Where there is darkness...

We recently celebrated the feast of St. Francis. Below is a prayer attributed to him. The Missionaries of Charity pray it every day after Communion, so it played an important role in Mother Teresa's spirituality. I think that the references to light, peace, love, and joy had a special resonance for Mother Teresa. Jesus told Mother in a locution, "Come, be my light," which is also the title of a book that recounts Mother's dark night of the soul in her own words. In many ways this was her mission, to be Christ's light to the world. The references to peace and love are remembered in Mother's "business card." Of course, these are cursory thoughts; a fuller exposition of the prayer and its role in Mother's spirituality would be a major project in itself! 

Here is a version from the National Shrine of St. Francis in San Francisco: 

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, the truth;
Where there is doubt, the faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. 

Amen. 

Processes, spaces, peripheries, horizons

Another fascinating and overlooked quote from the pope's interview: 

"We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics. And it requires patience, waiting."

This is a rather cryptic comment. I am intrigued how Pope Francis's rejection of occupying space links up rather well with his concept of peripheries. A periphery is a boundary--it is a line, a limit, a demarcation. A periphery is not a space. It is a vector, a velocity and direction--in other words, a process. A periphery is the edge of space. Occupation of space, control of power, appears to win out in the present moment, but over time, historical processes displace spaces. So God acts in history as a vector, rather than occupying a space.

I think to understand this comment more fully, we need to turn to a comment the pope made earlier in the interview when referring to St. Ignatius:

"I was always struck by a saying that describes the vision of Ignatius: non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo divinum est (“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine”)....it is important not to be restricted by a larger space, and it is important to be able to stay in restricted spaces. This virtue of the large and small is magnanimity. Thanks to magnanimity, we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are. That means being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others. That means being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the kingdom of God."

St. Ignatius

Of course, without saying it, Pope Francis is referring to the logic of the Incarnation here. God is not limited by the greatest things (God is greater than the universe) and yet he is contained in the tiniest (God emptied himself to become a baby in a manger). But it is also the logic of God's essence. It is the interplay of God's transcendence (He is infinitely above and other than all things) and his immanence (He is more intimate to all things than they are to themselves). As Augustine has it: God is more intimate to me than my innermost self and higher than my uppermost self--interior intimo meo et superior summo meo (Confessions, 3.6.11). God is not limited by the greatest spaces, and yet he is in a sense contained in the tiniest. How is this the case? Oddly enough, Thomas Aquinas seems to suggest that God is immanent because he is transcendent. God's transcendence or infinity (his being-esse, his comprehension all perfections) is the ground of all created being that participates in God's esse (i.e., His act of being). And so God is in all because he is above all.

If that confuses you, it should. Check out the Summa (I, 7-8).

In the Incarnation, God reveals in concrete terms what he already shows forth in his essence--that the God who is above all is also in all and present to all. In the Incarnation, this truth takes on a vivid reality. The God who is not subject to time assumes a human nature in time. And he does so in a way that spurns occupation of space, that is, possession of power. God knows that possession of space is static while processes are dynamic. In his utter poverty, Jesus initiates a historical process that changes the world. He changes the vector of history.

Incarnation window from Chartres Cathedral.

The Pope then brings all of this high-flying theology down to earth. The spiritual takeaway from the logic of Incarnation, the dynamics of God's metaphysical relationship with creation, and the rejection of occupying space is this: we can "appreciate the small things inside large horizons". 

Again, the theme of peripheries! A horizon: the boundary between earth and heaven, the mutual limit of each domain, the space in which earth becomes heaven and heaven becomes earth (here again we find the logic of Incarnation and Sacramentality). If the horizon of our life, the eschatological orientation of being, is the Kingdom of God, then all of our actions, even the smallest, can have eternal significance. 

In fact, we could say that the more meaningless our actions seem, the greater significance they have. This is the case because small actions, actions on the periphery (as opposed to space-occupying actions) are God's privileged channels for changing the world. Indeed, precisely because an action seems so small, there are great opportunities in it for love. Why? Because love is humble; it does not seek aggrandizement. To love when no one is looking, when there is no reward on the other end, when choosing not to love would be so easy--it is then that love counts the most, because it is then that love gives freely and purely.

