Reading Mother Teresa--Cheerfulness

A cheerful heart is good medicine, 

but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. 

Proverbs 17:22

Cheerfulness is a sign of a generous and mortified person who forgetting all things, even herself, tries to please her God in all she does for souls. Cheerfulness is often a cloak which hides a life of sacrifice, continual union with God, fervor and generosity. A person who has this gift of cheerfulness very often reaches a great height of perfection. For God loves a cheerful giver and He takes close to His heart the religious He loves. (33)

Someone once asked Nelson Mandela, whose years in prison reached despairingly close to a lifetime, why, when finally he was released, he wasn’t more angry. Reportedly, he smiled. “If I thought it would be useful,” he said, “I would be.” A generous spirit was more blessed and more useful.

Cheerfulness had to have been a way of life for Mother Teresa. It had to, for even that immense recognition given to her and her work late in her life was difficult for her accept. She claimed to dislike crowds, and it’s clear that she did. She felt uncomfortable with the adulation showered upon her in foreign places and loved nothing more than returning home after meeting with presidents and potentates and even the pope.

Still, what she found back home in Calcutta was ever more of the dying. She ministered to the lowliest of the low, the most despised of the despicable – the poor, the infirm, those approaching death totally alone. Her terrain was the torn edge of our existence, the seam where life slips painfully into darkness. The landscape she loved was the beaten shroud of human suffering. The faces she looked into were beautiful only because she saw in them the very image of her suffering Savior.

What’s more, impossible as it may seem, she often felt herself despised by God, forgotten, left behind, alone and terrified that the Jesus she so loved had no time for her, her pains or her triumphs. She was, as some call her, a “saint of darkness” (336).

And yet, throughout her life, there is this persistent cheerfulness, this effervescent sense of humor that could, at any moment whatsoever start an entire audience to slapping their knees, or double-up her friends and acquaintances in laughter.

Some of all of that emerged from her belief in providence, in God’s own unmistakably cagey guidance. And while some might bicker about God’s blessings in this particular situation, Mother Teresa loved the often astonishing juxtaposition of human need and divine largesse. “Three days ago,” she once wrote her Archbishop, “we picked up two people eaten alive with worms. The agony of the Cross was on their faces.” She says they proceeded to make the two of them comfortable, when one of them, the old man, asked for a cigarette. “How beautiful of God,” she says, because “in my bag there were two packets of [the] best cigarettes. . . . God thought of this old man’s longing” (254). When with those she served, she seemed never unwilling or unable to smile.

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to nominate a single human being more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than Mother Teresa, an award she was given in 1979. In her much heralded – and much hated – acceptance speech in Oslo, Mother Teresa related told a story she’d often related elsewhere. She was asked, she said, by a “very big group of professors,” to “tell us something that will help us.” She told them, in response, simply, to “smile at each other.” One of her learned audience must have been a little skeptical. “Are you married?” he asked. “Yes,” she told him, without missing a beat, “and I sometimes find it very difficult to smile at Jesus because He can be very demanding” (281).

Or this. She confessed to one of her spiritual directors that she simply lacked the wherewithal to accomplish much: “I can do only one thing, like a little dog following closely the Master’s footsteps.” And then, “Pray that I be a cheerful dog” (236).

Comparing my suffering to yours or yours to hers is futile. All suffering is suffering. Besides, what good are such comparisons anyway? “It is a curious fact,” said Oscar Wilde, “that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously.”

Not so apparently, the cheerful dog.