Reading Mother Teresa--The rough road of obedience

Oh, that my ways were steadfast in obeying your decrees!
Then I would not be put to shame when I consider all your commands.
I will praise you with an upright heart as I learn your righteous laws.
I will obey your decrees; do not utterly forsake me.
How can a young person stay on the path of purity?
By living according to your word.
I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands. Psalm 119:5–10

According to the editor of her letters and diaries, Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, Mother Teresa believed that in obeying her superiors in the Sisters of Loreto, she was, in fact, obeying Jesus, in “submitting to their commands, she was submitting to Christ Himself” (31) is the way he puts it.

I confess that’s a way of life I can’t imagine.

There’s something undeniably saint-like about her inviolable commitment, but something slavish too. If the simple obedience – can I say “blind obedience”? – to one’s superiors is the portal to sainthood, then I’ve yet to trot joyfully through that door.

I can’t imagine it was easy to believe that one’s superiors spoke for the Lord God almighty – then again, maybe it was easy to believe, just hard to live.

Still, that Mother Teresa would believe what she did makes good sense. If you’re going want to be the bride of Christ, if you’re going to commit, via something as permanent as an oath, to live for him always, every second of the day – no time off, no Expedia getaways, no VRBOs – then it seems to me that some kind of infrastructure to that commitment is, in fact, required. In her case, that scaffolding was created by the church – or The Church.

I mean, no human being ever believed that he or she was one with Jesus, 24/7, you think? Even David the King often found himself abandoned – see Psalm 13, the “howling” psalm. I hate to be skeptical, but my guess is no one on the face of the earth ever has ever claimed to have God’s voice in his heart and soul all the time, like the phone in his pocket. No earthling stays permanently in some higher world.

It just doesn’t happen. In his “Personal Narrative,” Jonathan Edwards, the great revivalist Calvinist, claims he suffered long, anguished moments of silence. Ralph Waldo Emerson tried to lift anyone who’d listen to him into bright-and-shiny moments of revelation, but he certainly didn’t stay there himself (read “Experience” sometime). Even Edgar Allen Poe wanted his bizarre verse to lift us, at least for a moment, from our rotten, stinking world. But only for a moment. Abraham Kuyper’s most famous devotional work, To Be Near Unto God, is all about helping his loyal followers find their way to glimpses of glory. Glimpses. 

No one I know would say that Christ’s voice is always within them. But then, I’m not Pentecostal. Maybe if I were. . . .

It’s understandable that someone like Mother Teresa, someone as committed to God’s near physical presence in her life, would believe the way to get there, even and maybe especially through the silences, is by reckoning that the words of the boss – her Mother Superior or her bishop, or whoever was in charge– was always the very voice of God.

I’ve failed badly on that one. But that’s a story for another time.

Here’s what I’m thinking. We’re wired with desire, all of us, desire for God. That g has to be lower case, as in Poe’s case; but human beings share an undeniable spiritual aspiration. Mother Teresa, who is without a doubt a saint, attempted to stifle the doubts she had (and they were considerable) by believing that whatever church authorities said was gospel-level truth. When her superiors spoke, the voice belonged to God (upper case). She believed that because she believed what was required of her, in response, was, total obedience.

I’ve never been so sure as that. But there’s no doubt in my mind – and soul – that I too want God. As hard as it is for an old Calvinist like me to admit it, I think we all want what we believe God is or does, even if that aspiration doesn’t make us saints.

Maybe what makes all of us want to get there is that we can’t.

Only by his doing. Only by grace.

I’m sure Mother Teresa believed that too.