A Reflection
on IX Pentecost (Proper 11)
All
Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC
July 21, 2013
Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
When I first
started this business of being a Priest I focused in on the externals of liturgy
- am I doing it “right”?; of theology – am I teaching it “right”?; of budget,
how much money was going out versus how much money was coming in; and of attendance,
how many people were at the services or in classes or at functions because they
were for me a sign of how I was doing as a Priest. In the testosterone-loaded
clergy meetings, within the first five minutes of a conversation with a new
clergy acquaintance, information about the size of each other’s parish would
enter the conversation. Under the
surface of mutual support at the clergy meetings, we were always in competition
with each other, and at the yearly convention we would check the numbers of the
other churches of the diocese to see how we were doing in comparison. When I
came here, I knew it was a smaller parish, and it freed me of the competition
inside my soul. Instead of seeing myself in comparison to another, I got to see
myself without comparisons. Not only are comparisons odious, but as the
character Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much
Ado About Nothing expresses the malapropism, “Comparisons are odorous”. And he was right - they smell to high heaven.
Mary and
Martha are in the process of comparing each other as to who serves Jesus better. Is Mary’s quiet contemplation better or is
Martha’s dedicated service better? The answer of course is “Yes”. Each is
better for them, and they are different but each beloved. The differences are
less important than the faithfulness as they work together and respect the
different gifts they bring to the relationship. One of the things I keep
pushing parishioners to do is to seriously ask themselves the question “What is
my gift that I can give to the church?”, not “What is the job I should do in
the church?”. The gift we can give is
ourselves, the thing that gives us energy when we do it.
One of the
things I do with couples as they enter into premarital counseling is to ask
them to take a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment, and I ask them to bring
in the results as we look over their communication and fighting skills. The MBTI
is a questionnaire that asks people to make choices on how they see reality,
process information, and make lifestyle choices. Catherine Cook Briggs and her daughter,
Isabel Briggs Myers, designed the tool using Carl Jung’s psychological insights
on the personality in which Jung said that each of us lives with a dynamic
tension of sets of opposites within ourselves. For instance, each of us live in
a dynamic of male and female; I am a male and that is dominant, but since I am
a product of a dynamic genetic
interaction between a male and female, a mother and father, I have both within
me. The female shadow of myself, what
Jung called the “anima”, needs to be recognized and honored to give me depth,
for something without a shadow is flat and one dimensional.
According to
Jung, the dynamic tension of sets of opposites is given to us in attitude as
well, which has as its opposites the Outward Turning or Extraversion (E) and the
Inward Turning or Introversion (I). In the Mary and Martha story, Mary seems to
be content to quietly listen and mull things over inside herself, while Martha
is not content to mull things over but goes to Jesus to enlist his help about
what to do with Mary. No one is 100 % one way or the other, but we tend to go
to our strength and live out a preference.
The next three
dynamic tensions of opposites are in the functions of how we see, judge, and
respond to reality. The way we perceive reality is either sensing (S), through the
use of sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound, or through intuition (N) which is
based on hunches. The next function is how we judge the worth of what we see,
the dynamic tension between thinking (T) and feeling (F). The last dynamic is
the Lifestyle tension between perceiving (P) which wants to get a bigger
picture and judging (J) which urges “get it done”.
In the Mary and Martha story,
Mary seems to see the world based on the intuition that Jesus is a man she can
trust, and she judges her experience based on the deep feeling she has as she
is listening to Jesus and she wants to hear more. On the other hand, Martha’s view of reality is
dominated by the way the dinner is being prepared as she touches the plates,
tastes the food, sees how the tables are set, smells the food burning, etc. She judges worth by the thoughts she has about
the importance of this guest and the task that needs to be accomplished - and
she wants it done now! In the MBTI Mary would be an INFP, an introverted,
intuitive, feeling, perceiving personality, while Martha would be an ESTJ, an
extroverted, sensing, thinking, judging personality.
They are
different and yet they both need each other, for the dominance of one helps to re-enforce
the shadow of the other. If both were introverts (I), they would not have
invited Jesus; if they were both sensates (S), they would both be in the
kitchen and no one would pay attention to their guest; if they were both
feelers (F), the dinner would be a mess; and if they were both Perceiving (P), the
dishes would never get done.
There are so
many stories about Jesus. Why did Luke
include this one? I think Luke sees the house of Mary and Martha as the church
in miniature, as different people come together, respecting and honoring their
differences, to give the different gifts they each have to the guest who comes
to dwell with, and within, them. All the divisions we want to think are so
important, as in last week’s story of the “Good Samaritan” where the perceived
enemy is really the true neighbor, fade away if we honor the differences. Luke
will continue with that theme of having Jew and Gentile, men and women, saint
and sinner, leper and healthy, coming together - for nothing separates us from
the love of Christ.
The problem
of the institutional church is that we tend to divide over differences, wanting
to be “right” rather than seeing the sacred ground that binds us together. The
cross, the very symbol of our faith, is the dynamic tension between two
opposites, the horizontal and the vertical - the horizontal holding east and
west in tension, and the vertical holding heaven and earth in dynamic tension –
and speaks to our unconscious mind, calling us to the deeper truth of who is
this Christ within us. The church splinters over the unimportant stuff and
neglects the deeper message.
The way I
use the results of the MBTI with couples in the pre-marital process is to help
them see that they were attracted to each other by the differences they saw in each
other, intriguing the neglected side, as they risk becoming whole; the
introvert (I) is attracted to the (E) extrovert’s ease in dealing with people,
the (S) sensate is touched by the (N) intuitive’s ability to read the
undercurrent of the world, the (F) feeler finds a fuller sense of reality by
the (T) thinker’s use of facts, and the stuck-in-a-rut, nose-to- the-grindstone
(J) judger is freed by the spontaneity of the (P) perceiver. The problems arise
when challenges and outside stresses come into their lives, and each person anxiously
wants to go to their own strength and is annoyed that the other person sees and
reacts to reality in a different way.
This is what is happening with Mary and
Martha in the Gospel lesson. Martha is
so frustrated that she tries to triangulate Jesus into making Mary feel guilty
as a way to change Mary. In marriages when stresses build up, the couple can
get so frustrated that they want to make the other into their own image so that
they can win the fight and be “right”. But the secret of marriage is not that
one plus one equals one, where one person is dominant and the other gives in,
nor one plus one equals two, as when marital partners become two roommates who
share the same bed but have grown into strangers, but one plus one equals three,
a trinity united by honor and respect of differences, living in the dynamic
dance of a relationship. The difficulty is that sometimes we get so busy doing
family and work stuff, Jesus in the story uses the word “distracted”, that we
don’t spend the time to honor the differences as gifts rather than viewing them
as hindrances.
Today at the
10:30 service we will have a renewal of vows on the 50th anniversary
of the wedding of Tom and Kay O’Brien. These are two different people who at
times will disagree but who, at the same time, honor the differences - as the
French say, “Vive la difference!” They see each other not as competitors for
the same limited space in a universe of scarcity, but as two individuals who
share the same sacred space together in a universe of abundance, connecting the
Christ with and within them. The church does weddings not because we want to
throw holy water on relationships but because healthy relationships remind us
of who we were called to be as a church. They remind us of what the church can be
if only we work out our differences with love and respect and honoring the
Christ living within and with each of us.
Thank you,
Tom and Kay, for helping us see in the way you treat each other the Christ reality
in a different light.
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