About Mother Teresa and Other Saints

Fall in Virginia is quite a different matter from the same season in New York or Oregon, the other two places in which I have experienced its bittersweet mingling of pulsating life and coming death.  It has always been my favorite season of the year, but here in the steamy South (I know it gets steamier south of here, but this is all the steam I can bear) it is a completely different matter.  Fall, when it finally comes here, is a more about the weather than the calendar, and when the weather finally cools I tap into that combination of renewed energy that comes with a new academic year and the melancholy of remembering that winter will soon close in around us.  My melancholy has an extra depth this year as I watch my sister’s struggle with pancreatic cancer, a struggle she stands no statistical chance of winning, but still we hope. 

This is a time to meet faith questions head on – – or, perhaps, to meet one’s doubts head on. I think that’s why I found the recent story about Mother Teresa’s doubts on NPR’s Weekend Edition both startling and compelling.  Host Scott Simon, who had interviewed Mother Theresa in 1984, at which time she had told him she was not a saint, reported on a forthcoming book called Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.  The book contains some of her letters to her confessors and “will apparently reveal that for more than 50 years, most of her life as a nun,” she doubted the existence of God.  Now, on the tenth anniversary of her death and well on her way to official sainthood, some are calling her an atheist and a hypocrite.

Simon suggests that reading her letters reveals her as something closer to rejected lover than serious doubter, adding that in her homespun cotton sari “she seems more the word of God made flesh than any pope in golden finery,” and “if you found her calling among the dying and destitute of Calcutta, it would be hard to hold frail, starving children in your arms and not ask, even shout, where in this hell is God?”  This story, together with my annual reflection on the changing seasons, suggested a couple of thoughts of relevance for educators. 

My first thought is about the teaching power of the liturgical year, whether one’s liturgical orientation is high or low.  And here I offer three resource recommendations, neither of them new, but both highly useful.  Gertrud Mueller Nelson, in her To Dance with God, writes of the way in which the gospel coincides with the “mystery of apparent death and finalities” which confronts us in autumn.  “We consider in these days,” she says, “the saints who have gone before us.  We consider the souls of our forebears, known and unknown who have died.  Just as the harvest has been gathered into barns, as the children have been collected into schools, the saints and souls have been gathered as a heavenly harvest or brought before our consideration, because it is the nature of things.”  The Sunday scripture readings as we inch again toward Advent, she continues, “have been picking up the themes of endings, a looking for Christ’s presence with us, now in glory, in the fullness of time.” 

Also worthy of reading is John H. Westerhoff’s A Pilgrim People, in which the author suggests we Christians are “a strange lot.”  When we’re most faithful, he says, we are like the unsophisticated, devoted shepherds who “while going about their daily rounds longing for a new possibility, waiting in hope for a new possibility, living prepared for a new possibility, open to the mystery of God . . . saw what only the eyes of faith can see.”  What they see, of course, is good news “but it is also awesome, because it is only a possibility, the mystery of a baby in our midst.  But that is enough, and so we come and bow down before his light and give thanks for the gift of sight.”   It’s T. S. Eliot who wrote that “what we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning.  The end is where we start from . . .”  It’s all of a piece – – the gathering in, the beginning again, in the fullness of time.  Rejoice! Rejoice!  Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
 
My second thought is about how we teach.  When I try to put myself inside Mother Teresa’s skin, I cannot imagine NOT crying out to someone about the horrors she witnessed and to which she relentlessly responded.  Outrage, coupled with the need to assign blame, is pretty human, so far as I know.  And so are doubts.  Do we who are educators create learning environments in which doubts can surface? 

In the end, Scott Simon noted, while Mother Teresa denied she was a saint, she said “we should know that it’s not necessary to be a saint to do good.  You need willing hands, not clean ones.  If we wait for our souls to be totally clean, our time on Earth may slip away.”
One more resource recommendation: Margaret McMillan Persky’s Living in God’s Time. 

Persky notes that “all things have their appointed time, so rest is available, peace is possible, and joy is always at hand.”  Pilgrims on the kairos road, she adds, have a calm awareness that “in the midst of the frantic demands of everyday life, God is at work doing a good work in them, through them, even in spite of them.”

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2 Responses to About Mother Teresa and Other Saints

  1. mharton says:

    Good word, Judy. Thinking of Mother Teresa, I’m reminded of a story Phillip Yancey tells, of a friend who visited her in Calcutta. When they met the conversation went something like this: she asked him how she could pray for him, to which he responded, “Pray that I will have clarity.” To that she responded, “Sorry, I can’t do that.” The guy was taken aback and said, “But, Mother Teresa, you’ve always had such clarity, ” to which she laughed, and said, “I’ve never had clarity. What I have is trust. Your search for clarity is what is keeping you from trusting. I will pray that you will have trust.”

    My application of the story is this: folks so often seek out education or learning to find clarity. Nothing inherently wrong with that, I suppose. However, I would prefer that we seek learning simply to “move us a little farther along the road” (less traveled?) rather than “to get the answers.” Perhaps our search for clarity gets in the way of the broader spectrum of possibilities that learning may afford.

  2. A good thought, Mike. My phrase for the approach or perspective on learning is “teaching for obedience.” Teaching for knowledge and insight is important, but too often it results in not much more than learning “trivia” if you don’t live into it. There’s a difference between “something I know,” and “something I live.”

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