The Better Part
The Slow, Subversive Wisdom of Love
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain's heart
the sapphire I know is there?
from Flickering Mind by Denise Levertov
Oh patience, good
self. This slow
and quiet growing,
this, too, is
what you are
here to do.
from Allium, by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
The times are urgent. Let us slow down.
Bayo Akomalafe
Opening Meditation
Instead of rushing through this and onto the next thing, decide to slow down for a few minutes, if you can - or return when you can give this time. You might like to use the music at the end to help you find stillness, it’s stunning, contemplative Bach.
Breathing in, imagine sitting at the feet of Love.
Breathing out, leaning in, listening, trusting…
1st Readings
Luke 10: 38 - 42
Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.* Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’
REFLECTION
This is a much-loved gospel story, especially among those of us inclined toward contemplative paths.
Yet no reflection on this passage can go far without first insisting that poor Martha not be criticised, nor placed on the wrong side of an unhelpful duality. Someone had to provide the hospitality—bring the tea and biscuits, make the meal—and in that culture, such tasks fell to women by default. Besides, hospitality was central to Jesus’ ministry: emotional, spiritual and practical. Thank you Martha!
Still. I dare say we all know that feeling–banging around the house, slamming doors, feeling resentful, whatever our equivalent of those household tasks might be. We know those times or seasons when we haven’t made peace with our life, or found a deeper presence within the tasks we might not have chosen. Because–let’s be honest–life requires us to do things we’d rather not have to do. And sometimes we are not altogether gracious about it.
But to be clear, Jesus was not telling Martha off for being active, but for being anxious, distracted, and–by the sound of it–peevish. I imagine his tone not as critical but tender, cajoling, affectionate; Martha, Martha, you’re so worried. If you can’t sit down, at least slow down. Come into the present, and let it all be caught up in the greater life of Love that is your very heart-beat. And mine.
Something of this is echoed in the writing of contemporary thinker and poet Bayo Akomalafe.
He writes:
The times are urgent. Let us slow down….
And continues:
The first time I heard this African saying, I knew I had happened upon something important… it seems like the wrong thing to do when there’s fire on the mountain. But here’s the point: in ‘hurrying up’ all the time, we often lose sight of the abundance of resources that might help us meet today’s most challenging crises. We rush through into the same patterns we are used to…the call to slow down works to bring us face to face with the invisible, the hidden, the unremarked, the yet-to-be-resolved. Sometimes, what is the appropriate thing to do is not the effective thing to do.
Slowing down is thus about lingering in the places we are not used to. Seeking out new questions. Becoming accountable to more than what rests on the surface. Seeking roots. Slowing down is taking care of ghosts, hugging monsters, sharing silence, embracing the weird.1
Enter Mary. Whether inside or aside from our actions, we desperately need to find ways of choosing to slow down–to have an honest encounter with our truest feelings and questions and to find the wisdom that emerges when we put these in conversation with Love. We can do this in the kitchen and on the street—slowing down while still moving, listening to Love. But, without wanting to reinforce a duality, I think we do need also to set time aside for sacred reading, intentional silence, contemplative rhythms, a fuller letting go.
Come to me all who are weary, and burdened, and I will give you rest.2
And while we are promised rest and peace, and desperately need that, contrary to Martha’s belief, ‘the better part’ is not always the easier option. Slowing down can be comforting–but it can also be deeply disruptive.
If those feet are the feet of the Good Shepherd, they are also the feet of the fierce Prophet. There is a decidedly disruptive dimension to slowing down. When we slow down, most of us find ourselves confronted by the very things we’ve been avoiding by keeping busy. Just beneath the surface of our lives, we often find anxiety, agitation, grief, emptiness, longing, resentment.
Sitting at Jesus’ feet, we may hear a truly radical message. These inconvenient feelings and questions are not always to be soothed or managed away but welcomed as thresholds–places we might glimpse the real state of our soul and the deeper patterns that shape our living. What might these feelings be telling me about my priorities and my deeper desires? What might wisdom want to say in response? How might Love bring me into a truer relationship—with myself, with others, with the world?
