Choosing the Better Part

Choosing the Better Part

What’s the worst kind of experience you can have with a doctor? Short of an actual error in diagnosis or treatment, the problem that most of us would complain of (or have) is if we are treated not as a person but as a disease or symptom. If you are really sick, you don’t want to be treated as the disease, but as the person who has the disease. You want to be engaged with and understood, even empathized with. When this doesn’t happen, it’s usually not the fault of the doctor. It’s more common that the limits on the physicians’ practice (for example, how he or she is compensated, and so how long he or she can actually spend in conversation with a patient) prevent the doctor from being present to you as a caregiver as you are present to him or her as a patient.

The complexities of our society all too often allow us to objectify each other. We focus on what a person is rather than on who he or she is. I need not tell you about how much trouble this causes—about how we objectify each other by race or class, by national origin or political or theological affiliation—and about how once we objectify each other then we tend not listen to each other. None of us is immune. When a person walks off the street and comes to my office seeking some kind of help, it’s all too easy for me to prejudge what the interaction is about on the basis of dress and grooming, for example. And, guess what? Not all of these prejudgments are wrong (in the sense of being incorrect), but if my perception of what someone is prevents me from learning who they are my ministry will be very much diminished. I’ll focus on solving a problem rather than on encountering a person.

When we do succeed in recognizing the who instead of the what, it’s then that we can both connect at a personal level and at a spiritual level—at the level God intends. It’s then that we can show a little spark of the image and likeness of God; the image and likeness in which He has created each one of His sons and daughters, each one of us. That’s what St. Paul is getting at in Colossians, what he calls “the riches of the glory ... which is Christ in you” (Col. 1.27, and note that “you” in “y’all”—Paul is speaking to the Church, not to individuals only). When we can show forth God’s glory then we can see a brief flash shining through the dirt of a fallen world and a troubled soul; we can see a brief flash of the richness of new creation because by God’s grace we see the person in another, in another child of God.

It’s easy to see something–an object–when we are called to see someone–a person. Think of the adjectives we use. Whether they’re good or bad, when we use them we’re not referring to the person created in God’s image and likeness. To use examples of the bad (and of unhelpful language): If I look across a table and see a “junkie,” “grifter” or “deadbeat,” I am not seeing the person within and beyond appearances or behaviors. If I’m a little bit less nasty, and see a “sinner” (even recognizing that this adjective applies to all of us), I’m still not looking for the person created in God’s image and likeness. Even if I try to be completely neutral in the use of adjectives, and use only a descriptor such as “man” or “woman,” I still can’t look past labels and categories to the see the person as God does, to see the divine spark which God has created in His own image and likeness.

Of course we can’t see things as God does, but God reminds us constantly that we’re called to try. He even shows us how to try, so that we can get glimpses of the new creation to which He calls each of us, a new creation in which St. Paul reminds us there are no labels: Neither Jew nor Greek; slave or free; male or female, but the redeemed clothed once again in the light of God’s image and likeness.

God shows us how to try in calling us to serve: To be “Martha’s” in ministry, serving the Lord by acting in His name. God shows us how to try in calling us to listen to His word: To claim the better part which Mary claims in sitting at Jesus’ feet to listen to Him (Luke 10.42). Seeking and serving Christ in all persons means both giving and listening, serving and listening to whom God has made, regardless of what stain of sin may cloud the spark of His creation in the person who stands before us. It is in seeking and serving Christ in all persons that we become nearer to God.

What a difficult thing to do this is; what an impossible thing it is if we seek to do this relying only on ourselves. But–thanks be to God–we rely not on ourselves but on God. We rely on the God who in Jesus reminds Martha to pay attention to His word, the same Jesus who says that in listening to Him Mary “has chosen the better part.”

Mary is not just being quiet and dreamy. The quiet contemplation of prayer and study is doing something in ministry. Mary engages with the Lord. She engages His person. She listens to Him. And that is what each of us is called to do, when we promise in our Baptismal Covenant to “seek and serve Christ in all persons,” to seek and serve Christ we have to choose the better part. We have to look beyond labels and adjectives to find the person who stands before us, however familiar we may be with a label, and however unfamiliar and even uncomfortable we may be with what labels and adjectives describe.

We’re called by God to never treat any one of His sons or daughters as an object, but as a person created in His image and likeness. We’re called to serve God in serving each other. We’re called to honor God in engaging with the person who stands before us, to “choose the better part”: that image and likeness of God which He has created in all men and women; to choose the better part which is the hope of glory in new creation.

Notice what else happens when we choose the better part. We also share it. When any person is able to realize that the person encountered is interested in him or her as a person and not as an object–when a person experiences care–then the person gets a little glimpse of a reality far greater than the reality of his or her own troubled existence. By God’s grace, when we can choose the better part and be attentive to God, then we can be more attentive to each other, and then each of us can experience just a little bit of God in each other. God equips us to be His eyes to see with, His ears to listen with, His hands to comfort with, and His back with which to ease the burden of another. And when we incarnate God, truly we have chosen the better part, sharing the riches of God’s glory.