From second through sixth grade, I attended a small Catholic school in Wyoming. We were fortunate to have three Franciscan nuns who taught all six grades. At least once a week the parish priest would come by the classrooms, reminding us to “pray and obey” and to strive to be saints. I have failed miserably on all three counts throughout my life.
As an adult I understand my calling much differently. Prayer is often a struggle, blind obedience is simply wrong, and saintliness has been greatly misunderstood. I’ve been thinking about this whole saint thing quite a bit lately in anticipation of the canonization of Mother Teresa, which is to occur this Sunday. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, to canonize in the Roman Catholic Church is “to officially give a dead person a special status as someone very holy: to declare (someone) to be a saint.”
Most of us can picture Mother Teresa as a small bent-over woman, wearing her traditional white and blue trimmed religious habit, ministering to the poorest of the poor, primarily in India. She had a special love and devotion for those considered untouchable, including lepers and the terminally ill left to die in the streets. She would often tell the story of a particular man who was found in a gutter, half eaten by worms. When the nuns brought the man to their convent, he said, “I have lived like an animal in the street, but am going to die as an angel: loved and cared for.”
I also remember when Mother Teresa visited the U.S. after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. According to one account: “She was asked to come to New York to be presented with $100, 000 for her work by a Catholic organization. The occasion was a fancy formal dinner where filet mignon would be served. Mother Teresa accepted the check. Next she scolded the crowed for their extravagance, telling them that before she came it took her three hours to scrape the maggots from a dying man’s body. Then she left without eating. A few days later, she received another $100,000 donation, equal to the cost of the banquet.”
My husband even had the opportunity to meet Mother Teresa in 1976 when he volunteered at a Catholic Worker house in Davenport, Iowa. The community offered simple hospitality to the poor and homeless, and Mother Teresa chose to pray with a small group in their living room when she was visiting the area.
But perhaps the most notable aspect of the life of Mother Teresa for me is that throughout all the years of her amazing and grace-filled ministry, she struggled a great deal in her spiritual life. After her death, a book was released filled with letters that she wrote to her pastoral advisors over the years. Although I have not read Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, I understand that it contains many accounts of Mother Teresa’s deep despair and darkness in her prayer and personal life. Her saintliness did not come without cost nor by “cheap grace” but by living with much inner turmoil and tribulation. I tend to believe that she was able to reach out in such loving empathy to the suffering around her because she identified so personally with the suffering she felt within herself much of the time.
As some of us celebrate the official “saintliness” of Mother Teresa on Sunday, may we also reflect on our own calling to serve those in need. May we reach out in service, even when our prayer life feels empty and God may seem very far away. May we find encouragement in our efforts, recalling the words of Mother Teresa herself: “God does not require that we be successful only that we be faithful.”