Reading Mother Teresa--Providence and Planning

. . . establish the work of our hands for us – 

yes, establish the work of our hands. Psalm 90:17

In 1994, Dr. Robin Fox, editor of The Lancet, a leading journal for medical professionals, toured Mother Teresa’s mission in Calcutta to have a look at the nature of care given the needy. It would be difficult to characterize his fact-finding trip as a witch hunt, and the report he created is thought of today as being largely sympathetic.

Some criticism, he determined, was in order, however. There were moments and events he observed, he said, when some additional diagnostic testing was called for and available but simply not undertaken. “Such systematic approaches are alien to the ethos of the home,” he wrote. (???)

And then this line: “Mother Teresa prefers providence to planning. . .” What he means, of course, is that he observed events when, in his opinion, more scientific medical treatment was called for but spiritual treatment was the only therapy offered.

Such criticism is neither insubstantial nor over-critical, and one can’t help hear echoes of such spiritualizing in Mother Teresa’s own words: “Jesus gave one very big grace – to accept everything with a big smile.”

“Accept everything with a smile” feels like another t-shirt, but the phrase has a distinctly questionable aftertaste because it suggests a willingness to tolerate most any injustice.

She didn’t. Mother Teresa famously used her Nobel Prize acceptance speech to warn the world of the evil of abortion. Her crusades on the streets of slums around the world were determined to ease real human suffering. She was the quintessential activist, giving herself away to the cause, to Jesus, in the lives of the poor, and for Jesus, as a tribute to his great gift.

The late Christopher Hitchens, a prolific atheist and writer, went on the attack against Mother Teresa in a book titled The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens’s invective is deftly aimed because no Christian believer in the late 20th century was more universally admired. His target, he says, is not Mother Teresa per se, but the faith that gave her cause and mission, a faith he famously scorned and ridiculed throughout his life.

“Mother Teresa has a theory of poverty, which is also a theory of submission and gratitude,” he writes in the introduction. What most offends his sensibilities is the manner by which she, in his estimation, spiritualized real problems, tried, in a way, to smile away ills in reaching toward some beyond-the-sunset ideal.

That criticism, however misguided and defiantly aimed, is still worth considering. When she tells a dying man, as Hitchens says, “You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you,” it seems to me that Hitchens is not all wrong to call what she’s creating a “cult of suffering.” 

But it’s a tough call. How many times aren’t we stretched painfully between faithfully relying on God’s promises on the one hand and taking extraordinary steps to extend lives on the other? Right at this moment, untold believers in medical offices around the world don’t know whether more horrifying chemo or none at all is what God wants.

Too much faith can obscure our vision, blind us to realities--witness Q-Anon. But believing only the realities makes us incapable of seeing anything beyond what is quite literally right there before our eyes.

The eyes of faith require vigilance for this world and the world to come, which is to say, humbly and prayerfully, “we do.”

Christopher Hitchens wasn’t totally wrong about MT and her strategies in helping the oppressed. But all of us – believers and atheists – are beset by dilemmas whose answers and outcomes are vastly more complex and more difficult than any of us – believers and atheists – can ever handle.