Reading Mother Teresa--Persistence

And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’ For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’ Luke 18:3–5

The famous judge in this famous parable is often called “the unjust judge” because, sadly enough, justice isn’t his thing. His thing is peace – his own. Christ makes clear that this judge, who doesn’t fear God, couldn’t care less about justice. It’s the widow’s infernal nagging that moves him finally to act – the squeaky wheel gets the grease, we like to say.

Anyone who browses through the Mother Teresa story after her call to ministry among the poor can’t help but get the sense that this woman – no widow and no child either – turned into the persistent widow of the parable, because Mother Teresa simply would not let her cause – the new dream ministry – alone. Clearly, she was on a crusade, leading it, in fact, right out there in front.

She’d passed the tests administered by Father van Exem, her spiritual counselor, and then (after waiting again, this time for an entire year) by those created by the Archbishop – and he was no slam dunk. 

What remained was a judgment about the new mission Jesus commanded her to undertake, a judgment that would be rendered by Mother Gertrude, concerning the Loreto order with whom she was not only associated but bound, by oath. What she needed was a signal from her own Superior General as to how the new calling would look, on paper as well as in life.

Took a while. Too long. Way too long, thought Mother Teresa.

Impatient? – probably. Rash? – some might say so. Maybe just persistent, like the widow. So, should we call her tireless or tiresome? Maybe a little of both.

In her great haste, she sent off another letter to the Archbishop, hoping he would exercise his considerable power and push Mother Gertrude along. He may well have rolled his eyes a bit at her persistence, her impatience, so he begged her to remember that Mother Gertrude was likely busy.

“To have her answer now would suppose that she had nothing else to do but to write to you at once without reflection,” he snapped in a letter. “Perhaps she was sick or in visitations.” Then he offers a gentle bit of advice: “Take a little time. If Our Lord wishes to work miracles in this case certainly He can do it, but we have no right to expect them. . .” (112).  All of that translates easily into “Just take it easy.”

But no one stands for long in the path of a tsunami, a tornado, or, I suppose, an Albanian nun who’s been talking to Jesus (I’m sure she’d say listening). 

There’s more to the parable, of course. How much more, Jesus says, will I grant justice when you call on the name of the Lord than this “unjust judge?” And I suppose that’s the point finally, isn’t it? Whether she was tireless or tiresome, what is most important about her persistent begging was her selfless devotion, not to her cause but to the work of the Holy Spirit among the poor in Calcutta. What she wanted was not that her will be done, but that God’s be accomplished, that his own beloved be loved. 

And what God heard – I think – is her own grand and beautiful persistence to be his servant to his people in the “dark holes” of poverty she saw all around her.

“The art of love,” a man named Albert Ellis once wrote, “is largely the art of persistence.”

I like that, and I think Father van Exem would agree, as would Archbishop Périer, and Mother Gertrude as well. Even Mother Teresa.

“The art of love is largely the art of persistence.”