Scenes of Bethany – III
This is the third of four Lenten addresses on the theme Contemplation, Activity and Resurrection in the Passion of Christ. The first is posted here, the second here, and the fourth here.
“Martha received him into her house”
Martha: Love-in-Activity
“And a woman named Martha received him into her house”. Our lives are busy lives, probably far too busy. Our busyness becomes our burden and our justification. We are busily miserable and miserably busy all at the same time. The world, without and within our souls, conspires to make us busy and we acquiesce to its demands. We all fall prey to the hideous notion of ‘justification by busyness alone’. Leisure, in its proper and more ancient sense, is intolerable and inexcusable for this possessive spirit of busyness. And yet, there is something not only inevitable but necessary about some of our busyness. Martha in Bethany presents us with the true and the false form of busyness. There is something here to affirm and something here to eschew.
The problem is not so much that we are simply busy, but what our busyness is about. What end does it serve? Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, speaks of the contemplative life as a negotiossium otium – “a most busy leisure”. Like the true form of outward activity, that “most busy leisure” has a focus. It is centered. Martha shows us the false and miserable form of busyness not because of what she is doing but because of the manner in which she is doing it.
She is “distracted” or “anxious”. What does that mean? It means that she is uncollected, uncentered, and without a proper focus. The word itself suggests that her eyes move about from one thing to another, turning this way and that, almost in a frenzy of activity but without any clear sense for what end, for what purpose. The most miserable form of busyness is busyness for busyness’ sake.
No doubt, it is easy to lose our heads and our hearts in the daily busyness of our lives. The danger is very great and very real. We can end up by being defined by the endless round of the mere doing of things. Our activity becomes ceaseless and aimless and thoroughly meaningless. We may not even be aware that it is happening. That is a tragedy. When we lose our center, we lose our purpose and our direction. We lose ourselves. Our lives become unsettled. We become unglued. We get bent out of shape.
