August 27, 2007
Works
Today is the birthday of Mother Teresa, born in the city of Skopje, Macedonia (1910). Her father was murdered when she was seven, and her family fell into poverty. She was educated by Irish missionary nuns and decided to follow in their footsteps. Her first assignment was in Calcutta, India.
One day, she found a woman dying in the street and sat with her, stroking her head until she died. That experience inspired her to found a new religious order, the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, devoted to anyone “unwanted, unloved, and uncared for.” By the time she died, the order consisted of more than 5,000 nuns and brothers, operating more than 2,500 orphanages, schools, clinics, and hospices in 120 countries, including the United States.*
Her letters and journals have recently revealed that for the final decades of her exemplary life she had lost all touch with God and with her faith, and that to bear this was of considerable agony for her. Yet in no way was it apparent that this affected either the diligence or the results of her work with the poor.
It does raise, however, not only something of the ambiguity of the word “faith,” but the travesty we churchers can often make of it. Every chance it gets, religion seems to stifle faith. Perhaps one of its more subtle ways is its often successful attempt to make of faith, itself, a religion, to make a deeply subjective personal commitment, capacity for perseverance and risk into a rigid system of right and wrong. Some religious orders, ever so much as churches, are are especially capable of this sort of thing.
One only has to look over on page 845 in the Book of Common Prayer and compare that neat and innocent, albeit bold, title there, “An Outline of the Faith,” as if faith can actually be outlined. Then compare every bishop’s ordination vow to “guard the Faith.” If that doesn’t scare the beejeebies out of the purple as it surely should out of the rest of us, then we’re simply not paying attention.
The religious establishment in Jesus’ day similarly put their dogma ahead of his faith, and subsequently, of course, his humanity. How easily they and we forget how inseparable are his kind of humanity and faith. Perhaps you’ve noticed how the practice continues, how it has apparently never been out of vogue, and how it remains so firmly planted today that it threatens the very life of the community that has helped give it the freedom which it so misuses. It was that milieu that forced Jesus to say that even though all else has its place, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8.20).
Recalling that saying of Jesus’s and hearing this news about Mother Teresa, I remember another Theresa, the Saint of Lysieux, who surely had something like this in mind when with such spiritual insight she wrote, “If you are willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter.”
When those times come that we cannot accept ourselves for some self-imposed reason, or for some so-called orthodoxy that equally imposes and that rejects God’s forgiving grace for all and prevents our own wholeness, then we have turned against this “freedom (for which) Christ has set us free.” But if we can love ourselves — and our neighbor — in spite of all we know to be unlovable about the both of us, if we can will to bear serenely that trial of being displeasing to ourselves, indeed, even if we “lose” our faith, especially that systematized faith of which we’re so proud (but often cross our fingers about during the Nicene Creed) then we will indeed be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter where the Son of Man can lay his head. We may even be for Jesus… a church.
Mother Theresa received the Nobel Peace Prize for her true compassion with the poor and the sick and the dying. She has wisely been beatified by Rome. She will probably be canonized, they say, once an appropriate miracle can be found and attributed to her.
If her servant leadership, especially under such wrenching spiritual duress, is not miracle enough, then perhaps the fact that her image once actually appeared on a sweet roll from one of our town’s local bakeries will suffice. And if even that is not sufficient, at least she should be credited with finally turning around that oft quoted and embarrassingly challenging saying from that stuffy old St James that “faith without works is dead.” After all what has she done but show us that works without faith is altogether alive and kicking to beat hell?
*Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac.”
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