Reading Mother Teresa--"Saving Souls"

Hieronymus Bosch, from Descent into Hell

“You snakes! You brood of vipers! 

How will you escape being condemned to hell?” Matthew 23:33 

“From the age of 5½ years, – when I first received Him [in Holy Communion] – the love for souls has been within. – It grew with the years – until I came to India – with the hope of saving many souls.” (from Come Be My Light)

For reasons which that I don’t understand myself, when it comes to the fires of hell, I have, since childhood, become significantly less fearful. What’s more, I’m probably a good deal more generous about who might or might not go there – and why. I am, without question, far more theologically liberal today, maybe even something of a backslider, especially when it comes to hell. My guess is that, for the most part, I’m not alone.

Mother’s Teresa’s white-hot, childhood passion for “saving many souls” probably arises from a cosmos she saw clearly before her at that age, a cosmos I think I know too, because when I was a kid I saw just two roads leading toward eternity – one wide, one narrow, both clearly and vividly mapped leading to two diametrically opposed ends.

I think I knew exactly how to travel down the road to either destination, and it wasn’t all that difficult. In my kid’s mind, salvation had very little to do with the mysteries and miracles of grace, and much more to do with toeing the line in every which way – “oh, be careful little eyes what you see.” The “straight-and-narrow” was, for me at least, wholly as understandable, the signage as unmistakable, as it is on the interstate to hell.

And hell, for me, was as real as, say, Milwaukee.

If you love people, as Mother Teresa did, you want to save them, at all cost, from the nightmarish visions of Hieronymus Bosch or whatever horror one’s mind creates down there at the luminous end of that diabolical road, the wide one. I understand that. She says she was 5½ when she partook of her first communion, just 5½ when those lifelong passions took root. She was a child. She saw things as a child.

Me? – when I became a man, I think I put away those childish things.

Or did I?

Christ’s admonitions about babes in arms, about children, about kids, about the dire necessity of simple, untrammeled childhood faith – hHe was kidding about that, right? Throughout his ministry, he was given to hyperbole, after all – like rich men passing through a needle’s eye. How nonsensical is that? – it’s poetry, not hard-and-fast truth.

Isn’t it?

Besides, what she’s talking about here isn’t Hieronymus Bosch. What she’s talking about is saving souls, her love for them, a full dose of which I think even this learned professor could use.

I’m not as sure as she was at that age, or at this. Nor am I as sure of what “saving souls” really means.

Oddly enough, that having been said, I honestly don’t think we’re that much different.