Reading Mother Teresa--Selflessness

For it is by grace you have been saved, 

through faith – and this is not from yourselves, 

it is the gift of God. . . . Ephesians 2:8

I was neither crushed nor heartbroken. It hadn’t worked out, this long-distance relationship she thought essential in defining our relationship. You’ll go to one college, and I’ll go to another, she’d explained when we were in our last year of high school. It was the kind of test she wanted – if we could last through a 500-mile separation, then viola! – we’d be a real thing, maybe even marry, although at 19 we were a long way from that kind of talk.

We failed, although it’s fair to say that she was the one who turned away. I was the faithful one – I kept troth, a word I’m sure I didn’t know back then, but makes me sound severely saintly. She didn’t, and, come summer, she broke it off, whatever it was we had, as they say. This isn’t spin.

Anyway, my grandma held down a seat on a bench full of neighborhood widows who, over coffee, likely held court on a variety of characters and issues, including, obviously, her grandson and his love life. She was trying to be sweet, I’m sure, when she told me what she did once the relationship was history. “Well, you know what the ladies say,” she told me, lovingly, “– maybe it’s better it’s over because she would have been the one who wore the pants.”

Makes me giggle yet today, all these years later.

And I can’t help thinking about what she said with respect – strangely enough! – to Mother Teresa because what she wanted more than anything, it seems, is to be selfless, not to wear the pants, ever. She wanted to be nothing for her Lord. She wanted him to be her’s. “I want to be at his disposal,” she wrote, often. Disposal, she said. I want to be rid of me.

I don’t have any doubt that the reason my grandmother’s double-edged comfort stays with me is because the image she created isn’t necessarily sympathetic of her grandson – Jimmy Milquetoast, a pushover, a patsy.

But then, in any relationship – even a marriage – selflessness is a virtue, right? – the polar opposite of pride, which is, remember, the first of the Seven Deadlies. But I didn’t read the implication of grandma’s assessment as positive. I didn’t want to be spineless. Who does?

That Jesus Christ wants us to live for him goes without saying. That he wants all of us, every bit of us, is a doctrine of scripture that no one can deny – heart, soul, and strength all for him. That Mother Teresa would want to be selfless in the divine presence of her Savior is not only understandable but saintly. “All to thee, my blessed Savior – I surrender all.”

Few believers in the history of the 20th century have come to epitomize so clearly true Christian service as Mother Teresa. Few believers could – and yet fewer believers have – so devoutly wished to be “disposed” of by Jesus Christ.

But the hard-core Calvinist in me can’t help but wonder if her life-long passion to be at “the disposal” of her Lord didn’t create something inverse, a rich and revealing self-abnegation that, psychologically speaking, made her feel totally unworthy of the very attention and love she so passionately craved. Perhaps, her fervent desire to be nothing left her, oddly enough, somehow believing she was far beyond the reach of his love.

Is there a limit to selflessness? What God wants, as orthodoxy would have it, is the death of “the old man of sin,” but not our death, nor our disposal. Does ardent selflessness somehow require the doubt, the darkness that Mother Teresa lived with for so many years?

That her suffering brought her closer to the suffering Christ is understandable, but we do – don’t we? – worship a risen Lord. That's the real story this Easter morning, just as much as any. Mother Teresa’s life is the very model of love, of Christian charity, of service devoutly to be praised. She is, even in this Calvinist’s sense, a saint.

But that her despair in his absence needs to be understood as necessary to her saintliness on the streets of Calcutta seems somehow wrong-headed.

Even in the royal robes of her righteousness, or so it seems to me, this saint remains one of us, a human being and, as such, she stands, as all of us do, in need of grace, in need of what only Christ could do this blessed Easter morning.

On that score, I think she would agree.