and coworkers are more often there in our lives than Jesus, and their voices and the voices of our culture, speaking to both women and men about the value of accomplishment, come more often than the strange teacher seated in the living room drinking wine.

Many tasks in my life and the lives of others are Martha tasks, both overwhelming and necessary. However, I think implied in the story is also an attitude toward work that "The Kitchen Prayer' accurately asks of me. These tasks that seem so necessary to feed my family or my future, "chop wood, carry water" in the Zen phrase, need to be approached with Mary's mind, the mind that consistently chooses acts of the spirit. Martha fails to take the right task in the moment that life offers it, the task of listening to the sacred voice when it visits. And it is apparent in the story that her guest does not ask that she be "distracted with much serving." He asks that she be concentrated, asks that she be served instead.

Mary has the good part. I imagine her as an open vessel to the moment, whether an itinerant teacher or a dust devil dancing in the courtyard, open to the risky possibility of knowledge, rather than being bound to the accomplishments she can securely claim. If it is Mary among the other Marys at Golgotha, then she chooses in the evening of this story to follow the intense quest, the political tragedy of the young man challenging the world she knew. That man draws her sister away from the kitchen and asks the two women to challenge the world of the mundane for the sacred pursuits of the self. Mary's choice, honoring the Mary mind, leads to attendance at a potential resurrection. Back home the dishes may still be waiting. That extra $10,000 and the title added to her resume may have gone to someone else. But she and Martha have met the unexpected Guest, the self that draws to itself the Word, in whatever way that Word may come.