A few days back I read somewhere that Thomas Jefferson was a lousy public speaker. Interesting, but kind of beside the point, I thought. I've had something of the same reaction to the news that Mother Teresa often felt cut off from God. Yes, I know there's gain in discussing doubt as an essential to faith. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton, speaking in Calcutta (interestingly) in 1968, perhaps said it definitively when he stated that a person of faith who suffered no doubt could not possibly be a person of faith.
Mother Teresa's letters do nothing to diminish her status as a social entrepreneur whose vision focused on helping people despised for the disease and poverty. Coming from Albania (maybe the most obscure nation in Europe), she built a worldwide organization that attracted an awful lot of people who dedicated themselves full- or part-time to helping utter outcasts achieve a measure of dignity in their living and dying.
I clapped eyes on Mother Teresa exactly once, as pure observer, in close and decidedly unusual circumstances. She struck me as tough as nails.
It happened back in the mid-1980s, when I was on a newspaper assignment in Nicaragua and a fellow journalist tipped me that that evening she'd be visiting Daniel Ortega, then (as once again) Nicaragua's president and head of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, at Ortega's house. I gathered she had come to ask permission to set up a chapter of her order. I caught a ride over and joined the small circle of journalists clustered around the two. Ortega was half Mother Teresa's age, twice her size, and, well, this was his country. The house was aswarm with his bodyguards. I think, by contrast, Mother Teresa had a single nun with her, a woman who kept pretty much to the shadows.
Still, it seemed to me that Ortega was not really in control of the situation. Which is to say that, O.K., maybe Mother Teresa had more than her share of spiritual doubts, but she knew what she could do in building an organization, including in places where she was one of the few not packing heat. Pretty creative. Gutsy, too.
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