That beautiful story of the sisters, Martha and Mary, welcoming Christ into their house (cfr. Lk 10,38-42) teaches us a precious lesson about how prayer and piety should take precedence over any consideration of practicality, no matter how legitimate and praiseworthy such consideration is. Such precedence would indicate the proper way of truly welcoming Christ into our life.
When Martha said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving,” Christ clarified about the proper priority to observe when he replied, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.”
This clarification is important and quite relevant these days as many of us are pressured, with all the challenges of our times, to go practical at the expense of our prayer and piety.
To be realistic in our present conditions, we need to be ready to resist this great temptation and work toward giving piety priority over practicality. Better still, we should find a way where the two values, in their proper order, can be put together. They need not be at odds with each other.
This, of course, will require some deepening in our convictions that God should be treated first before anything else in our life. God should be the beginning and end of everything in our life.
He is, in fact, everything to us. We need to convince ourselves more strongly that there is nothing in life where God need not be the center of interest, or where he can be set aside, at least for some time. Again, God is everything to us! That is non-negotiable.
We have to understand that it’s when we pray, that is, when we truly pray and not just going through the motions of praying, that we would be engaging ourselves with the most important person in our life, God himself. That’s when we can truly welcome and receive Christ in our life. He is absolutely our everything, without whom nothing and no one has any importance.
It’s when we pray that we manage to relate who we are, what we have, what we do, etc. to our ultimate end which, to be sure, is not something only natural but is also supernatural. Nothing therefore can rival the importance of prayer. In other words, prayer is irreplaceable, unsubstitutable, indispensable. It’s never optional, though it has to be done freely if we want our prayer to be real prayer.
It’s when we truly pray and when we develop an abiding and vibrant life of piety that we can convert our work and all our other concerns into a form of prayer also, into an act of worship and thanksgiving to God. It can also be a way of making up for our sins and of asking some favors from God.
We have to develop a strong sense of piety while being immersed in the world, doing mundane things that are supposed to give glory to God and are the raw material, so to speak, for God’s providence to operate in the world.
We have to develop a strong sense of relating things to God, asking ourselves questions like: Is what I am doing now what God really wants me to do? Am I doing things with rectitude of intention? Am I doing it right? What is God trying to tell me at this moment, in this particular occasion? Etc.*
