Mary and Martha (TRUE GRIT STUDIES—Part 2)

I too was sad and lonely today knowing that I wouldn’t soon be with thousands and thousands of political scientists. TRUE GRIT STUDIES took a hit from which it might take a year or two to recover. Here’s another part, which isn’t meant to flow from the previous part:

Mattie doesn’t talk about her own grace or lack thereof. She doesn’t seem to wonder whether she’s saved or not, presumably because such speculation would be idly presumptuous. She does talk about her gifts and lack thereof. She means natural gifts, but surely she understands that they too are given or withheld by God. She’s says she “doesn’t boast” about her gift for numbers and words. She doesn’t make it clear that in those two areas she’s superior to her parents. Her dad has a “common school” education, but isn’t as adept in figuring out the bottom line and is honorably inclined to have little interest in that direction. Her mother “could hardly spell cat” and did no better at “sums.” So, as a girl, Mattie did her father’s books or pretty much ran his business. She was stuck being about her father’s business, including , she thought, seeing to his burial and bringing his murderer to justice.

Being good at figures and numbers “isn’t everything,” Mattie knew. Now she did take pride in not flinching or being resolute or facing up to unpleasant duties and hard truths. But even that isn’t everything or the most important thing, the one thing needful. She compared herself to her mother by thinking of herself and mother as two sisters found in the Bible: Martha and Mary. Her mother, like Mary, “had chosen that good part.” She had “a serene and loving heart,” whereas Mattie, like Martha, was “always agitated and troubled by the cares of the day.”

In the Bible, of course, Martha whined to Jesus that she was left to do all the work, while Mary sat and listened as Jesus talked. The Lord, in fact, didn’t seem to care about that injustice, and didn’t order Mary to help her. Instead, he criticized Martha for her obsessively zealous service at the expense of companionship and reflection. Martha, it turns out, was careful and troubled by everything but the one thing needful. That Mary had chosen, “that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.” The one thing needful, it seems, is to attentively listen to Jesus, and the resulting wisdom is the foundation of the loving serenity that should, most of all, characterize every human life.

Mattie’s memories here and elsewhere border on whiny. She did do all the unpleasant and dangerous work while her mother took to her bed. Her disabled mother was totally dependent on her. But she also saw the truth: She excelled in “doing,” and her mother in “being.” Her heart wasn’t, in fact, serene and loving, and maybe we can say that serenity must be the gift of grace. Without that gift, maybe it’s impossible to listen to Jesus. But that way of looking at things excludes the possibility that the way to grace is asking for it, and the wisdom comes through being attentive to Jesus’ most loving and personal words. We see Mattie’s serenity-free and remarkably love-free life in her observation/complaint near the end of the book that time gets away from us. Time especially flees from those who live in the past and the future, who can’t be in love in the present and trust in others and the Lord more than Mattie ever seems to have done. Mattie is aware, of course, that she didn’t chose the best part, but she also sort of whines hat both her circumstances and her nature make that choice either difficult or impossible for her.

Mattie distinguishes herself from her father by a “mean streak,” a quality that keeps her from being used. She was capable of appreciating gentlemen, but only to a point. Her father’s chivalric indulgences were literally fatal for him, and they caused him to, in effect, stick his daughter with the details of his business both before and after his wasteful death. There was something of the gentleman in Rooster, but he was a terrible businessman—having, to begin with, none of the skills associated with literacy—and was too uncivilized to be fit for decent society. Gentlemen, she reminds us, “are only human and their memories can sometimes fail them.” So it’s always better to have a contract. “Business,” gentlemen often forget, “is business.” The mean streak, gentlemen think, is a lack of generosity, but it’s really one basic way of holding people accountable.

While in the cave with the bats, the snakes, and the dead bodies, Mattie remembers “I told numbers to the measure the time. It gave me a sense of purpose and method.” It fended off anxiety and panic. It allowed her to keep her head and not surrender her will and let the snakes bite. So this purposeful method, as much as Rooster, saved her life. The striking use of “method” suggests that Mattie even ordinarily was unusually unguided by personal purpose—love. But that’s not completely true, because her method was, for most of the story, in the service of her father’s business—in the service, despite the commercial language, of love. So it’s fairer to say that her confidence in her method—and her belief that it could be the source of purpose—keep her from critically examining her real purpose, giving her that unjustified confidence that her knowledge of numbers was evidence that she was right about justice. Even in the cave, her method was subordinate to her fear and so to her rather stunningly willful determination not to surrender her life. But it turns out that nobody can methodically save herself all by herself.

If, as our current philosopher-pope reminds us, sin flows from a failure to gratefully acknowledge and do the duties that flow from our deeply relational being, then Mattie was, in a way, sort of a sinner by nature (as are we all, due to original sin), who added to her natural brokenness through her proud willfulness. The loss of her arm, may or may not have been grace or punishment for sin (we can easily become guilty of overdiscerning the visible sign), but it does correspond to the mutilation of her soul. She surely didn’t learn enough about grace from either her gracious, chivalric savior or her dismemberment. Despite all her theology, surely we’re allowed to pity her for having no discernible sign of grace. But we also question whether she’s as good as she might have been at discerning.

So to return Martha and Mary: Those two sisters are extreme cases. Both display part of the virtue of a woman, at the expense of another part. Not only didn’t Mary work, she didn’t gratefully acknowledge her dependence on the competent service of her sister. But Martha couldn’t lighten up to gratefully acknowledge her dependence on the word of the Lord. A perfect woman would be a perfect balance of the excellences in working and listening, in doing and being, in taking care of the future and being in love in the present. But the Bible, we can say, differs from modern, technological thought in giving the preferential option to trusting in the Lord, in grace, given the hopelessness of a wholly chance-and-necessity or cause-and-effect world. The fundamental question is whether, deep down, the world can be described best by numbers or best by love. In this sense, Mattie lived as if she were an atheist, despite her uncanny knowledge of the Bible. In her view, we’re stuck with living as if grace didn’t exist, because there’s no discernible way we can rely on it. That’s why Mattie, in a decisive sense, lacks faith: God doesn’t provide justice; we have to achieve that for ourselves. That’s also why we see in the sort-of subtext of Mattie’s narrative more than a bit of whining, although she knows perfectly well that whiners are contemptible and far inferior to lovers and gentlemen and the resolute manliness of true grit.

We can also see that the future belongs to neither Martha nor Mary. Mattie (Martha) doesn’t reproduce. Mary (mama) can’t take of herself. She needs someone like Mattie (Martha) just to survive. She’s no self-reliant American woman. Mattie, of course, is overly self-reliant, much more self-reliant than she was made to be.