Reading Mother Teresa--Purity

. . . I consider everything a loss 

because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, 

for whose sake I have lost all things. 

I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ. . . . 

Philippians 3:8 

Fine and pure as summer dew
Her soft warm tears begin to flow,
Sealing and sanctifying now
Her painful sacrifice. (17)

Just before the epic battle that would forever change Native American life on the Great Plains, the Battle at Greasy Grass, or Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull, a Lakota medicine man, performed a Sun Dance, then cut chunks of his own flesh from his arms and legs as an act of devotion to the divine, or the sacred, Wakan Tanka. Bloodied and weakened, he then saw a vision of cavalrymen falling from the sky. That vision, historians say, both red and white, strengthened Native resolve for the battle which that was to come.

Barbaric. Heathenish--sure. But somehow, to a religious person, understandable. What Sitting Bull did that day was a sacrifice. He gave bloodily of himself to his god, humbled himself, hurt himself in contrition and submission to his own image of the divine.

Mother Teresa was little more than a child, when, tears in her eyes, she wrote a self-reflective poem on her trip to India, a poem that describes her mood on board that ship. I believe her when she says she cried. I believe her tears. She had to be anxious about the world she was entering and what was to come. She was little more than a college freshman; and, away from home for the first time, I’ve seen them cry in torrents.

What’s difficult for me to understand is that she considered the way she had pledged herself to God and his love to be such an immense sacrifice. If she truly valued what she might have become had she not chosen to take her orders, being on that ship and on her way to a whole new life would have been more difficult, and much less filled with the sweet promise that she was soon to become, after all, “the little bride of Christ”?

Yet, here, in the last lines of that little poem, she says her tears, “pure as the summer dew,” flowed from her “painful sacrifice.”

I don’t think Mother Teresa ever pulled out some kind of poetic license to wrench out half-truths or hyperbole. I can see her there on the deck of that ship, little more than a kid, handkerchief in hand, dabbing at her eyes.

What I don’t understand is her sacrifice.

But then, I just returned from the gym, where I work out lest my weight balloon, as it certainly could. Our house is comfy and warm. Sometime this week, I’m getting a new easy chair. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are tough teaching days for me, but I’m sure I’ll come out whole on the other side by the time by the weekend. I haven’t cut out any chunks of my flesh as of late, haven’t worn the hooks in a Sun Dance, haven’t denied myself anything to speak of, haven’t even fasted. I just don’t think I’ve done much suffering.

With so much of her storied life still in front of her, so much suffering yet to be discovered and endured, so much love yet to be given away, it’s difficult for me to understand how tears could possibly be wrenched from what this young lady, still a child, thought of as her significant sacrifice in following Jesus.

But then, maybe that’s my fault. Not long ago, somewhere I remember, we sang the old hymn “I Surrender All.” Really? I do?

Maybe I don’t recognize her sacrifice because I haven’t a clue about my own.

Maybe.