This from a Time Magazine article worth reading, maybe even the new book out about her:
“On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere — "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive."
Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."
The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.”
5 comments:
Really understanding someone is an impossible task, I think. Even ourselves or a family member. But someone in history? I think Joseph Smith's statement 'no man knows my history' rings true for just about anyone. Did we know Mother Teresa? Certainly a very small but public part, and now apparently we know a little more. I think everyone's lives are filled with 'dissonant' paradoxes, and what makes a good biography for me (and I think Bushman does it well), is when a biographer refuses to draw conclusions based on some of the evidence, but leaves all the muddy dissonance on the page.
It is in the paradoxes of life that we can better understand people I think. Or maybe I just like mud.
You are correct, no disagreement here. What I found interesting were the somewhat disparate personas of the public and private Mother Teresa. Maybe a number of Mormons would fit into that category or any religionist for that matter. We have our public faces and our private ones and they too may change as we ride the roller coaster -- climbing and coasting, slowing and accelerating...
I agree. I wonder how many different personas we really have. Should it be that way or do we need to integrate them? Maybe that's a question for M.A.
Human beings are complex!
That's why we have so many different "frames" for understanding them. When we apply a frame, we (should) understand that it's just a way of conceptualizing, that it may not really capture the "essence" of an individual. Perhaps one great challenge in truly understanding people is overcoming the desire to make someone good or bad? So them's my thoughts right before I fall asleep.
I like the author's words, "Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction...” speaking of Mother Teresa's public and private persona. Isn't that something a few of us see in the world around us -- contrasts and contradictions? Are not our lives filled with contradictions? My religion is littered with them. How about yours?
There are many frames and all must be looked at and then perhaps a composite can achieve resolution. One of the newer hobbies for amateur astronomers is to hook up a web cam to a telescope and then shoot several minutes of digital images of a nearby galaxy. Then with some interesting software a distillation process occurs and out of this comes one very detailed and crisp image. Perhaps the more frames or the more pixels we can have then it gets us closer toward clarity.
For Mother Teresa there was a set of public frames and from her letters now there are private frames. By melding them together we have an image that differed from one most knew of. I do not think it has, in this case, anything to do with good or bad. I offer no judgment. I remain impressed with what she gave up to love others, truly as He loved.
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