Reading Mother Teresa--Holy Fool

“I remember the devotion of your youth, 

how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the desert, 

through a land not sown.” Jeremiah 2:2 

She was just 19 years old when, after six-weeks aboard a passenger ship, she started up the River Ganges, the “Holy River,” into Bengal, and met, along with the others, her “Indian sisters.” Then, in the convent chapel, together, she says, they “thanked our dear Saviour for this great grace that He had so safely brought us to the goal for which we had been longing” (17).

To her friends and family back home, she wrote, “Pray much for us that we may be good and courageous missionaries” (17).

Sister Teresa was only 19 years old, no different from the students in the chairs in my own classrooms, the very ones who text their friends the moment they shut their books; but she was ready to give her life away as a missionary for our Lord. At that moment, she had to be filled with equal measures of fear and conviction. She had to be, at that moment, near unto God. What she could not have known was how near.

She thought she knew what she would be – “a good and courageous missionary.” But in reality she knew next to nothing of what she would become, even less about the squalid world she was about to discover, a world overflowing with the desperation of children she would touch.

At that moment, her youth, idealism, and blind faith carried her triumphantly into a fray she didn’t know was there. She could have had no clue that her selflessness, her righteous dedication to the poor of Calcutta would, in time, establish for her a place among the most revered heroes of this world, a saint. She had little more than a child’s sense of what God almighty had in store for her. Really, she knew nothing at all.

In this complex world of ours, naiveté can sometimes prove a blessing. A young church down the block is filled with the Spirit these days, sure as anything that they’ve embarked on a crusade that is like none other in the community. They’re going to do things right; as a fellowship, they’re not going to be overrun by tradition or the way it’s always been. They’re the new Reformation.

It’s not rhetoric. It’s a mission they believe of themselves.

I’m older and tons less sure. It won't be long and someone what get angry. There will be divisions. Comes with the territory of our humanness.

But there’s something to be said about child-like dreams, of innocence and daring, something to be envied in a real holy fool.

Mother Teresa’s bravado as she takes her first baby steps into her ministry, given what little she really knew of what was to come, is downright astounding. But even more amazing is the grace that crowned her, even as a 19-year-old girl.