Being and Doing

By Tom Ponchak


"Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her."
(Luke 10:42, from the Gospel for the 16th Sunday of Ordinary Time)

I was listening to a podcast with Fr. John Riccardo and he said something to the effect of “we often think that the calling to be a disciple is to work for Jesus, but the calling of a disciple is to be with Jesus.” The Gospel account of Martha and Mary this week is so important for us to hear and learn from. 

Over the last six years, I have worked in two suburban parishes doing adult formation. Both parishes are located in very affluent areas and have a large number of upper middle class, white collar professionals. We have CEOs, attorneys, physicians, salespeople, pharmaceutical professionals, corporate executives, and even professional athletes. I’ve joked at times that our home could probably fit in the garages of some of the parishioners I know. Many of their young people are involved in multiple afterschool clubs and traveling sports teams. To say that I am often surrounded by Type-A personalities would be an understatement.

There is often a temptation to carryover the fast-paced, hardworking, overcommitted, results-oriented lifestyle into one’s spiritual life. We busy ourselves with doing things, good things, but can confusing doing things for God for being with God. I know this can be a struggle for me. I do quite a bit of teaching and it can be tempting to allow studying scripture to put a teaching together to replace spending time prayerfully in scripture to just connect with the Lord.

When we look at the Gospel for the 16th Sunday of Ordinary Time we see Martha and Mary, two women who loved Jesus and desired to be his disciples. Martha is focused on serving Jesus and her guests, and that is a good thing. As Catholics we value the works of mercy and have a robust social teaching focused on carrying for others. The average Catholic parish cannot function without an army of dedicated volunteers who selflessly give of their time, talent, and treasure week in and week out – and we can always use more of them. Focusing our efforts on doing good things with good intentions is a good thing.

But Mary chose something better. Many times the good can be the enemy of the best. The foundation of our spiritual lives needs to be “wasting” time with Jesus. We must learn to value being over doing. At the baptism of Jesus, the Father declares his pleasure with Jesus before Jesus did any public ministry. Jesus didn’t earn the Father’s pleasure by doing things, but he had his pleasure based on their relationship. If we want to be effective in doing good things for God, we must start in a place of rest and knowing that God’s love and pleasure for us is not found in what we do, but who we are. 

Being & doing are not mutually exclusive. One is not right & the other wrong. However, being is more important ("the better part") and effective doing must come from a place of being. Being is also the part that most of us find more difficult, but it is worth the effort.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cultural Insanity and The Christian

By Tom Ponchak
Image
On multiple occasions over the past year I’ve had a reoccurring dream. I find myself in an insane asylum where the inmates have taken over and have the appearance of zombies. I was going from room to room looking for other trapped people, some asleep and others unaware of what was happening, and leading them to escape. At the same time, I encounter a few of the insane zombies and I am able to cure them so they become “normal” and leave with us. I believe this is a prophetic dream speaking to the nature of our culture and our mission as Christians. In the early telling of the story of Narcissus in Greek mythology the young man become enamored with his own image and committed suicide after despairing that no one could love him as much as he loved himself. It’s from this story that modern psychology takes the name Narcissistic Personality Disorder to describe an individual with an inflated sense of their own purpose and a lack of empathy for others. The Mayo Clinic lists the followin
Read more

Living in the Right-side Up

By Tom Ponchak
Image
“Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him.” Colossians 1:15-16 (Second Reading from 15 th Sunday of Ordinary Time – July 10, 2022) I must confess that I love Stranger Things, the streaming series on Netflex*. If you’re not familiar with Stranger Things, it’s a sci-fi/horror show set in a fictional Indiana town in the mid-80’s where our core group of characters battle evil forces from the Upside Down, another dimension that is a corrupted copy of their own world. I love how they’ve nailed the whole 1980’s vibe from the music to the clothes to the freedom we had as kids to roam the town with little parental supervision. The storylines are suspenseful, and you get attached to the characters. The primary hero figure is Eleven, a girl with telekinetic superp
Read more