A Friendly Rant From Captain
Spaulding
A LITTLE
WOMAN WHO CREATED BIG PROBLEMS
Mother Teresa, the
world's biggest troublemaker, is dead at the age
of eighty-seven.
As the media
drowns us all in a lachrymose flood of maudlin
farewells to the former Mrs. Chuck Windsor, word
seeps out over wire and airwave of the passing of
the little wrinkled lady in the white-and-blue
sari.
Tidal wave of
media-stirred grief or not, even the most cynical
among us now have a reason to pity Princess Diana
and her legacy. I wouldn't wish for my worst
enemy to die in the same week as Mother Teresa.
How can a mourner sensibly trot out the do-gooder
tributes in someone's eulogy while the
"saint of the gutters" lies on a frozen
cake of ice in a Calcutta convent awaiting
burial?
But the hoopla
surrounding a megacelebrity will have its way
nevertheless. Meanwhile Mother Teresa gets maybe
a single column on the side of page one, or two
minutes after the first commercial on the six
o'clock news. An acquaintance, fully aware of
Teresa's true place in the context of human
affairs, says that she would have preferred it
that way, that it almost seems fitting that she
leaves the stage through a side door while the
world's gaze lies elsewhere. Let the paeans rain
down on someone else's casket, she'd say.
That's part of the
reason why she was the world's biggest
troublemaker. Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (a
mouthful if I've ever seen one) on August 26,
1910 to Albanian parents in what was then
Yugoslavia but is now the Macedonian Republic,
Teresa entered the nun biz at eighteen in Ireland
and named herself after St. Teresa of Lisieux,
patron saint of missionaries. In her thirties,
while serving in the Himalayas in India, she had
a vision in which God told her to minister to the
"poorest of the poor". And here's the
funny part--when God talked to her, she listened.
She started
ministering to the rat-bitten and diseased
beggars, the dregs of the most squalid city on
the planet, Calcutta. Opened a hospice for the
dying and then a clinic. A BBC camera discovered
her in 1969. Donations started coming in, as well
as volunteers. She founded her own order of nuns,
the Sisters of Charity. Their ranks being mostly
Indian--and she considering herself one with
those among whom she ministered--they eschewed
the traditional nun's habit and wore instead
saris, the national dress of Indian females.
This, too, made her a troublemaker. She was no
Western interloper come to remake Indian society
in the imperial guise of Rome. She took her place
and her flock seriously.
By 1979 she was a
Nobel Peace Prize winner. By the eighties, she
was everywhere--Ethiopia during the famine;
Chernobyl during the meltdown; Armenia during the
earthquake; South Africa and Eastern Europe
before, during, and after liberation. She became
a household name, the modern-day equivalent to
Schweitzer or Gandhi.
In a weird way she
was as much a ubiquitous media creature as the
young Englishwoman who preceded her in death last
week, but she understood long before that naive
princess that the camera was a tool to be put to
the ends of the needy, not the ends of one's own
ego. She said upon receiving the Nobel Prize,
"I am unworthy." And she believed it.
Sincerity and
humility together make for dangerous stuff. She
was so mirrorlike that she bounced everything off
of herself and onto the work of her order, and to
the wretched and homeless wreckage of human life
that she served. Paradoxically, she was so
transparent that people saw God at work right
through her wizened little smile.
She said that she
saw the face of Jesus Christ in the faces of the
poor, the face of Christ in the "distressing
disguise" of people who thus deserved
"the delicate love of God". That's a
pretty old conceit, one that goes all the way
back to the first century AD and the Gospel
according to Matthew (chapter 25, if you're
following along at home).
But if you're a
talking head on location in the world's latest
trouble spot or a reporter on deadline, you look
at her and think to yourself, "Only kids in
Sunday school or people who are smoking some very
strange weed really believe that that leper with
his face half eaten away is the Son of God's
doppelganger." And then you looked at her,
and you knew she believed it. And you knew that
she was trouble.
It gets worse. She
spent her life ministering to people who had
absolutely nothing, yet insisted that it was they
who gave to her.
"The poor
give us so much more than we give them," she
would say. "They're such strong people,
living day-to-day with no food. And they never
curse, never complain. We don't have to give them
pity or sympathy. We have so much to learn from
them." And you saw the logic in that, and
you fell into her trap.
The bottom line of
her life, in a sense, has nothing to do with the
fact that Teresa gave herself over to the aid and
comfort of the most unfortunate people on Earth.
You got the feeling, if you spent any time at all
studying her as a media creature, that she would
have been the same person if she was selling
ladies' pumps at a Payless Shoe Store in
Sheboygan. She did two outrageous things with her
life, things that sensible people aren't supposed
to do much of anymore: She believed God--not
believed in God, believed God--and
obeyed.
People tend to
associate those two phenomena with wild-eyed
fanaticism, with the harsh denunciations of
zealots who are out to club you over the head
with the moral superiority of their program for
the world, or with out-and-out asylum inmate
gibberish. But she was not a Savonarola or a
Falwell, nor was she insane.
And if you think
that she was somehow a nice woman who was a bit
deluded in terms of motivation, you have to
wonder at the energy and resourcefulness with
which she lived out that motivation. And wonder
at its source; after all, she is only the latest
in a long line of her coreligionists who took
their faith seriously enough to transform a
little bit of the world with them--and
transformed the whole shebang in the process over
two millennia. And there are others like her out
there somewhere, demonstrating such obnoxious
traits of their founder the man from Nazareth as
compassion, selflessness, kindness, integrity,
and purity. Scary people, troublemakers, just
waiting for a camera to point their way and have
the red light on top go on.
And don't think
for a moment that the little old Albanian lady
didn't know that, too. Towards the end of her
life, she said, "Pray together and we'll
stay together. And if we stay together we'll love
each other as God himself loves us."
She believed this
stuff. And she played the media like a violin,
getting as many people as would watch to believe
this stuff, getting as many people as she
possibly could who wanted to look away from the
ugly and the outcast to instead stare them in the
face and see Jesus Christ revealed. One little
old lady turning the world upside down every time
a press junket from CNN hit town. What a scary
woman. Scary, because she might not be the only
one out there.
E-Mail Captain Spaulding.
(Choice reader
mail will be published in Pandemonium
Online.)
Previous
Mountaintop Experiences with Captain
Spaulding:
Hooray
For Me #1-- One Margarita
Too Many?
Hooray
For Me #2-- Spitting at the
Generations
Hooray
For Me #3-- The One-Eyed
Spokesmodel
Hooray
For Me #4-- Semisardonic
Over Semisonic
Hooray
For Me #5-- Bury My Brain
at Wounded Knee
Hooray
For Me #6-- Tempest in a B-Cup
Hooray
For Me #7-- Princess Diana
Hooray
For Me #8-- Get Back, Honky Cat
