Reading Mother Teresa--Total Depravity

Kaspar Memberger the Elder, The Flood

We all, like sheep, have gone astray, 

each of us has turned to our own way. . . . Isaiah 53:6 

I should, I suppose, consult some dog-eared, learned treatise. I need to walk only two blocks to find a fine theological library. Shoot, today, who needs a library? – I could simply google “total depravity.” It would not be difficult for me to learn more about what those two words mean. What I know in total about “total depravity,” the T, the first letter of the famous Calvinist acronym T-U-L-I-P, is what I’ve picked up about it through the years.

I don’t know what the great theologians speculate about the nature of our human misery, post-Fall. I should check. Undoubtedly, there’s more than one opinion.

What I think I know is what my own human experience tells me, and it’s not exactly what my graduate school advisor used to claim. “Jim, I want you to know that I’m a Calvinist too, just not a Christian,” he’d say. “When I look at the world, all I see is crap.” That, he thought, made him some something of a Calvinist anyway, half of one at least.

I don’t think that “total depravity” means that human beings are pigs. My grad school advisor was great guy, and I liked him a ton; but his aim was off by a country mile.

I think Mother Teresa has it down. Listen to this, from a letter to a mentor: “One thing, pray much for me – I need prayer more than ever,” she writes. “I want to be only all for Jesus – truly and not only in name or dress.” The year is 1937. The place is Calcutta. Undoubtedly, she wore the habit. “Many times this goes upside-down” – this idea of being only all for Jesus – “so my most reverend ‘I’ gets the most important place. Always the same proud Gonda” (25).

The idea of this most righteous woman, this woman who has, in fact, given her life for the poor and destitute, given up everything – the very idea of that woman, Mother Teresa herself, going to war with her own fawning pride is remarkable, isn’t it? Almost beyond belief.

But then, we have her words. Every day, every moment, in the caverns of her own soul she says she fought an infernal holy war.

Yesterday I finished a story, and I was proud of it – proud because it took a ton of work and I thought I’d pulled it off. I liked it, believed it was good. It was hard work, and it took me too many days to accomplish; but the joy of creativity is to gather together stuff – an idea, an anecdote or two, a taste of character, an odd event, a few good names, a hillside, some sheep – and then, like a creator, somehow roll it up together and have it somehow make sense. Art, I think, is finally little more than being able to find order in chaos.

I was proud of myself in a good sense. I’d made something that I thought was good and new and wonderful. That kind of pride is no sin. That kind of pride has little to do with total depravity.

But the moment I think I need to be praised is the moment “the most reverend ‘I’” struts in, dressed in impish finery. The moment I want acclaim is the moment my needs, my wants, my desires overshadow anything else. And it happens. Always. Total depravity, at least in my experience, is that sad human condition, forever attempting to satisfy the voracious I.

Still, it's good to know I'm not alone. Mother Teresa’s “most reverend ‘I’” would not stay in the closet, she says.

We all need prayer. We all need grace. Even Mother Teresa.

Our depravity is that total.