Mother Teresa: Her message is love

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

I think of it as myth, now, as a fairy tale I once believed. Truth has been downsized to fit a package I can carry around with me. The whole truth grew too heavy and cumbersome with age. The whole truth demanded a responsibility I continue to shun.

But I remember the child who accepted the whole truth, the child I was, who knew that life on Earth was only a test, that Heaven was the reward, not anything we might win here on Earth, and that the sole purpose of existence was to love God in this world and be happy with Him in the next.

How were we to love God? By loving our neighbors; by honoring the God within them. It was that easy. No complicated formula - four letters, one word: love.

Father Damien was my inspiration. His love manifested itself in service. He tended to the lepers on Molokai when nobody else would. Eventually he contracted their disease and was buried with them in a little cemetery worlds away from his family and home. But he had fulfilled his purpose in life. He had helped those who could not help themselves. His was a life to emulate and extol.

I wonder now what happened to that child whose faith was so strong. When did the treason of doubt take root? When did I begin to rationalize truth, to question life's purpose, to stop seeing service as a goal and God in every living thing?

It was history, I know, that first highlighted religion's flaws. History showed me man's failings, the grasping, greedy natures of saints as well as sinners: licentious priests, systematic persecution of non-Christians by Christians, perfidy among popes. Did I really believe that God lived within even liars and killers and thieves?

The truth was realigned and reinvented then, and has been repeatedly through the years. Mine is a pick and choose truth now, to the point where I can walk by the ragged, begging homeless holding signs that plead "Help me," and not help. To the point where I can almost always look the other way.

Such is life, I tell myself. Am I my brother's keeper? Not all the time. Only when I want to be.

Mother Teresa is her brother's keeper. She knows the whole story. She isn't a child, and she isn't naive. She knows that saints aren't much different from sinners, that the good in people is often impossible to find, and that for all her work and faith and devotion, she can never change the world.

But this doesn't embitter her. She gets up every morning at 4:30 for Mass and meditation, then goes out and ministers to the poorest of the world's poor with a resilience born of faith and sustained by humility. She does what she can, what God allows her to do. She doesn't dwell on what she cannot do. She doesn't waste energy on resentment or anger or despair. She doesn't question why things are, and she doesn't judge.

She simply loves. Which is what we've all been called to do.

When you see her on TV, you get a feeling she's a saint. When you meet her in person, you know she is. And yet the word "saint" distances her, separates her from other human beings, for people think that saints are born, not made.

This isn't true. Even saints have choices. For 20 years Mother Teresa was an ordinary nun, teaching geography to affluent Indian girls, living a comfortable life. When she was 36, she says God spoke to her and told her to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them.

She didn't have to heed this voice. Nobody else heard it. It didn't come over a loud speaker. She could have chalked it up to stress, an overactive imagination, and continued serving God as she always had.

But she did as she was told. She started a new order of nuns devoted to the indigent, diseased, and dying. She shed her habit for the rough-hewed sari worn by the poorest of Indian women, so that she and her sisters would be indistinguishable from the people they served.

Today is her 83rd birthday. She could be sitting on a porch somewhere, enjoying retirement. She could be basking in accolades. But she continues to shun fortune and to serve the world's poorest poor.

The world has honored Mother Teresa, with the Nobel prize for peace and with its continuing respect. The world with its billions of people, full of royalty, pedigree and super stars is awed and humbled by this tiny, bent, deeply-lined old woman who has nothing the world so openly values: wealth, youth, beauty, talent.

But she has what it secretly craves. She knows the purpose of life. She knows why we are here.

"You have no time for one another. That is the terrible thing today . . . We must love each other," she constantly says. "And the truth of love is service."

Her message is an old, oft repeated one, incredibly simple but incredibly difficult, too.

Unless you believe, as Mother Teresa does, that God lives within us all.