Let's ask St. Therese for light on this point, whose feast day we celebrated recently. Mother Teresa, who took her name from Therese, looked upon her as a guide to the spiritual life. A good summary of Mother's teaching (although I can't verify that she ever said this sentence word for word) is this maxim commonly attributed to here: We can do no great things, only small things with great love. 

The Little Flower

Towards a theology of thirst

The divine thirst is the first principle and foundation of the MC charism. All else is contained within the experience of thirsting for and being thirsted for by Christ. Accordingly, any theological work must begin with this principle and keep it ever in mind. It will be the soul of any theology that seeks to explicate the MC charism.

What is the task of the theologian as he studies the charism received and transmitted by Mother Teresa? I think it is to make explicit what was implicitly lived and taught by Mother. She was not a theologian, in the normal sense of the word, but I suspect that she had a deeper theological outlook on reality than almost any theologian that lived in the 20th century (and beyond), insofar as she more deeply penetrated the mysteries of reality and their ordering principle--i.e., the divine thirst.

At the beginning of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas makes an interesting distinction between two types of wisdom (I, 1, 6, ad 3). One type of wisdom judges by inclination. The virtuous man knows what is right, for example, though he may not be able to explain why. This wisdom is given as a gift of the Holy Spirit. Another type of wisdom (sacred theology) judges by knowledge. This knowledge of wisdom is acquired by study. The moral theologian knows what is right, not by inclination necessarily, but by a thorough study of the precepts of the natural and divine law, etc. Mother Teresa was wise in the first way. She judged by inclination, illuminated by the divine light. It is the task of the theologian to (1) enter into and (2) give an account of this light.

Mother Teresa came to theologically profound conclusions about the relationship between the poor and the Eucharist, the role of suffering in the Mystical Body of Christ, the meaning of human vocation, the phenomenology of love, the meaning of spiritual and material poverty, the interrelationship of beauty and sanctity, to name a few themes. She rarely gave arguments for her conclusions, having received them in the depths of prayer, but since they come from God, they are surer lights to truth than any worldly philosophy. A theology of thirst can help us to explore her conclusions and their significance, with the aim of making manifest the profound depth of the charism so as to draw others to sanctity.

Although many biographies and memoirs have been written about Mother Teresa--the most recent of which have focused on her dark night of the soul--very little work has been done on the theology underpinning the charism. The most significant step in this direction, I think, would be the book Mother Teresa's Secret Fire written by Father Joseph Langford, co-founder of the MC Fathers (read an excellent biography of Father Joseph and the inspiration for the book here). He writes in Secret Fire that Mother Teresa's vision "takes us into the depths of the Trinity in one direction, and the depths of human nature in the other" (84). I think there is no better time than now to explore this theme.

The application of beauty

What are the end of all these musings on beauty? Why spend the time trying to grasp the relationship between beauty and being, the structure of beauty, and its relationship to love? I think because more fully understanding beauty is a key to unlocking Mother Teresa's vision of the human vocation.

Mother teaches us that we must make our lives something beautiful for God. I think we now have the tools to explicitly describe what Mother Teresa implicitly grasped:

• Christ's crucifixion is the apex of created beauty, insofar as it most fully reveals the depths of divine being whose essence is love (we can understand the processions of the Trinity from Father to Son and Father and Son to the Holy Spirit as perfect gifts of self [=love]. The crucifixion is a creaturely icon of this self-gift). Our entrance into this beauty is a double ecstasis. It is a meeting of thirsts: Christ's thirst to love and our thirst to be loved. Or Christ's thirst to be loved and our thirst to love. Here is the core of the charism of the Missionaries of Charity. 
• Holiness (beauty) is the goal of human life. This could change how we understand even the smallest of our tasks. If we are able to orient all of our work towards the final goal of holiness, and if we understand holiness as beauty (the glimpse of God that breaks out of our life and into the lives of others), we can find intense meaning in even the smallest tasks.
• The Church teaches the path to beauty. To want to live a beautiful life is not some false sentimentality. The objective path to beauty (and the most beautiful life is the holy life, inasmuch as the holy life more fully reveals the being of God who is love) is taught to us by the Church, above all in Scripture and Tradition as interpreted by the Magisterium. The Church calls us to holiness and gives us the means: Tradition and Scripture guide us, the Magisterium instructs us, the Sacraments strengthen us and prepare us to live charitably, and our prayer feeds us. Mother Teresa's holiness was a holiness lived from and for the Church. Let us make her mantra our own: I will give saints to Holy Mother Church [starting, we could add, with myself!].

