Reading Mother Teresa--Guilt

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart 

and with all your soul and with all your mind 

and with all your strength.” Mark 12:30 

The very first Dutchman I ever met – I mean, someone from the Netherlands – told me that my people, Dutch Calvinist Americans, were the kind of uptight people Holland “got rid of,” the kind, he said, who couldn’t ride bikes on Sunday.

I couldn’t ride my bike on Sunday.

My people were Sabbatarians, big-time Sabbatarians, a word my spell checker doesn’t recognize. What I mean is, I had a list as long as my arm of things I couldn’t do on the Sunday. We were orthodox Jews in wooden shoes, although we nailed down the first day of the week, not the last.

I don’t regret my religious childhood. It may well have been, well, strenuously spiritual, but that’s okay. Besides, most people my age – Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Church of Christ – had their own firmly established principles of right and wrong, a code, often only vaguely understood, by which they, as believers, defined themselves.

Many reasons exist to explain why my people were strict on Sunday (my mother-in-law couldn’t use a scissors), and piety was one of them; but another, I think, was identity. Maintaining Sabbath purity separated us even from other Christians and allowed a good heavy dose of assurance about who we were in a polyglot society where you couldn’t count on your neighbor having a pocket full of peppermints.

Codes sustain identity – I know something of who you are if I understand how you spend your Sundays. But to know thyself, as honorable as that is (saith Socrates), also implies knowing who isn’t you – and knowing (tsk, tsk) what isn’t, well, proper. If I know what the word impropriety means, it suggests I know guilt.

Guilt, Garrison Keillor says, is the gift that goes on giving, and I’m as much an unhappy recipient as anyone. Up until July, I was the only member of my family who went to two Sunday services, even though we were all raised that way. I’ve now decided enough is enough. Sound impressive? – come six o’clock Sunday night, I’ll be hiding somewhere, not from others, but from my own thorny guilt.

More confession: I feel guilty when I read what Mother Teresa told the Archbishop in a letter begging him to allow her to create the mission that Christ himself, she claimed, had commanded her to do. “I have been longing to be all for Jesus and to make other souls – especially Indian, come and love Him fervently,” she wrote, “– to identify myself with Indian girls completely, and so love Him as He has never been loved before” (47, emphasis mine).

Striking, I think – really striking: “So love Him as He has never been loved before.” I find that a gargantuan mission. If I honestly didn’t believe her a saint, I’d think it was posturing, wouldn’t you? Rhetoric. Talk, talk, talk. How can anyone really believe that he or she will gain a level of love for Jesus that no one – NO ONE! – in the history of mankind has ever reached?

I don’t envy her. I don’t think I’d ever, ever say anything like that, and yet I believe that in life and in death, in body and soul, I belong to Jesus. Okay, I feel a species of guilt scratching at my throat when I read that line because it’s something I’d never ever considered – that my love for Jesus might possibly be greater than anyone else’s. I’ve never aspired to become the Champion of the World in love for Christ.

But she thought so, and, I believe, she thought so purely.

Here and there MT’s writings suggest what she was made of and how what she was made of nurtured her into what she became. Right here is one such moment. The pledge she sets for herself is way beyond reason: to “so love Him as He has never been loved before.”

Yet, I don’t doubt her. Okay, I doubt myself most every day, but I don’t doubt her.

Amazing.