Reading Mother Teresa--The Little Bride of Christ

Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, 

but rather offer yourselves to God 

as those who have been brought from death to life; 

and offer every part of yourself to him 

as an instrument of righteousness. Romans 6:13 

She calls herself “the little bride of Christ,” and even though she was still a child when she used that language, she does so, her letters suggest, with a sense of destiny already in great part fulfilled in her heart and soul – “the little bride of Christ.” There had to be thousands like her during her time, all of them – Roman Catholic girls and women – entirely devoted to Jesus, to the virgin mother, and to their special calling as, well, women of the cloth.

Born in Albania, intimately taken with the lives of saints and missionaries, Mother Teresa committed herself early to “the religious life,” a phrase that meant to her, a woman and a Roman Catholic, entirely different things, I believe, than it means to me.

A friend of mine once met her in passing, shook her hand, in fact. Someone told her she’d better buy a glove to preserve what she could of the blessed touch of a saint.

I am, as Mother Teresa was, a believer in Jesus Christ; but, at least on the outside, very little of how she described herself is language I can borrow or a tradition I can understand. As a child in an evangelical Christian school, I was taught to revere Luther, Calvin, Knox, and Zwingli, those whose burning righteousness valiantly resisted apostate popish claims. My own heritage is deeply Calvinistic, and even though I was reared 500 years after Calvin, a great number of the Reformation’s antagonisms spilled into my consciousness – indulgences, inquisitions, thumb screws, piggish priests growing fat on the poor of the land. Heritage is never quite as pure or sacred as some of us want to believe.

None of the many fine adult Christians I knew as a kid ever asked me – or the little girls in my class – to think of ourselves as “little brides of Christ.” That’s not my language, our language; it’s a metaphor I could never pull over me or feel in my heart. It’s hers, and, in part, I believe, the language familiar to a particular time and place that may well be diminishing, if not gone, these days.

I picked up Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light on a Saturday morning, early, from a bookstore left unlocked at a retreat center in the hill country of Texas. I walked a dozen pages into the book that morning, alone, and was ushered into a story so unlike my own as to be fantasy, yet so much akin that I felt her breath rise from the open page.

I mean no disrespect and have no problems with the canonization of Mother Teresa of Calcutta – hers is a marvelous story, and saints themselves are a venerable tradition. May her thin, angular face, stark and pious, grace a hundred thousand stained glass windows and enrich countless human souls.

That she has much to teach me, and that I have much to learn about being an “instrument of righteousness,” doesn’t alter the fact that the nature of our shared faith is sometimes greatly different.

Still, we’re far more deeply and intimately related than not, the two of us – Mother Teresa of Calcutta and an aging bald male twice her size, lugging a Calvinist pedigree, a man who hails from the emerald edge of the Great Plains in the virtual heart of North America.

As children of Adam, we share a mortal coil. We’re both undeniably and fully human, and we both know our help is in the name of the Lord, in whose love we draw our every breath.

That is a joy, as I begin to write this morning, a reason for morning thanks.

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