I hope to return more to the theme of beauty and its relation to Mother's charism in future posts. 

Beauty, being, and the transcendentals

[This post is a little heavier than usual. A summary of the argument and more interesting implications can be found at the end of the post!]

Most people today understand beauty to be a subjective appraisal of an object. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so goes the saying. This idiom is often resorted to when people disagree about whether or not something is beautiful. Imagine you and I are at an art gallery. You find a particular work beautiful, but I don't. We talk for a bit, and end up agreeing to disagree. And no hard feelings, we tell each other, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You're not wrong and I'm not wrong. We just have a different opinion. Beauty, this perspective proposes, is a matter of taste. Or is it? We're asking this question: Is there any on which can we judge something as more beautiful than another thing?

Before we answer that question, let's remember why we're asking it. What's at stake in the question? Why should we care if beauty has an objective basis or whether it's just a matter of taste? it gets back to the teachings of Mother Teresa that we're trying to understand. "Make every action something beautiful for God," she instructs us. Well, if beauty is simply a matter of taste, than what makes an action beautiful or not beautiful is just a matter of taste, a matter of opinion. And once we accept that premise, we very quickly fall into moral relativism (the refutation of which would require another post, at least).

Not so uncommon a view today.

But back to the question: is beauty merely a matter of opinion? I think that the reduction of beauty to subjective judgment without an objective basis degrades beauty to the level of all other things that are a matter of taste. You might like vanilla ice cream and I might like chocolate ice cream, but we can disagree--it's a matter of taste. Vanilla is not objectively better than chocolate. We just have different preferences. Is the same true of art? Is a pop song by Ke$ha really just as beautiful as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (hint: the answer is no)? And if Beethoven's symphony is more beautiful, what is the objective basis for making such a determination?

Before we can answer that question, we need a small crash course in Aristotelian and Scholastic metaphysics in order to familiarize ourselves with two concepts: being and the transcendentals. I'll be drawing mostly from the thought of Thomas Aquinas. We proceed to our first question:

What is being? Ens est id cuius actus est esse [see this wonderful compilation of scholastic axioms]. Being is that whose act is to be. We could say that anything that is has being. But we should note that being is different than existence. Existence is dichotomous. A tree exists and a man exist. But a man exists in a different way than a tree. His act of being is different than the tree's. In scholastic terminology, we say that the particular mode of being of the man--i.e., the form of the man--is different than the form of the tree. A man exists as a creature that thinks, wills, feels, etc. A tree does none of these things, but it does grow and reproduce.

Here's my point: whereas existence is dichotomous (things either exist or they don't), being is intensive (things can exist in many different ways, on account of their different forms). To put it another way, being admits of degrees. We could say it's multichotomous, rather than dichotomous. A man has more being than a tree, because it can think and will and feel and move, whereas a tree can only grow and reproduce. Man more fully expresses the possibilities of being.

Hierarchy of Being.
From Rhetorica Christiana, 1579. 

Why should we care about the difference between being and existence, whether one is dichotomous and the other is intensive, etc? Keep reading. We need one more concept to get there, the transcendentals. What are the transcendentals? Transcendentale est universalis modu entis inquantum entis. A transcendental is a universal mode of being insofar as it is being. To put it another way: a transcendental is a property of being that pertains to all being qua being. All things that are possess these properties. 

