Thinking about Mother Teresa

[pegkerr]

I have been thinking a great deal about this article ever since I read it. Time Magazine has published a report about the inner life of Mother Teresa:

On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere — "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive."

Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.

I have never entirely venerated Mother Teresa, as she supported many tenets of the Roman Catholic church that I simply cannot accept. But learning this about Mother Teresa has made me feel an unexpected kinship with her, and I have been brooding about that this week.

What I have been thinking about specifically is something that I have talked about with Kij occasionally over the years. I have always wanted my living to follow an ethical framework. I am, in fact, a Myers-Briggs ENFP ENFJ: the "F" (as opposed to "T") means that my mind operates on a "Feeling" axis rather than a "Thinking" one. But I have had to accept that how I live my life cannot be guided by how I feel about things. This is partly because I am subject to periodic bouts of depression, and so my feelings, which can occasionally be out of whack, are not a sound guideline. But more, I have come to feel that actions, if I wish to be ethical, must be guided by will, not by feeling.

Love is shown by actions, not by how one feels. I live out my love for my spouse not by how I feel about him but by how I treat him. Same with my kids. Same with God. It is painful, however, when these are dissonant. I have been thinking about what ethical questions it raises when this dissonance stretches on and on. Apparently these questions have been raised about Mother Teresa, too. If she experienced her relationship with God as being an endless silence, does this not mean, as some atheists have suggested, that she simply lacked courage to face what she should have realized as the truth, based on her own feelings: that there is in fact no God? Or was it in fact greater courage to continue on in obedience to what she felt was God's will, despite feeling no support or guidance from her God at all?

My depression seeps into many areas of my life: my faith, my marriage, my parenting. How do I live my life, despite it? What things must I continue to do, no matter what I feel? What must I keep doing, even if my feelings tell me that I am being a fool, that all is hopeless?

Much to think about.

Comments

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Year before last I saw a fascinating Fringe show that made a permanent impression on me. It was a young storyteller (whose name I've forgotten) talking about his upbringing as a Pentacostal Christian and how he left all that behind to move to New York and become an actor. Unlike many monologuists of that type, he talks about his friends and family with real affection and a little sadness, even though he no longer shares their beliefs.

What struck me about his story was this: the reason that he eventually lost his faith was because he couldn't hear God speaking to him and everyone else in his church could (or said they could). He was a sincere and devout young Christian, and apparently spent the first 18 years of his life feeling crushed because the teachings of his church made a big deal out of personal conversations with God, and he just couldn't hear that voice.

I had to wonder if his problem was that he took the "voice of God" thing way too literally. I'm willing to bet that most of the devout members of that church didn't literally hear voices either. Yet somehow none of the spiritual advisors he confided in ever were willing to admit that. They just told him to "listen harder" and ultimately lost one of their little lambs to the Big City of Sin. Would it have killed his pastor to say, "Some people experience God differently, my son, as a feeling instead of a voice?"

Maybe I'm missing the point of the Mother Theresa story, but I wonder if she's doing the same thing - expecting a little too literally to have conversations with God, and discounting the feelings, impulses and motivations that have driven her to do God's work all these years. If that's the case, she isn't doing anybody else in her faith any favors by letting people think she's in constant communication with God. Maybe if she'd been more honest with her admirers and followers all along she'd have been a better role model.