Reading Mother Teresa--Amazing Grace

 

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith

 – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God

 – not by works, so that no one can boast. Ephesians 2:8–9

It had to have been a troublesome question – “have you never had any doubt about God?” That’s what he asked her, a journalist, someone undoubtedly given to announce her answer as publicly as a billboard, maybe more so. He was writing her story, after all.

Anyone who reads her letters and notes knows the answer, sort of. Of her doubts, there were many: doubts the size and intensity of a killer twister, doubts that Jesus loved her, doubts that she was worthy, doubts that her savior was anywhere near Calcutta.

But that’s not the way she answered the writer’s question. “There was no doubt,” she told the journalist. “. . . The moment you accept, the moment you surrender yourself, that’s the conviction” (259).

Excuse me?

Did MT lie? I don’t think so. Mother Teresa’s doubt had far more to do with her than it did with Jesus, far less to do with his love than her unworthiness to receive it. It’s impossible not to think her answer wasn’t heartfelt truth – “There was no doubt,” she told him, and she meant it, no matter what we might think ourselves.

And let’s be clear here. I’m not sure anyone – even Mother Teresa – really understands grace. An old preacher once told me he thought it more than passing strange that we human beings love to get most anything we can for free . . . except grace, which all of us really want to earn. Most every Christian I know wants to be worthy of God’s love, to be someone God smiles upon because, my goodness, we’ve battled the tempter for all these years and kept him at bay. We’ve run a good race. We’ve kept the faith. We’ve deliberately walked the paths of righteousness.

To all of that, grace says, “Big deal.”

I can’t help but think once again of Martin Luther the Scale Santa, going up the stairs in Rome in the prescribed way, the holy way, on his knees, only to get to the top and be haunted by the conviction of a false promise. The story goes that once on the top stair, his mind kept saying, the just shall live by faith, not works – that any man should boast. That’s the way the story goes.

“Without Him I can do nothing,” Mother Teresa told the reporter. “But even God could do nothing for someone already full.” And then: “You have to be completely empty to let Him in to do what He will” (260).

Completely empty, she told him. Completely, totally empty.

I’m not sure any human being in her time did as much to empty herself as did Mother Teresa. She’d promised her body and soul, in life and in death, to her faithful savior Jesus Christ; she tried to be nothing, nothing at all. Still, she spent most of her life determined that he’d somehow abandoned her.

Maybe what she wanted to feel was her own unworthiness, what she wanted to offer God himself was a life that had absolutely nothing to do with self, a life that was not her life but his. She attempted self-abasement to be loved by the God who’d sent her on a mission she’d begun and then run among the poorest of the poor. Because she needed to be nothing, she got down on her knees and suffered the debasement of selflessness because she wanted so badly to love and be loved.

I don’t know that anyone really understands grace, understands love that is totally unmerited, catches on to the logic of the gift of life forever. Like the Galatians, for some human reason, we all want to earn it.

All of us.