Tough talk, the Forerunner and Mother Teresa
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I’ve been thinking about John the Baptist. I know the Feast of the Beheading was last week and it’s time to move on, but I was struck as I went through the service by the Forerunner’s incredible courage in telling King Herod the truth.John “reproached the infidel king when he disobeyed the law. (2nd aposticha)” Did anyone else? Did any of the Pharisees or other religious leaders have the strength to stand up for the Law? There’s nothing to indicate they did. These days we hear a lot about how brave the people are who “speak truth to power.” But who of us even knows what that really means?
We live in privileged times. Dissatisfied people love to exaggerate their situation as a 21st-century American and try to imply that it takes tremendous guts to rant about Big Business or the current administration, but I don’t see how we can understand what it would really mean to risk your life in order to tell the truth.
And worse, maybe there’s a little King Herod in all of us.
How very much we despise someone telling us what we know, that we sin and fall short of the glory of God. And these days a person doesn’t even have to say such things. Apparently it’s enough merely to make it obvious to us by living a simple life of sacrifice to God. Or so I assume, given the recent media spin on Mother Teresa. As we near the tenth anniversary of her death, the media has uncorked a particularly odious bulletin: It turns out she wasn’t such a good person after all!
That seems to be the jist of last week’s cover article of Time, entitled Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith. The article draws on the evidence of Mother Teresa’s letters (which, by the way, she requested be burned after she died) in a recently published book “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light” to make a case that she was occasionally conflicted and suffered periods of doubt:…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.”
Mandatory litmus tests for Christians
Maybe I’m wrong to feel like this is a hit piece. The people at Get Religion are actually relieved to know that Mother Teresa had weak moments. Personally, it strikes me as being wearily familiar of the formula used to denounce anyone who preaches and manifests the grace of God. That formula seems to go:- Establish that they hold to a Christian ideal (exaggerating it, if possible, to make it seem bizarre and extreme)
- Find any evidence at all that they are not perfect (exaggerating that as well)
- Produce that evidence to prove conclusively that they are, in fact, (Favorite Word of the Day) hypocrites!
- Discard them manfully to the ashcan of history, with perhaps a short reminder that religion is bunk and true contentment can only be found in the comfortable misery of the world
So after ten years, we hear that Mother Teresa, who bore a cross every day that not many of us could lift, experienced times when God felt far away or absent. Is that supposed to undermine our respect for her? Consider this from St. John of Kronstadt (though I think I could have found many such examples):
Even the saints of God were at times seized with diabolical despair and despondency. What, therefore, can we sinners expect? O, the enemy often wounds us by the wrath, humiliation and cruel despondency of the heart!
or again
Sometimes, just when we begin to delight in the Lord, the enemy soon after, either himself or through men, brings the greatest sorrow upon us. Such is the lot of those who are laboring in this life for the Lord.
These ‘dark nights of the soul’ aren’t insignificant, but neither are they newsworthy. What makes these pundits think that Mother Teresa’s lifetime of sacrifice and service was a sham but the doubts she occasionally experienced constituted her “real” life?
John the Baptist’s “Secret Life”
Take John the Baptist, for example. He had lived his entire life in asceticism, had been filled with the Holy Spirit while still a babe in the womb, had seen the Holy Spirit descend on Christ in the form of a dove and heard the voice of the Father testify that this was His Beloved Son, and yet when John was in prison, he suffered doubts. As Metropolitan Anthony put it:
Two thousand years ago a man was waiting for death, John the Baptist, and before he died, when he knew that death was inevitable, he sent two of his disciples to Christ to ask Him ‘Are you He for whom we waited, or shall we expect another one?’ That means ‘If you are Him, then my life of asceticism, my aloneness, my preaching, my imprisonment and death, all the tragedy and hardship of my life, make sense. But if you are not, then I have been betrayed by God and by man, by my own inspiration and by the weakness of the living God. Are you He?’ Christ did not give him a direct answer. He gave him the answer of the prophet: ‘Go and tell him what you see — the blind see, the lame walk and the poor proclaim the good news — news about God — news about man.’ The humility of the one and the greatness of the other.
(Mpn Anthony of Sourozh “God and Man”)
If the one Christ called “the greatest born of women” had doubts, why should we be surprised that we all do? But again, why should we define our saints by their weakest moments? I think the tendency to do that has more to do with the desperate need of secular people to discredit godliness and vindicate themselves than it does to the purported wish to get at the facts.
That may sound cynical, but going back to Time’s article on Mother Teresa, we find some decidedly sour notes at the end. Uncovering her “secret life” apparently is just the appetizer; assailing the Christian faith itself is the main course.
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.”
This is why I think it’s important to begin to understand what might be required of us. Perhaps we think that such a vicious lie aimed at the heart of Christianity won’t touch us, that we only have to maintain a low profile and strive to get along. We may not think we have it in us to do what John the Baptist did or Mother Teresa, but we can’t determine the times we live in. God determines them.
