This blog is extremely personal and emotional for me to write, but that’s where we find God is most present – our personal lives. I’m focusing today on Saint Martha, a beautiful saint whose chief saintly act was that of Love.

Saint Martha first enters into the life of Christ when she welcomes Jesus into her home. Martha’s sibling Mary sits and listens to Jesus while he speaks, while Martha busies herself with food and drink, and the hospitality that was so important in the Middle East during that time. Martha works and works, while Mary just sits and listens to Christ, which naturally exasperates Martha. I have siblings; I know what its like when you don’t feel that one of them is pulling their weight. Jesus, however, reminds Martha that the important service she can give to God is to listen, rather than be distracted with her busy ways. It’s a humbling lesson for Martha, but she accepts the message with grace and love.

Saint Martha is someone I’m personally very close with. She intervened when my parents were struggling to conceive me, and I feel is therefore partially responsible for my existence. After six years of extremely disappointing childlessness, my mother began to pray to Saint Martha, the patient servant to Christ, to conceive. Saint Martha answered her prayers, and within months I was growing happily in my mom’s womb. My given middle name is Marta, to honor the saint who intervened to God on my parent’s behalf to give them the gift of a child, their only daughter, and the first of an eventual family of five children! Just goes to show you that even when doctors say “You will probably never a child, and never more than one” – you don’t know what gifts you can be granted if God has his way with things (remember Joachim and Anna, after all…)

In simply being born, I am therefore touched by Saint Martha. Just in the past few weeks, however, I was once again brought into prayer with my first Saint, and this time through death. In the last week of October my youngest brother, himself named after the Archangel Saint Michael, died unexpectedly. He hadn’t even graduated high school yet. My grief is ongoing, and I pray daily for the strength for my family and myself to continue to honor his memory while coping with this indescribable loss.

I wanted to do a reading for his funeral, and I spent an afternoon looking through various appropriate Bible passages that I could speak – something to give comfort, something to give faith, and to be completely honest, something that meant something to ME. I thought, if I am going to read at the most difficult time in my life, I want it to be something I can forever carry in my heart as my prayer to him. It was then that I read John 11:20 – 27. I’ll retranscribe it here, because to paraphrase is pointless given how powerful this Gospel passage was to me.

20 When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home. 21 “Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22 But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.” 23 Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” 24 Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” 25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; 26 and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”27 “Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I believe that you are the Christ,^[b] the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”

What could I say that Saint Martha had not already said, directly to Jesus, and what better comfort could I hear than Jesus’ own words that my brother will rise again?

I was honored and humbled when the priest in the Catholic Church that held my brother’s funeral allowed me to read this passage, as it is a Gospel. In the Catholic Church, the Gospel is proclaimed by the priest, but for my brother, I was granted the grace and honor to proclaim Martha and Jesus’ words to my family, our community, myself, and to my beautiful brother. I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.

There really isn’t much more to say. Female Saints do powerful things – they hit demons with hammers, they cure the sick, they survive all attempts at martyrdom, they convert thousands upon thousands to Christianity.

And sometimes, a Saint does something as simple as serve Jesus food and drink in her home, and love her brother. We do not need to be great people or powerful people to be saintly and beautiful in the eyes of God. Saint Martha is proof that one of the most powerful acts one can perform is simply to love.

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