Reading Mother Teresa--Mystery

The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: 

“Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, 

because its wickedness has come up before me.”

But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. 

Jonah 1:1–3

Years ago, I had a student, a young woman, who was embarrassingly, even incorrigibly shy. When I was a student myself, I hated being ambushed by a teacher – “Say, Schaap, what are the three earmarks of Renaissance poetic sentiment?” Duh. 

“Do unto others” – and all that, right? So I didn’t bushwhack students once I got on the other side of the desk.

But this student – I could tell by her mannerisms – was impossibly shy. She’d sit in the back corner and hide for most of the class. She was no superstar academically, but neither was she a dolt; she did well. But it seemed to me that, at least in class, she prayed to be sheer.

I saw her at a ballgame one night – in the pep band. She was banging a drum. Seriously, of all things, she was a drummer! And she was good, even featured. That person with those sticks in her hands was someone completely other than the reserved little slip of a girl in the classroom’s dark back corner.

One of the earmarks of good writing – or so it seems to me – is surprise, within reason. Great stories never end exactly where you thought they would – they surprise us. If they don’t, we don’t care. Great characters always surprise us, as do, often, almost all human beings.

We had a preacher once upon a time, a man I knew in college as being especially acerbic – witty but capable of cutting someone up like sausage. When he accepted the call to be our preacher – something I voted for, by the way – I would have bet it wouldn’t be more than six months before he’d offend someone with something he said.

He left a dozen years later, totally loved, not an alienated member in sight, all of them in tears at his departure. I’m still shocked.

There’s a story about Mother Teresa that is similarly surprising. Father van Exem – her spiritual advisor, the priest to whom she went immediately after hearing Jesus’s command to go out into the ghettos of Calcutta and be his hands – Father van Exem told his superior about a vision one of the sisters had, told him of the fiery directness of Jesus’s voice to the young woman (he didn’t disclose her name), told that superior that she’d heard that voice time and time again during the retreat at Darjeeling and that it wasn’t just a dream that glanced off her consciousness. It was a voice, the voice of Christ. 

Father van Exem’s superior was a man named Father Henry, who, along with Van Exem, was Belgian. In fact, they were friends, close friends, since they’d entered the priesthood.

When Father Henry heard the news, he prayed and prayed and prayed, in part, one can imagine, because he too knew that the need was immense in the neighborhood where they lived. Immense, as in gargantuan. Father Henry wanted the vision to be sound and wanted the mission to be granted. He started praying immediately.

Later – significantly later, when the whole story came out and the sister who’d had the vision was identified – Father Henry learned from Father van Exem that the petitioner was none other than Mother Teresa, that little slip of a woman. 

Father Henry was amazed. He said no matter how he’d have tried, he would never guessed that the woman with the vision, the woman with the call, the woman recruited by Jesus Christ and given divine orders was little Mother Teresa. It was not to be believed. 

Mystery. 

Jesus Christ himself was the greatest mystery – how can a man be a god? How can a god be a man?

But we are his image-bearers, and it’s helpful to remember that we too are capable of things we’ve never believed, things we’ve never attempted, things we’ve never guessed were in our powers to achieve.

In each and every one of us there’s a drummer.

Who would have guessed it would be little Mother Teresa? No one. But she heard and she listened, and she wouldn’t stop banging on the door until what she believed she’d been told to do simply got done.

We’re mysteries – all of us. And that’s a divine blessing.