Reclaiming My Identity as Mary when My Life Looks More Like Martha

I used to love today’s Gospel, feeling justified by the story of Mary and Martha. I’m a Mary at heart, always have been. Quiet hours of adoration, reading scripture or other spiritual reading, soaking up the time with my Savior- these are heaven to me. I would be the woman at His feet any day of the week.

And yet, now that I’m a mom, this gospel can sometimes feel like a harsh judgement. My heart may be Mary, but my life looks a whole lot like Martha’s. My to-do list is pages long. And any task that doesn’t get done by someone else ends up on my plate. I empathize with Martha completely as she complains that her sister left her to serve alone. As I read, I hear in my head my own complaints to the Lord, “But Jesus, Mark gets to come home at the end of the day and leave his work behind. And if a chore doesn’t get done before the night is over, he gets to leave it behind, and I’m stuck doing it.”

I miss being Mary. I miss hours spent with Jesus, quiet and alone, just Him and me. I hate being Martha. I hate having piles and pile of things to do, the constant mental load of running a house and caring for a family- the planning, pre-planning, arranging, modeling, executing, teaching, witnessing, loving. It’s easier than I care to admit for my longing for what once was to become a point of resentment in the midst of the blessings that I do have.

This morning’s introduction to mass from the Magnificat was a smack upside the head for me: “Yet Martha, worried about many things, needed to realize that all of her busyness and activity could also be unified by the one thing necessary- love for Jesus.” Busyness unified in Christ. That is what I have been missing in the equation. Jesus doesn’t say that Martha needs to stop serving, and he doesn’t tell me that either. The reality is that dishes and laundry need doing, houses need cleaning, children need teaching, Gram needs loving and caring for. I don’t need my to-do list to disappear to reclaim my identity as Mary; I need to remember that my busyness should be unified in Christ.

More often than not I have a tendency to try to plow through the day on my own, fueled by coffee and sheer force of will. What I need is to ask Jesus to enter into my to-do list. I need to give Him space to work in the midst of my day, to order and re-order my tasks, to quiet my heart as I work so that I can hear His voice and follow His lead.

The entrance antiphon from today’s mass offered me further conviction. (Side note: I love that the Magnificat includes the antiphons and the collects from mass. I rarely get to pay attention to them while wrestling young children, but they are so inexpressibly beautiful) It says, ” within Your Will all things are established.” Sometimes I forget that God’s Will includes all of my needs and desires, and even my to do lists. Our God is a God of abundance. He doesn’t not mete out grace in teeny tiny spoonfuls; he pours it out upon us lavishly. I can experience Him just as deeply and as fully as I go about my serving as I could during a quiet holy hour years ago.

I’m going to be thinking and praying with this today, and probably for a while. And I’m going to pull out a book from my shelf for a re-read as I work on reclaiming my identity as Mary. If you haven’t already read it, you might want to check out Being a Mary in a Martha World by Joanna Weaver. It’s well-worth it.