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Faith and Mother Teresa


I have more faith in God and the hereafter than Mother Teresa. Who knew? Apparently not her. The Vatican published a book of letters not terribly long ago from the future saint to her various confessors over the span of forty plus years that revealed, among other things,  that she didn’t believe God existed or that there was even a heaven. I am over-simplifying a bit when I say this, but she was a hypocrite walking. I don’t personally think that having doubts or questions about your faith, or the Creator, disqualifies anyone from being an example of good to others. In the area of championing the poor, the down-trodden, the sick and the basically ignored of the world, there are few people who could lay claim to the devotion to cause that Mother Teresa exemplified during her life. The reason I believe that she is a hypocrite, and shouldn’t ever be proclaimed a saint (though she will be), is that she didn’t admit she had these doubts publicly. And why should have she? Because she was Mother Teresa, the shining example held aloft for all Roman Catholics to measure their own pitifully lacking spiritual selves against. A fact that she could not have been ignorant of nor could it have escaped her attention, especially in her later years, was that the church had lofty plans for her post- mortem. 

 

I am not enough of a theologian to debate the finer points of what this big reveal means in terms of the church’s crusade to saint her. But I am enough of a believer in God and the existence of a hereafter to know that, while I have my doubts and suspicions about organized religions of all kinds, for the most part we don’t have all the information we need in order to form any realistic picture of who God is and to what extent he is really in charge. Unlike Teresa, I never doubt. Not anymore.  Not even recently. Which covers most of the last couple decades of my life. Oh, I may vehemently object to the events of my life and the obligations these events have imposed on me, but I don’t doubt God’s presence in my life. Such as it is. I have deliberately not listened to God, thinking that if I pretended ignorance I wouldn’t have to do whatever it was I was expected to do, but that’s not doubt as much as it is childishness. 

 

I have written about this before, but it bears repeating in the context of today’s topic. I prayed for a miracle when I was told that my first husband, Will, was going to die. When it was clear that he wasn’t going to be spared, I prayed that he would go quickly, as much for my own sake as his, and when I finally stopped begging for a reprieve for us both and listened, I accepted what was to be. Not always graciously. I will never be the outward model of humility and acceptance of God’s will. Not the model that Mother Teresa was for appearance’s sake. I expected God to step up and help me, and he did. Whenever I was faced with an obstacle that I couldn’t overcome myself, I got assistance. Money that I needed was offered. Babysitters appeared. Assistance of all shapes, sizes and types manifested. It was almost magic really. How can you doubt in the face of magic? And maybe that was Teresa’s problem. Assistance came too readily and seemingly without strings for her to believe that God was behind it. After all, if she was a victim of the same Catholic upbringing that I was, she was taught that God doesn’t give his assistance, or his love, freely but grudgingly and after you have suffered enough to earn it.

 

Teresa’s hypocrisy lies in the fact that she doubted without limits and, as someone who was touted as a model to other Catholics, she kept her doubts to herself. If she were just one of the flock, her crisis of faith would have been her own to wrestle with, but she allowed her superiors to use her as a “shining” example for others to emulate or feel inferior to depending on your take of the Catholic hierarchy. She could have been a stronger example of faith if she would have been honest, but she chose to be a false model, a fake.  And it apparently ate away at her. Small wonder she couldn’t hear God or see his stamp on her life and work.

 

I feel sorry for Mother Teresa. She is going to be sainted for all the wrong reasons and I can’t imagine that such a tortured soul would find much eternal rest in that.

Why Do You Want to be a Writer?


I was skimming an article on Backspace–The Writer’s Place a website for writers with delusions of being published. The article was an excerpt taken from the book, Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing by David Morrell. In it Morrell discusses his experiences with the wanna-be authors he encounters in writing workshops. He always begins these seminars by asking the students why they want to be writers, and he always gets the same teacher’s pet responses. The kind of answers that seem so obviously right that they are wrong on every level you can think of as a writer.

 

“I want to be a writer to satisfy my creative nature.”

 

Uh-huh.

 

Why not paint or sculpt or throw pots or dance or sing or decoupage Hallmark cards on styrofoam balls to give out as Christmas gifts? 

 

“I want to make a lot of money.”

 

Valid enough because Morrell has made his share. David Morrell is the creator of Rambo. He wrote the novel, First Blood, that is the second most famous of Sylvester Stallone’s franchises. He was also my American Literature instructor one fall semester while I was attending The University of Iowa. This was before the movie came out and I don’t think more than a handful of students in class knew that Morrell was a writer or had even heard of his book. I thought that the guy was a fair lecturer, and the fact that he was a published author with a book about to be turned into a Hollywood movie explained why I kept getting stuck with his graduate student correcting my papers and tests. She was notorious for being a hard-ass, and we all prayed fervently for our papers to end up in the tiny pile that Morrell actually graded himself. The only thing I learned from him was about reading, not writing. He had us read The Last of the Mohicans. I read it and afterwards couldn’t come up with one reason why such a piece of racist, misogynistic crap was a classic. I could’ve kissed the man for his first comments to us as a class about this book. He said, “Last of the Mohican is one of the worst books ever written, and if James Fennimore Cooper hadn’t had the good fortune to be one of the first American writers to make it big in Europe, we wouldn’t be reading it today.” You might be asking yourself what I learned, exactly, from such a blasphemous statement. Well, I learned that “classic” is not synonymous with “sacred” or “well-written” or even “readable”, and that was  a hugely important thing to know for an English major and future teacher. It freed me from preconceptions which in turn allowed me to one day liberate my students to think and decide for themselves.

