(All's Well That Ends Well is this year's Longmont Theatre Company Taste of Shakespeare summer production, featuring our own Brett Landis, and can be seen at venues around the area. See LINK for more details.)
I gotta tell you, this play is a laundry list of "what not to do" if you want to live into the fruit of the Spirit. Deception, lies, trickery, abandonment. But then again, if we don't highlight how these things work against us in our efforts to be at one with humanity, we might not be able to see the logs in our own eyes very clearly. In this play, Helena is set on marrying Bertram even though he has no interest in her. Through a series of missteps and deceptions, Helena does win Bertram as her husband. But there is so much to unpack there. Helena's desire for a husband who doesn't want her being the most obvious of the long list of complications. And all the things that everyone does to distract them from what matters most in life.
"Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."--from Luke 10
In the scripture reading, a very famous one from Luke, we have sisters Mary and Martha hosting Jesus. And while Martha is busy tending to details of the household, Mary is sitting at Jesus' feet, listening to him. Martha gets jealous and upset and asks Jesus why he isn't concerned that Mary has left Martha with all the work. He tells Martha that she is the one who is distracted and that Mary has chosen 'the better part, which cannot be taken away from her.'
While I have my own struggles with this scripture because plenty of us have times when we know that if Martha doesn't get things done the household will fall into disarray, I do see Jesus' main point here. He is with them to share stories and inspiration for just a short time, and if they don't seize the moment, they will miss it, and he will be gone. Kind of like stopping to realize that if you don't put aside your list of to-do's while the kids are still young, one day they'll be grown and you won't have stopped to play enough. Or the old phrase, 'stop and smell the roses.'
So distraction, then, becomes the theme of the week. When do we allow distractions to take our eye off the real 'prize' in life? When do we settle for things that aren't necessarily life-affirming for us? How do we learn to stop and listen for the message of Christ first, rather than diving headlong into a laundry list of activities? How might we recognize the benefit of listening to Christ first as a way to center and ground us as our lives unfold?
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