Remembering Mother Teresa--Bewonderment

[Yesterday was Mother's Teresa's birthday. One early morning, maybe ten years ago, I picked up her biography from a retreat bookstore and discovered a religious life so moving that the morning I picked up the book I determined to work my way through that life devotionally. I found it remarkable how distanced from my own religious experience her life drew her, but more often than not I was simply awed, as millions were. In honor of her birthday, I'm reposting one of those meditations.]

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens;

let your glory be over all the earth. Psalm 57:11 

The basic story line by which I’ve always seen the Christian life is the outline of a narrative that rises from the handbook of doctrine with which I was reared. That outline goes like this: “sin, salvation, service.”

The story line begins with sin – our knowledge of it, as it exists within us. Calvin starts even a bit earlier, with the heavens, with our sense of God as manifest in his world: what we see and experience. Because humans can’t help but see God’s marvelous work in the heavens and the earth around us, we come to know that there is a God. With that knowledge, we feel our own limitations – that we aren’t God. And there begins our knowledge of human limits, our knowledge, finally, of sin.

That conviction draws us closer to God because we need a Savior. Sin precedes salvation, or so the story goes, through the second act.

Once we know that he loves us, in spite of our sin, he loves us, our hearts fill, our souls rejoice; we can’t help but celebrate our salvation. That celebration leads us into gratitude and service, into doing what we can to be his agents of love in the world he loves so greatly.

Sin, salvation, service – three acts of a drama that is the plot of all of our lives.

Mother Theresa’s take on a very similar tale in three different acts, was created, I suppose, by her experiences in the ghettos of Calcutta. We begin with repulsion, she says –: what we see, she says – brokenness, sadness – offends, prompts us to look away.

But we really can’t or shouldn’t or won’t; we have to look misery in its starving face, and when we do, we move from repulsion to compassion – away from rejection and toward loving acceptance. End Act II.

The final act is what she called “bewonderment,” which is sheer wonder plus a-grade admiration. Our compassion leads us to bewonderment. 

“Bewonderment” is likely one of those words few of us use but most all of us understand. Still, like reverence, it’s hard to come by in a world where our sorest needs are never more than a price tag away.

I’ll admit that bewonderment is hard to come by for me, perhaps because it isn’t so clearly one of the chapters in the story I was told as a boy, the story which that is still deeply embedded in my soul. “Service” is the end of the Christian life – or always has been – for me, not “bewonderment.”

I’m more than a little envious of David’s praise in Psalm 57. What he says to God in prayer is something I rarely tell him. I don’t think I’ve ever asked God not to hide his little light under a bushel, to display his radiant grace from pole-to-pole in my life and yours. I’m forever asking for favors, some big, some not, but am only rarely into adoration, in part, I suppose, because I’m so rarely in awe.

But bewonderment, awe, is something I’m learning, even this morning, and for that I’m thankful – for the book of songs, for David, and for the God David knew so intimately that he could speak the way he does in Psalm 57. It’s difficult for some of us to be intimate with God – to be so close to a being so great and grand and seemingly out of reach. But bewonderment is something I think we can learn, all of us, even an old man.