Riddle: What do you get when you cross pragmatism with love?
Answer: Mother Teresa
That's one angle a reader can take after reading this impressive little volume. A Revolution of Love (Loyola Press, 2005) is a combination of interesting biography and stimulating devotional. It meditates on the life of a woman who wallowed in the dirtiest parts of creation, performing highly practical work with love.
Scott's is the first book about Mother Teresa to use newly-discovered letters that she wrote to her spiritual advisors. The book is full of her words, and her words highlight the spirit of her mission.
“Each time people come into contact with us, they must become different and better people because of having met us.” “Live life beautifully.” “A smile is the beginning of love.” “Proclaiming is not preaching — it is being.”
Scott recounts her childhood, her early years as a nun apparently disinterested in the poor and dying, the revelations she received from God, the awkwardness she caused the secular VIPs she met as part of her fame.
He also tells the reader how she got started. Her first location was an abandoned building that Calcutta officials gave her near a crematorium. It was quite practical: the patients could die then be ashed. Though situated next to a popular shrine to the goddess of destruction, Kali, Mother Teresa was grateful. She worked with whatever she received and infused love into it, hence the riddle that opened this review.
Some would rigorously reject that riddle, by the way.
Those grand planners who would remake the world in Moloch's image if necessary to fit their schemes scorned her approach. The ideologues who loved the poor but wouldn't eat dinner with them didn't like her mission. Says Scott, “Until her last days, she endured the same criticisms — that she was putting a bandage on the cancer, that she was naïve about the evils of neoimperialism and neocolonialism, that she was indifferent to the root causes of the exploitation and domination of the poor.”
It's not surprising. The important saints often contradict their ages. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, the saint “will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age.”
Mother Teresa may have been the important saint for our age, an era when different cultures and levels of wealth have been brought closer together. She worked with the rich but preferred poverty. She lived among the Hindus but never hid her Christianity. She never sought the all-pervasive camera lens, but her likeness was captured throughout the world.
In Scott's words, “Shutting the eyes of the dead in the charnel house of the twentieth century, Mother Teresa seemed to be trying to pry open the eyes of the living. . . Mother Teresa was a missionary of reconciliation and communion, a healer of the hatreds that drive the human family apart . . .”.
She was also a healer and a defender of life. When she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, she devoted her speech to abortion, calling it the “greatest destroyer of peace today.” Abortion? It was a “dead” issue to many back in 1979. Many hated her words; many dismissed her as hopelessly impractical.
It's unsurprising. Let's face it. In our age, the utilitarian has won. Bentham, Mill, even Nietzsche and his Superman. All bent on the useful. What will make the most money? What will bring the most progress?
But never asking, What is good?
Mother Teresa reflected our era's practical utilitarianism, but also answered the question, What is good? Her answer: Love. Without love, there is no goodness and, perhaps more startling, no usefulness. “Unless the work is interwoven with love,” she said, “it is useless.”
Eric Scheske is a Contributing Editor of Godspy and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine. He also publishes a blog, The Wednesday Eudemon.
