Reading Mother Teresa--Bringing Him and Meeting Him

Rev. Casey Kuipers and family

Whatever you did 

for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, 

you did for me.’” Matthew 25:40 

In Chant of the Night, Cornelius Kuipers’ 1930s novel about mission work in the Zuni pueblo of New Mexico, a young Zuni named Ametolan agrees to take three Anglo missionaries for a day-long hike up Zuni Mountain, a deeply sacred place to his people. As they climb, they learn some things about the Zunis’ history of great suffering, first at the hands of the Spanish, then at the hands of missionaries from the south, from Mexico, stories amply illustrated by hand and footholds carved into the sheer sides of the mountain so the people could escape death.

The white folks love the stories, but they joke around; they don’t revere the place, as does Ametolan. When one of the Anglos says she’d like to meet the god of the Zuni mountain because “he must be some guy,” “the party laughed,” says Kuipers, “but not Ametolan.”

Kuipers was himself an Anglo missionary who spent decades in the Zuni pueblo. That he would criticize his colleagues and fellow Christians’ nonchalance is noteworthy and, in its own way, lovely. He breaks the stereotype of Christian missionaries who were often what Native people determined them to be – piously disguised scouts for a cultural cavalry, men who sought, as did the U.S. Army, the demise of all indigenous people.

I don’t claim to know anything about missiology. I’ve never been a missionary, and I don’t know how missionaries are trained. But I do know something about how Christian mission has often blundered with Native people, killing them and their spirit with their own Godly intentions. Almost a century ago, a missionary named Cornelius Kuipers seemed to understand that too – and he used his novels to try to explain what he’d discovered on the mission field, tried to explain, not to the Zunis, who needed no explanation, but to his own people, Anglo Christians.

How did he come to understand that banter like the hikers in Chant of the Night was crass and unfeeling, especially when it was done in holy places, even pagan holy places. How did he learn that, on the mission field, mockery is always off-key? The title of his only nonfiction book is Zuni Also Prays, which is to say, "Don’t demean people." Pride is the first of seven deadlies, spiritual pride the most hideous. Just remember, he likely wanted to tell his own people, Zuni also prays.

This morning Mother Teresa taught me something Cornelius Kuipers would have liked. Mother Teresa took to heart that absolutely central passage of the gospel recorded in Matthew 25: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” While she dedicated her entire life to bringing Christ to the poor on the streets of Calcutta, she was equally sure, strange as this may sound, that when she met the poor, she met Jesus. She not only brought Christ, she met him in wasted streets. She looked into the faces of the poor and, quite literally, saw her Lord.

When I read the novels of Cornelius Kuipers, novels meant for his people, I can’t help thinking that he too saw Jesus there in the Zuni, a vision he knew very well might be difficult to relate to people back home.

Really, all of this isn’t just about missiology; it’s about more than that. It's about the very character of the Christian life, don’t you think?