Reading Mother Teresa--Treasure House

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.’” Matthew 25:34.

In Calcutta in the late 1940s, men and women and children were dying on the streets. Notice I said, “on” the streets, not “in” the streets. In some places and at some times, dying “in the streets” conjures images of insurrection, confrontation, and riotous civil strife. I meant to say what I did: in Calcutta, mid-century, men and women and children were dying on the streets – literally, on the streets.

They were human beings – men, women, and children – who were simply considered gone, those for whom the limited medical facilities had no room. They were dying, hopelessly alone, on the streets, corpses left at the side of the road.

Perhaps we should consider Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity the very first hospice nurses in India, maybe even Asia, maybe even the world. What she couldn’t help but see before her daily was not only death, but death without hope. Calcutta’s city government gave her a place for the dying, a place she called “Nirmal Hriday,” or “pure heart,” in celebration of “the blessed virgin”; and Nirmal Hriday soon became a hospice center, a place that offered the dying poor at least a bit of what we call today “death with dignity.”

Fifty years earlier, on the Navajo Reservation in the American southwest, Protestant missionaries from my own church found themselves besieged by death and dying. Traditionally, the Navajo people held the belief that the bodies of the dead were haunted by the evil spirits of death itself. Sometimes, if a death occurred in a hogan, the place would be burned. Navajos, traditionally, weren’t so much afraid of death as they were horrified by it.

So they would bring their dead and dying to traders and missionaries, Anglos who would, graciously, dispose of those haunted bodies. Today the cemetery behind what was once the Rehoboth mission complex is still laden with unmarked graves of thosefrom dead and dying once long ago delivered to the mission hospital.

I don’t doubt that taking up the burden of dealing frequently with the dead and dying, almost as if it were a service to the Navajo people, could be wearing and difficult, even expensive. But the missionaries did it. They took the role of peace-givers; and the case can be made, I believe, that had they not, they would never have secured the favor of the people they came to serve over the length andof breadth of the sprawling Navajo reservation

That blessed service – like Mother Teresa’s – may well have met with only limited success in “conversions,” in bringing the lost souls home to the Lord. After all, blessing the dying with comfort may well have less to do with what we call “evangelism,” than with simply giving away love. Nirmal Hriday, like those mission graves, is, or so it seems to me, what Matthew 25 is all about, the gift of love itself: when I was dying, you gave me a pillow.

Here’s the way Brian Kolodiejchuk describes it, in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: “[At Nirmal Hriday] she and her sisters would bring the dying off the streets and offer them accommodation, basic medical care and above all, tender love” (145).

Maybe I read Matthew 25 poorly, but it seems to me that what Christ offers us in the little story of sheep and goats, right and left, is nothing more and nothing less than tender love.