The Love that Made Saint Teresa

Secret visions, dark nights and the path to sainthood

David Scott

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780281077052
• eBook ISBN: 9780281077069
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Part biography, part spiritual reading, this beautifully written book brings to light little-known stories from the extraordinary life of Saint Teresa of Calcutta. Here you will meet the woman who challenged the ancient Goddess of Death to become the first saint of our global village. You will learn of the remarkable mystical visions that led her to start the Missionaries of Charity. You will read, in lines drawn from her secret letters, about her long dark night of the soul. And you will discover the infinite love that enabled her to shine through the clouds of despair and suffering that she encountered as she gave herself to God's work. Let Saint Teresa be your guide, as through this book she shows how you too can receive and radiate the love of Christ in the ordinary events of your life.

Part I

The Scent of Sanctity

You know my God.
My God is called love.

Mother Teresa

1

A Mother Made Blessed

What’s so special about Mother Teresa? Why did everybody from the president of the United States to your neighbor next door call her a “living saint”? Why, now that she is dead, is the Roman Catholic Church ready to affirm with finality that she is dwelling in heaven, near to the face of God, a saint from whom we can ask prayers and after whom we can pattern our lives?

If we go with the official definition of a saint from the Catholic catechism, we would say she is worthy of sainthood because she “practiced heroic virtue”—that she lived by faith, hope, and love and was prudent, just, temperate, and brave. St. John Paul II said as much on October 19, 2003, when he beatified Mother Teresa during a solemn ceremony before a throng of three hundred thousand devotees in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.

In advancing her status from “blessed” to “saint” on September 4, 2016, Pope Francis described her as a living witness to God’s mercy. Francis had met Mother Teresa in Rome in 1994, when he was still a cardinal from Buenos Aires. At the time, he joked about how tough she was, saying he would have been afraid of her if she had been his religious superior.

Mother Teresa, in fact, met all four of the popes who have led the Catholic Church since the mid-1960s—and she left her mark on each of them. Not only for her toughness, but for her humble love for Jesus and her selfless service to the poorest of the poor. But force of personality alone does not explain why the Church has inscribed her name in the official canon or register of saints.

Nonetheless, now that Mother Teresa has been canonized as St. Teresa of Kolkata, you can name churches after her, pray for her help, read her writings as bearing a certain divine stamp of approval, and make her your role model. The Church will celebrate her feast day every year on September 5, the anniversary of the day she died in 1997.

None of this, however, helps us figure out what qualifies her for such lofty stature in the first place.

It cannot be because she led a stirring life. She has no dramatic conversion story. She wasn’t knocked off a horse and blinded by a brilliant light and a voice from heaven, as St. Paul was. We find with her none of the high sexual drama that Augustine confessed. There is none of the shuttle diplomacy of Bridget of Sweden or Catherine of Siena. Unlike St. Thomas More, she didn’t have her head chopped off for standing in the way of a lusty king’s ambitions. Her contemporary Padre Pio, declared a saint in 2002, was a stigmatic, one whose hands and feet bore wounds like those of Christ. Teresa wasn’t one of those either.

Mother Teresa was simply a cradle Catholic raised in a pious, generous home, who went off at age eighteen to be a nun in the missions in Kolkata, India, which in her lifetime was known as Calcutta. Some years later, she was riding on a train, and she heard a voice that she took to be that of Jesus telling her to leave her religious order to serve the poor. So that’s what she did.

But the work that made her famous, while admirable, wasn’t all that exceptional, especially for a nun. You can find plenty of people doing what she did—taking care of the sick and the dying, finding homes for abandoned children, defending the poor, the unwanted, and the unborn.

There is no denying she was a devout, deeply prayerful woman who knew her Bible. But a great spiritual master, a poet laureate of the soul—these things she was apparently not. She was a saint of the commonplace—a sound-bite saint—uttering gnomic things such as, “Do something beautiful for God” and “Many people are talking about the poor, but very few people talk to the poor.”

“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” the great essayist George Orwell wrote of Mahatma Gandhi. And there have always been plenty of people ready to bring up Mother Teresa on charges of being a great fakir in whom can be found much guile, a kind of Trojan horse for reactionary popery and medieval morals, a peddler of religious Prozac for the poor.

That’s not unusual. Saints always attract their share of detractors and devil’s advocates. The sermons of St. John Vianney so incensed dance-hall proprietors in his nineteenth-century French town that they used to send ladies of ill repute to sing lewd songs outside his window about how he had sired love-children by them.

A lot of people didn’t like what Mother Teresa stood for either. She drew fire from a loose coalition of atheists and agnostics, abortion advocates, and others who wanted the Catholic Church of the late twentieth century to start endorsing a lot of things it had never endorsed before—women priests, birth control, violent revolution, divorce, and more.

What really seemed to rankle her detractors was the success of the religious order she founded, the Missionaries of Charity—more than four thousand nuns serving the poor in 123 countries by the time of her death in 1997, along with another four hundred or so religious “brothers” and thousands of lay volunteers.

What her opponents couldn’t explain, some tried to chalk up to corruption and ill-gotten gain. But even these folks couldn’t turn any real dirt on her.

One of Orwell’s brightest disciples, British journalist Christopher Hitchens, tried the hardest. But his 1995 exposé, The Missionary Position, when shorn of its antireligious cant, actually exposed very little: her hospices for the destitute dying needed modernizing; she kept the names of those who gave her money confidential, along with the amounts of their donations; and she sometimes supped with sinners and accepted contributions from them.

