A recent email from Franciscan Media reflected on Martha and Mary.

 

Jesus, it says, “was extending to her an invitation to the one necessary thing, the one thing we need to live in intimacy with Him ... an invitation to contentment, to live unhurried and unafraid, knowing that He is present, right here in the chaos of our everyday lives.”

 

The reflection pointed out that we can be contented and connected to Jesus while working in the kitchen or while sitting at His feet. And we can be anxious and worried in either place also.

 

A good example of this work-and-contemplation blend is Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, a 17th-century Carmelite friar. He, as the book compiled by Father Joseph de Beaufort says, devoted himself to “the practice of the presence of God.”

 

This humble friar worked for many years in the kitchen of his monastery, serving as its cook even though that work did not come naturally to him. He struggled at it, day after day, year after year. Even so, he trained himself to be aware of God as right with him in every moment. His holy and peace-filled joyfulness caught the attention of others who asked him about it and recorded his wisdom.

 

“The difficulties of life do not have to be unbearable,” Brother Lawrence says. “It is the way we look at them — through faith or unbelief — that makes them seem so. We must be convinced that our Father is full of love for us, and that He only permits trials to come our way for our own good.”

 

The simplicity of this religious brother’s prayer might seem too small an effort for those of us who believe in hard work as necessary to advance in anything we do. 

 

“He does not ask much of us, merely a thought of Him from time to time, a little act of adoration, sometimes to ask for His grace, sometimes to offer Him your sufferings, at other times to thank Him for the graces, past and present, He has bestowed on you, in the midst of your troubles to take solace in Him as often as you can,” Brother Lawrence says. “Lift up your heart to Him during your meals and in company; the least little remembrance will always be the most pleasing to Him. One need not cry out very loudly; He is nearer to us than we think.”

 

But the sense of this as being over-easy is misleading. Doing such for one day is easy. Keeping up the practice day after day requires ongoing focus and effort.

 

“Do not be discouraged by the resistance you will encounter from your human nature; you must go against your human inclinations,” Brother Lawrence says. “Often, in the beginning, you will think that you are wasting time, but you must go on, be determined and persevere in it until death, despite all the difficulties.”

 

At times Brother Lawrence presented himself before God as a wretched and wicked sinner. That is a common posture for those who are advancing in faith because they are becoming more and more aware of God’s greatness and of how pathetic, weak and slow-to-love they are.

 

“But this King, filled with goodness and mercy, far from chastising me, lovingly embraces me, makes me eat at His table, serves me with His own hands, gives me the keys of His treasures and treats me as His favorite,” Brother Lawrence says. “He talks with me and is delighted with me in a thousand and one ways; He forgives me and relieves me of my principle bad habits without talking about them; I beg Him to make me according to His heart and always the more weak and despicable I see myself to be, the more beloved I am of God.”

 

Hidden away in his kitchen doing humble work that was not pleasing or satisfying to him, Brother Lawrence nonetheless found the essential purpose of life, instructing, “Let us thus think often that our only business in this life is to please God, that perhaps all besides is but folly and vanity.” 

 

The biblical woman, Martha, went from being someone who was filled with anxiety to someone who professed great faith in Jesus and who became a close friend to Him.

 

May we practice God’s presence, find and treasure Him who is always present to us.