Reading Mother Teresa--Nothing

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, 

neither angels nor demons, 

neither the present nor the future, 

nor any powers, 

neither height nor depth, 

nor anything else in all creation, 

will be able to separate us 

from the love of God 

that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

Romans 8:38–39 

Seriously?

The Apostle Paul’s searing claim is, in some ways, characteristic of the zealot he always was. Absolutely nothing will separate us from God’s love in Christ? Nothing? Seriously?

It may be difficult to locate another single line of scripture that so boldly proclaims the sovereign character of God’s love in this chapter from Paul's letter to the Romans – nothing, absolutely nothing can pull us away from God’s love. Nothing.

The Bible’s poetic character carries along more than its share of hyperbole or overstatement. Give Paul a break here – he’s just really pumped and people sometime say mumble extravagant things when they are way high. Take it with a grain of salt, eh?

My very pious great-great-grandfather came to America in the 1840s, got himself a chunk of land outside a pioneer community called Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Then, in a matter of just a year or so, lost three sons and his wife to some vile, rampaging disease. I’m sure he spoke no English; he was just off the boat, really, a citizen of a brand new, barely understandable world. After suffering that kind of loss, I wonder whether he felt separated from God’s love. Even Job did, after all.

Still, it’s there, isn’t it? – Paul’s bravura. Even if you’ve heard that line only once, it will stick to the memory like eternity. Nothing. Nothing at all can separate us from his love.

When the church finally granted Mother Teresa the calling she claimed Jesus himself demanded of her – to go into the darkest, dankest dens of human suffering in the woeful city around her – Mother Teresa faced a difficult problem: she believed she would have to leave the Order. Part of the call Jesus gave her was to become the poor, not just to be like the poor in their Calcutta hovels, but to be them; and that divine directive meant leaving the Sisters of Loreto and breaking the vows she’d made 18 years before. In order to follow Christ, she would have to undergo a separation the church itself called “secularization.”

But she was resolute.

Nobody can unbind me from God – I am consecrated to Him and as such I desire to die. – I don’t know what the Canon Law has to say in this matter – but I know Our Lord will never allow Himself to be separated from me. – Neither will He allow anyone to separate me from Him. (87)

That’s what she wrote in a letter to her spiritual mentor, that’s the pledge she gave him, not as if to assuage his fear but to proclaim as defiantly as she could that even in reneging on her vows she wasn’t, for a moment, expecting even the slightest separation from the grace she’d always known. She was, in essence, willing to give up the church to follow Christ.

And she meant it. She wasn’t playing politics or plying her superiors to get her way. What she claimed was not hyperbole or poetic license. Like Paul, she was totally convinced, completely convinced, that nothing would separate her from the Love of God, not height nor breadth nor angels nor demons, nor anything else in God’s green earth or some spiritual world. Not death. Not life. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Seriously? 

Seriously!