Summertime is full of the feast days of lesser known saints, and for the 29th of July it’s the Feast of St. Martha, patron saint of cooks. If hearing this calls to mind for you a contemporary patron saint of cooking and entertaining, Martha Stewart, well, then… your mind operates a bit like mine. In the gospel story, Jesus is visiting Martha and her sister Mary at their home in Bethany. Martha is consumed by the tasks of good hospitality: cooking, preparing, making everything just right. Her sister Mary, on the other hand, spends all her time visiting with their guest, leaving all the work to Martha. Martha, as you might imagine, is a bit peeved about this situation, and she asks her guest to intervene. “Lord,” she says, “don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
But Jesus basically tells Martha not to worry about so many things, that she should come and sit with him and Mary. I love this story, because I can be a bit like Martha (both the biblical and contemporary versions) as I strive to make sure everything is just right. But what is just right? Sometimes just right is just being. Martha offers us a valuable lesson. She does this by practicing the opposite, of course. But through this visit and what she learns from her visitor, Martha teaches us to engage life fully and to not worry so much about appearances, and this is a valuable thing to learn.
Image: Saint Martha, in a Flemish illumination from the Isabella Breviary, 1497. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.