Look! Over there! It’s Mother Teresa, white robe flying, sprinting madly to get ahead of her competitors, win the race and claim the trophy.
Wait…there must be some kind of mistake. This was a woman whose life work was tending to the poor, not striving to get anything for herself. When she wasn’t helping people directly, she was praying.
Know that feeling when you see someone familiar, but out of context, and it jumbles up your brain? Like when you’re in the line at the post office and Larry, who is your go-to guy for any plumbing problems at your house, comes in, wearing plain clothes, just looking to mail a package. It can throw you, temporarily. Then you realize, kind of sheepishly—of course he doesn’t have to be a plumber 24-7.
And sometimes you are prodded to see someone you thought you knew perfectly well in a different light. This too can jumble the brain. In fact, the longer I live, the more I see how most of the solid structures we count on — and by “structures” I mean actual things like buildings as well as human beings or even any realities we think are definite and unfaltering, immune to change – can, in a flash, look suddenly different; perhaps shifting in a good way, perhaps crumbling, or even disappearing in flames.
I write this on September 11th, fifteen years after this happened quite literally, and our world was never quite the same.
But I started out with Mother Teresa, now Saint Teresa, who died four years before that terrible day. Let’s look at how the language that’s used to describe her can radically change how we imagine this icon of Christian goodness.
The fact that she was “canonized” by Pope Francis last week wasn’t all that surprising, really. Back at the end of 2015, The New York Times ran a story with this headline: “Pope Francis Clears Mother Teresa’s Path to Sainthood” Doesn’t that make her sound like an airplane on a runway, and the Pope an air traffic controller? Bet you never imagined this diminutive, quiet woman with engines roaring.
As far as I can understand from this article, a person can be “beatified” once he or she has one miracle under his or her belt. That happened with Mother Teresa back in 2003, with the apparent miraculous healing of an Indian woman with a tumor who prayed to the nun; then in 2015 the Pope “recognized a second miracle” which involved the multi-faceted healing of a Brazilian man, this time after his wife had been praying to Mother Teresa for months.
Once she was deemed responsible for two miracles, she had lift-off towards the destination of sainthood.
The canonization ceremony took place amidst throngs of people in St. Peter’s Square a week ago. For everyone there, it must have been a awesome experience to witness how a plain Albanian woman — someone who spent her life in back alleys, clinics, shelters with the poor, the sick, the cast aside – was celebrated by the full, gleaming power of the Catholic Church.
Afterwards, I began hearing another jarring metaphor in various news reports. It was said repeatedly that Mother Teresa had been “on the fast track to sainthood.” This image takes her off the runway and sends her directly to the athletic complex, with a pause for putting on sneakers.
Picturing the woman who had also been called the “Saint of the Gutters” on any track at all, let alone a fast one, doesn’t jive with our usual image of her, that’s for sure.
These runners definitely belong on a fast track, and they inspire us by being there…
And these guys (could be women, too) provide a nice illustration of the definition from Google, when the term is used as a verb: “The old boys’ network fast-tracks men to the top of the corporate ladder.” Well, there’s no ladder pictured here exactly, but you get the idea.
This may be just fine for them; they look exuberant and all. But do we need to see someone like Mother Teresa as just another person who’s jostling to get ahead, in any sense of the word?
What’s not clear is whether we’re affixing language to her that changes her unfairly; or whether the surprising descriptions actually do present the possibility of startling new dimensions for this woman we thought we had already engraved just so in our minds. Going back to my plumber at the post office example, she doesn’t have to be perfect 24-7, but let’s hope we can respectfully refrain from giving her an overdose of ambition.
Furthermore, to savor many of life’s regular pleasures that aren’t about running races or speeding up for take-off, or even aspiring to sainthood for that matter, staying in the slow lane and really taking in the view keeps looking like a pretty good option.