Teresa's legacy

The Coffee Shop
1

“Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”
— Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979

"Two very different Catholics predict that the book will be a landmark. The Rev. Matthew Lamb, chairman of the theology department at the conservative Ave Maria University in Florida, thinks Come Be My Light will eventually rank with St. Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain as an autobiography of spiritual ascent. Martin of America, a much more liberal institution, calls the book “a new ministry for Mother Teresa, a written ministry of her interior life,” and says, "It may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone.

“Not all atheists and doubters will agree. Both Kolodiejchuk and Martin assume that Teresa’s inability to perceive Christ in her life did not mean he wasn’t there. In fact, they see his absence as part of the divine gift that enabled her to do great work. But to the U.S.'s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem absurd. They will see the book’s Teresa more like the woman in the archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband 30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Says Christopher Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a scathing polemic on Teresa, and more recently of the atheist manifesto God Is Not Great: “She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself.” Meanwhile, some familiar with the smiling mother’s extraordinary drive may diagnose her condition less as a gift of God than as a subconscious attempt at the most radical kind of humility: she punished herself with a crippling failure to counterbalance her great successes.”

http://www.time.com/...8599,1655415,00.html

For anyone remotely interested in faith, religion, belief, history, psychology or simply human nature, I’m thinking Come Be My Light should be on your short list.

(And, I never thought I’d see Mother Teresa’s name or legacy likened to a sex act; thank you Mr. Hitchens for that necessary and oh-so-clever double entendre. One can only wonder why the stereotype of the amoral Atheist flourishes.)

2

A portion of a Washington Post review of Hitchen’s work “God Is Not Great” (sounds vaguely familiar, no?):

"As should be obvious to any reasonable person – unlike Hitchens I do not exclude believers from this category – horrors and good deeds are performed by believers and non-believers alike. But in Hitchens’s Manichaean world, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Indeed, Hitchens arrives at the conclusion that the secular murderousness of Stalin’s purges wasn’t really secular at all, since, as he quotes George Orwell, “a totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy.” And in North Korea today, what has gone awry is not communism but Confucianism.

"Hitchens is not so forgiving when it comes to religion’s transgressions. He aims his poison pen at the Dalai Lama, St. Francis and Gandhi. Among religious leaders only the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. comes off well. But in the gospel according to Hitchens whatever good King did accrues to his humanism rather than his Christianity. In fact, King was not actually a Christian at all, argues Hitchens, since he rejected the sadism that characterizes the teachings of Jesus. “No supernatural force was required to make the case against racism” in postwar America, writes Hitchens. But he’s wrong. It was the prophetic faith of black believers that gave them the strength to stand up to the indignities of fire hoses and police dogs. As for those white liberals inspired by Paine, Mencken and Hitchens’s other secular heroes, well, they stood down.

"Hitchens says a lot of true things in this wrongheaded book. He is right that you can be moral without being religious. He is right to track contemporary sexism and sexual repression to ancient religious beliefs. And his attack on “intelligent design” is not only convincing but comical, coursing as it does through the crude architecture of the appendix and our inconvenient “urinogenital arrangements.”

"What Hitchens gets wrong is religion itself.

"Hitchens claims that some of his best friends are believers. If so, he doesn’t know much about his best friends. He writes about religious people the way northern racists used to talk about “Negroes” – with feigned knowing and a sneer. God Is Not Great assumes a childish definition of religion and then criticizes religious people for believing such foolery. But it is Hitchens who is the naïf. To read this oddly innocent book as gospel is to believe that ordinary Catholics are proud of the Inquisition, that ordinary Hindus view masturbation as an offense against Krishna, and that ordinary Jews cheer when a renegade Orthodox rebbe sucks the blood off a freshly circumcised penis. It is to believe that faith is always blind and rituals always empty – that there is no difference between taking communion and drinking the Kool-Aid (a beverage Hitchens feels compelled to mention no fewer than three times).
“If this is religion, then by all means we should have less of it. But the only people who believe that religion is about believing blindly in a God who blesses and curses on demand and sees science and reason as spawns of Satan are unlettered fundamentalists and their atheistic doppelgangers. Hitchens describes the religious mind as “literal and limited” and the atheistic mind as “ironic and inquiring.” Readers with any sense of irony – and here I do not exclude believers – will be surprised to see how little inquiring Hitchens has done and how limited and literal is his own ill-prepared reduction of religion.”

3

I will definitely be reading this book hopefully by the end of the year. For some reason I am eerily drawn to the notion of the “dark night” of the soul. It is both scary and inspiring to me.

Bernie

4

I seem to recall you mentioning a book you had read on the subject, sometime last year maybe?

5

Indeed, if you do a search for The Dark Night of the Soul you can find it from about a year ago. Peggy Noonan wrote a book called John Paul the Great and in it there is a chapter about Pope John Paul’s friendship with Mother Teresa. She also mentions Mother Teresa’s candidacy for sainthood. The idea that Mother Teresa could perceive that void yet continue to do the work she did is nothing short of amazing to me.

Bernie

6

The idea that Mother Teresa could perceive that void yet continue to do the work she did is nothing short of amazing to me.

That’s my take as well. Apparently, she didn’t want these letters made public, although it seems the man behind the book deemed them paramount in understanding who and what she was, and why. To me, the story of her dedication in the face of spiritual turmoil is far more fascinating than what I assume is the common perception of her life and faith. In terms of her legacy, it’s far more compelling and instructive (or destructive, depending on your viewpoint).

7

Great point. I look forward to this book. It is always interesting to read about when the giants of the faith go through their dry times like the rest of us. It is inspiring to me.

8

That’s what makes her story so compelling. It isn’t that she was a giant of faith going through occasional dry spells, it’s that she perceived herself as living in a spiritual desert, enjoying only brief periods of respite - yet she managed to live a life so few faithful ever have or will.

9

**It is always interesting to read about when the giants of the faith go through their dry times like the rest of us. It is inspiring to me. **

Yes, especially when their “dry time” is like most of their life!!! These revleations really add such an amazing dimension to who and what Mother Teresa was. It certainly makes her beatification seem a bit controversial. Her life/mission was so much more than what we thought it was. I can envision hardened religious skeptics taking pause after reviewing her life.

Bernie

10

"For some reason I am eerily drawn to the notion of the “dark night” of the soul. It is both scary and inspiring to me. "

You might REALLY like:

“Soul Survivor: How my faith survived the church” by Philip Yancey (editor of Christianity Today)

13 stories of faithful famous people who certainly have been through their tribulations of the soul. Includes Martin Luther King Jr, Gandi, Tolstoy, Dr. Paul Brand (who works with lepers), GK Chesterton, etc. Also includes really interesting true info on Yancey’s own struggles with the church he grew up in. Fascinating read, not always easy, and not sugar-coated. He’s a great writer and thinker - I used to own almost all his books.

Hope this helps,
Lauren

11

Thanks Lauren, I’ll check into this. I like the idea of faith surviving the (sometimes) unnatural and heavy nature of Religion and Church. The very amazing thing about Mother Teresa, is that she went the other way. She stayed with the Church despite the fact that she lost her Faith. I think she wrote something like she became unable to feel or see the presence of Jesus.

Naturally, I am getting all of these book recommendations just as I’m buying my texts for the next semester! I’ll get to them.

Bernie

12

I’m only posting this because there seemed to be a good bit of interest on the topic. I haven’t read the book or the Time review.

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=848