FROM THE PASTOR’S DESK
My Dear Parishioners,
Leading a parish can, at times, feel overwhelming. With endless tasks and responsibilities, trying to keep parishioners happy where do you even start? My mentor recently asked me to pause, breathe, and answer a simple question: “What is the one thing you need to focus on at the parish to make everything else flourish?” And he offered examples of what this looks like in other professions. A doctor juggles patients, paperwork, and family, but when a trauma case arrives, everything else fades—laser focus kicks in. A firefighter drops all else when the alarm sounds. A student hones in on a looming deadline. We’ve all experienced moments where one thing demands our full attention.
Yet, in our fast-paced world, these “extreme” moments feel like daily life. We bounce from work to kids’ activities, from one crisis to the next. Parents today face an unrelenting race. In emergencies, focus is clear, but what about the long term? What’s most necessary for tomorrow, next month, or the next decade?
An author I greatly admire, Annie Dillard, wrote something that really opened my eyes. She wrote, “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.”
We can get so caught-up and smothered by the daily needs, the constant barrage of “stuff” that we need to focus on, that we need to do for our kids, our family, our job—we can get so entrenched in this, fill our days with this, that we forget that this becomes what we’re doing with our lives. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.
In her anxious concern about many things, Martha is corrected by Jesus in this week’s Gospel. Jesus calls her attention to a glaring problem in her life, “There is need of only one thing. Only one thing is necessary” (Luke 10:42).
And here’s the kicker for each of us: by the way we live, by the way we live each day, we claim to know what that one need, that one necessary thing is. I don’t need you to tell me what is most necessary, your life tells me what you believe is most necessary.
This incredibly famous scene of Martha and Mary, Jesus does just that with Martha. He looks at her life and reveals her heart to her. We can easily mischaracterize what Jesus says to Martha as being, “Stop working so hard and learn to enjoy life more, enjoy the present moment more.” We can think Jesus means, “Martha, stop with the anxiety and worry. Life’s too short for that!” But no, Martha is already aware of her temperament.
What Jesus reveals to her is her heart, he exposed her heart’s deep, essential, total need—and revealed to her that she was fooling this deep, essential, total need, not taking care of it. Or better, she was clogging it up with things, worries, activities, judgements, fears, irritations, preconceptions and dislikes, just like we do!
“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. There is one thing necessary.”
Jesus is not simply giving a bit of psychological or spiritual advice, or an invitation to commit ourselves to bringing order into our life, starting by getting our bad character under control. The meaning of this message is that only Jesus responds to the fundamental desire of the heart and of life.
So, we need to engage the silence. Listen, listen with the “ears of the heart.” Listen in the uncomfortable aftermath of Jesus looking at us, at our life, telling us, “Michael, Michael, there is need of only one thing, only one thing is necessary.” In the silence that follows that statement, the silence where all our self-justifications and retorts for why we are living such frantic distracted and chaotic lives start racing through our mind—in this silence, listen to Jesus’ words over and over and over: “There is need of only one thing. There is one thing necessary.”
Let these words expose your heart. Let them expose your heart’s deep, essential, total need; how you have clogged up your heart with things, worries, activities, judgements, fears, irritations, preconceptions. And let Him respond. Our heart, our life needs only Him, it lacks only Him.
Peace,
Fr. Monteleone
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