{"id":2208,"date":"2016-09-06T09:30:52","date_gmt":"2016-09-06T14:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pts.edu\/blog\/?p=2208"},"modified":"2021-01-29T14:29:05","modified_gmt":"2021-01-29T19:29:05","slug":"st-teresa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pts.edu\/blog\/st-teresa\/","title":{"rendered":"The Challenge of Imitating Mother Teresa (or The Sorrow of Not Being a Saint)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once she was fast-tracked, the end result was no surprise. We knew she should become \u201cSt. Teresa\u201d\u2014though, as Pope Francis noted at Sunday\u2019s canonization mass, it will be hard not to keep calling her \u201cMother.\u201d<\/p>\n

No, what struck me was something else Pope Francis said: \u201cMay she be your model of holiness.\u201d<\/p>\n

My<\/em> model of holiness?<\/p>\n

I had been inspired by her in college when I discovered her 10 \u201crules for humility\u201d and tried to practice them. Like, \u201cNever defend yourself.\u201d The experiment didn\u2019t last long. I can\u2019t imagine imitating the rest of her life\u2014living so intimately on a daily basis with the dying and the poor; sleeping on a hard flat each night; waking so early to pray (ask the people who live with me\u2014I need my sleep). Can she really be a model for people like me\u2014comfortable, suburban Christians who live so far from the poor she served?<\/p>\n

And then there are the detractors who say she shouldn\u2019t be imitated, who argue\u2014perhaps rightly, who am I to say?\u2014that her order lacked transparency and oversight; that the medical care she gave suffered a deficit of good hygiene; that her rhetoric about the poor glamorized poverty. For all the people who worked with her in India and came back praising the holiness of this \u201csaint of the gutters,\u201d many returned crying foul.<\/p>\n

So: a life of holiness that seems impossible to imitate or a life that shouldn\u2019t be imitated at all?<\/p>\n

As I ponder these things on the day after her canonization, wondering how they relate to my own life, I think: Both of these options are off the mark. One gets wrong what it means to imitate a saint and the other misunderstands what makes a saint to begin with.<\/p>\n

Quaker Thomas Kelly has written that each of us is called to allow \u201cGod\u2019s burdened heart\u201d to become \u201cparticularized\u201d in our own lives. And if nothing else, Mother Teresa was a living, breathing particularization of God\u2019s burdened heart for the \u201cleast of these,\u201d of God\u2019s desire to draw them near in love. She did that with every fiber of her being and in a way that expressed her own passionate love of God. Those two\u2014the love of the poor and the love of God\u2014became one flame on the altar of her heart.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s<\/em> the kind of holiness I long to imitate. But I will not particularize God\u2019s burdened heart in my life the way she did in hers; I\u2019m still learning, achingly slowly, just how I might (I know too well the sorrow novelist Leon Bloy was talking about when he wrote, \u201cThere is only one sorrow\u2014not to be a saint.\u201d). I\u2019m still waiting on God and cooperating with God along that journey of discovery. Thomas Merton said, \u201cFor me to be a saint means to be myself.\u201d Mother Teresa had discovered the saint that was her truest self as she served the poor. She had, as my favorite hymn puts it, \u201cone holy passion filling all [her] frame.\u201d In that way she is a model of holiness for all of us.<\/p>\n

This understanding of sainthood doesn\u2019t mean there aren\u2019t mistakes in judgment, organizational inadequacies, errors in fact; it doesn\u2019t mean that your life couldn\u2019t be better\u2014healthier, happier, wiser, more organized. Some of her critics might be right\u2014and she can still<\/em> be a saint. Because that one holy passion filling her slight frame overflowed, making its way into the world as a fierce, stubborn love that went by the name Mother Teresa.<\/p>\n

Which gives me hope. If that one sorrow Bloy spoke about is ever healed in me\u2014a big \u201cif,\u201d but \u201cifs\u201d are God\u2019s specialty\u2014and the saintly, truest me ever gets discovered; if my prayer is answered that I might learn, as that same hymn puts it, \u201cto love Thee as Thine angels love,\u201d and that love gets expressed in a visible love here and now\u2014that doesn\u2019t mean I will need to become perfect, to have it all together. Thank goodness.<\/p>\n

After my funeral, a few people might murmur in the parking lot: But . . . but remember how he loved run-on sentences so; how he was a slave to sweets, eating banana splits secretly at night and covering his tracks so his kids wouldn\u2019t know the next day; remember how he ate all the salt and vinegar chips at the picnic, at every <\/em>picnic; how his temper was short, his patience shorter; how he never mastered balancing a checkbook and his wife had to keep the family finances; how he couldn\u2019t resist a semi-colon if his life depended on it. How can this man be called holy<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Well, I probably won\u2019t be, and certainly won\u2019t be in St. Peter\u2019s Square. And all of the above is true, anyway.<\/p>\n

But if one person\u2014a child of mine or a grandchild someday, a former student or parishioner, a stranger whose path crosses mine\u2014happens to say, even if to no one in particular, \u201cThere was nonetheless a consuming love for God in him that seems worth learning from\u201d\u2014if that happens, that will be enough.<\/p>\n

To that end, St. Teresa, pray for me.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Rev. Dr. L. Roger Owens is associate professor of leadership and ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and teaches courses in the MDiv, Doctor of Ministry, and Continuing Education programs. Before coming to PTS he served urban and rural churches for eight years in North Carolina as co-pastor with his wife Ginger. He has written multiple books including <\/em>The Shape of Participation: A Theology of Church Practices which was called \u201cthis decades best work in ecclesiology\u201d by <\/em>The Christian Century.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once she was fast-tracked, the end result was no surprise. We knew she should become \u201cSt. Teresa\u201d\u2014though, as Pope Francis noted at Sunday\u2019s canonization mass, it will be hard not to keep calling her \u201cMother.\u201d No, what struck me was something else Pope Francis said: \u201cMay she be your model of holiness.\u201d My model of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2209,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[273,274],"series":[],"class_list":["post-2208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-theological-reflection","tag-mother-teresa-saint-teresa","tag-st-teresa"],"yoast_head":"\r\nThe Challenge of Imitating Mother Teresa (or The Sorrow of Not Being a Saint) - 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