SETTING THE TONE OF OUR RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES
paper given at a Muslim seminar at Premier Hotel, Ibadan,
sponsored by the Caring and Sharing Muslim Centre, Ibadan
2001The Story of Martha and Mary: Mary and Martha were both good women, but each had her own way of life. One was occupied with material things, the other with spiritual things; one with the world, the other with the Lord; one with temporal things, the other with eternal things.
What is the character of our personal religious life or of the religious community to which we belong? What preoccupies us in life? Are we Marys or are we Marthas, or both?
The Catholic experience
Let me speak first from a Catholic perspective. Following the New Testament and the Council of Chalcedon (451), we hold that Christ is fully God and fully man, with two distinct natures in the unity of a single divine person. The Church too, having Christ as its head, is the Body of Christ and a continuation of his presence on earth. Therefore the Church also has both a divine and a human character.
Its divine character consists primarily in its members being incorporated into the mystical body of Christ by sanctifying grace conferred at Baptism. This grace empowers them to relate to God by faith, hope and love in this life, and the beatific vision in the next life. It entitles them to live their Christian life by the assistance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit, received particularly through the sacraments of the Church.
The human character of the Church consists in all the people who belong to it, with all their diversity of personalities and corporate cultures. In most religions people distinguish between a divine element which is ideal and pure good, and a human element which is a dilution of that ideal, since people do not live up to their religion as they should. But the Catholic Faith does not view the human element of religion so negatively. Yes, sin is a terrible reality, and its results are seen in the devastation of wars, corruption and neglect of responsibility. Yet the Church recognizes that each person and each nation is divinely endowed with many natural gifts and that human intelligence is capable of magnificent achievements in the areas technology, science, the fine arts, philosophy and social organization. Just as Jesus is true God and true man, so the authenticity of the Church demands that it respect not only the realm of revelation and grace but also the realm of human talent and achievement, since it is God's creation and is therefore good. And, as Jesus' humanity and divinity are not two separate persons but one person, so the Church is one Church, and each Christian is one Christian with two dimensions, a divine and a human side.
When we come to law we find the same perspective. There is one divine and eternal law in the mind of God, but it comes to us in two ways. Revelation is one of them. God spoke through the prophets, and lastly through Jesus his divine Word, which is the fullness of revelation. Jesus reaffirmed the basic moral law of the Old Testament, such as the Ten Commandments, and he added new teaching, expressed chiefly in the Sermon on the Mount. On the other hand, God gave us reason and the power to know good and evil by a law engraven in our consciences (cf. Rom 1:19-21). This is what we call the natural law.
The Church, therefore, and the Christian are called to be neither Martha nor Mary but a combination of the two. We are talking about a divine reality fully immersed in human reality, as Tertullian once said: "I am a Christian; nothing human is alien to me."
Sufic experience
Every one of us has been personally touched by God, at least occasionally, in different ways and to different levels of intensity. Sufism owes its existence to such experience. Beyond the formalities of ritual worship, Sufis seek a direct encounter and communication with God. Such mystical experience is super-rational, and can never be adequately put into words. That is why another name for Sufis is "ahl al-ishâra", people who talk in sign-language, because words are inadequate.
Over its more than a millennium of existence, Sufism has always had its critics or enemies. That is partly because Sufis are generally not trained theologians or philosophers, and when they try to theorize about Sufism in their poetry they are out of their element and make many blunders. Only al-Ghazâlî's defence of it in terms of Islamic orthodoxy has won for it some degree of tolerance.
Apart from dealing with external opposition, Sufism constantly needs to seek and preserve its own internal equilibrium. Like any religious movement, it can get out of balance by exaggerating Mary or exaggerating Martha. Let me give a few illustrations of excesses either way:
- Spiritual pride. It is the temptation of any mystic, prophet, charismatic or sufi who has had a dramatic religious experience to think he is superior to the rest of mankind, especially the Marthas who are too busy taking care of husbands and children and visitors to spend much time in religious exercises.
- Intellectual pride. Someone who has dreamt dreams and seen visions can be tempted to think he has nothing to learn from others, and to dismiss as useless the wisdom and learning of others, especially about spiritual and religious matters.
- Relaxing in prosperity. We need material things and should work and pray for them, but they have a relative value, and we have to be prepared to recognize our spiritual treasure and keep our peace when we meet disappointment and tragedy in this world. A spiritual champion can be tempted to believe that overcoming the world means to enjoy success and wealth in security. The prosperity gospel of winners cannot deal with the cross. It is nonsense to them. Yet it was the Sufi, al-Hallâj, who found that the closer he came to God the more he shunned enjoyment. He stated that the religion in which he dies must include the cross. His desire was fulfilled when he was executed, a Sufi martyr.
- Workaholism. That is the temptation of the Marthas. A perfectionist wants to complete the job and leave nothing undone. The problem comes when he wants to do it all in one day, and do it alone. The Marthas need to learn to budget their time to give God his due and give themselves needed rest. They also need to leave something for others to do, so that it may be a cooperative effort.
- Exploitation. A Martha who is working only for herself and not for others will use religion as a means of getting money and influence. We do not need 419 religious leaders.
Conclusion
A Mary-Martha combination will help us to respect at once our religion and all the values of our culture and of science. We will be living simultaneously in eternity and in time, in spirit and in bodily matter, attentive to God and attentive to the needs of our neighbour. We will also know how to handle human tragedies and death, seeing in them God's decree which, for those who love him, is always a blessing in the end.