Reading Mother Teresa--Be Still

“Be still and know that I am God. . . .” Psalm 46:10 

In a chapel speech at Liberty University a few years ago, then-Governor Rick Perry, of Texas, a candidate for President of the United States, talked openly about the nature of his faith in a testimonial that rather notably lacked the fire and brimstone he’s known for when he speaks about politics. He was reserved and very personal when he spoke of being someone who didn’t so much turn himself to God as being someone who had been turned to His throne:

My faith journey is not the story of someone who turned to God because I wanted to. It was because I had nowhere else to turn. I was 27. I’d been an officer in the United States Air Force, commanding a fairly substantial piece of sophisticated equipment, telling men and women what to do. But I was lost spiritually and emotionally. And I didn’t know how to fix it. 

There’s much to admire in his humility. I don’t share many of his political views, but his speech was, or so say a hundred reports, a performance totally as moving as it was sincere.

Sad, though, that anyone has to talk about it as a “performance.” I pity political candidates because, these days, they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t talk about faith. Not addressing your relationship to God means staying in the starting blocks forever – or not even getting out of the locker room and into the race.

It’s ever so easy to listen to someone like Governor Perry and distrust what you’re hearing. Politicians, for goodness sake, all say what they need to. For Presidential candidates especially, doing a testimony is as important as being capable of tending the economy. And you’re judged. "All that yapping is just so much b.s. So-and-so’s faith ain’t nothin’ more than politics. Just listen."

Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the editor of Come Be My Light, says that in April of 1942, Mother Teresa made a significant vow before God. This is how she described it: “I made a vow to God – binding under [pain of] mortal sin – to give God anything He may ask, ‘Not to refuse him anything’” (34–35).

That vow was, Kolodiejchuk says, one of her “greatest secrets.” Only two people on the planet knew what she’d done – she and her confessor; and when, 17 years later, she finally went public with that vow, she admitted, “This is what hides everything in me” (29).

It seems to me, as our preacher said not long ago, that the joy known to those who know the Lord may, paradoxically, be, for us, one of the most difficult things to talk about because the language of faith is so easily manipulated. I don’t doubt for a moment Rick Perry has great faith, but he becomes, in a way, a victim of his own politics – as does every aspirant politician – the moment he or she talks about faith, simply because that person is running for office.

It is not particularly easy to talk about faith because, in fact, it is so marvelously easy.

One of the most easily forgotten mandates Christ put on the table was the warning to pray in private, to go where no one can see you. Sometimes, with faith, Jesus might have said, silence is golden.

I wonder whether part of the marvelous spiritual legacy Mother Teresa leaves behind grows from the fact that her own life-changing pledge, the vow she says changed everything in her life – a vow not to refuse God whatever he would ask – was more binding because it wasn’t broadcast over CNN or written up in a Calcutta mission newsletter. Her witness to his glory in that pledge, that vow, was between the two of them and the two of them only – between her and God.

It’s impossible for politicians not to talk about their faith. They must. And because they are who they are – politicians! – it’s easy to roll your eyes. At any of them.

What Mother Teresa teaches me with this silent vow of hers is the lesson the scriptures offer, the lesson of Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God.”