In Scholastic philosophy, they are four: all being is one, true, good, and beautiful. Since all being as being has these properties, the transcendentals are convertible. So whatever is one is also true, good, and beautiful; whatever is beautiful is also one, true, and good; etc. Under this schema, what is beauty? Ens relate ad apprehensum. Being in relation to the apprehension. It is the revelatory character of being, the aspect of being that is self-showing, that gives itself to the intellect to be understood (as truth) and acted upon by the will (as good). As Balthasar would have it: "The basic phenomenon in all three of them [the true, good, and beautiful] was their epiphanic character, which permeates everything that exists: self-showing (beauty), self-giving (goodness), self-saying (truth), were all seen to be various aspects of this appearing. This appearing is a king of shining-out that recalls the illuminating action of light" (Chapter 5, section c in the Epilogue to his Triptych).

Of course, none of these are my ideas, nor are they new ideas. I'm relying here first of all on Plato's notion of beauty from Symposium: beauty is the epiphany of form that functions as a bridge to the divine (cf. 210 [acc. to Stephanus pagination]). I am also appropriating Heidegger's notion of aletheia (unconcealedness or disclosure), which he identifies as truth in The Origin of the Work of Art but later admits, correctly I think, that "to raise the question of aletheia, of disclosure as such, is not the same as raising the question of truth. For this reason, it was inadequate and misleading to call aletheia, in the sense of opening, truth" (On Time and Being, p. 70). I think what Heidegger was getting at with the notion of aletheia as the opening and disclosure of a world is what Plato understood as the epiphany of form and what the Scholastics would understand as beauty. So the notion of beauty as the self-showing aspect of being has a long and rather distinguished philosophical genealogy.

Plato's Academy. Mosaic from a villa in Pompeii.

At this point, perhaps you're thinking that not all things are beautiful and true and good. There seems to be much in the world that is not beautiful and good. Things like genocide, starving children, civil wars, and natural disasters that we read about in the news every day. Here it is important to keep in mind the aspect under which being is beautiful, etc. All being is beautiful as being. Some beings as evil agents are perverse and ugly. But even these people who do ugly things are still beautiful insofar as they are beings. They are morally evil, yes, but ontologically good, true, and beautiful. So we need to be careful to recognize the formal aspects under which we judge something as beautiful. 

To summarize: 

1. Being is that which is. Everything that exists has being, but not all being exists in the same way. Different beings exist through different modes (called forms). Being admits of degrees in such a way that one thing (e.g., a man) can have more being than another thing (e.g., a tree). 
2. The transcendentals are properties common to all being as being. That is to say: everything that is has these qualities. They are the one, true, good, and beautiful. Beauty is being qua being as it relates to the apprehension. It is, in other words, the self-showing property of being. 

With this framework, our conclusions about beauty fall into place rather easily:

1. All things that exist are beings. Some things have more being than others (they more fully express the possible ways of being).
2. All being possess transcendental properties. The more being a thing possesses, the more one, true, good, and beautiful it is qua being. Why? If beauty is the self-showing property of being, a thing that has more being will be able to show/reveal more being than that which has less. 

To answer our original question: we can judge something as more or less beautiful on the basis that it possesses and shows forth more being than another. This is primarily a conclusion that applies to the ontological realm. It would take quite a bit more work to move from here to the ethical realm, but I would at least suggest a way forward: the human who lives a more beautiful life is the one who more fully reveals the possibilities of being and the nature of being itself.

If God is the source of all being-- ipsum esse per se subsistens, being itself subsisting through itself (again, material another post!)--then the human who is most beautiful is the one whose life more fully reveals being itself by conforming itself to that Being's mode of being. And if the essence of that supreme being--being itself--is love, then the life that is most beautiful is the life most fully lived in love. And what is it to love? To will the good of the other as other (that is, for its own good and not for your own benefit). So Christ lived the most beautiful human life because through his human nature he most fully revealed (incarnated) being itself is and showed forth the possibilities of being. He most fully showed us what love is and how to love.

I would suggest that the saints and blesseds, including Mother Teresa, did something similar: showing us new ways of living in the world in conformance with the life of freedom that is life lived in and for God. 

