Reading Mother Teresa--Voices from on High

   When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
   When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. John 11:32–33

In the 1820 throes of the Second Great Awakening western New York was aflame with spiritual passions. All kinds of people were seeing visions, dreaming dreams, Joseph Smith among them. Smith was living there at the time, speaking directly to God – his father and grandfather and dozens of others had too. No big deal.

What’s more, Smith was a scryer, someone who could be professionally employed to see things psychically – “have crystal ball, will travel.” Even better, he made his living by treasure hunting, seeking buried fortunes in fields. Enough. I’m prejudicing the case. Mr. Smith told those who knew him that he was regularly visited by an angel named Moroni, who told him the location of some buried golden plates. Smith couldn’t find when he went to retrieve them. However, sometime later, he did. Those plates were inscribed in a language Smith called “reformed Egyptian” and therefore needed translation.

When finally the plates were translated, what they said became The Book of the Mormon.

Today, no one knows where those plates are, nor whether there is or has ever been a language called “reformed Egyptian.”

It was a vision, Joseph Smith said, another Joseph the dreamer. And it was also the beginning of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

To me at least, this vision thing is really tough. Mother Teresa was so sure that Christ himself had spoken to her during the retreat in Darjeeling that she likely had trouble sleeping – if God wants you to do something and you’re his little bride, how can he be denied? When she told her spiritual mentor, he told her to forget about it.

She couldn’t. Mother Teresa became the Bible’s own persistent widow (Luke 18), constantly pressing everyone including her bishop to speak to Rome about what she’d been simply told to do – to go into the darkest corners of Calcutta’s ghettos and bring love to those who know so very little.

The bishop waited, not sure, so had her spiritual mentor. Time passed. Mother Teresa was upset; her letters burn with her frustration. The command was vivid. The responsibility was hers. She had to act. The church was in her way.

It took some time for the bishop to allow her to move in the direction she felt called to do, but months later Mother Teresa was given authority to minister to the unloved of Calcutta, a task Jesus himself, she said, had instructed her to take up.

Joseph Smith claimed to hear from on high too, but he determined to start his own fellowship. He didn’t wait to hear from church authorities. He didn’t have to cool it. He didn’t have to bow to any authority but his own.

I fear I will forever be skeptical of those who claim to hear Jesus’s own voice. I don’t know why exactly, but I am.

The Mormons today are wonderful people. Last election, a Mormon was one of the candidates for the Presidency of the United States; another, with totally opposite politics, was the Senate Majority Leader.

But if I’m going to believe that Jesus Christ chooses individuals with whom to speak, as Smith and Mother Teresa both claimed, I’m going to side with “the little bride of Christ,” not because I knew or know either of them, but because one of those visions was tested strenuously by church folks who may well have been as skeptical as I was. They didn’t want to believe it either, and who knows but that they granted her wishes over against their own better judgment.

Did Jesus Christ, son of God, speak to Mother Teresa on a train to Darjeeling?

Maybe he did, but what he told her is something she’d heard before – a command to minister to those in need wherever you find them. She's not the only one who has heard that. He’d said all of that before, after all, in ways all of us have heard. 

Still does.