Meditating

MARY: Did you notice the way he looked at me when I sat and listened to him?
MARTHA: Milk it, why don’t you?
MARY: Oh, don’t be like that. Can’t you see what he meant? Here we are cooking and cleaning all day long … so tired and anxious all the time about doing our duty … making sure Lazarus is comfortable and can receive all his Pharisee friends without shame. It really is a miracle how, for we have but little. Well, little compared to the most of them. But our rabbi wasn’t like any of them.
MARTHA: (with sarcasm) Not any of them?
MARY: Oh, be quiet – you know I can’t abide your gibes.
MARTHA: You just make yourself such any easy target. (she laughs, then loses the heart) … I worry about you whenever you’re with him.
MARY: Please Martha, not this again. You know we can’t agree.
MARTHA: That doesn’t mean I’m not right!
MARY: I don’t actually care who’s right anymore. This is how it is. I am who I am.
(Silence.)
MARY: But then you’ve always known about me … even whenever we were young. (Pause.)
MARTHA: Let’s not fight.
MARY: That was my point.
(Silence.)
MARY: But didn’t you see how he looked at me, sitting there by his knees. What must he have thought of me? But I was so … I don’t know … comfortable close to him … there was no timidity in me then; nor any arrogance.
MARTHA: What’s left?
MARY: Peace. I just felt peace. (Pause.) Whenever he said that my sitting there doing nothing was the only thing I needed I suddenly felt myself lifted inside, as if life was all so ridiculously simple all of a sudden.
MARTHA: If it was simple, there would be no need of that other Pharisee of yours.
MARY: Maybe not … but if his simple words are true, why haven’t we heard them before?
MARTHA: You do talk nonsense sometimes. What are you saying? And I don’t see that it was at all fair of him to single you out for praise, whenever I had been running around tending to you and him. I suppose nothing else is needed if you have a servant waiting on you hand and foot. What about my backache? Why don’t I just lie in tomorrow and you can be the one who brings Lazarus his breakfast? I can lie in and really deserve our rabbi’s praise!
MARY: Oh, don’t be like that, sister. (Tickling her) He wasn’t criticising you; you mustn’t think that. It was just some point he was making in the way he has. I’ve heard him many times before. He says the most peculiar things in public … really forthright things, as if completely certain about what he’s saying. The only problem is that the things he says aren’t possible to prove. We have to believe in what the traditions teach; but he says things that seem to come from nowhere. (Pause.) Well, maybe you’re right … for what would happen to our lives if we all wanted to stop and muse as I do. The world would stop! But you didn’t see the look in his eyes, and you didn’t know my feeling, when he said those words.