July 29, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Romans 12:9-13 Extend hospitality to strangers
Psalm 36:5-10 or 33:1-5,20-21
Luke 10: 38-42 Martha welcomed him, Mary sat at his feet and listened
Contemplation, like the air we breathe, is available to all. Although venture capitalism may yet figure out a way to privatize air and sell it, so far it is free, and "up for grabs," like grace itself. Contemplation is the means of grace given without sacraments, and even Holy Scriptures, whether those sacred to our religion or to another, are not required to engage in it. The Gideon Bible on the bedside table is a banner of the host's piety, and an invitation to read it and a bidding to prayer, perhaps. But when we arrive late at our host's doorstep, or at our hospedaje, we are gladder to know that dinner has been saved for us, or that the dining room is still open and we can get some supper. In 1969, travelling the Mediterranean on a rustbucket freighter, I was welcomed to a desert home near Sfax, in Tunisia, for a noonday lunch, and immediately I was brought a basin to wash up with, a pitcher of juice to refresh me, and a shortwave radio tuned to an English program on BBC. Servant children scurried around to lavish attention. Bedouin courtesy had fallen out of legend into the desert afternoon to welcome me, and I sat under a grapevine and listened to music. .
Martha's welcome to Jesus at Bethany was welcomed by him, as simmering pots and pans and plumped pillows are welcome signs to an arriving guest. We know we will be comfortable when Martha welcomes us, and busies herself about many things on our behalf. Yet "Mary has chosen the better part," for in the gospel today, it was not she but Martha who was too distracted and who demanded attention to her own tasks, who wanted to take even Mary's attention to herself, and away from the Guest. Jesus quips that in the preparation of a banquet for Him, only one course, one serving, was necessary, and that all there is to the feast of contemplation is to sit and listen. Who was "con-templating"at Bethany, that is, who treated Jesus as the Temple that God had raised up? Well, evidently it was Jesus who was talking, and Mary who was listening. His conversation was the succulent dish he set before Mary, but it was she who chose for him the choicest entreé, the better part, and gave to him her full attention. Listening is his recipe for our own prayer, our Sunday best to serve up to company, and especially to Him when he is a guest. Martha was only over-hearing, an unavoidable circumstance, but she was not listening. Nevertheless, it was because of the ministry of each of them that Jesus did not curse Bethany as he had cursed Chorazin and Bethsaida in the early part of chapter ten of Luke's gospel. This also is a commentary on hospitality, for he had admonished the Seventy, "eat what is set before you" and "whoever listens to you listens to me." What was the proferred menu at Bethany? We can only guess, but can suppose it was complex enough that Martha thought she needed Mary's hands to help her. And what was the gist of Jesus' table talk? We can only guess, but we have the rest of our lives to listen to him in the gospels and in our silent times.
Protestantism, since Luther, has disavowed Martha's good works as means of grace, and its denunciations of Pelagius are always fierce, as much so as in upright Anglicanism, which in the 39 articles noticed that "the Pelagians do vainly talk" when they say that original sin is only mimetic, imitative, and that humankind is not thereby bound to evil. Humble and gentle Pelagaius was run out of town for such views, and Augustine was left to guilt trip the world with original sin. It was not only the Church of Rome, but all the West thereafter, Wittenberg and Geneva too, which embraced Original Curse instead of Original Blessing. P. J. Fitzpatrick says that Augustine "turned words into playthings, and thus, he read Romans 14:23, 'Whatever is not from faith is sin', failed to see that 'faith' here is 'good faith', and so held the pagan's apparently virtuous actions to be sinful. A Wisconsin synod Lutheran pastor's son, my schoolmate as a child, assured me that Boy Scout Merit Badges were sinful, as they were rewards for good works and not from faith. As an old man, Augustine, disdainful of merit badges, was intellectually trounced by the Pelagian, Julian of Eclanum: "You say that all inherit guilt: so babies are guilty? You reply they are oppressed by another's sin: who then judges them guilty, and condemns them to eternal punishment? God? What barbarian would talk of God as you do?" . . Our Mother religion, Judaism, has no such dogma, and lives without it inspite of the persuasive arguments presented to it by the Pogroms and the Holocaust, that Original Sin must really be the truth about our species.