Reality with Mother Teresa was far less sinister: she worked hard, prayed a lot, lived simply, and died as she lived—her personal effects consisting of a prayer book, a pair of sandals, and a couple of saris, the trademark blue and white linen habit of her order.

2

What Becomes a Saint

Is this enough to make you a saint—to lead a simple, prayerful life and do good unto others? Yes and no. Inevitably, with this line of questioning, you wind up taking a sort of reductionist approach to sainthood, as if being named a saint is like getting the gold watch for a lifetime of loyal Catholic service.

To really understand why the Church wants to call Mother Teresa a saint and to understand her meaning for our times requires putting out into the depths of the Catholic psyche and imagination. Other religious traditions esteem holy men and women (mostly men, it must be said): Buddhists have bodhisattvas and Hindus their gurus; Jews have tzaddikim and Muslims their awliya’ Allah. Only in Catholicism do we find holy humans at the center of the cult and culture of the religion, as if hardwired into the deep structures of believers’ identities.

“Our Church is the Church of the saints … Those who have once realized this have found their way to the very heart of the Catholic faith,” Catholic essayist and novelist Georges Bernanos wrote in the 1930s.

The outsider sees only what he labels as kitsch—St. Christopher medals on dashboards, “Thank you, St. Jude!” ads in the classifieds, animal and throat blessings, Madonnas with puppy-dog eyes and flaming hearts. But even these more exuberant expressions of popular piety reflect a sensibility that’s authentically and uniquely Catholic.

Catholics hold that God, the maker of the universe, came down from heaven and became a real flesh-and-blood man named Jesus; that he grew from an embryo in a mother’s womb, experienced all the joys and anguish of human existence, save for sin; that he died and rose, body and soul, into heaven. Catholics believe that this same Jesus every day becomes their real food and drink, that he comes to their altars always and everywhere his Church remembers his death and Resurrection in the Eucharist.

God does all this, Catholics believe, because he wants human beings to share in his very own life. This is the essence of a short prayer the priest prays silently at the altar before every Eucharist: “By the mingling of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

Think of the saints as God’s answer to that prayer. The prayer itself grew out of a slogan used in the early Church, a kind of snappy shorthand for what Catholicism is still supposed to be all about: “God became human so that humans might become divine.”

Catholics believe that because Jesus shared our human life, we can share his. Because he became human, humans can aspire to the divine. Jesus showed not only the face of God, but the true face of the human person and thus the glorious place that men and women hold in God’s creation. “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” That was another important slogan in the early Church, attributed first to St. Irenaeus, a bishop in late-second-century Lyons.

The saints embody what Irenaeus was talking about—the human person most fully alive, living the life that Jesus came to give, a divine life in human skin. If dogmas and doctrines are the theorem, the saints are the proofs of Catholicism.

The saints aren’t angels. Nor are they like Hindu avatars—incarnate visitors from the Godhead. The saints are human, all too human in some cases. When the Church declares somebody a saint, she is not saying that the person never sinned or made a mistake. She doesn’t mean that the saint said, did, or thought the saintly thing in every circumstance.

You can take the saint out of the world, but you can’t take the world completely out of the saint. Saints can be as blinkered as the rest of us in their social and political opinions and as prone as others to the prejudices of their time and place. Sainthood doesn’t even guarantee that these people were much fun to be around—some are known to have been quirky, cantankerous, and temperamental.

Saints, in short, are still sinners. But we don’t have to go so far as to embrace Ambrose Bierce’s cynical definition in The Devil’s Dictionary: “A saint is a dead sinner, revised and edited.”

What sets the saints—flaws and all—apart from the rest of us is their powerful thirst for the holy, for total communion with God. They stand out because of their constant struggle to rise above the selfish limits of their human nature, to love with all their strength, to live by the grace of God alone.

We don’t know what secret sins or temptations Mother Teresa struggled with. Certainly her visible sins and failings were negligible. We suspect she may have confessed to a sin similar to the one Orwell guessed to be Gandhi’s: “vanity … the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power.”

Mother Teresa did appear to be keenly aware of the persuasive moral power that lay in her stooped, diminutive appearance, her poverty, and her prayerfulness. And people were sometimes surprised at how little she suffered fools and how relentless and demanding she could be in pursuing her objectives.

Bob Geldof fronted a rock band called the Boomtown Rats and spearheaded celebrity concerts in the 1980s to raise money for Africa’s needy. He met Mother Teresa in Ethiopia and came away with these thoughts:

There was nothing otherworldly or divine about her. The way she spoke to the journalists showed her to be as deft a manipulator of media as any high-powered American public relations expert. She does a sort of “Oh dear, I’m just a frail old lady” schtick … There was no false modesty about her and there was a certainty of purpose, which left her little patience. But she was totally selfless; every moment her aim seemed to be, how can I use this or that situation to help others?

Supposing this is an accurate description, is this mix of calculation, ambition, and media savvy inconsistent with holiness? Hardly. Did she, as Orwell wondered about Gandhi, compromise her religious beliefs by mucking around in the worlds of politics and media to achieve her objectives? Maybe a little. Does it disqualify her from sainthood? If you think so, you’re laboring under a gingerbread, holy-card idea of sainthood. The mistake is to equate divinity and sanctity with otherworldliness—as ...

Table of contents

• CoverImage
• Imprint
• Dedication1
• Contents
• Dedication2
• Part I: The Scent of Sanctity
• Part II: Love Like a Child’s
• Part III: Our “Calcutta of the Heart”
• Part IV: Mother in Our Dark Time
• Sources
• About the Author
• Charity