Lessons on Social Justice from St. Teresa of Kolkata

BY HARV BISHOP

It is said if you want to learn to pray be in the presence of a praying person.

I find that to be true, especially with Mother Teresa of Kolkata, in the two times I saw her during my years as a reporter for The Denver Catholic Register. The energy of her presence and intention was palatable as she deplaned from a small private jet in an airport north of Denver for a speaking engagement. It was a presence that was by magnitudes larger than her stooped five-foot stature as she passed within a few feet of me, gnarled hands above her head clasp in prayer position entwined with a rosary as she bowed to each of the dozens of people lining her path.

I remember my heart in my throat as the photographer and I were driving way too fast in an effort to keep up with the police motorcade driving her to the Denver Coliseum. We joked that the showy recklessness of the speeding police could inadvertently end the life of the living saint.

Whether Mother Teresa, or His Holiness the Dalai Lama, I have found that being in their presence and contemplating their actions evoke more than the words delivered in their formal addresses. The words, at least for me, weren’t the font of wisdom I expected and in a way were beside the point. I’d hear people talking after they spoke, quoting nuggets that they had heard but inevitably it was projection, something the holy person had said mixed with a favored view of the listener.

I was reminded of all this as Mother Teresa achieved formal sainthood becoming Saint Teresa of Kolkata this week. The Catholic Church finally recognized what was obvious to everyone in the latter 1980s and before. For all its profound strengths and weaknesses, the Church can be behind the curve. And that is understatement. They okayed listening to The Beatles just a few years ago, making the world safe for “the White Album.”

Gary Jansen, who edited the new Mother Teresa book, “A Call to Mercy,” writes in a forthcoming article in the October issue of Science of Mind magazine:

The life of newly canonized Saint Teresa of Kolkata was a Jesus-centered, love-centered life of responses. Wherever she saw another, she saw Jesus. She saw love. And she responded in kind with compassion, obedience, and devotion. Because that’s what you do when you encounter love. You don’t spit on it. You embrace it.

She was not without controversy. She was a conservative Catholic and a traditionalist also when it came to the role of women in the church, society and abortion. Some conservatives unfairly invoked her as a model for how church woman should behave as they too easily overlooked her drive and toughness. She herself advocated a traditional role for women of home and motherhood even though her own life was anything but. Some liberals questioned whether her charity driven model was effective since it did not address systemic causes of poverty in the way that Liberation Theology birthed in South America did.  And she could connect to questionable characters to support the work of her Missionaries of Charity sisters and those questions extended to her use of the businessman’s private jet trip to Denver.

But her simple and courageous compassion transcended liberal and conservative theology and politics.

The remarkable thing is that this saint was so human.  As we now know Mother Teresa could often be depressed and plagued by doubt, what Jansen calls “a decades long dark night of the soul.” All of that and still she achieved wondrous things.

Sainthood, Jansen writes, is not about perfection but instead about remembering our essential holiness, being mindful of how we respond to life, and constantly being mindful to allow more love and compassion to come through us.

I asked Jansen what New Thought can learn from the Catholic perspective on social justice.

“Catholic social justice is really about elevating others,” Jansen says. “I had the good fortune recently of editing one of the works of Mother Teresa’s writings (“Mother Teresa: A Call to Mercy”). In those writings you see someone who is not afraid to take action to help other people. Mother Teresa was not afraid to clean maggots out of people who were barely alive. She could have just let them die. They were going to die anyway. She wanted to clean them, she wanted to look at them and remind that they were human beings worthy of dignity and compassion. It was as if she said, ‘Maybe the world did not care about you for most of your life, but in these last moments I want you to know that you are cared for.’

“I think that is God’s message to all of us. To remember that God always says, ‘I care for you.’

“You are not going to understand all the crazy stuff that goes on in the world. Maybe God does not even understand it, but it is a reminder that you are here for a reason. The fact that you have life and that you have breath, you are here for a reason.

“Catholic social teaching says no one person is better than anyone else. People like Dorothy Day who helped the homeless and the poor, she sacrificed her life because that is what Jesus did. The whole idea of the crucifixion and passion is Jesus saying ‘I am sacrificing myself for the better good. And I am trying to be an example of the way we should lead our lives.

“If you look at the Stations of the Cross, which is a Catholic teaching, there are 14 Stations and those are 14 Stations of 14 different reactions that Jesus has about suffering. He could have cursed people, but he did not, he forgave them. When people turned their backs on him he could have hated them, he did not, he met them where they were and accepted them.

“Catholic social teaching is really about meeting people where they are and doing the best you can to try and make their lives a little bit of heaven on Earth in any way you can. Maybe that means giving someone a dollar, or cleaning someone’s sheets, or giving them food or giving them clothes. It is about uplifting humanity. That is what the cross is all about. Jesus is dying on the cross, he is being uplifted for all to see. I think we are all called to lift up the people who are suffering, not on a cross, but to lift them up and to raise them closer to God.”

To become a saint, an individual has to be associated with two miracles. Read how the Catholic Church documented Mother Teresa’s two miracles in this article from NPR.