not your job (on luke 10)

During my first year of seminary, my internship was with the chaplain of Metro State Women’s Prison in Atlanta. Metro State doesn’t exist anymore, but at the time it was a maximum security facility, housing what the State deemed the “most violent criminals.” That was twenty years ago, and my understanding of this country’s prison industrial complex has evolved a lot since I sat with those women in cinderblock interview rooms in that Georgia prison. In 2004, I was mostly just trying to be a good student and follow directions.

Part of our responsibilities as chaplain interns was to attend regular Sunday evening worship services in the prison. I have one visceral memory of those services. Worship was held in a big community space which required set up and take down every week. At the end of one Sunday service, I found myself at a loss for what to do in the cavernous space with so many people I did not know, so I did what I’d been taught to do: I started helping. I joined several of the woman who were picking up and stacking chairs, clearing and re-setting the space. I worked silently for a few minutes until Chaplain Bishop saw what I was doing and told me, in no uncertain terms, to QUIT IT.

Cowed, I dropped the chair I was holding and hunkered down in the corner until it was time to leave. The next week, in our class session, Chaplain Bishop got pretty upset with all of us who dared to help stack chairs:

“That is NOT YOUR JOB!” She said. Stacking chairs in that prison community room was someone’s job - a coveted role, actually, only available to women who had demonstrated “good behavior” and responsibility in the culture and context of prison. When confused interns interrupted their work, we weren’t helping. We were making everything harder for everybody.

“Your job,” Chaplain Bishop told us, “is to be present. Your job is to talk to the women. Your job is to be a human being without an agenda in a place and a system where everybody else has one. Your job is NOT TO STACK CHAIRS.”

I was raised to *always* help stack the chairs. If you’re in the room and things need to be cleaned up, everybody helps. It’s everybody’s job to clear the table, wash the dishes, stack the chairs, put the tables up. If you’re a warm body with ability to do the task at hand, you just…pitch in. It’s automatic, in my bones. Being told that stacking chairs at the end of worship wasn’t my job and, even worse, that it was actively HARMING people, rocked my world.

The chaplain’s point is one I think about all the time, these days: our job in that prison was to be present to the people who were stuck there, living their lives in confinement. Our job wasn’t to do any particular task or get any particular project accomplished; our job was to exist and pay attention to the people around us. The longer I showed up in those Metro State visitation rooms, the more stories I heard from women imprisoned there, the more I understood the value of being a person who paid attention, who had no private agenda to work, no to-do list to accomplish.

I don’t think prison is good for anyone, these days. I don’t think sending anybody to jail benefits any of us, at all. I thought about the people I met at Metro while I sat on a that criminal jury last week in the courthouse and knew that there was very little that could convince me to be a part of sending anyone to prison, ever.

I learned so much from those women imprisoned by the State of Georgia in 2004, most of all the power of showing up just to show up.

//

Luke’s gospel keeps unspooling for us this week. He’s telling the familiar story of Jesus visiting his friends, Mary and Martha. You probably know the story already: Martha busies herself in the kitchen, preparing a big meal for her honored guest while Mary kneels at his feet and directs her entire attention to him. Martha is harried, in the background, and she gets annoyed with her sister for abandoning her, so she complains to Jesus himself: “aren’t you going to tell my sister to get up and help me?!”

Look: there is absolutely nothing wrong with the practice of hospitality. There’s nothing wrong with stacking chairs or preparing the meal. It’s something Jesus himself recommends, time and time again. The problem comes when we elevate the tasks of hospitality over the purpose, when we spend too much time on the details and not enough on the people. Martha got so caught up in making sure everything was perfect that she let her hospitality get beat out by her resentment. She wasn’t graciously inviting Mary to enjoy the heart-warming practices of cooking with her; she was shouting at her sister in front of their guest for neglecting her duties.

I think Luke tells this story to remind us that the people are almost always more important than the work. The ability to be fully present and attentive to the people in our midst is almost always more important - and almost always more difficult - than getting shit done.

I was stacking chairs at Metro State because I was afraid of interacting with women who the entire world deemed dangerous. I wasn’t stacking chairs to be helpful; I was stacking chairs in order to avoid getting to know the human beings in front of me. I was stacking chairs so I didn’t have to be fully present and attentive to the precious people in that room, and Chaplain Bishop knew it.

“Martha, Martha,” Jesus says. “You are worried and distracted by many things, but few things are necessary - actually, there’s only ONE THING: being attentive to one another, honoring one another’s existence, enjoying one another’s presence.”

I imagine Jesus kept going. I imagine he invited Martha to set down her dishcloth and sit with them, to let go of her to-do list and her resentments and settle into the conversation with them. I wonder if she ever managed to do it, if she ever figured out how to appreciate the fleeting invitation to simply be, together.

I wonder if we’ll ever figure it out, ourselves.