The Sixth Sunday of Pentecost

This week’s gospel reading from Luke relates the story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42).  Mary is prayerfully focused on Jesus.  Martha is “distracted by many things.”  My guess is that many of us can relate to Martha.  Our lives are busy, crowded, and distracted, and prayerful focus on Jesus seems like a luxury.  And yet, as Richard Foster has suggested what the world and the Church needs is not more intelligent people, not more gifted people, and certainly not more busy people.  Rather, what the Church, what the world desperately needs is deep people.  What the world needs is people like Mary who are spending time regularly sitting at Jesus’ feet, people investing in time alone listening to God.  The world needs us to be a people whose lives are bathed in prayer and whose discipleship, whose faithful busyness, is rooted in a life lived in communion with Christ.