“Martha, Martha, you are anxious about many things.  One thing is needed.  Mary has chosen the better part and it shall not be taken from her.” (Luke 10:41-42)

One of the greatest gifts of Contemplative Prayer is that it teaches us to “be.”   The time that we spend in this prayer enables us to put aside all we “do” and simply be – to consent to the action and presence of God in our lives.  This sounds simple but it can be surprisingly hard.

From the time we are very young, we are taught and rewarded for doing – crawling, walking, grasping, forming words and on and on.  In time what we do becomes so bound up with who we are that we can only define ourselves by what we do.  
And yet, in the story of Martha and Mary above, Jesus teaches us that to simply be, is “the better part.”  Martha’s “doing” has made her resentful and impatient.  She becomes so aggravated that she has to complain to her guest.  Haven’t we all been there?      

With Contemplative Prayer, we learn to sit and to be.  Yes, we will still have to “do” but we will know that all we do will fall away in time.  In the end, we will simply have to be.  And this simple “being” enables us deepen our relationship with God – or as Martin Laird writes in Into the Silent Land, “This Self-Giving God, the Being of our being, the Life of our life, has joined to Himself the two givens of human life: we are built to commune with God and we all meet death.”