Sensing the Systems

 

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”  “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”  Luke 10:38-42

 

It is interesting to me how many conclusions and convictions we can arrive at from reading just a few verses of scripture.  Our minds love to fill in the blanks with all sorts of delicious details. For example, I can be lured to believe that Martha is the type A, driven, and 8 on the Enneagram (people who want to prove their strength and resist weakness, dominate the environment, and stay in control).   While Mary is quieter and more contemplative, glad to be reading books or singing, “The hills are alive with the sound of music.”  Do we really know this?  We get one glimpse of Martha and Mary’s complex, contradictory lives, and we think we’ve got them all figured out.  We do this not only with scripture, but sadly, with each other.  We meet someone with a bumper sticker on the back of their truck for a particular candidate, and suddenly we know their whole life story.  Or we bump into someone at a health food store buying matcha, and suddenly we have compartmentalized and condensed their whole story.  After all, how well do we really know ourselves?  How often do I say to myself, “Why did you do that, bonehead?!?”  (I often talk to myself in ways I would never talk to someone else).  Because we compartmentalize someone, we tend to put them in a box, assign them a role in the play we are producing ~ where we are the star of the show, and force that person to stay in their lane/stick to their knitting.  God forbid that someone try to change, even though we are constantly changing physically, emotionally, relationally, and spiritually.  This isn’t new.  Dr. Murray Bowen noticed this years ago when he was a doctor in a psychiatric hospital.  He noticed when families would come to visit on weekends, how the patients would change in response to their moms and dads…suddenly taking the role their parents wanted them to take.  We all want to belong, but because we are not sure we will truly be accepted or that we are truly wanted, we tend to settle for fitting in.  Bowen said that family systems will do anything to keep homeostasis.  We will bully, triangulate (that is, talk about someone to a third person rather than talk directly to the person ~ church parking lots are famous breeding grounds for this behavior), shame, or blame someone ~ raining guilt down until they are saturated and soaked into submission.  And systems that are unhealthy don’t easily change; we know this socially in our economy and politics, but also in our churches that would rather go along to get along than risk trying something new.  Rewind and review your life so far this year.  Have you triangulated?  I have.  Have you sometimes stopped listening to someone because you think you know what they are going to say?  I have.  Do you sometimes resist change, or have you said, “Oh, we already tried that!”  Or “That will never work here”?  I have.  This week, let's explore the systems that shape us, stop us, and other times confine and contain us in ways we may not even realize but spend a lot of calories resisting.  May the reflections on our one, wild, and precious life (thank you for that beautiful phrase, Mary Oliver) be shown in all its perplexity and complexity and three-dimensional nature that is true not only for us, but for others, especially Martha and Mary.