CREATIVE NONFICTION 45The difference, he said, is that he is also
growing in faith. “That is the definition of faith,
giving yourself over in trust.”
there’s a sermon my father often preached
when visiting a new church. I always thought it
was his best one, although he would never have
put it in those terms.
As my father got older, he began to teach more
at seminary and preach less. His sermons, as a
result, became a bit colder, more intellectual in
their examination of the text. But somehow,
whenever he taught the story of Jesus’s visit to
the two sisters Mary and Martha, he would revert
back to old form.
There was something about the source mate-
rial—perhaps the parable-like nature of it, or the
way the story boiled the world down to these
two polarizing, contradictory sisters.
Up on the pulpit, my father would reenact
with almost comical physicality the busybody
sister, Martha, bustling about the house, cooking
and fussing over the preparations that came with
hosting the world’s savior in your home.
Then, my father would stoop into a frozen
crouch and talk of how, amid all the bustle, the
other sister, Mary, simply sat rapt at Jesus’s feet
and listened.
Eventually, the exhausted Martha couldn’t hold
in her frustration any longer. “Don’t you care that
my sister has left me to do the work by myself ?”
my father would exclaim in Martha’s voice. “Tell
her to help me!”
“Martha, Martha,” Jesus replied, “you are
worried and upset about many things, but few
things are needed—indeed, only one. Mary has
chosen what is better, and it will not be taken
away from her.”
In the decades since I first heard this story, I’ve
often thought of myself in terms of those sisters.
Sometimes, I see all of humanity as a collection
that can be sorted into Marthas and Marys.
Martha—the rational, pragmatic part of
us—focused on what is before us, what we can see.
Mary—our more intuitive, emotional part—drawn
to the inexplicable, the impossible, and able to
recognize it for what it is. The head and the heart.
As a boy, I felt bad for Martha, reprimanded
for just trying to do what she thought was
right. As a teenager, I felt an unearned degree of
superiority toward her, for missing the obvious,
more important thing—the fact that the messiah
himself was in her home, speaking to her, calling
to her.
But as an adult, I have felt frustration more
than anything at Jesus and his words. “Mary has
chosen what is better,” he says. “Few things are
needed. Indeed, only one.” And yet, he never
spells out, for the sisters or us, what that one
thing is.
I have, at various points in my life, felt a
degree of anger at this capricious nature in the
Bible and religious teachings in general and
doubted their value. If that one thing was so
important, why not just come out and say it?
Why send us forth into the world, combing
through the wreckage of life, trying in vain to
figure it out for ourselves?
At times, I’ve doubted whether the one thing
even exists. And I’ve come to the conclusion
that many things in this world, and people most
of all, do not fit so easily into tidy parables.
For my father, however, the climax of the
story was never the visit, but what happened
later. In his sermons, he often focused more
on Jesus’s final visit with the two sisters—just
days before the world would turn on him,
before his broken body would be hoisted up
onto the cross.
During Jesus’s last visit, my father would point
out, Mary bought a pint of expensive perfume,
worth an entire year’s wages. She poured it onto
Jesus’s feet and began using her own hair to
wipe them clean. When others began criticizing
her for wasting, in an instant, that exorbitant
perfume, Jesus rebuked them: “Leave her alone.
Why are you bothering her? She has done a
beautiful thing.”
From the pulpit, my father would pause at
these words to quietly reenact the scene, his
hands rubbing his hair over the imagined feet of
Jesus. Often, the congregation would be stunned
by his actions, watching in a rapt, eerie silence.
It would always strike me later as almost
comical, the image of my father—a man more
serious than any I’ve known in life—doing
this silent pantomime on the stage. But in the
moment, it was hard not to feel the weight of