Sunday, April 11, 2021

Reading Mother Teresa--A terrible longing


Do not be anxious about anything, 
but in every situation, by prayer and petition, 
with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 
And the peace of God, 
which transcends all understanding, 
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. 
Philippians 4:6–7

Reading Jamie Quatro puts a reader like me in an extremely unfamiliar place, smack dab in the middle of the torture a woman, a young woman, knows when she determines that her affair with a man other than her husband cannot – simply cannot – continue. Despite her absolute certainty, her heartfelt conviction that it must end, his sudden absence from her life is a loss as traumatic as death itself – or so Ms. Quatro claims. Figuratively, in that woman’s mind, her heart, and in her body, the other man must die to save her marriage.

One of the highly imaginative stories from Ms. Quatro’s first collection, I Want to Show You More, – starkly places that “other man,” dead, his body decomposing, in the adulteress’s own marriage bed, her husband beside them both. It’s a striking image, a mark of her creative strengths as a writer.

What animates the story is the narrator’s “terrible longing,” terrible meaning, something so awful it’s painful. And yet, what she feels is longing. The phrase is an oxymoron, two mutually contradictory terms juxtaposed as if they’re not mutually contradictory. Some oxymorons get used so often that, they’rve morphed into cliché: sweet sorrow and living dead. But all of them are rooted in paradox, and paradox – or so it seems to me – lies forever at the heart of human experience in part because it’s so undeniably human to, for instance, want what we don’t want.

The torture that results from such inhuman humanness is the stuff of story, even of legend. Listen to Romeo:

“O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!”

Words go to war in an oxymoron, a madness that still somehow makes sense.

And, self-confessedly, it’s at the heart of Mother Theresa’s darkness. Accolades were arising from around the world, her sisterhood was being lauded for its selflessness, the poor on the streets of Calcutta were being loved, daily, but the longing that lay deepest within the heart and soul of Mother Theresa was, for years, unmet.

“My feelings are so treacherous,” she wrote to her bishop, “I feel like ‘refusing God’ and yet, the biggest and the hardest to bear – is this terrible longing for God” (245).

She had no way of understanding the darkness she found in her own soul, a darkness created by Jesus’s own absence; and the result was a “terrible longing,” all-consuming need, passion unsatisfied. What she wanted so badly, she seemed incapable of receiving – the love of Jesus, his words, his comfort. Her love was unrequited. In her heart, Jesus Christ had walked away from his bride, sentencing her to years of this torture, this terrible longing.

Confessions like this were so few and so limited – only to her superiors, and then only to some – that it’s helpful to remember that not once did this Sister of Charity stop working, not once did she falter in what she gave to the poor, not once did her witness on the killing streets of Calcutta flounder. She well may have felt Christ’s absence in her soul, but she never faltered in carrying out what, long ago, Christ had demanded of her.

She may have had “treacherous” feelings, may have had days, even weeks, when she considered simply “refusing God”; but she never did, even though, by our standards, she almost certainly had cause.

Mother Teresa is, via the exacting standards of the Roman Catholic Church, a saint. She gave her life in dedication to the plight of the poor in ghettos of unimaginable suffering. She deliberately chose to live with the poor amid their poverty and even squalor. She took on their suffering, and hers is a life of shining witness.

But when we consider this terrible longing of hers for a lover she believed, with all her heart, had left her, and when we remember that her devotion to God almighty and the least of these his children never flagged, then there is another reason to celebrate this mighty little woman – pure and simple, the enormity of her faith.

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