Beauty, evangelization, and MT

Here is another fascinating video from Father Robert Barron. In it he discusses the role of beauty in the New Evangelization. here's his thesis: "The best way to evangelize...is to move from the beautiful, then to the good, then to the true. And to get that backwards is to evangelize very ineffectively." Since our culture tends to be suspicious of truth claims ("all religions are at their core the same"), and relativistic on the question of morality ("what's good for you isn't necessarily good for me"), it is best to start with the beautiful--simply to present beauty to a person. Not to tell them that what they're doing is wrong or that they're living a life of lies. Obviously no one likes that. Simply to show them the beautiful.

It is difficult to argue with something beautiful, perhaps because beauty doesn't make an argument. It shows forth something, it gives of its essence to the beholder. Beauty seizes us and compels us to enter into the world that it has created, the world that it shows forth. The experience of beauty is also something intensely personal (although beauty itself is not subjective), and for this reason it is a good place to begin evangelizing in the modern world, which places so much emphasis on subjectivity and personal experience. It is hard to deny the beauty of the Sistine Chapel, the Divine Comedy, or Palestrina's motets, as Father Barron notes. It is even harder to deny the beauty of a saintly life. 

I think this is one reason why Mother Teresa so fascinated the world. She did make claims about truth and goodness that cut against the modern world, especially on abortion (as she so often said, "abortion is the greatest destroyer of peace in the world"). But most people's first encounter with Mother Teresa was witnessing her work with the poor, the selfless sacrifice she made day after day for those who had nothing and no one. Who could fail to see the beauty of a life so lived? 

From the beautiful, we move to the good: when we encounter beauty we ask ourselves, how can I become like that? how can I become beautiful? And here we have the good. Once we are striving towards goodness, we are likely to ask ourselves about truth: what is the goal of my action in the world? what is the end toward which I am ordering all my activity? The beautiful opens us to the world of the good and true, in a way that seems more inviting than demanding. 

And so, when Mother Teresa gave the 1982 Harvard commencement speech, she could denounce abortion and call students who had cheated to repentance--and still receive a long standing ovation. Can you imagine any other Catholic religious figure giving a speech denouncing abortion at Harvard, that bastion of secular bastions, and receiving a long standing ovation? I think not.

Yet people listened to her, and listened intently. Why? Because she lived a beautiful life. She made great sacrifices that few others were willing to make, and so the world listened. And through that beautiful life she opened up to us more distant horizons and broader vistas, the life of beauty lived entirely from, for, and with Christ. She showed us that beauty is our portal into the divine. 

Something beautiful

Beauty was a key category for Mother Teresa. When I was at Kalighat, the home for the aged and dying in Calcutta, there was a sign that read, "Let every action be something beautiful for God." I think it was one of Mother's favorites. To those who implicitly criticized the work that she did as enabling the poor or somehow not being enough she would say: "I can do what you cannot do. You can do what I cannot do. Together we can do something beautiful for God." Many people have heard both of these quotes, but I suspect that not many people know what they mean.

Mother Teresa became a living presence of the divine beauty in the world. I think it is no small aspiration to want to become beauty. It is our vocation: to become beautiful. We are made in the image and likeness of God, and God is beauty itself. But we have lots of mud and grime caked on this image within us, and it takes hard work to scrape it away and let the divine light break forth.

In the next few posts, I'll be exploring beauty. I think if we can understand this concept better, we can come to a much deeper appreciation of what Mother Teresa meant in the above quotes.

What, after all, is beauty?

Who is Jesus?

Christ asks his disciples in today's Gospel: "Who do you say that I am?" (Lk 9:20). It is a question worth asking ourselves. Who is Christ to me? What is my relationship to Christ? We know the answers of others. He is a great prophet (Lk 9:19). We could translate that this way in the 21st century--he's a good and holy man, a wise teacher...but not God. Sound familiar? It is a scandal to the secularism of our culture that God assumed a human nature, that God became man (cf. Jn 1:14).

