Fr. James Martin, SJ has a great article on Huffington Post today on how Mother Teresa isn’t any more holy than say, the average housewife.
Since at least the Second Vatican Council, which convened in the 1960s and stressed the “universal call to holiness,” Catholics have been reminded that everyone has a vocation. Everyone’s call is to be holy — no matter who you are.
To be blunt, that means that the work of a Catholic sister is no holier than the work of your sister — who might be a mother, a lawyer or a physician. (Or all three.) That doesn’t mean that your sister is necessarily a saint, but that she could certainly become one!
That’s not to detract from the manifest holiness of Mother Teresa, who I consider to be one of the greatest saints ever. (She vaults into that category because of her unshakeable fidelity to her call even in the midst of her “dark night” of prayer, when God felt absent to her for years and years.) Rather, it’s to remind people that the young mother who wakes up in the wee hours of the night to care for her child is every bit as saintly as the Catholic nun who spends hours and hours teaching children in an inner-city school.
Indeed. There is an inherent misconception that our lives themselves cannot be deemed holy. But the truth of the matter as Merton points out that “All that is needed to become a saint is to simply want to be one.” We don’t live lives of quiet desperation, I think, rather we live lives that we view as quiet degradation.
“I’m no Mother Teresa”
“Well, I’m certainly no saint.”
“The church will fall down if the likes of me should be a lector.”
“I can’t believe that I’m holy enough to be a eucharistic minister.”
These are all uttered by GOOD and HOLY people who live their own lives as students, fathers, mothers, librarians, firefighters and sports announcers. They can’t see that these vocations in and of themselves are holy.
God calls us to simply be who we are. And the act of being who we are is holy. And when we sin, we get off track from what is the best expression of who we are but it doesn’t mean that we’ve suddenly stopped being able to be holy people. Fr. Jim gets this fact directly.
I’ll bet that Mother Teresa would agree. Better than most, she understood the universal call to holiness. When visitors used to visit her in Calcutta, and offer to work with her, and follow her example, she would happily accept some. But to most, she would say, simply, “Find your own Calcutta.”
Today we pray to find our Calcuttas–the places we are called to express all that we are and all we can be. For many of us, our Calcutta may be helping with homework when a child is stuck on a math problem, or holding the hand of a fearful spouse when she gets diagnosed with cancer, or mental illness, or even shingles. It may be helping a co-worker or even treating them with respect when others don’t.
You don’t need to be Mother Teresa. The world already had one.
You simply need to be you.
1 comment
Ginny says:
August 14, 2010 at 1:56 am (UTC -5 )
This is a great post, and so very true. It reminds me of the Called and Gifted workshop, which is put on by the Catherine of Siena Institute (I used to teach the workshop years ago). It’s all about recognizing that you are gifted, and finding what your gifts are, and then using them to bring God to others.
One of the first things I realized when I went through the workshop myself was that I didn’t need to drop everything and work with the poor in Calcutta … because that is not my gift. Not to say that I can’t help the poor (obviously, we are all called to social justice). But what it means is that if I pattern my entire life around the life that Mother Theresa lived, I will burn out and be ultimately ineffective. Her gifts are not my gifts. My gifts are not her gifts. That is very important to realize.