“Mary and Martha Comment in Sunday School” by Marianne Hales Harding
“When I Begin to Bend” by Jacquelyn Healy
“Sunday School” by Hanna Thayer Brown
Mary and Martha Comment in Sunday School
Women of a certain age
know which one they are
from countless Relief Society
class discussion misinterpretations
of four verses known but not really read.
The women in the kitchen
wear their Team Martha badges.
The women on Team Mary
abdicated their pedestals long ago.
Both are kind of touchy on the subject.
Team Martha still feeling, perhaps, the sting
of Christ’s gentle rebuke under
all of their Martha Pride.
Team Mary still needing an advocate
to get a day pass from traditional gender roles.
And if it comes up in Sunday School
someone changes the subject because
we’ve made a book of those four verses
that no one wants to read.
But this is not the parable of
the feminist and the homemaker.
This is not the time when Jesus taught
the Doctrine of You Be You, Girl.
This is the time Martha was braising
a pot roast during General Conference
(because–duh–learning is for boys)
and Jesus said No
(no offense to your pot roast).
Martha had her moments but this was not
one of them so why is this one painted
and printed and hung in churches?
No part of the image is true—
Martha listening intently while stirring
an empty bowl. Mary folding her
uncalloused hands in her lap.
by: Marianne Hales Harding
Marianne is the Head Curator for the Plein Air Word Gallery (aka laminated poems taped to the vinyl fence along the busiest sidewalk in the neighborhood) and a writer of many flavors, including playwriting, essay writing, and poetry. She co-founded Provo Poetry, a non-profit that brings the work of local poets to local poetry enthusiasts in the form of poemball machines, chalk art, viral videos, and running bibs. She is privileged to influence the young writers at three universities and is raising two more of her own writer/artists.
When I Begin to Bend
You meet me—no matter the time or place—
and in my melancholic dissonance,
as I begin to bend, your elegance
genuflects with me, until I’m encased
by the unseen, sparkling swan of your grace,
as real as anything, in abundance,
and for a few seconds, pure resonance
pours through every velvet cell, fills the space
of Question, then my porcelain skeleton
rings with song—an orchestra within me,
entirely triumphant, the melody
so electric—it can’t go forgotten.
Yet it does. Again. Often. Even still,
when I bend
we blend
and I know you’re real.
by: Jacquelyn Healy
Jacquelyn Healy is a wife, mother, student, and poet who lives with her young family in the tiny town of Baldwinville, Massachusetts where she’s just beginning to grow and sell a range of boutique daffodils. Devoted to beauties both seen and unseen, she wrote this little song as a love letter to the Spirit of God.
Sunday School
Some roots are too deep to unearth.
Church makes me uncomfortable
because I don’t have any
nice little stories that end well,
end how you’d expect,
and provide a relatable moral.
There’s a dead fly on the
windowsill, as still and
silent as I’d like to be
when surrounded by God.
I’d rather be ignored,
so that no one can exhume
the coffins I don’t want to discuss.
I will sing hymns until my throat
is raw and my voice breaks.
But please, spare me
the divulging of past sins
in the hard name of faith.
by: Hanna Thayer Brown
Hanna is an artist and writer in Salt Lake City, Utah, who has been engaged in a cheerful struggle with her faith for several years. She wishes Sacrament meeting was a little bit closer to monastic liturgy and spends far too much time eating pizza and watching Stargate: SG-1 with her husband.