When she was in the hospital, Mother Teresa made a meditation on the parallel passage of this Gospel in Matthew (cf. Mt 16:15). I post her meditation below:

"Jesus is the leper..." Lepers in Pune, India.

Who do you say I am?

You are God. 
You are God from God. 
You are Begotten, not made. 
You are One in Substance with the Father. 
You are the Son of the Living God. 
You are the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. 
You are One with the Father.
You are in the Father from the beginning: All things were made by You and the Father.
You are the Beloved Son in Whom the Father is well pleased. 
You are the Son of Mary, conceived in the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary. 
You were born in Bethlehem.
You were wrapped in swaddling clothes by Mary and put in the manger full of straw. 
You were kept warm by the breath of the donkey who carried your mother with you in her womb. 
You are the Son of Joseph, the carpenter who is known by the people of Nazareth. 
You are an ordinary man without much learning as judged by the learned people of Israel. 

Who is Jesus to me? 

Jesus is the Word Made Flesh. 
Jesus is the Bread of Life. 
Jesus is the Victim offered for our sins on the Cross. 
Jesus is the Sacrifice offered at the Holy Mass for the sins of the world and mine. 
Jesus is the Word--to be spoken. 
Jesus is the Truth--to be told. 
Jesus is the Way--to be walked. 
Jesus is the Light--to be lit. 
Jesus is the Love--to be loved. 
Jesus is the Joy--to be shared. 
Jesus is the Sacrifice--to be offered. 
Jesus is the Peace--to be given. 
Jesus is the Bread of Life--to be eaten. 
Jesus is the hungry--to be fed. 
Jesus is the Thirsty--to be satiated. 
Jesus is the Naked--to be clothed. 
Jesus is the Homeless--to be taken in. 
Jesus is the sick--to be healed. 
Jesus is the Lonely--to be loved. 
Jesus is the Unwanted--to be wanted. 
Jesus is the Leper--to wash his wounds. 
Jesus is the Beggar--to give a smile. 
Jesus is the Drunkard--to listen to him. 
Jesus is the Mental--to protect him. 
Jesus is the Little One--to embrace him.
Jesus is the Blind--to lead him. 
Jesus is the Dumb--to speak for him. 
Jesus is the crippled--to walk with him. 
Jesus is the Drug Addict--to befriend him. 
Jesus is the Prostitute--to remove from danger and befriend her. 
Jesus is the Prisoner--to be visited. 
Jesus is the Old--to be served. 

To me--

Jesus is my God.
Jesus is my Spouse.
Jesus is my Life. 
Jesus is my only Love. 
Jesus is my All in All. 
Jesus is my Everything. 

Jesus, I love with my whole heart, with my whole being.
I have given him all, even my sins and He has espoused me to Himself in tenderness and love. 
Now and for life I am the Spouse of my Crucified Spouse. 

Amen. 

God bless you,
Mother Teresa, MC

The two pillars

A charism (>Gk: charis: favor, gift, grace) is any gift of the Holy Spirit. I am using it in this context to refer to the founding grace of a religious order, from which that order draws its spiritual life. Every charism has two aspects: a spirituality and a mission.

• Spirituality is a particular way of relating to God. It is not a substitute for religion, but a particular lived experience that places a person in relation to Jesus Christ and the Trinity. The spirituality of the Jesuits, for example, has a particular focus on discernment of spirits. The spirituality of the Benedictines focuses on the liturgy, especially on relating to God through communal prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours. The spirituality of the Dominicans places emphasis on coming to a deeper knowledge of God through study and contemplation. 

• Mission is a particular apostolic work towards which a charism is oriented. It is important to note that the mission is not necessarily an active apostolate. Monks, perhaps even more than missionaries, go out in search of souls to save them, but they do so through prayer and penance. To give some examples, the particular mission of the Dominicans is preaching; the mission of the Benedictines is prayerful labor; the mission of the Jesuits is...almost anything, it seems! But historically they have been excellent educators and missionaries.   

Of course, I give these examples with the caveat that I am painting in broad strokes. The particular spirituality and mission of any order is far more nuanced than I have presented them.

