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Good People, serendipitously I offered a short presentation this past Wednesday to the CASC (Charlottesville Area Spiritual Companions) on ways to leverage Meister Eckhart's reading of this story as a tool for reframing the spiritual lives of those caught up in the responsibilities of this world in ways that don't seem to allow for "Mary" contemplative practices - parents of small children, those caring for aging parents, those working multiple jobs, those working multiple jobs and have caregiving responsibilities for younger and/or older family members.

I start by pointing out how readings of the Martha & Mary story all assume an adversarial relationship between the two sisters - Cynthia Bourgeault's. But I find this understanding dualistic and ultimately, unhelpful. At some level, every telling of this story I have ever heard assumes that one sister needs to be more like the other - except one, Meister Eckhart's. Hence the title of my talk, "Martha, Mary, & Meister Eckhart: Moms & Dads as Monks & Mystics."

Depending on which numbering system one follows for his sermons, Meister Eckhart ("from whom God hid nothing") interprets this parable (and I consider it a parable) in sermon 86. Briefly then...and knowing in advance that Meister Eckhart's more poetic and allegorical ways of scriptural reasoning may not tie things up for us as nicely as our modern minds might wish...is his reframing of the interaction between the two sisters.

Martha goes to Jesus out of concern for Mary's spiritual growth, not out of envy or frustration.

Mary is the contemplative, still grasping tightly her contemplative method - silence, stillness, proximity to the perceptible presence of Jesus.

But Martha has left the need for such supports behind and does what love requires in the moment, free from the necessity of special ways or places or times of praying.

Mary clings to her contemplation and at the end of the day her contemplation, her “necessary thing,” is all she has.

Martha rests in God and has that rest no matter where she is or what she is doing - like cooking and caring for a houseful of unexpected guests.

Martha & Mary aren't in different parts of the house, one in the kitchen and one in the living room. Martha & Mary are on the same way, the same path, with the older sister just a little bit further down the road, offering her love, concern, and experience in service to her younger sister.

So, as a spiritual friend and a preacher I try now never to tell folks to "pray more" and "do less." Who am I to make that determination for anyone else? And in the circumstances, that may not be realistic for many people. It might not be possible to do less. And it might not be possible to revisit or change existing priorities. In fact, the key to living a Martha life as envisioned by Meister Eckhart might just lie, not in a new set of priorities, but in leaning more strongly into our existing ones.

In his small book, "Domestic Monastery," Fr. Ron Rolheiser points out that those who get up to the alarm clock's warning to take the 8:15 to the city (now I have the BTO song in my head...) to support a family are responding out of duty and love just like the monks moving from one task to another in response to the monastic bell. Both groups of folks recognize that their time does not belong to them and both answer the call of the bell precisely because their lives and their time don't belong to them. Caregivers and the heavily burdened don't need to take on the artificial constructs created by monastics, constructs designed to get the monastic precisely to the place where child rearing or elder care or financial necessity have led the lay contemplative to inhabit.

As I read Eckhart and Rolheiser, in order to walk down the contemplative road that Martha & Mary both walk together, all we need is to let love rule our day, in every sense of that word.

If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading, and I promise not to bloviate like this on a regular basis!

Peace,

-Dawg

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Thank you, Dawg! I love that you brought up Meister Eckhart’s beautiful use of this Gospel story. What a gift to all of us. Others, like Augustine (sermons 103 and 104) and the Beguine mystics also offer fascination variations of interpretation not unlike Eckhart’s. But like you, I'm drawn to Eckhart.

One of the joys of the spiritual life is that seemingly contradictory or even opposite interpretations of the same sacred text will often be true at the same time. In the contemplative tradition, paradox is often a sign that we are being drawn deeper than the discursive mind can go, into the unspeakable vastness of God. For people of faith, differing approaches to the same text is something to celebrate! It’s the insistence on only one correct interpretation that leads to fundamentalism, intolerance, and even violence that worries most of us.

What I especially love about one of Eckhart’s sermons on the story of Jesus visiting Martha and Mary, and a reason I am grateful to Dawg, is Eckhart’s fabulous idea that Martha is the more spiritually mature of the two. She’s worried that Mary, sitting at the feet of Jesus, is going to get stuck, just seeking (as my friend, Martin Laird says) to be “blissed out all the time.” For Eckhart, Martha is the one in whom active service and deep grounding in God are beautifully integrated, and Martha seems concerned that Mary might be lapsing into a desire for her own happiness that would hinder spiritual deepening. It’s a wonderful lesson and helpful to ponder!

Eckhart says in that same sermon that Jesus reassures Martha, the more spiritually mature of the two, that Mary’s heart is in the right place, that Mary is still learning, that Mary has only just “entered school” and is “learning how to live.” It’s a lovely image, and Eckhart goes on to talk about various “ways” in which the soul is engaged with God.

And it is here, for me, that I find the most beautiful insight that rings throughout so much of Eckhart’s writing – that we are already at home with God, that the “journey” is to realize or awaken to what we already have, who we already are in God. This is the part of the sermon where Eckhart gets especially mystical, elusive, and even has to correct himself at one point, perhaps because all language about the soul’s engagement with the divine necessarily falls short of what the soul experiences. It’s all so beautiful, and again, I love that Dawg has drawn our attention to this gift.

Cynthia Bourgeault is drawing a different lesson from the same story, and for me, it is no less true or helpful. Bourgeault’s approach is a comparatively simple and pastoral one to the story (though elsewhere she teaches with Eckhart-like mystical beauty). Here, though, she speaks about an everyday reality with which many of us struggle, and she offers us practical, reassuring guidance. She is using the same story that Eckhart used, not to show that Eckhart was wrong, but to illustrate a different truth.

In a nutshell, Bourgeault is addressing the reality that many of us struggle with a multitude of distracting, nagging, and sometimes critical voices in our heads that seem to pull us away from our grounding in God. This can be as true for the person who is working three jobs and caring for young children, as it is for the person who is quietly retired with few daily commitments. But so is the truth of our fundamental, grounding union with God - it's true for all of us.

Bourgeault realizes that we all need a way to “re-member” or a way to “return” to the fundamental reality of our life and identity in God, whether we are “decompressing” on the subway home in the early hours of the morning after the nightshift, or we are waking to a new day in a retirement community, or we are bedding down again on the sidewalks of downtown Houston. And I can imagine each of these quietly repeating, “Jesus, have mercy” or “The Lord is my shepherd” or just quietly returning to the gift of breathing: each of them contemplatives in their own way – Martha or Mary, Jim or John – and each of them reconnecting with the deeper reality of our eternal life in God.

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