The sun hits the magnified face, hanging above the crowds on the banner. It’s a cartoon stuck with smile. Each wrinkle in parallel waves. The wimple shines white.
On September 4, 2016, throngs of the faithful packed the mammoth key-shaped threshold of the Vatican to hear Pope Francis speak the words that declared Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, or, Mother Teresa of Kolkata, a saint.
During the weeks before and after her canonization, my social media feeds were peppered with images and news about Mother Teresa. So I spent about a month casually click-baiting through and learning about her extraordinary life.
Mother Teresa became convinced of her religious calling at age twelve, joined an Irish convent at age eighteen, and, at age thirty-six, experienced a “call within her call” to leave her work at a school in Darjeeling and dedicate the rest of her life to loving and serving the poor in Kolkata. She described these people, her mission, like this: “people who have nothing, who are wanted by no one, who have become a burden to society, who have forgotten love, who have forgotten human touch—for us they are the children of God.”
Reaching sainthood is not easy. But even before her death, Mother Teresa was called a living saint. I’m hard-pressed to think of another twentieth-century figure who embodied charity so publicly as Mother Teresa. Her reach was far, deep, and iconic. Even I can remember my childhood Catholic friends talking about how Mother Teresa’s example encouraged them to “find their own Calcutta,” or to serve the poor faithfully wherever they might be.
In photographs, her exposed skin was tanned to leather—misshapen feet, rough hands, and a round face with an angular nose.Thick and creased. Raw-hide hard.
Last week, as I was excitedly talking about my renewed love of Mother Teresa, a wise friend interrupted and asked if I had done any research into criticism about her. I hadn’t, and there is, surprisingly, quite a bit.
Mother Teresa, for all her claims about not being political, was a powerful, public person. She was tough. She kept things private; she had friends in the highest places; she had an agenda.
Like any saint, she was not perfect.
Christopher Hitchens vilified Mother Teresa in his documentary “Hell’s Angel.” Hitchens calls Terasa the product of “tawdry media and medieval superstition,” a not-so-holy women who eased the consciences of a guilty, privileged West by extorting and publicizing the poverty of the East.
Now, I think Hitchens’s so-called documentary is probably just as tawdry as the hype he so quickly condemns. However, he makes a point. Mother Teresa’s methods of ministry were old fashioned; perhaps they even smacked of neo-colonialism. Maybe her motives were mixed, maybe she shouldn’t have been so quick to label abortion as the chief sin during her nobel peace prize speech (for someone who claims to not be political, that’s quite a statement).
I began to wonder if living saints are more trouble than they’re worth. It’s infinitely easier to admire distant, comfortable heroes, whose faults have been erased by time and whose virtues have been burnished into the canon. I think some Christians distance themselves from saint culture for this reason. But maybe this is exactly why we need “living saints.”
She was so small, compared to the tailored stature of the presidents, war-lords, and giants of industry she met. Her body bent almost into a shepherd’s crook. An angle of burden.
All human societies make heroes. Christians enjoy a cloud of witnesses to choose from—some ancient and some who bear the complexities of our own times. Mother Teresa is a perfect example, but not just because she died less than thirty years ago, but because she was a complicated figure even to herself.
Mother Teresa struggled with long, painful bouts of doubt in her spiritual life. She wrote to her spiritual advisor, “In my soul I feel that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not existing.”
I first read about Mother Teresa’s dark night in a book by Fr. James Martin S.J. (his chapter on Mother Teresa is neatly summarized in this YouTube video); Martin calls Mother Teresa the “patron saint of doubters.”
This is why I admire Mother Teresa in all the different snippets and images of her life that I observed: the saint enshrined in St. Peter’s, the tough and controversial political force, a woman secretly bowed down with doubt. She was a complicated person within and without, and she will remain a controversial saint. But, if there ever was a saint that this world needed—right now, this month—it’s a person who understood what it meant to carry the burden of uncertainty and still threw herself into God’s hard, but beautiful service. That is saint enough for me.
After a trial-by-fire year as public school substitute teacher and fly-by-night freelancer, Julia will shed the tribulations of the work-world to embark on a MA in art history and museum studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH. If you are in town, she’ll gladly take you to a local museum. She enjoys walks, leopard print, and good conversation.