An illumination from what appears to be Pentecost.
The Holy Spirit is the source of all charisms.

But back to the point: The MC charism has two scriptural foundations for these two pillars of its charism. They are the source of inspiration for the life and prayer of the MC. We could say that they are the two engines that drive the MC's body and soul.

1. Jesus' cry of anguish from the Cross--"I thirst!" (Jn 19:28)--is the basis of the spirituality. Mother Teresa, in a famous letter she wrote to her Congregation from Varanassi, tells us that the thirst of Jesus is something more than love, something deeper than love. This is, of course, difficult to understand outside of a lived experience of Christ's thirst, as Mother had on the train to Darjeeling, when she received her call within a call to found the MCs. The MC takes his identity entirely from his understanding of Jesus's thirst for him. He comes to recognize himself and his vocation only in the light of this thirst. And from this experience of being loved, he desires to go out to the world to satiate Jesus's thirst--to share Christ's love by loving others.



The spirituality: "I thirst".

2. How does one satiate the thirst of Christ? Mother understood that Christ was especially present in the poorest of the poor. She took her inspiration from the 25th chapter of Matthew, when christ gives us his criteria for judgment, when he is separating the sheep from the goats: "whatever you did to the least of these my brethren--you did it to me" (Mt 25:31-46). When we give water to the thirsty, we are giving water to Christ. In the poorest of the poor, Christ thirsts to be given water, but he thirsts even more to be loved.

The mission: "you did it to me".

To summarize: the MC understands the meaning of his existence as this--to quench the thirst of Christ on the cross, by quenching his thirst for water and for love in the poorest of the poor. And I cannot emphasize enough that the poorest of the poor, those who dwell at the peripheries of existence, exist in the wealthy countries of the world perhaps even more than in the poorer countries. There is a great poverty of loneliness in the developed world, a thirst for love and a thirst for God. 

Radical poverty

The Gospel for today, from Luke (9:1-6), contains a fascinating passage in which Jesus instructs his apostles, whom he is sending on mission, to take with them no staff, no money, no wallet, no bread--and no second tunic! I think that would make washing clothes rather tricky.

Why the instruction to radical poverty? It seems exaggerated and unnecessary, perhaps even dangerous by modern standards (and I'm sure it seemed like all of those things to the apostles). So what was the point? I think it has to do with the power that Christ gives them, "over all the devils, and to cure diseases" (Lk 8:1). I think it also has to do with the nature of their mission: "to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick" (Lk 8:2). In order to receive the power of Christ, "who though he was by nature God...emptied himself, taking the nature of a slave" (Phil 2:6-7). To enter into the power of Christ is to become weak, as St. Paul knew: "for when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Cor 12:10). Just as Christ's strength depends on his being entirely from the Father, we gain our strength from being entirely from Christ--living entirely in Christ and according to the form of Christ's life.

Christ asks that the apostles empty themselves of their attachments, to adopt a radical poverty, for the same purpose that he came into the world: to love man--"to love one another: that as I have loved you, you also love one another" (Jn 13:34). Radical poverty is for the sake of radical charity, as witnessed to by the purpose of the apostles' mission: to liberate man from material (disease) and spiritual evil (demons). In the MC charism, poverty [perfect emptiness] exists for the sake of our fourth vow, charity [wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor]. We empt ourselves of ourselves to fill ourselves with God's love. In emptying ourselves, we become weak in the eyes of the world, but such emptying gives us a great spiritual strength.

What are we attached to? Just as Jesus asked the apostles to leave behind even their staffs, so, too, he asks us to leave behind our staffs--those things that we lean upon for comfort and security to which we are inordinately attached. Perhaps it is my ego, my sensuality, my love of small comforts. Let's ask our lord for the grace to give these up, for the sake of living a more radical charity. 

A map of life: hearing and doing

The Gospel for today (Lk 8:19-21) tells of an encounter between Jesus's mother and brethren who come to see him. They try to get closer to Jesus but cannot get in because of the crowds surrounding the Master. Jesus asks a question, "Who are my mother and my brethren?" And he gives what should appear to us as a surprising answer: "They who hear the word of God and act upon it."

