Reading Mother Teresa--The Fortunate Fall

For it is by grace you have been saved, 

through faith – and this is not from yourselves, 

it is the gift of God. . . . Ephesians 2:8

One of the most famous yarns about Martin Luther, who was, among other things, marvelously colorful, is the story of him as a young monk, on his knees, climbing the stairs in front of the Lateran Palace when he was, for the very first time, in Rome, the heart of religious life.

Through the years that have passed since the earliest decades of the 16th century, the story now comes to us in several versions; but what each emphasizes is the suffering Luther pushed himself into, on those 28 stone stairs, as he attempted, on his knees, to send someone romping joyfully out of purgatory and into heaven.

What’s true and what’s myth will never be known, but dispute is silly on one point: what Luther learned and eventually taught is that salvation arrived in our lives not by indulgence, or bloody penance or bloody knees, or even an entire lifetime of “Hail Marys,” but by grace alone, a gift of God. Grace isn’t win-able, even by profound suffering. We can’t pay the price for sin, only Jesus can. Grace is the loving gift of a loving God. Nobody earns it. No way. No how.

Before Luther stumbled on the Bible’s own definition of grace, before he discovered that no sentence of stony stairs can atone for sin, young Martin was sorely troubled by his sin, at times to the point of death itself. His profound doubts, like Mother Teresa’s, were legion and prompted similarly dark despair.

In Luther, Eric Till’s 2003 film, one of young Martin’s superiors in the monastery asks him if he’d ever read the New Testament. When Martin says no, the superior says that soon enough he will, now that he’s off to Wittenberg. Luther is shocked. “Here I’m losing my faith, feeling like a fool, even to pray, and you’re sending me away?” he asks.

“You’ll preach,” the superior says.

When Luther says he’ll be a fraud as a preacher, the Superior tells him, “We preach best what we need to learn most.”

It’s always been a fascinating kind of psychological paradox to me – that preachers (and, okay, writers too) do their very best at what they need to learn. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan prelates are always better preachers when they’ve got something to hide – take the good Rev. Hooper from “The Minister’s Black Veil,” for instance. Especially in my tradition, in which the preacher, long ago, was once addressed only as “dominie,” the possibility of the preacher being anything less than a paragon of personal virtue is almost scandalous.

With good reason. It seems to me that had Mother Teresa ever confessed the grave depth of her doubt to those who served with her on the streets, such a revelation could have led her sisters to doubt the whole enterprise. So she held back her honesty, which in all likelihood made her doubt and pain even worse.

“The place of God in my soul is blank. – There is no God in me,” she wrote to a superior, Father Joseph Neuner, when he asked her to write out her inner trials. “When the pain of longing is so great – I just long & long for God – and then it is that I feel – He does not want me – He is not there” (210).

And then, remarkably, she says, “My heart & soul & body belongs only to God – that He has thrown away as unwanted the child of His Love. – And to this, Father, I have made that resolution in this retreat – To be at his disposal” (212). 

I don’t know that anyone will ever determine how it was that a woman of such faith could become so spiritually penniless – could have, for years by her own admission, had no faith at all. But what seems to be true is that her own deprivation – God’s own absence in her own life, her prayer life, her devotional life – somehow strengthened her resolve to live the life of service and love that she did on the dark streets of Calcutta.

Only in the poor did she see Jesus.

Understanding grace made a great difference in the life of Martin Luther. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder whether Mother Teresa, saint though she is, could have been lifted from her near despondency by a reminder that our owning salvation is not something that comes by a purchase any of us could have made.

But she knew. She had to know. She just had to. She just couldn’t believe it somehow, and she’s likely, today too, not alone.