I’ve been reading Something Beautiful for God. It is primarily Malcolm Muggeridge’s reflections on Mother Teresa, but also includes a transcript of one of his interviews with her and some of her prayers. Here are a couple of my favorite parts:
Malcolm: You took [the poor] things that they needed.
Mother Teresa: It is not very often things they need. What they need much more is what we offer them. In these twenty years of work amongst the people, I have come more and more to realize that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience. Nowadays we have found medicine for leprosy and lepers can be cured. There’s medicine for TB and consumptives can be cured. For all kinds of diseases there are medicines and cures. But for being unwanted, except there are willing hands to serve and there’s a loving heart to love, I don’t think this terrible disease can ever be cured. (p. 73-4).
It seems to me that this disease can afflict many of the people you see in an affluent Starbucks: bitter middle-aged divorcées, the successful businessman who bullies everyone, teenagers who were only read to by daycare employees. This is the disease of the culture of death.
But there is hope, and it is not in pity but in active love.
Malcolm: I understand that [love must be expressed in action, and the poorest of the poor are the means of expressing love of God], and even in this short visit I’ve sensed it as I never have before. These lepers and these little children that you get off the street, they’re not just destitute people, to be pitied, but marvelous people. Anyone who’s well can pity a man who’s sick. Anyone who has enough can pity someone who hasn’t enough. But I think what you do is to make one see that these people are not just to be pitied; they are marvelous people. How do you do this?
Mother Teresa: That’s just what a Hindu gentleman said: that they and we are doing social work, and the difference between them and us is that they were doing it for something and we were doing it to somebody. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in, that we give it and we do it to God, to Christ, and that’s why we try to do it as beautifully as possible. Because it is a continual contact with Christ in his work, it is the same contact we have during Mass and in the Blessed Sacrament. There we have Jesus in the appearance of bread. But here in the slums, in the broken body, in the children, we see Christ and we touch him. [This is the other part, the greater gift, the harder part.] (p. 87).
These passages resound of Dostoevsky, especially in the Brothers Karamazov. Prince Myshkin (in The Idiot) and Ivan pity from a distance and destroy, while Alyosha and Fr. Zosima love by sharing the lives of others, and they redeem. The similarities are so strong that one is tempted to find out whether the Brothers Karamazov was in Mother Teresa’s library. But she didn’t have a library, and there’s no reason to think that this book was important to her. Dostoevsky and Mother Teresa both discovered the same and fundamental truth of the two great commandments: love of Christ lived through active love of neighbor in Christ.
The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference towards one’s neighbor who lives at the roadside assaulted by exploitation, corruption, poverty and disease. (From a reflection, p. 53). Her Home for the Dying is filled with people who were literally picked up off the street. She is doing the work of the Good Samaritan, who cared for the traveler beaten and helpless on the side of the road. But when she sees that those she serves are Christ, she sees the deeper truth of the parable. Christ is the Good Samaritan, but much more so he is the man lying on the side of the road.
Dostoevsky discovered this because—largely through his own fault—he was the man lying on the side of the road, so much so that almost all of his critics have felt free to condescend on a scale that puts Lady Catherine De Bourgh to shame. What they don’t realize is that it doesn’t matter how Dostoevsky got to be on the side of the road, but rather what matters is that once he was there he was with Christ, in pain and ignominy. He learned there that pity, helplessness, and disgust are fellow-travellers, whereas love sees only equality and the means to serve the Beloved.
Mother Teresa learned that Christ was lying on the side of the road without apparent humiliation—certainly not exterior humiliation like Dostoevsky suffered. She learned it by uniting herself to Christ in prayer and in the Sacrament. Christ gave her a profound belief in the verse that she references throughout the book: “I was hungry, I was naked, I was sick, and I was homeless and you did that to me.”
