Jesus said to his disciples, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. "I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them." (John 14:15-21)
People were shocked when the personal memoirs of Mother Teresa of Calcutta became public. In those memoirs Mother Teresa revealed that for more than half her life she did not feel the presence of Christ and at times gravely doubted God’s existence. For many, such truth-telling was too much to bear. They could not bear Mother Teresa’s experience of God as hidden, as veiled, or as absent nor can they bear that she would not only experience such but allow it to be revealed to public scrutiny. Saints are not to suffer such doubt and despair and if they do it is to be for a limited time and be the precursor to a great deepening of faith. And yet her life also reveals and witnesses to the compassion and mercy that Christ calls forth from his people. Her life was a movement of Christ to the forgotten, to the dying, to the untouchables, and to all those who were probably much like her.
Maybe those that she served never experienced God or Christ or the Holy Spirit except through her ministry and the ministry of her order. Maybe they only experienced people and nothing more. And maybe Teresa’s experiencing of emptiness was her own experiencing what those whom she served experienced day in and day out as they lived and died in her care. Maybe such emptiness was a gift of the Holy Spirit. However, I have to admit that it was a cruel gift. Yet, her determination to be Christ to others was without falter. Such strength and determination can only be empowered by the Holy Spirit. Rather than the proof of the Holy Spirit’s life within her ministry being located in Mother Teresa’s emotional landscape it was located in the life being lived in the midst of her and those for whom she cared.
I do believe that we do worship a loving God but I also believe we worship a dangerous God who plays for keeps because the stakes are so high. Maybe the cost of caring for those people was the cost of Mother Teresa’s faith. Maybe God saw them as worth that and knew that only Teresa could bear such a profound loss. We too often associate the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives with our own experiencing of that presence via only certain feelings and emotions and in some Christian expressions with only certain actions. Yet, maybe the presence of God’s Holy Spirit is not about us and about how we feel. Maybe it is more about our being Jesus to the world. Willing to live our lives for the sake of others and if need be sacrifice, deny ourselves, for the sake of others. Now, I do not mind doing nice Christian things for other people but being like Jesus calls forth vast sums of courage, love, strength, and compassion that I do not have and, yet, there have been times when those qualities have been present. There have been times when the call and need to be Jesus was such that God’s Holy Spirit made up for any lack in my life so that Christ could be in the world through me.
We too often associate being in the Holy Spirit with our own exuberance and positive feelings that we forget that Jesus’ promise of an Advocate, of One who will stand with us, is about our being empowered by the Holy Spirit to reveal Christ to the world so that any and all can witness the life that God offers. If such a witness is proof of Christ’s presence in the world then Christ can and will be present through us just as he was present in the life and ministry of Mother Teresa-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.
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