Reading Mother Teresa--"Be the One"

And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, 

and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. When he rose from prayer and went back to the disciples, he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow. 

Luke 22:44–45

The American Puritans exercised a kind of typology that may well have been, finally, their own undoing. Their strict attention to the very words of scripture suggested parallels in their own lives that were, I’m sure, as exciting as they were perilous. In the pattern of a persecuted people, they left England as if they were Israelites bound for the promised land. Their reading of the story of the God’s chosen people opened its arms to them in a fashion that allowed them to identify with Israel so completely that the distinction between biblical history and their own virtually disappeared.

The horror of such close identification – and there are horrors – is that those who read their themselves into the Bible’s story can all too easily identify those forces working against them as being in the service of the Great Deceiver: we’re God’s chosen; if you’re against us, you’re against him. Dissent becomes deviltry.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always been skeptical of the kind of identification that too quickly makes claims for who gets the love of God – and who gets his scorn and punishments. It’s not difficult for a steadfast believer to identify too closely with the great biblical stories.

But then, it may be I read the Bible too historically, to at-a-distance. One can err, I’m sure, in both extremes. Mother Teresa, for instance, had no similar problem. Her strengths sometimes arose from her immediate identification with the gospel she so treasured.

There’s another t-shirt-quality phrase in her lexicon that I should really try to market. It has all kinds of possibilities, and it’s built on her intimate identification with a gospel account that itself is unforgettable.

The night Jesus’s passion begins, he takes some of his closest friends along to the Mount of Olives to pray, to ponder the events he knows all too well are coming. It’s going to be an all-nighter, hours of bloody sweat-filled supplication to his own blessed Father.

And when, just for a moment, he turns away, he looks around, only to find his friends, his disciples, his hand-picked, lovingly-nurtured followers, fast asleep. What a bunch of dunderheads. Their thoughtlessness in the inky darkness is unimaginable. But we weren’t there.

“Be with Jesus,” Mother Teresa used to tell her sisters. “He prayed and prayed, and then He went to look for consolation, but there was none.” And then she’d say this: “I always write that sentence, ‘I looked for one to comfort Me, but I found no one’” (260).

And then she’d write, she said, “Be the one.”

Be the one.

Really, let’s make that t-shirt cardinal red, signifying that bloody sweat, and then let’s plaster those three fat words in fat, white stripes across
the chest. Nothing fine or fancy. No old-fashioned calligraphy or some scripted nonsense – I want “Be the one” as pushy as a sandwich board.

Be the one.

Be the one.

I never read the story just like that, never thought of it, really. I was too taken by those disciples nodding off as if the Mount of Olives was a dim-lit, all-night train station.

Be the one. Big, bold letters. It ought to be written on my heart.