All the more reason to commemorate the Forerunner and the saints who have come after. All the more reason to resist these attempts to slander those whose greatest crime was to tell the truth, either by their words or by their actions.
Lest it sound like too thankless of a calling, consider for a second the joy of the Forerunner. He was the first to bear witness of the coming of Christ to both the living and the dead, since, in the words of the festal troparion, “the beheading of the glorious Forerunner was by divine providence, that the coming of the Savior might be preached to those in hades.”
And as for what it felt like to live as he lived, I was uplifted by the portion of Isaiah that foretold his coming:
1Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.
2Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.
3The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
4Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:
5And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.
6The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:
7The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.
8The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
9O Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountain; O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!
10Behold, the Lord GOD will come with strong hand, and his arm shall rule for him: behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him.
(Isaiah 40:1–10)
Through the intercessions of the Forerunner, O Savior, save us.
Related posts:
- Happy Mother’s Day with head noogies
- Feel the truth
- “Lord, have mercy”, cont.
- The beauty of soulless grass
- It is truly meet
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9 Responses and Counting...
Amen! What a beautiful reflection and way to tie the two saints together (because I actually, while not an Orthodox saint, believe that Mother Teresa is a RCC Saint). And, to meditate on what the lesson of the letters is (other than to burn your letters before you die, if you can).
And, I think it is very good to meditate on hagiographies, even when the offical commemoration is over!
As always — phew! Because these were thoughts that had been bumbling around in my head for a bit, and once I tried to write them down, it seemed to me that I was “all over the place.”
But yes, I found myself thinking that John the Baptist gets a bit of a short shrift (though of course you’ve got other feast days of his to reflect on).
And Mother Teresa — well, what can you say? For all my formative years, she was the generic way to refer to anyone who was a living saint, above all reproach. I suppose it says a lot that it’s taken 10 years for the world to figure out a way to try to defame her.
I have the book of a few of her written thoughts, and I couldn’t read it all the way through, I was so struck with how puny my attempts at doing good are by comparison.
“burn your letters before you die.”
AMEN! I’ve got journals I’ve kept for the past 20 years or so, and I’m trying to figure out how I can strike a match to the whole lot of them as I’m on my deathbed.
My mother has made me promise that if she dies suddenly, so that she can’t burn her journals, that she wants me to burn them without reading them. I have definitely made that promise, as I totally understand.
Yep, that’s exactly what I would ask of Greg, but I wouldn’t guarantee he’d comply. It’s funny really, and it may not make any sense at all to someone who doesn’t write a journal. “If you want them burned anyway, why not do it yourself?” But there’s this infinitessimal chance that there may be something I wrote 10 years ago that I’ll want to look at. Apart from that, though, I feel like there’s a LOT of stuff I don’t want anyone to see.
I suspect she asked me because I don’t think my sister would comply. Or, maybe she’s asked both of us and I don’t know it.
No, I can’t see her them burning them now, because I know she re-reads them. I don’t journal, but I do understand.
Grace.… hey, more power to you. I read this “Time” piece at the gym and quit at the Hitchens quote thinking: “Him again!” There is tremendous animus… and I guess before I was Orthodox I really didn’t see it or understand the full impact of the assault. And le Forerunnierre (he was French, doncha know? the Forerunner of the Bohemian Look)… well, I haven’t spent enough time there… but he keeps popping up. Very nicely done.
Yes, without saints.… as one Greek priest put it, “What would be the point?” It’s not their perfection, but their humanity that is precisely the challenge.… to us… to follow in their pursuit of righteousness. But to take it even further, it is the sense that what matters is only what Mother Theresa thought… as if belief is only ideas… and not a life. She lived a life in Christ in spite of her struggles. And personally, having just finished “The Life of Moses”, I tend to believe that the “darkness” is the deepest point of belief… where the experience of God far surpasses all that we know… to the point that perhaps we may be unaware. Certainly it must be a point beyond language and cognitive recall. It is the point where Moses, who was led by the light and experienced God in the light.… suddenly experiences him in darkness.
I guess I’m not so sure that out of context — and it is all quoted out of context in the article — that we can truly be so certain precisely what M. Theresa was referring to. I give her faith the benefit of the doubt. Hitchens doesn’t. Hmmmm. Is that really news?
Maybe that says something more about Time than about anything else.
Insightful and eloquent (as usual), but also encouraging. Yes, I said it. From my unfailingly self-centered point of view, it’s encouraging to know that even saints struggled and experienced dark moments. I, for one, need all the encouragement I can get that you can struggle and fail, yet ultimately live with God.
I think sometimes I’m a little bi-polar about my saints. I want to know that they struggled with the same things I struggle with, but I don’t want to hear non-Christians just get bash-happy because they’ve got a secular idea of what the ascetic life is for.
Does that make any sense? Probably not.