Session 65 Mary and Martha from a new perspective

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Father Keating begins the story of Mary and Martha that we have heard so many times before at the beginning of this session. And he acknowledges that analysis we commonly hear, that Mary was listening to Jesus and she had “taken the better part.” Keating goes on though and says that Mary perhaps is listening to the Word, she is listening past the personhood of Jesus and is going deeper to the spiritual center of the Divine. He compares Mary’s attention to the practice of Lectio Divina, when we listen to the Word of God and the meaning it has for us. And Lectio Divina, in the way Mary was present to the Lord in the gospel story, Keating notes “… is to give us God’s thoughts and these good thoughts kind of push out the ordinary run of worldly concerns and self-centered programs, and the whole world of the false self system around which our thoughts and reactions to events circulate and produce behavior in accordance with the value systems of our childish programs for happiness: security ... pleasure ... power, as absolutes. “

Keating compares what is happening for Mary as she sits listening to Jesus to what happens for us when we are listening to someone who is fascinating and there is a shift, or a blurring, that occurs and we go deeper in our understanding of that person, beyond the words being said to the sacredness of the speaker. Keating says, “So, having left aside, then, the thoughts and the concepts in some degree as this process deepens, one also begins to lose track of the images and reflections that you were making on the texts or the words that you were hearing in Scripture. And now one is beginning to wait upon God, listening to his person and entering into union with that person.”

Father Keating discusses further that we surrender to the presence of the Divine and we need help to do that. He says that the sacred word helps us “. . . to maintain that surrender, given the distractive-ness of human nature, we need some little help. And that help is simply the sacred word, which gently, ever so gently, maintains our attentiveness to the Presence. It doesn’t create the Presence. It doesn’t hold it in place. It simply holds us in the attitude of waiting upon God in general loving attentiveness. Not to his words, not to concepts, but to the Presence itself. “

He next identifies the sacred glance and the sacred breath as other ways to help us surrender to the Divine within us. Keating says, “What happens, then, as one practices the sacred word as the take-off point, or the sacred glance towards God, or the sacred breath, is that one begins to realize that these gestures are like what is happening on the spiritual level, where one is in the presence of God “as if” you were looking, “as if” you were hearing, “as if” you were breathing the Spirit. But you’re no longer on the external level. You’re not involved in the external senses. But you’re involved in the awakening of a spiritual experience which is removed from the senses; but is similar to them. In spiritual things you can’t explain what is happening because there’s no language for immaterial experience.”

Keating ties it all together in the final paragraph and I am just going to quote it so you can get the entire point, “ It’s as if you were looking at a tree and then your gaze expands and you’re looking at the whole woods. Only in this case the difference is maximal, because when you move from a tree to the woods, you’re still on the same horizontal plane of reality. Here you move from the senses to the Spirit and there’s a vast difference in the vertical plane that we’re dealing with on those two levels. And so, spiritual attentiveness, then, is the fruit of the practice of listening to the Word of God, of looking lovingly upon God, icon, or at the tabernacle, or at the Eucharist exposed on the altar, or in breathing, following one’s own breath as a symbol of opening, receiving, and surrendering to the Spirit. And at that point, then, one becomes aware of the undifferentiated presence of God beyond thinking, feeling and particular acts. And this is where every method of contemplative practice is designed to bring us.”

And though Father Keating doesn’t bring it back to Mary here, the implication is that this is what happened for Mary as she sat “listening to Jesus.”