Lightness

Oct 20, 2018

"When I ask people late in life to reflect back on when they were the happiest, they always bring up the years when their children were little. There was no sleep and no money. It was exhausting and kids were yelling and running around, but there was so much love. And where there is love, there is God." - Fr. Adam (paraphrased from my memory)

Caleb and I went on a retreat over the weekend to a monastery nearly two hours away. It is so, so hard for me to leave Sammy, even with loving grandparents and aunts that he adores, but we did it. And there was so much space and so much quietness that it was a little hard to know what to do with myself. Except that I knew exactly what to do with myself - sleep as much as humanly possible over the 24 hours we were gone. 

It's been seven years since I last went on a retreat - to give some context to that number, I was not yet dating Caleb. So a *few* things are different now. A small group of us sat and received wise words from a man who has been a monk for 40 years to help guide us into our retreat. 

Fr. Adam also shared about Mary and Martha - about how we often separate them and talk about how Mary was "holy" because she was sitting and contemplating and Martha was not holy, as she rushed about trying to complete housework. We try to separate them, he said, and it's ridiculous because serving God and serving your neighbor are two sides of the same coin. The sin of Martha, he continued, isn't that she was busy doing housework, it's that she was officious about it. (Officious: assertive of authority in an annoyingly domineering way, especially with regard to petty or trivial matters.) There's a false dichotomy that's been around since the nearly the beginning of Christianity that there is the material world which is not and cannot be holy, and there is the sacred, which only exists in the spirit realm. But you can't separate service of God and service of neighbor. You can't say that only Mary was doing holy work. 

It struck me that it had been awhile since I had read the story of Mary and Martha, but as a busy mom, I identified with Martha a whole lot more than ever before. I was relieved to hear that her work was also holy, though her posture may not have been. 

I later reflected on this - every day there are so many routine task that I do, and each of these is usually laced with anxiety. Truly though, it is such a gift to be able to prepare meals for myself and my family every day, to pack food to send to daycare with my son, to have dishes that need to be washed and the water available to do it, to have clothes that have been lived in and need to be washed to remove the food or dirt or drool that seems to coat everything we wear. These are all acts of love - and where there is love, there is God. Could I stop being anxious or stressed about these task simply by deciding to view them like this? 

 I remember a few weeks ago at church, Sammy desperately needed me to hold him. I remained seated in the pews, his head snuggled up in my neck as I draped him over and around my 3rd trimester belly as we sang:

Come to me

All who are weary and burdened

And I will give you rest

Put my yoke

Upon your shoulders

It might appear heavy at first

But it is perfectly fitted

But it is perfectly fitted

But it is perfectly fitted

To your curves

For my yoke is easy my burden is light
My yoke is easy my burden is light

It's true, I thought. There are a lot of what appear to be heavy burdens literally hanging on me right now, but somehow it's not heavy. It's pure love.