The risk of being more like Mother Teresa

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I saw the statue of Mother Teresa during a visit to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. earlier this year. A pleasing and apt tribute, but a little unsatisfying, and it took me a minute to figure out why: the image is fixed and still, while its subject was so often in action.

I’m glad Mother Teresa is being canonized this weekend. I’ve thought of her for a long time as a saint. With or without miracles, she embodied heroic virtue and service. How much of that will be understood by the people who weren’t around or weren’t paying attention when she was working in India?

She deserves more than reduction to a dry paragraph in a book of saints.

We can read about her. Start with Malcolm Muggeridge’s Something Beautiful for God (a project that changed Muggeridge’s life). We can watch the movies  made about her life; I enjoyed The Letters. Eventually, though, I must move from hearing about her to hearing her.

Would you throw away an established career in midlife, to your own bewilderment and that of your superiors? She did, going from being a teacher as a Sister of Loreto to becoming a minister to the poor and foundress of an new religious order. “I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith.” She called it her “call within a call.”

That woman had some nerve. Her address at the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast was but one illustration of her ability to unsettle world leaders. She talked about caring for the dying, about abortion, about natural family planning, about the urgency of first caring for one’s own family. Poor President and Mrs. Clinton found themselves seated while everyone else in the room was giving Mother Teresa a standing ovation.

I honestly don’t think she got up every morning thinking of how many people she could annoy. She simply went about her work and then told people about what she saw and did and believed. She served God with her words as much as with her deeds.

There was a bit of a fuss after her death when letters between her and her spiritual advisor became public. I remember some of the news coverage: Mother Teresa had doubts; she felt separated from God at times – as if those revelations somehow undermined her work and her reputation.That’s not how I took them, then or now.

She was really human. That was comforting in a way, but also unnerving. If this thoroughly human woman could do what she did even in the midst of internal turmoil, what’s my excuse?

I have none, of course.

It’s easy to say that I wish there were more people like her. It’s tougher to say that I want to be more like her. No telling where that could lead.

Sunday Best: a NH Catholic Church re-opens

Above the altar, St. Stanislaus church
Photo: St. Stanislaus FSSP Catholic Church Facebook page.

One of the old ethnic churches near my New Hampshire home has been re-opened after being shuttered for 15 years. Bishop Peter Libasci asked an order of priests dedicated to the Latin Mass to set up shop, and the order obliged. The first Sunday Mass under their auspices at St. Stanislaus Church in Nashua was held recently, and it was an eye-opener.

First of all, the number of young families was staggering. They’re looking to the future. Talking with them after Mass was like a tonic.

The church was packed, people standing in the back, even 40 or so standing on the steps outside when the church filled up. It’s possible some were there for the novelty, or to see what a Latin Mass was like. There were a few folks who had been parishioners back in the days when it was “the Polish parish.” There were certainly some pre-Vatican II Catholics who wanted the liturgy of their youth. Most of the attendees, though, looked like they’d been born well after the mid-1960s.

I’ll tell you what this looks like to me, as a Catholic activist: these people praying together are not cultural refugees. They’re not wringing their hands. They’re not obsessed with the next election. They’re steeped less in tradition per se than in faith in God. And they’re bringing that faith with them as they raise their kids, go about their daily business, and prepare to vote.

This post is derived from one to which I contributed on Da Tech Guy blog.

On Amoris Laetita and one priest’s counsel: “stay as close as you can”

Pope Francis has written The Joy of Love (Amoris Laetitia), and it evokes words that had a profound effect on my life – words uttered a decade before Pope Francis even became a priest, and a year before I was born.

The pope’s apostolic exhortation reinforced the Catholic Church’s recognition of the truth about the dignity and indissolubility of marriage. At the same time, he urged readers to build bridges of mercy and patience and acceptance for other people as they are, where they are.

Can one be “accepting” of people in unsanctioned unions, without compromising on truth? Let me tell you my family’s story, and you’ll know why I say yes.

My parents had a whirlwind courtship: they got married five months after they met. There was one sticky point that probably kept them from getting married even sooner: my father had been divorced.

Both my parents were Catholic, my mother more observant than my father. Before going through with the wedding, Mom needed to talk to a priest.

She knew what it meant to marry someone whose marriage had been dissolved under civil law. She did not ask the priest to re-write the rules.  She was going to marry my father, and that was that. At the same time, she had faith in God and in His Church. What, she asked the priest, could she do?

His answer was simple. “Stay as close as you can.”

No threats. No thundering denunciations. No compromise of the truth. Just a clear, merciful invitation for Mom to participate in the life of the faith community as best she could, with the clear understanding that she and my father were choosing to forgo the sacraments.

And so my parents were married in a civil ceremony. I was born a year later. Mom took me to church every week, we were active in parish activities, and when the time came I had religious education. One day when I was very little I asked Mom why she didn’t come to Communion with me. “Just pray that I can someday,” she replied. Stay as close as you can, she must have been thinking.

When my father’s first wife passed away – may she rest in peace – my parents had their marriage solemnized in the Church. It must have been one of the happiest days of my mother’s life. It was therefore a happy day for my father, regardless of his ongoing irritation with the Church.

When I became an adolescent, I started asking why I had to go to church when Dad didn’t. “Listen to your mother,” he growled. I muttered mutinously but I complied. A couple of decades later, Dad listened to her, too.

A funny thing happened when adulthood snuck up on me: I realized my mother had put down roots for my faith, and those roots stubbornly refused to be torn up.  My mother brought me up in such a way that I couldn’t escape the truth if I tried.

All that time, she lived by the merciful and encouraging words spoken by a priest I never knew: stay as close as you can. Had she not received mercy and encouragement at that critical moment, she might have fled the Church in despair, and her life and mine would have been very different.

My mother didn’t tell me about her conversation with that priest until a short time before she died. When she told me, I thought to myself, now it all makes sense.

I have been the beneficiary of encouraging words spoken at a critical moment to a person whose marriage was for several years not in accord with Church teaching. I’ve seen the generational effect of those words. As I read The Joy of Love, I knew that Pope Francis understood how powerful mercy, acceptance and encouragement can be.

I wish I knew the name of the priest who counseled my mother. I ask God to bless him, wherever he is. There’s a good chance he was a military chaplain, since my parents met on an Army base. That’s a tough pastoral environment. I’d say he knew how to rise to an occasion.

My parents had 42 years together. The first dozen of those years were spent outside the sacraments but still inside a warm and faith-filled parish (stay as close as you can). My mother’s example brought my father back to the practice of the faith. I am Catholic in large part due to her influence, which in turn has affected my own husband and children.

Stay as close as you can. Those words anticipated The Joy of Love by more than fifty years, and they built a bridge that my parents were eventually able to cross together. Witnessing my parents’ eventual full reconciliation with the Church, I learned that mercy and truth are essential – and we separate them at our peril. I’m grateful to the Holy Father for reinforcing that lesson.