The brothers of Christ--or to change the relational term: the sons of the Father--are those who hear God's word and act upon it. And so we have here a map to our ultimate destination in life, a path to divine sonship. First we must hear. Where do we hear God? In prayer. "In the silence of the heart, God speaks," as Mother Teresa so often repeated. And to hear, we must be silent.

So we are reminded of Mother Teresa's spiritual axiom: souls of great prayer are souls of great silence. The first step to becoming sons in the Son, children of the Father, is to learn silence. There is a silence of the body, a silence of the mind, a silence of the heart.

But as St. James exhorts us, "be doers of the Word and not hearers only" (Jas 1:22). To hear the word of God and not to act upon it--this is a great tragedy, because it is a refusal to accept the great dreams, gifts, and plans that God has made for us. It is to reject our own ultimate happiness, because our ultimate beatitude is in God. "I have come that they may have life!" It is life with the Father.

How do we become doers of the Word? Through charity. The fourth vow of the Missionaries of Charity is wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor. We can all live this vow, even if we do not publicly profess it. In this vow, we encounter the ideal of the Christian moral life. Faith, hope, and charity abide (1 Cor 13:13). But charity is the greatest. For to live a life of charity is to live the life of God, since God is love (1 Jn 4:8). Charity becomes the path to life.

Sanctity--for you and for me

"I will, I want, with God's blessing, [to] be holy!" Here is the secret of joy. 

The text in full: My dear Lay Missionaries. Keep the joy of loving Jesus in your hearts and share this joy with all you meet. Make a strong resolution, "I will, I want with God's will [to] be holy." This will help you to satiate the thirst of Jesus for love for souls--by working at the salvation and the sanctification of the poor--especially your family. Let us pray. God bless you, Mother Teresa. 

A perfect summary of the MC charism in her own words. Notice: work for the salvation of the poor--especially your family. We need not look to the horizon to find the periphery.

The MC charism

Mother Teresa, inspired by a call within a call from our Lord, founded the Missionaries of Charity (MC). The aim of the religious congregation is to labor for the salvation and sanctification of souls. The ultimate end of the society is to satiate the infinite thirst of Christ on the cross (Jn 19:28).

What was Christ thirsting for? Water, yes. But infinitely more for souls.

He thirsts to love and be loved. We satiate his thirst by loving Him.

But how to satiate Jesus' burning thirst? Where is his presence in the world today? Mother Teresa found an answer in the 25th chapter of Matthew's Gospel: whatever you did to the least of my brothers, you did it to me (Mt 25:40). You did it to me. We love Christ by loving Him in the least and the lost.


Who are the poor? Yes, those who hunger and thirst. But more than that--I am the poor. You are the poor. We find the poorest of the poor in the peripheries, and the peripheries are within us. As Mother Teresa would say, Calcutta is everywhere. It is a place of great beauty and a place of great suffering. Just like our heart. And so we come to know that there is a spiritual third world in every human heart.

Christ thirsts to be loved. And we can love him in the poorest of the poor. But what sustains such efforts? How do we learn to love? For we cannot give what we do not have. Of course, the answer is in another presence of Christ--the true presence in the Eucharist. It is at adoration that we encounter Christ's burning love for us that we share with others. Christ feeds us with the bread of life, that we may become that bread for others. When we recognize that we can love the poor and that the poor are the presence of Christ's love for us, all becomes prayer. All becomes grace.

No longer is there interior life and exterior apostolate. They become one. Working with the poor becomes adoration of Christ, and adoration of Christ in the Eucharist becomes the means of working for the salvation and sanctification of the poor.

In sum, Christ loves us so that we may love others. And in loving others, we become more open to sharing the love of Christ. It is an infinite cycle of love begetting love.

This is the life of an MC.

A universal call

Christ thirsts on the cross (Jn 19:28). Not only for water, but for souls.

Even now, he thirsts to give us relationship, meaning, peace.

He thirsts for our sanctity. To love and be loved--this is our vocation.

Do we hear him call our name?

Will we quench his thirst?