Reading Mother Teresa--Paradox

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. 

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, 

for they will be filled. 

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. 

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Matthew 5:5–8

We baptized our firstborn, our daughter, in Arizona, where we lived, a thousand miles from either grandparent; so an old retired preacher and his wife told us they would be there and take the traditional grandparents’ role, which meant, among other things, Mrs. Verduin said, taking the baby out should she get fussy. Rev. and Mrs. Leonard Verduin were Arizona “snowbirds” we came to meet and love, and their participation in our daughter’s baptism was something I will never forget.

Rev. Verduin was born and reared in a tiny Dutch-American colony smack dab in the middle of South Dakota’s Rosebud Reservation. I’ll always remember the stories he told about his childhood out there in all that open land among the Brule' Sioux.

But then, there are lots of things I won’t forget about Rev. Verduin. Maybe most basic because most useful to me was his singular insistence that the real, honest-to-God truth is never circular, that is, it never has just one center, one pole. It’s always elliptical, he used to say – it always has two centers, never one. Jesus Christ was both God and man. How is that possible? I don’t know – it just is. It has to be or he isn’t who he said he was. Or this: freedom of speech means I can write anything I want; well, not just anything. If I sling slimy river mud at someone, a downright lie, then what I said is a bloody, muddy sin, if not a crime. There is no such thing as total freedom of speech because even freedom has limits: you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. Truth always has two centers.

I thought of Verduin when reading a passage from Mother Teresa, who confesses her own exhaustion on the streets of Calcutta. “It does not go so easily when a person has to be on one’s feet from morning until evening,” she tells her mentor and friend in a letter. “But still, everything is for Jesus,” she writes; “so like that everything is beautiful, even though it is difficult” (25).

Two centers, a kind of paradox, “a seemingly true statement . . . that leads to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition.” What’s beautiful, really, is what isn’t.

But then, I don’t think I was raised to think it might be. When I was a kid, we used to sing, “I’d rather have Jesus than silver and gold” and a host of other lyrics that promised joy from suffering or divine beauty in tribulation. How about this: blessed are the poor in spirit.

Why on earth do I think her statement is paradox? Maybe because a gadzillion ads – on print and screen and wherever else – always promise something else. Ad men and women want me to believe in skin cream, Caribbean beaches, twin bathtubs.

How can anything be both difficult and beautiful?

Maybe, this morning, that I see her claim as a paradox this is maybe a mark of how far I’ve strayed from truth I learned as a child. Really, what Mother Teresa says is plain old biblical truth.

I’m the one full of mud. Shine on me, Lord. Shine on me.