Reading Mother Teresa--Taking note

Humble yourselves, therefore, 

under God’s mighty hand, 

that he may lift you up in due time. 1 Peter 5:6 

The crazy thing is, I can’t remember selling the novel – but I must have. Somehow, my copy got into a used book bin, because years later a student in some university down South picked it up, required reading for a lit class she was taking. Faulkner, I think it was As I Lay Dying. 

It’s not my style to toss books that I’ve scribbled full of notes, and I’m sure I wrote in this one because I always do when I use a book of almost any kind in class. I’m sure this one was scored with gloss, a grand mess of under-linings, jots and tittles, and, I’m sure, a rainbow of bright, highlighted sentences.

Or so she said. This woman who became its recipient found me somehow at my college address and sent me an e-mail to thank me for all of my blessed notations. The scribbles, she said, helped her understand Faulkner’s complex novel. She was thrilled with my notes.

I know scholars, literature scholars, who have spent years with original manuscripts, page by page, looking over typed lines a writer edited or reupholstered in finer language, noting changes in how the story’s characters dress or act or speak. A manuscript’s edits create their own stories.

The real reason people in my profession pour over dusty pages is the desire to understand. Sometimes what gets edited or underscored or highlighted can be, I suppose, as revealing as what is actually typed on the page.

As it is in the very sweet letter Archbishop Périer sent to Mother Teresa when, like the persistent widow, she simply couldn’t wait for Mother Gertrude to respond to her questions.

Here’s how the kind Archbishop responded to her request to hurry the process:

In due time the reply will come, remain quiet. Pray much and live intimately with Our Lord J.C. [Jesus Christ] asking for light, strength, decision; but do not anticipate HIS WORK. Try not to put anything of your own in all this. You are His instrument, nothing more. I do pray also, but I would be disappointed if perhaps things went too fast. (112)

A wonderfully pastoral letter.

That letter survives because Mother Teresa gave it to Father van Exem, telling him that he could destroy it when he finished reading because she had, she said, copied what she needed to know. When Father van Exem looked at the note, this is what he found:

In due time the reply will come, remain quiet. Pray much and live intimately with Our Lord J.C. asking for light, strength, decision; but do not anticipate HIS WORK. Try not to put anything of your own in all this. You are His instrument, nothing more. I do pray also, but I would be disappointed if perhaps things went too fast.

Her underscoring what she did, the way she did – single underline, then double underline! – is as full of her character as anything she ever wrote herself. Look at what she noted, what she understood she had to remember, and you can feel her yet.

And she’s there too in the way she explained all this to her mentor. “The letter is simply beautiful,” she told him in a note. And then, “Pray for light that I may see and [for] courage to do away with anything of self in the work. I must disappear completely – if I want God to have the whole” (113).

Humility is a word whose origins are in humus, or the earth itself. In a paradox vastly more mysterious than I can explain or even understand, a seeming contradiction clearly observable in the life of Mother Teresa, her divine work in Calcutta could begin only on the ground, in the supine humility of the earth itself before her God. 

It would be--it would have to be--HIS WORK.