MOTHER TERESA IN HER OWN WORDS
A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown
Market Square Presbyterian Church
All Saints’ Sunday
October 28, 2007
Scripture
Psalm 31:1-5, 19-24 and 2 Corinthians 12:1-10
We Presbyterians have never known quite what to do with saints. Part of the reason is that in the New Testament the word for saint—hagios or holy one—denotes someone consecrated to Christ and dedicated to holy living. For Paul and the early church, all Christians were saints.
This is why he addresses his second letter to the Corinthians like this: “To the church of God that is in Corinth, including all the saints throughout Achaia”—which was the Roman province that included most of what is modern day Greece. All Greek Christians were saints—not because of their perfect lives, but because they knew that they were being perfected through the power of God working in them as they followed Jesus Christ.
This whole matter has come to the forefront in recent days with articles and comments about Mother Teresa, who was canonized, who was declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church in 2003. This understanding of sainthood rests on the conviction that there are Christians whose lives are so exemplary, so Christ-like, that they deserve to be set apart and given a special mark of sainthood.
We all know something of Mother Teresa’s story. She was born in Skopje in Macedonia in 1910 and joined the Sisters of Loreto in Dublin in 1928. Thereafter she was sent to India and taught at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta from 1931 to 1948. She then left the Loreto order, after quite a struggle with her superiors, to begin the Missionaries of Charity. Her work with the poorest of the poor, with the dying, the suffering, the outcasts, the AIDS patients, the unwed mothers in the slums of India—led to worldwide acclaim. In 1979 she received the Nobel Peace Prize, and as I pointed out, was declared a saint of the Catholic Church in 2003.
I probably wouldn’t be preaching about her today except for the fact that a few months ago a book was published the title, Mother Teresa—Come Be My Light—The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta. The book consists her reflections and letters to those who served as her spiritual confessors—writings she had asked to be destroyed, but which were kept by those who knew the world would benefit by learning about Mother Teresa’s inner life.
I first read about the book in an editorial in The New York Times, of all places, under the heading, “A Saint of Darkness.” That got my attention. I ordered the book. And I’m glad I did.
The very heart of the book is Mother Teresa’s struggle with terrible darkness, with doubt, with a radical sense of disconnection from God for long stretches in her life. This led her at one point to make what the editor of her writings calls her mission statement, one that at first seems quite odd:
If I ever become a saint—I will surely be
one of “darkness.” I will continually be
absent from heaven—to light the light of
those in darkness on earth. [p. 230]
In a letter to one of her spiritual directors, probably written in April of 1961, she was even more explicit about her days and nights of darkness:
Now Father—since 49 or 50 this terrible sense of loss—
this untold darkness—this loneliness—this continual
longing for God—which gives me that pain deep down
in my heart—Darkness is such that I really do not see—
neither with my mind or with my reason—the place of
my God in my soul is blank—There is no God in me—
when the pain of longing is so great—I just long & long
for God—and then it is that I feel—He does not want me—
He is not there--…God does not want me—Sometimes—I
just hear my own heart cry out—“My God” and nothing
else comes—The torture and pain I can’t explain-—
I think you can see why this book is such a puzzle for many. What I found instructive was the point in one of her letters in March of 1962 in which she ties her own struggle to that of Paul’s about which we read in our lesson for today. Paul talks about a mysterious ‘thorn’ in his flesh that haunts him. Some of thought this might have been a physical ailment like epilepsy or a failure of sight or emotional distress—no one knows for sure.
It’s what comes next in Paul’s story that touches Mother Teresa’s soul. The Lord said to Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness. So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” Mother Teresa calls this the Mystery of Redemption, and what a mystery it is. Listen to what she wrote to the sisters in her Order in July of 1961:
My dear children—without our suffering, our work would just be
social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work
of Jesus Christ, not part of the redemption.—Jesus wanted to help
us by sharing our life, our loneliness, our agony and death. All
that He has taken upon Himself, and has carried it in the darkest
night. Only by being one with us He has redeemed us. We are
allowed to do the same: All the desolation of the poor people, not
only their material poverty, but their spiritual destitution must be
redeemed, and we must have our share in it….
Yes, my dear children—let us share the sufferings—
of our Poor—for only by being one with them—
we can redeem them, that is, bringing God into their
lives and bringing them to God. [p. 220]
A pivotal point in Mother Teresa’s life had come when she heard the voice of Christ pleading with her, “Come, come, carry me into the holes of the poor. Come, be My light.” What is remarkable in her story is that even when darkness plagued her, she carried on her work of bringing the light of Christ to the poor and dispossessed.
When all is said and done, Mother Teresa in her days of light and her days of darkness took to heart Christ’s words, “Love one another as I have loved you.” She is surely a saint, as are all who make their way along the same pathway of faith with similar devotion and courage.
“Today,” she said in a speech in Rome in October of 1982, “”God keeps on loving the world. He keeps on sending you and me to prove that He loves the world, that He still has that compassion for the world. It is we who have to be His love, His compassion in the world of today. But to be able to love we must have faith, for faith in action is love, and love is action in service.” [p. 338]
The New York Times editorial about Mother Teresa quoted the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor: “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.” Yes, it is. It’s good to be reminded that coming to faith and keeping faith takes work. God’s grace sets our faith journeys in motion, and then comes the work.
Mother Teresa’s sainthood rests on her dogged desire to be with Christ in his humiliation, in his self-giving love, as she lived among the poor of India—doubts and all. We do well to read her letters and admire her work. In so doing, we find her to be a real human being committed to doing good in the world. It is this kind of saints the world needs now, saints who identify themselves with Jesus and the poorest of the poor.
Mother Teresa deserves the last word. Here is the story with which Come Be My Light draws to a close. It’s a good one for us to hear on All Saints’ Sunday.
I will never forget the first time I came to Bourke and visited
the sisters. We went to the outskirts of Bourke. There was a
big reserve where all the Aborigines were living in those little
small shacks made of tin and old card-board and so on. Then
I entered one of those little rooms. I call it a house but it’s only
one room, and inside the room everything. So I told the man
living there, “Please allow me to make your bed, to wash your
clothes, to clean your room.” And he kept saying, “I’m alright,
I’m alright.” And I said to him, “But you will be more alright
if you allow me to do it.” Then at the end he allowed me.
He allowed me in such a way that, at the end, he pulled out
from his pocket an old envelope, and one more envelope, and
one more envelope. He started opening one after the other,
and right inside there was a little photograph of his father and
he gave me that to look at. I looked at the photo and I looked
at him and I said, “You, your are so like your father.” He was
so overjoyed that I could see the resemblance of his father on
his face. I blessed the picture and I gave it back to him, and
again one envelope, second envelope, third envelope, and the
photo went back into the pocket near his heart. After I cleaned
the room I found in the corner of the room a big lamp full of
dirt and I said, “Don’t you light this lamp, such a beautiful
lamp. Don’t you light it?” He replied, “For whom? Months
and months and months nobody has ever come to me. For
whom will I light it?” So I said “Won’t you light it if the
Sisters come to you?” And he said, “Yes.” So the sisters
started going to him for only about 5 to 10 minutes a day,
but they started lighting that lamp. After some time he got
into the habit of lighting. Slowly, slowly, slowly, the
Sisters stopped going to him. Then I forgot completely
about that, and then after two years he sent word—“Tell
Mother, my friend, the light she lit in my life is still burning.”
[pp. 340-41]