This Jesus is subversive. He invites us into a way of moving in the world that embraces contradictions, grief, dying, strangers, monsters and ghosts. His is an upside down wisdom.
Mary would have heard all this in Jesus’ teaching: not just gentle consolation and hope but also the challenge of paradox, of subversion, of sitting with the tension, of dying to live. Martha, if she were listening, would have sensed the wisdom that drops beneath our grudging provisions, our compulsive busyness, our desperate solutions.
And later they would understand that this Jesus Mary had sat with was not just speaking paradox but was living it. He would make the ultimate subversive move: embracing even the violence of his own death, with arms outstretched in love. And on the third day he was back with fried fish and forgiveness.
My friends, we are anxious and troubled by many things. What if only one thing is needful? What if the better part is to find the strange presence of the One who holds and helps us to hold all our contradictions, questions, griefs, fears and impossibilities in an infinite gaze of compassion and hope–knowing, as Love does, that whatever the future holds, it is only Love that will endure.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.3
Ponder. Practice. Pray
How might you slow down: subvert your own tendency to avoid the deeper feelings and questions? As you do, what feelings and questions do you find? What would Love want to say to you now?
Take some time to ponder and pray with all this.
Suggestion: Write a letter to yourself from Love. Start your letter by repeating your name twice and feeling the affection with which Jesus spoke to Martha. Maybe begin the next line with: You are anxious and worried about… and identify what it is in you you’d like Love to speak to. And then write what comes next.
Take some time to journal, ponder and pray with what emerges from these reflections.
If you struggle to slow down or if you are holding intense, debilitating anxiety find someone to do this with. A friend, a spiritual director, a therapist.
Widening the Circle
As you move out of your personal prayer, wherever it might have taken you, take a moment to extend a prayer for love to anyone near or far who is on your heart today.
Is there someone in your life who might need a letter of love from you?
The Lord’s Prayer
Eternal Spirit, Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:
The hallowing of your name echo through the universe!
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth.
With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.
For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and for ever.
Amen.
2nd Readings
This one’s for Martha.
Flickering Mind
Lord, not you,
it is I who am absent.
At first
belief was a joy I kept in secret,
stealing alone
into sacred places:
a quick glance, and away—and back,
circling.
I have long since uttered your name
but now
I elude your presence.
I stop
to think about you, and my mind
at once
like a minnow darts away,
darts
into the shadows, into gleams that fret
unceasing over
the river's purling and passing.
Not for one second
will my self hold still, but wanders
anywhere,
everywhere it can turn. Not you,
it is I who am absent.
You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadow,
you the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain's heart
the sapphire I know is there?4And this one for Mary:
Allium
While I did not fix
the thing I most
wish to fix, and I
did not do
the most important
thing on my list,
and I did not save
anyone, and I did
not solve the world’s
problems, I did
plant the onion sets
in the garden,
pressed my fingers
into the dry earth,
knew myself as
a thin dry start.
Oh patience, good
self. This slow
and quiet growing,
this, too, is
what you are
here to do.
Blessing and Grace
And so, may we honour the slow and quiet growing
that we are here to do.
May we find more often, despite our flickering minds,
the sapphire at the fountain’s heart.
May we choose the better part,
receiving both the consolation and challenge
of that greater wisdom and presence.
May we find the courage to live into
The one thing needed.
And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
and the love of God
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit
be with us all, now and evermore. Amen.
Music:
Full of sapphire and slow wisdom…
Matthew 11.28
1 Corinthians. 13.
I’ve had this association and I wonder if it was in the mind of the poet when she wrote these last lines. I was very moved when I remembered these lines from Isaiah 54. 11.
O afflicted one, storm-tossed and not comforted,
behold, I will set your stones in antimony,
and lay your foundations with sapphires.