Stillness or Busyness?

20 July 2025

Luke 10.38-42

I’ve heard it said that the true heart of a home and the centre of household activity is the kitchen. Maybe that was even more true in the olden days where the kitchen table was where families would eat together, and the kitchen was where stories would be told and the important events of the day discussed. The kitchen was - and maybe still is - the room of the house where people are both busy and relaxed at the same time, where homework and phone calls compete with potatoes to be peeled and dishes to be washed.  The kitchen - at least in the house where I grew up, was where the really important business of the family happened.

When I was growing up in WA, houses also used to have verandahs, semi-public shaded areas at the front of houses where kids could play and old people could sit, where you could read the newspaper and still see what was going on in the street and pass the time of day with passers-by.  The verandah was where private space intersected with community space, where different sorts of conversation happened and the business of the whole neighbourhood took priority.  Front verandahs especially suit countries with warm climates -so you see fewer verandahs here in Tassie. In Galilee in the first century AD, houses were built, not with front verandahs, but with front courtyards which worked in the exact same way.  Courtyards and front verandahs are places of hospitality and daydreams, where kids can fly rocket ships and old men can solve the problems of the country.

So, which room of the house does Jesus want us to sit in?  In the warmth of a summer’s evening, Jesus sits in the front courtyard in Bethany, surrounded by women and men and kids and maybe a dog or two, and tells stories.  We know what Jesus’ stories are like - stories that come out of a keen observation of life, stories about farming and the natural world, about crops and wildflowers and sparrows, stories about sharp practices and dishonest neighbours, about the desperation of a tenant farmer who loses a sheep or an old woman sweeping her floor to find a lost coin. One of the sisters, Mary, sits in the cool of the evening and lets her imagination run freely, wondering at how God’s kingdom might be glimpsed in a buried treasure or a pearl or a crop spoiled by weeds.  While in the kitchen, Martha tries to figure out where everybody is going to sleep for the night, and makes bread, and runs next door to borrow some extra cheese and olives and dried figs. So, which room does Jesus want you to sit in?

Is your spirituality based on busyness, or on stillness?  Actually, is there even a choice?  After all, dishes need to get washed, paypackets need to be earned, kids need to be clothed and fed, even Jesus and the men and women who follow him on the road would have been expecting dinner.  To tell the truth, most of us probably relate better to Martha than to Mary.  How do we hear this story, and Jesus’ valuation of Mary’s receptive listening over Martha’s busy hospitality, without feeling a bit nicked off about all the times we helped out in the kitchen or vacuumed the church or did the flowers without anybody even noticing?

As always, part of the answer probably lies in who we think God is, and also how busy we imagine God to be.  Sometimes our prayers in church seem to suggest a God who needs lists of things to do, a God of details, a God who micro-manages - or even a God who needs us to micro-manage for them!  And of course we do believe in a God who is creatively and redemptively engaged with the earth and all its creatures, in all its minutest detail.  From this, we understand that we ourselves are called to a love of others that is practical and self-giving. And the prophets - like Amos - remind us sharply that when we say we love God, then how we treat others, especially others who are vulnerable, needs to come out of a heart that reflects the heart of God, which is love. We can’t treat people like commodities and still be right with God. 

And yet - we also believe in a God who is the still point at the heart of chaos, the still centre of a universe that explodes into being, of swirling superheated galaxies and stars that are born, and grow old and die, in unimaginable fury. This is the God experienced by Elijah as the sound of sheer silence at the epicentre of an earthquake. It’s also the God made known in Jesus asleep in the bow of the boat, as it is swamped by the watery chaos of the sea of Galilee.  We know God to be the eternal stillness at the heart of our agitated over-activity, the eternal truth that measures our moral murkiness, the heart of changelessness that gathers up the fickleness and impermanence of our lives and makes them holy. And in our hearts, we know we have a deep need to be still and listen to the God of silence.

We generally think that today’s story asks us to choose between being Martha or Mary - but what if we are being asked to notice that we are necessarily both Martha and Mary, and need a way of bringing the two halves of our lives and spirituality into balance?  That our spiritual health depends on keeping them in balance?

As a busy parish priest I used to make a retreat every year with the Benedictine monks at New Norcia, a couple of hours’ drive from Perth. The monks used to explain St Benedict’s emphasis on manual work - the Martha stuff - as being a way of sustaining the appetite of the human mind and spirit for God - a way of preparing the human heart for the work of lectio divina, meditation on scripture and contemplation, the way chosen by Mary.  And so it seems that Mary and Martha might represent two focal points of our own life, and the lesson might be how we can find a healthy balance between activity and stillness, between serving others and listening attentively for the whisper of God’s presence in our lives.  And if so, then for every one of us, the balance is different because our circumstances and personalities and gifts are unique.  But the fundamental point is that each of us has the capacity and a need for the sort of spiritual stillness and contemplation chosen by Mary, which leads us into the heart of the God who we know as a Trinity, the creative centre of our lives revealed to us by Jesus and active in us through the Holy Spirit.  

And the ways that draw us into this contemplative nearness are also going to be different for each of us - we need to seek the way of prayer that best suits our personality and our lifestyle, to discover for ourselves the best way to come close to the heart of God in music or meditation, in the garden or in the bush, through reading or painting or cooking.  We generally need the guidance of others in learning how to be still, and an important spiritual discipline is to seek out a spiritual companion who will listen attentively with us for the pattern of God’s presence in our lives.  Like any human activity worth the effort, tuning our lives to the presence of God takes intention and discipline and a lifetime’s worth of love. But to practise the discipline and the spirituality of stillness is essential to discipleship.

Our second reading from the letter to the Colossians also points to Jesus as the point of intersection between the unseen, unchanging character of the life of God, and the busy, changeable world of our everyday lives. Colossians makes a cosmic-sized claim - that through Jesus, God reconciles and brings together all things, the things of earth and the things of heaven. It’s a claim that suggests our lives might somehow bring together both the everyday activity of human busyness and relationships, and the still attentiveness in which we become aware of the nearness of God.

Of course, if we are really listening, Jesus’ voice is loud enough for us to hear him even when we are in the kitchen.  The saint who might best help us in practising the heart of stillness in the middle of the busyness of our everyday lives is the seventeenth-century Carmelite, Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, who had no education or special gifts and so spent most of his life scrubbing pots and pans in the monastery kitchen. But the secret, as he recognised, is that every mundane task is an opportunity to experience God’s love, an opportunity to express our love for God and for one another.  It seems Brother Lawrence’s kitchen was very much the heart or hearth of the monastery because as Brother Lawrence went quietly about his humble chores, the kitchen acquired a reputation as a place of peace and holy conversation. At the end of Brother Lawrence’s long life was found amongst his meagre possessions the manuscript of the shortest of books - just a pamphlet, really, called ‘The Practice of the Presence of God’. The secret of our own lives, it seems to me, is to discover that same holiness in the middle of whatever it is we have to do - tomorrow morning.