Yet over the years protestantim has, ironically, made faith itself a good work, while it emphasized the horizontal religion of good will and good works, busy Martha religion, and thought in Geneva that the prosperity consequent on hard work was a sign of God's blessing and proof of salvation, to the detriment of prayer and contemplation. It dismissed vows to poverty, chastity, and obedience, as 'works' religion, along with dissing liturgies and litanies, crucifixes, rosaries, statues, candles, banners and ikons as of no help, or even hindrances to prayer, and it fled for centuries from retreats and silence into clamoring assembly and eventually for a reductionist definition for usury, that sharp practice and investment might enrich its secularity.. Anything but shut up and listen. Such religion at its radical fringes is given to "the gift of tongues" and brandishes glossalalia as a badge of piety, ignoring the Apostle's description of it as a minor charism at best and always a disruption. Those who made the solemn talking of preachers, or the tub-thumping of evangelists, into their normal means of grace never "heard" apparently of the "gift of ears" whereby we may listen to a stiller, smaller voice than is raised in pulpits, or in wind and fire. Lest we all become glossalaliacs, W. H. Auden in his wonderful Essay on Protestant Mystics wrote that "we may learn first how to listen and then how to translate are the two gifts of which we stand most urgently in need and for which we should most fervently pray at this time." I like to tell garrulous guests here at Times of Silence that we have most of us been given two ears and one mouth as hints for the frequency of their use.
Catholicism's contemplation has over the centuries lived alongside its florid development of practice and diversity of expression, but insisted always upon unity of authority. It can include Trappist monks and mystics, along with Chilean dictators and Salvadoran death squads, thinking themselves patriots and godfearers for murdering the communist-atheist Saint Romero. W. H. Auden writes that "no other organisation as its range and variety, and though its political record hs been consistently evil, and though its hierarchy is perhaps the most corrupt, none has produced more saints." Protestants found their infallibile source in an old list of books, ironically the Scriptures of Catholicism. I think Auden might have noticed too, as I did, that Busy Martha has a Protestant, evangelical heart: it is not enough to do the kitchen work of Christianity, but it must insist that all give a hand. Catholicism can skip lunch, take the veil, let her sister wait on company, and sit and listen with Mary at the feet of Jesus.
Of course there will be desert stretches in our lives of prayer, when we panic that the storms of life will dislodge us from stability and blow us away, and as Friedrich von Hügel notes, "indeed especially in our times of fervor--of the normality and necessity of such desolation. . . and if the desolation is more acute, we will act as the Arab caravans behave in the face of a blinding sandstorm in the desert. They dismount, throw themselves upon their faces in the sand; and there they remain, patient and uncomplaining, till the storm passes, and until with their wonted patient endurance, they can and do continue on their way."
"Augustine? I detest him," says Alan Ecclestone in "Gather the Fragments", "His treatment of women is so appalling that it overshadows all his theologizing. He refuses to acknowledge that you can no longer separate Word and Flesh. Once separated, once you refuse the reality of the Incarnation, you are left with a theology that is merely a heap of words."
The Word and the Flesh cannot be separated, and Mary listening to the Word and Martha ministering to the Flesh cannot be separated, nor either of them banished from Bethany. Martha's mistake was not in her own leitourgia, her own liturgy, her own "work for God" but in her insistence that it was all-important, and that Mary's patient presence to Jesus was trivial and distracting, unimportant and of no use. Heaven and earth shall pass away, and pots and pans and plumped pillows, "but my words shall not pass away." Uban T. Holmes III, an Episcopal seminary dean tells us in "Spirituality for Ministry" that "in my first parish, located in the middle of the city, a constant stream of indigents came through. One came into my office and wanted to tell me his story. I sat as if to listen but was deeply troubled inside over some issue now long forgotten. I rememer I was fiddling with a pencil. The man stopped his story, looked at me and said, 'Young Father, the least you can do is listen.' He was right, there was no still center in me." Jesus, 'though he he must have been deeply troubled inside over the recent weeks' events--the arguments among the disciples over primacy, the sending of the Seventy as sheep amongst wolves, the failure of the Samaritan ministry, yet could find time to sit and talk with Mary, who had time to listen.
Viktor Frankl, in "Man's Search for Meaning" 1959) tells how contemplation was always a redemptive possibility even in the Nazi concentration camps, where he was imprisoned in World War II. "It is a simple story, there is little to tell and it may sound as if I had invented it; but to me it seems like a poem," he wrote. "The young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. 'I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,' she told me.'In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.' Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, 'This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.' Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. 'I often talk to this tree,' she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. 'Yes.' What did it say to her? She answered 'It said to me, "I am here--I am life, eternal life.'"
Wherever we turn in the world, we are God's guests here, and God greets us gladly to come to Love, to come to be God's guests at all our Bethanys, where we are called to a feast of contemplation. I first heard this poem of George Herbert's at Kirkridge, at a retreat for Lesbian and Gay people, led by Virginia Ramey Nollenkott, who read it to us and led our reflections on it for several days.
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning If I lacked anything. "A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here." Love said, "You shall be he. " I the unkind, the ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee." Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, "Who made the eyes but I?" "Truth, Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame Go where it doth deserve." " And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?" "My dear, then I will serve." "You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat," So I did sit and eat.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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