Hitchens, Obama and Mother Teresa

• Christopher Hitchens, I think you can also be added to my People Who Can Shut Up Now list.

• Barack Obama, unfortunately because of your Pakistan statement I have to give you a yellow card. Anyone without your record would have gone straight to the List (see above). You know and I know that what you are really about is transcending binaries and getting to the underlying truths of the matters and working WITH people for win-win solutions, and we know that that does not include threatening to send an unauthorized military force into another sovereign nation uninvited just so you can't be accused of being "soft on terror." You're better than that--or at least I thought you were.

Ok, this is the interesting part. Really the most fascinating thing I have read in possibly months:

• Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith

Ok, I have to admit that some of the relating-to-God-as-a-lover stuff gets a little weird when it's taken this literally, and the need to punish oneself to destroy the ego seems counterproductive to me (not necessarily the ego-destroying itself--arguably--but the means) but here are some quotes that really get to the point IMHO:

• The book is hardly the work of some antireligious investigative reporter who Dumpster-dived for Teresa's correspondence. Kolodiejchuk, a senior Missionaries of Charity member, is her postulator, responsible for petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supporting materials.

• The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the "dark night" of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the growth of some spiritual masters. Teresa found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it and abandoned neither her belief nor her work.[...]However formidable her efforts on Christ's behalf, it is even more astounding to realize that she achieved them when he was not available to her - a bit like a person who believes she can't walk winning the Olympic 100 meters. [This is what Camus, the French (atheist?) existentialist tells us to do in "The Myth of Sisyphus": it may very well be that life has no inherent meaning, but you can still make the decision to push your rock up the hill. In fact it is the only decision you can make, but it is the foundation of human dignity and the ability to live life with open eyes (your other options are to not really live, or to close your eyes)]

• "If I ever become a Saint - I will surely be one of 'darkness.' I will continually be absent from Heaven - to [light] the light of those in darkness on earth," she wrote in 1962. [What is that if not a bodhisattva?]
  

Of course, I think some of what she experienced as "darkness" or distance from god could also be described as clinical depression, but I also think that's in a certain way beside the point because the point is how she dealt with it (see my paraphrase of Camus, above).
- posted by k @ 4:19 PM