MOTHER TERESA

MOTHER TERESA

Opposition to making Teresa of Calcutta a saint strikes a discordant note. The reasons given for the opposition are that she was manipulative, accepted money from dictators and allowed poor standards of hygiene in her homes for the dying. As evidence of manipulation we are told that she once went to a supermarket and filled her trolley with goods. When she we went to the till she was told, “That will be $500.” “But,” she said, “this is for the poor!” “It is still $500.” Teresa insisted, “It’s for the poor.” An argument ensued and customers behind her got impatient until one of them said. “OK, I’ll pay.”  “You see,” Mother Teresa is said to have commented, “God provides!”

There may be truth in the story but the nuances are missing. The whole thrust of her life shows she constantly crossed boundaries most of us would not. And if we cannot admire that the problem is with us, not her. The other accusations, to my mind can also be seen off. What is missing in the assessment of these begrudgers, is any sense of the heroic character of her whole life from the time she left the relative comfort of the Loretto Convent in 1948 to the time of her death in 1997.

The “call within a call” to work among the poor filled her with consolation, a consolation that lasted as she took her first steps. But then she began to meet hostility. Who did she think she was, pushing into Hindu territory? People threw stones at her and her companions and there was an attempt on her life. And the consolation ended. We now know that she entered a period of spiritual darkness that endured for the rest of her life. She felt God was absent, heaven was empty and her sufferings were meaningless. “I feel just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing.”

When this great secret of her life broke, after her death, it stunned us. She seemed so peaceful, so at home in her work with the poor. And now we were learning that she struggled in a way that baffles us. Teresa gradually came to see that the darkness was the spiritual side of her work. The poor not only feel hungry, they feel abandoned. And now Teresa shared in this. She came to “love the darkness” and see it as a tiny part of the abandonment Jesus felt on the cross.

Poverty creates a gulf between the rich who “sprawl on ivory beds” (Amos) and the poor, like Lazarus who sits at the gate, and “longs to fill himself with scraps that fall from the rich man’s table. Teresa, like Jesus, sits with the poor man and ministers to him as best she can. And she suffers with them the great gulf that opens up when the poor are refused their place at the table of the world.  

25 September 2016     Sunday 26 C

Amos 6:1, 4-7             1 Tim 6:11-16             Luke 16:19-31