c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) I once sat across an airplane aisle from Martha Stewart and I know why she went to jail.

Watching her on that plane _ combing tiny unspecified flecks out of her hair for a thousand miles while dictating loudly to a young woman who seemed more an indentured servant than a secretary, strewing the aisle with her bags and papers and refusing to pick them up as we landed, she was more like a traffic accident than the doyenne of domestic tranquility. It was a terrible sight, but you couldn’t help looking at it.

So I have a measure of sympathy for Martha, renamed the “New Martha” by CNBC in “the untold story of … the most remarkable personal and professional turnaround in corporate history.”

The Associated Press heralded her in headline shorthand, “Image makeover: How prison helped Martha turn it around.”

Image makeover is not conversion of heart; read the Confessions of St. Augustine to learn more. Still, she was convicted for what many consider a thin and insubstantial charge _ lying to federal investigators about selling stocks on inside information, an alleged crime for which thousands go unpunished every day.

But she may be guilty of having vices that apply to other highly overexposed people, from former General Electric head Jack Welch and superstar Barbra Streisand to that inescapable guru for your soul, Deepak Chopra. You may have some relatives who fit into this category. People need relief from the relentless presence of such people and their insistent opinions on how to run everybody else’s life.

For every well-publicized, image-conscious Martha, there are a million unsung Marys who have no time to think about their images as they keep the world going by taking care of real families in real houses where children must be fed and gotten off to school and on into life without camera and cleanup crews in attendance.

Martha’s re-entry, whisked like one of her souffles, out of prison and into a jet plane and back to her 153-acre estate, was dealt with not as if she were a real person with hopes, feelings, and maybe some real regrets, but as a corporate entity with assets that had quadrupled in value while she was detained.

This turned her fairy-tale release at the stroke of midnight not from a pumpkin into a coach but from a pumpkin-colored jumpsuit into a billionaire.

Despite vigorous efforts by the Web site Savemartha.com to rally great crowds to her estate to display their affection and support on that same afternoon, nobody but television crews and newspaper reporters showed up. They breathlessly reported her reaction to freedom.

“The only thing I’ve been dreaming about is a cappuccino. I got here and I have a … cappuccino machine and it didn’t work,” said Martha, according to The Washington Post.

That this is not exactly a signal that she is accepting the cup of suffering to redeem herself makes Ms. Stewart’s plight more touching. She thinks, along with fans of television shows such as “The Swan” that we are born again not by a change of heart but by a change of image. Oh, fickle world, the stock that rose when she was in jail started to drop as soon as she was released.

Then there is the much publicized ankle bracelet that commentators think she may transform into a fashion accessory. On the very day of her release, we learned in the news of the discovery in Ethiopia of the 4-million-year-old remains of humans’ earliest walking ancestor.

If Ms. Stewart could find the connection between her electronic ankle bracelet and this ancient human ancestor, she would be going deep into the story we share in common rather than staying in the cappuccino-stained shallows of a new image that keeps her apart.

It’s the spirituality, Ms. Stewart. Nobody would call her stupid and everybody would like her to be as happy as she may be able to be. Perhaps she should consult the Gospel of Luke and the story of another super-homemaker to whom the visiting Jesus said, “Martha, you are fretting and fussing about so many things … The part that Mary has chosen is best and it will not be taken away from her.”

MO/DH RNS END

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)