Martha and Mary: what really changes the World?
Hospitality is a major theme in our 1st reading and Gospel today. But playing host to God is a real world shaker and it starts with sitting at the feet of Christ which the Psalmist anticipates by being the voice of God: ‘be still and know that I am God.’ Here we find the centre of true life, the eye in the storms of life and the dam of grace that holds back the flood waters of our sins. Indeed Saint Leonard of Port Maurice said: “Except for the Mass, being daily offered on thousands of altars, the world would long ago have been destroyed because of its sins.”
Yet this call by God to be still and sit at the foot of the Master who is the Way, the Truth and the Life makes us uneasy for it is far easier for us to be running about like Martha, being busy doing what we think needs to be done. Our Lord pulls her up and reveals to her the real problem and her real need and of course our real problem and our real need too:
“Martha, Martha, you worried about so many things.
There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part
and it will not be taken from her.”
Here lies the problem we all have in these Modern times, Buddhism calls it ‘monkey mind’ and Catholic mystics call it mental distraction that leads to wilful and fretfull activism. We suffer a mind that jumps about like a monkey swinging from one problem or one interest to another like a monkey swings from one tree to another. So to avoid being still, being silent and being alone, alone with the silent presence and awesome attention of God whose countenance gazes up on us and looks deep into us which is called contemplative prayer, we go into the mode of activism. Our monkey minds constantly seek an escape into restless activity, into being busy! Not surprisingly BUSY is also an acronym for Being Under Satan’s Yoke!
Hence, what happens in this restless mind and restless will is the entrance of complaining and pointing out the faults of another as we find in Martha’s complaint, a complaint directed not at Jesus or the disciples but against her own sister! Listen to her complaint for this shows you where the monkey mind leads all of us too:
“Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.”
We will seek to blame someone for the fact that despite all this soul-less and frenetic and anxiety ridden activity nothing really changes! When you have millions of Marthas engaged in fruitless activism then you have the din and noise of complaint, blame and scapegoating. Against which stands the silence of Mary. Martha can symbolise the storm whereas Mary is the eye in the storm!
It is at this point that we need to discover the importance of silence before the Lord which enables us to carry within us a profound silence in and through which we can hear the promptings of the Lord with regards to his will for us in our daily lives but also in our encounters with those we meet. The practice of the mental forms of prayer [meditation - thinking on the things of God; and contemplation - being still in the awareness that countenance of God looks upon and into us] gives us an inner stillness, silence and an in-depth awareness of both the presence and of the awesome attention of God upon each of us, which enables us to hear and listen to God and, thereby, to hear and listen to one another.
It is in spending time in this sacred silence that enables us to hear one another and to go beyond complaining, scapegoating and blame so as to find that vision [the Mary principle] that inspires us to bring about:
· unity where there is division,
· peace where there is strife and recrimination,
· forgiveness where there is desire for vengeance,
· reconciliation where there is betrayal,
· reparation where there is injury,
· and justice where there is unrepented injustice and mercy where there is repentance [the Martha principle].
Given what happened in the Brexit vote, what happened during Covid and what has happened over the Ukraine, it is time that all of us to take stock of how we behave towards one another. Indeed, to make reparation for the sins of thought and action which made us look upon others as not worth listening to, disinviting from our homes, cancelling on our internet sites and even hoping that they get put into concentration camps or suffer the horrible effects of medical procedures gone wrong!
But for those in power, be they prime ministers, MPs, and the Mass Media they need to stop using the politics of Project Fear to control the people. Instead they need to pay attention to how ordinary working people are beginning to wake up to the relentless propaganda of fear waged by the Media, and it’s Master, the Government, that has sought to keep the people in a constant state of anxiety, fear and dread such that it also brings with it grief, anger and suffering as they are presented with each new threat to their health, their jobs, their peace, their liberty, their loved ones and now to food, fuel and energy [see the video by Martin Lewis which gives a stark warning to the Government of financial collapse and civil unrest if they do not deal with the hike in the Cost of Living, especially the exponential rises in energy, fuel and food prices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DgCHblN_x0&ab_channel=MoneySavingExpert.com].
We all need to fast and prayer to be delivered from the Pharaonic powers that seem to be able to globally afflict the peoples of the world with body altering serums, food deprivation and energy shortages in the name of protecting the people of the world! It is like being in a chapter of ‘1984’! Eccleciastical leaders need to be less compliant and more prophetic towards such wilful and inhuman exercises of power by our modern Pharoahs. If Ecclesiastics continue to be pathetic and not prophectic, compliant and not critical then there will be a growing division in both the body politic and the body of the Church and with it there will grow increasing forms of communication-financial-and-social breakdown that will lead to the cooling of love and with that comes a growing spirit of anger, an increase in belligerence and a deepening suspicion towards all forms of authority and government.
Heartless and Inhuman forms of Bureaucratic exercises of control, fear and power, be they national, global or ecclesiatical do not bring peace but only division. It is into such a place of pitiless tyranny where our true enemy, Satan, loves to enter and do his work and it is where Hell on earth takes shape for all to see! Remember the German examples of Auchwitz, the Soviet forms of the Gulags, the first concentration camps by the British goverment in the Boar War and the same camps in USA during the Second World War and the more recent Killing Fields in Cambodia - these are just some of those places that were Hell on earth and it seems they may no longer be things that happened in the past as they now to be possible places for the dissenting peoples in the near future!
I now want to turn towards us Catholics in England. It is within the objective reality and order of the sacred mystery of the Mass that we find the source and summit of the life of the Church and from which true and lasting peace derives for both the Church and the world. For here we sit, kneel, stand, bow and genuflect before the Lord, before Our Lord Jesus Christ who is the eye in the world’s storms. As such, the Mass requires all priests but especially bishops and Cardinals to follow the reality and order of the Mystery of the Mass.
If we disorder the Mass, which is the greatest cosmic source of life, peace, order and power in our world, we will disorder the Church. From this spiritual disorder will flow the disorder that will be visited upon the world. Remember the Pachamama idol in St Peter’s Basilica and a year later came Covid!
It is the dam of grace that holds back the waters of judgment for our sins and it is a dam strengthened or weakened by the Mass properly celebrated or improperly celebrated! But the dam will break if the Mass is broken for the sins that increase and increasingly go unrepented of will mean that the dam gets thinner and thinner until the Levee breaks and like the waters in the time of Noah and in the time of Pharoah’s army the waters of cleansing judgment for all unrepented sin will sweep the globe and then there will be no more peace, nor more light, just the rising darkness of anger, scapegoating, division, strife and ultimately a world at war! Now is the time for many acts of reparation, sacrifice, mortification and the works of mercy - corporal and spiritual - to be activated in our parish and all parishes till we become the light house of the Hill!
