Well, she was here in spirit. This all happened this morning. I had the morning off and needed a little nap time. Shortly after getting up I was getting to work on my online university course when I heard several women chattering in the hallway. Curious and a little annoyed by the racket I looked out the door to see what was going on when two small women wearing bed sheet saris and with the loveliest and friendliest faces approached me and asked if they could stop in to chat. At first I declined but I recognized their habit, the uniform of the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta. I invited them in.
They seemed fascinated by all my art on the walls and one of them, who seemed clearly the spokesperson of the duo asked me a lot of questions about what I do. I told them honestly that I'm ordinarily at work Monday mornings and that I was also working on my university course. We talked about travel in Latin America and I learned that the spokes sister was fluent in Spanish, having spent several years in Venezuela so we chatted for a while in Spanish which I interpreted for her companion sister who is from the Philippines. Spokes Sister is from India.
Following our chat we prayed together and they gave me a little card with Mother Teresa's face on one side and a prayer in Spanish on the other. I have absolutely no regret about receiving both sisters into my home and I would do this again. It was like being visited by Christ himself and I said this to them as the were leaving. I am not a Catholic and I do harbour my share of cynicism towards the Roman Institution. Whether pedophile priests or their barmy prolife dogma and their objectionable anti gay and anti women stances and the centuries of bloodshed, corruption and abuse of power that this institution has under its white skirts it simply amazes me that there are still people who would dare defend the Roman Catholic Church as being God's only true representative. By their fruits you shall know them. And Mother Teresa defended and upheld the whole rotten kit and caboodle.
She was a woman who lived her faith, one of thousands, perhaps millions of faithful Catholics, who regardless of the rot and corruption of the institution they represent have accurately, faithfully and lovingly lived in their own times the life of Christ. I have a friend who spent six weeks with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, I believe in 1983. She returned glowing.
I understand that Mother Teresa went through years of spiritual, moral and emotional agony about her own loss of faith. She went through a prolonged dark night of the soul while never flinching once on her faithfulness towards the God she doubted and the poor to whose care and wellbeing she had dedicated herself. I also have absolutely no time for the spurious and slanderous nonsense written by Christopher Hitchens about Mother Teresa in his famous screed "Missionary Position." Himself a bitter atheist why would he find anything good in the life of someone who professed to love a God he not only did not believe in but would spare no effort to discredit?
To this day Mother Teresa, along with two other prominent Catholics, Jean Vanier, the founder of L'Arche and Henri Nouwen, Catholic priest and writer, has had probably the strongest influence on the way I live and follow Christ, along with Simone Weil, Ghandi, Dietrich Bonheoffer and Martin Luther King. What has remained constant about this legacy I have inherited from these ones is in the importance of following Christ through loving others, that really our love of God and our love of our fellow human being are absolutely inseparable. For me it is attempting to reach out to others in a spirit of love and reconciliation that helps keep Christ alive and resurrected for me and to this I owe these people's example and influence.
I especially remember the joy and the humility and the good humour of the two sisters who visited to me and I hope that together we will find and enjoy fellowship in the hereafter, and I would also gladly invite them again to chat and pray with me here in my little subsidized apartment.
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