Mother Teresa, the “Mennonite”

“She must be a Mennonite! Who would have known?” I thought as I read, Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta.

The rest of the world knows her as Mother Teresa, the wizened, diminutive Roman Catholic nun of Albanian origin who won the Noble Peace Prize for her work among “the poorest of the poor” in Calcutta, India.

She is among the most broadly respected and universally admired people of our time along with the late Pope John Paul II, Billy Graham, and the Dalai Lama. The most powerful leaders in the world deferred to her presence and hoped she might condescend to grant them a favour of blessing.

In 1969, newly converted atheist Malcolm Muggeridge introduced her to the world with his documentary film and book called, Something Beautiful for God.

Now Come Be My Light, a carefully selected compilation of Teresa’s private letters over the last 66 years, reveals a woman that even her closest co-workers never saw – a woman who, behind her perpetual smile, struggled with deep inner anguish.

Much was made of her “faith crisis” when the letters were published. But no mature Christian will be shocked by what they read here. For 10 years she wrote candidly to her confessor about a deep darkness in her heart. But in 1958 the locus of the crisis shifted and, from that time on, her letters must be carefully mined for hints of the darkness.

Her moments of anguish will not shock us because we all experience darkness. The notable difference is that our private cries aren’t published. Mother Teresa’s despair is neither as poignant nor heartwrenching as that recorded in Psalms. But, to coin a phrase, “the world loves the darkness rather than the light.”

Aside from her personal anguish, something recognizable began to emerge as I read my way through the early sections of the book. “I’ve heard this before!”

As a person who grew up in traditional Mennonite culture, I knew the language of service and piety wrapped in deep self-abasement. Mother Teresa, like pious Mennonites, never uses the personal pronoun in a positive context. John the Baptist’s statement, “He must increase, but I must decrease” and Paul’s “I rejoice in my sufferings” become mantras wrenched out of their contexts and turned into self-deprecation.

Those of us who grew up and out of that world quickly tire of this. When Mother Teresa writes incessantly of the need for “immolation” (sacrifice by burning) my instinctive reaction was, “lighten up for goodness sake!” – not a gracious response to the “Saint of Calcutta.” But then I come from a culture that used the Martyr’s Mirror as a textbook and lives with the memories of those who were actually immolated because of their commitment to be obedient to Jesus’ instructions.

So what can we take from the writings of Mother Teresa, the “Mennonite”?

For me it was a reminder that we are the ancestors of a culture, like Mother Teresa’s, that taught and lived radical obedience and self-sacrifice. The world may not have idolized our “saints,” but they worked, built, served, sacrificed, and preached to the “poorest of the poor” just as Mother Teresa did. And they did it with their whole lives. Their stories are still alive among us.

Not all is familiar, of course. Mother Teresa represents a facet of the Christian world as bizarre and exotic as a Western Protestant can imagine. It is the world of ancient Catholicism, of vows and blind obedience, of monastic orders. The fact this foreign Mother Teresa wasn’t easy to understand is not surprising.

Come Be My Light is a timely reminder of the fundamental humanity of our heroes. For all the adoration given her, Mother Teresa was not perfect. She was a remarkable person to be sure but she also fought selfishness, pride, despair, judgementalism, and a host of other very human maladies. Putting our heroes on pedestals that can’t accommodate reality serves no one well. She was not above reproach and what she accomplished is only made more remarkable when we realize she was one of us.

Pride is a complex sentiment, but we should be proud of our “saints” and, like Malcolm Muggeridge, tell their stories well. Their feats are extraordinary. The fact that we already know them to be human and fallible only makes their stories richer.

James Toews is pastor at Neighbourhood Church, Nanaimo, B.C.