 

Morrell believes that writers write because they have to, and I agree with that. Real writers write. It’s a compulsion. As much as I love you, my audience, I would write this blog without you. My vacation last week was a somewhat maddening exercise in finding things to do to fill the time I would have spent writing, and finding myself frustrated by the plethora of ideas that swirled around in my brain in the absence of this outlet. Everything I read was fodder for an idea. Every time I got near my computer, I was tempted to “jot a few things down”. It reminded me of my younger days when I could lose myself in a spiral notebook, churning out page after page. So what happened to that girl and those days, Mr Morrell might ask me if I were a student in one of his workshops. Nothing happened. Literally. I quit. Gave up on the idea of writing because a few people thought I wasn’t that good, and others questioned the sanity and sense of writing for a doubtful living as opposed to the certain living I could make teaching. And I wasn’t strong enough or sure enough of myself to ignore them. It’s still my Achilles heel. Even when I know I am right, I still wonder if the majority rules. It does, of course, but that doesn’t make me wrong about what I should do, have done or be doing.

 

There is that cliche about doing what you love, and the money will follow. I don’t think that it is necessarily true if you are depending on that money to pay the bills or put you in an enviable financial situation. Rob and I joke about me needing to hurry up and write that best seller, so he can retire, and we can build that little house in the mountains sooner rather than later on when we both may be to old to clamber around those peaks. Truthfully though, if money were an incentive to write, why then when I needed the money a lot more a while back wasn’t I moved to put finger-pads to keyboard? Where was my compulsion then?

 

What happened to awaken my need again wasn’t a lightning strike as much as a slow burn and once it caught fire was not controllable. I can’t imagine a scenario now that doesn’t include writing.  Teaching still occupies that fallback in my mind but I can’t see myself happy doing that again. I brought the idea of teaching up with Rob just recently and he likened a fallback career to a crutch that helps a person avoid their true passion. He’s right. Like Morrell is right when he tells his students that writers write because they can’t help themselves.

Good as I Once was


I was cranky yesterday. It was a fat day. Even though I weighed the same amount of weight that I did the day before and today, I still felt enormous and was irritatingly aware of the way my clothes felt and the space I took up. Rob wasn’t helpful “Not much I can do about that,” he said, but he was at least superficially sympathetic. (Not sympathetic at all, he corrected me with a shrug when he first read this. The man will just not let me harbor any illusions.) Men don’t have fat days. They lament the loss of strength, hair, stamina and skill (and not necessarily in that order), but they never think they are fat. Of course, men aren’t held to the same standards that even old women like me are and with reason. I can’t count the number of times I have seen couples together where the women are so much more visibly aged than the men. But, yesterday I felt fat. And it made me cranky. And the reason it did was that, like the Toby Keith song, “I ain’t as good as I once was.”

 

I can’t get by on little or no sleep anymore. It takes longer to get back into passable physical shape. I like evenings on the couch (well, okay that doesn’t really count as I have always enjoyed a good snuggle and anything else it might lead to, but you get what I mean, I’m sure) more than nights out sometimes. I am finding myself listening to oldies from my junior high and high school days more and more, and I don’t even count those days as the best of my life because fat, (drunk for some) and stupid is no way to go through life. I am not pleased by the wrinkling I see, or the grays that my new hair stylist needlessly pointed out by way of explaining why he needed to over-lighten my bangs. Not to put too fine a point on it ……I’m old! When did this happen? And why didn’t I notice it before now? Maybe I could have done something about it?

 

And it’s not just me. Rob was a bit morose last evening too (not about me having a fat day. He thinks that whole idea is ridiculous), but because he spent quite nearly the whole day working on a reno project to find himself not done when dusk arrived, and worse, not inclined to drag out the spot lights and work into the night to finish it up. He would have once. Back in a not really that long ago day. When he was young….ger.

 

Old. Alright, alright….middle-aged, but this forty is the new thirty thing is just boomer nonsense. When I look at photos of famous women, who I know are older than I am, I don’t see well-preserved. I see women who are older than I am and lucky to have good make-up, better lighting and a photographer with a great photoshop program. 

 

I am not sure what it is. My child starting kindergarten when most people my age are celebrating empty nests or the fact that my 25th high school reunion is around the corner and I have been getting in touch with old friends. Old ones. People I have known now for twenty plus years. My friend Lisa and I go back to fifth grade. That’s more than thirty years ago. Relationships outside your original immediate family and relations that you can measure in decade increments is humbling. And it really adds to that whole “Damn, I’m old!” thing.

 

But, I feel better about my wizening today. After all, many people still misjudge my true age by a good five or more years in the direction of thirty-something. I am actually thinner than I was before my child was born. A note-worthy achievement because, and most women know this to be true, your stomach is never the same again. I am not ignorant of current music and cultural. No time warp here. I don’t need reading glasses. Really. My optometrist says so. And most important of all, my husband thinks I have a great bum. What more could a forty-ish woman want or need?