Denver Catholic

23 DENVER CATHOLIC | JANUARY 23-FEBRUARY 12, 2016 Mother Teresa: Saint of light, saint of darkness L ike so many others around the world, I was overjoyed to hear of the recent decision of the Vatican to canonize Mother Teresa, a woman gen- erally recognized, during her lifetime, to be a "living saint." Mother Teresa fi rst came to my attention through Malcolm Mugger- idge's fi lm and atten- dant book Something Beautiful for God. Of course, Muggeridge showed Mother's work with the dying and the poorest of the poor on the streets of Kol- kata, but what moved me the most were the images of the saint's smile amidst so much squalor and suž ering. She was a very bright light shining in exceptionally thick darkness. Mother's life reveals so many aspects and profi les of holiness, but I would like to focus on three of them. First, she shows something remarkable about love, which is not a sentiment but rather willing the good of the other. I think it is fair to say that Mother Teresa went to extremes in demonstrating love in this proper sense. She renounced prac- tically everything that, in the opinion of the world, makes life pleasant—wealth, material goods, power, comforts, luxu- ries—in order to be of service to those in need. Further, for decades, she personally reached out to the most vulnerable in one of the worst slums in the world and sent her sisters to some of the most disagree- able places on the planet. Most of us, I imagine, manage to love to a degree, but few ever express this theological virtue more dramatically and radically than she did. This is not simply admirable, it constitutes a crucial witness to the nature of love. Unlike the other virtues, both natural and theological, love has no limit. Justice, limitlessly expressed, excludes all mercy; too much temperance becomes a fussy puritanism; exaggerated courage is rashness; unlimited faith is credulity; infi nite hope devolves into presumption. But there can never be too much love; there is never a time when love is inap- propriate, for love is what God is, and love constitutes the very life of heaven. Mind you, in heaven there is no need for faith and hope fades away. But in that supremely holy place, love remains in all of its infi nite intensity and radicality. Mother Teresa's way of life, accordingly, is an icon of the love that will obtain in heaven, when we are drawn utterly into the very life of God. A second feature of Mother's holiness is her dedication to prayer. When I visited the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata some years ago, what impressed me most was a life-size statue of Mother Teresa in the very back of the chapel, in the attitude she customarily assumed when she prayed: legs folded under her, palms facing upward, head bowed. From the very beginning of her community, Mother insisted that her sis- ters should engage in substantial amounts of prayer every day; and in time, she estab- lished a branch of her order dedicated exclusively to contemplative prayer. She understood something that is essential to the Christian spiritual life, namely, that the kind of love she and her sisters endeavored to practice could come only through the grace of God, only as a sheer gift. To get that gift, it was necessary to ask, to ask again, to beg one's whole life long. Without this explicit connection to God and his purposes, their work, she knew, would turn into mere do-goodism, and the egos of her sisters would inevitably assert themselves. Saints, those who embody the love that God is, are necessarily beggars. I remarked above that Mother Teresa struck me as a light in the shadows. How mysterious, therefore, that she herself once said, "If I ever become a saint, I will surely be a saint of darkness." She was referring to something that only a hand- ful of people knew in her lifetime, that for upwards of fi fty years, Mother Teresa experienced the pain of the absence of God. The living saint often felt abandoned by God or even that God does not exist. Once, a visiting bishop was kneeling in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament with Mother and her nuns. A note was passed to him from the saintly found- ress, which read, to his infi nite surprise, "Where is Jesus?" That she lived through this crucible for decades, even as people routinely saw her as the very paragon of holiness, shows forth a third dimension of her saintliness. To be a saint is to allow Christ to live his life in you. Indeed, St. Paul said, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me;" and this means the whole Christ. Jesus was a person of service to the poor and needy, and Mother certainly embodied this aspect of his life; Jesus was a person who prayed intently and for long periods of time, and Mother participated in this dimension of his exis- tence. But Jesus was also the crucifi ed Lord, who said, at the limit of his suž ering, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" To allow Christ to live his life in you is, therefore, necessarily to experience, to one degree or another, the absence of God, to undergo the agony of the crucifi xion in all of its dimensions. St. John of the Cross, the greatest mystical theologian in the Church's history said, quite simply, that there is no path to holiness that does not lead through the cross. Though it is a high paradox, the fi fty-year darkness that Mother endured is, therefore, one of the surest indicators of her saintliness. Saints exist for the Church, for in them we see the very raison d'etre of the Church, and this is why canonizations are always joyful až airs. So let us rejoice in this new saint whose love, prayer, and very darkness, are light for us. Bishop Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles. He is the creator of the award winning documentary series "Catholicism." Guest Column BISHOP ROBERT BARRON Is it real love, or pizza love? I saw a one of those celebrity maga- zines at the drugstore the other day. The headline read "The 22 Women Brando Loved and Destroyed." I looked at it and thought, "This nation needs a serious national conversa- tion about what the word 'love' means." A few days later, curious what this "love" looked like, I googled the article to see what it was exactly that the late, "great" Marlon Brando did to these women. Sure enough, this "love" seemed to consist in pursuing a woman he found attractive (not a di cult pur- suit for the beautiful Marlon Brando in his prime), commencing a torrid sexual až air, and then losing interest and cheating on her with the other attrac- tive women he was pursuing. Brando, of course, went through far more than 22 women in his lifetime. The number in the headline referred to the 22 of them who ultimately attempted suicide after being used and discarded by Marlon Brando. Many of those attempts were successful. Yeah, some "love." Unfortunately, in the years since Marlon Brando shu¨ ed ož this mortal coil, we have not fi gured out the diž er- ence between "loving" and "using." Take, for instance, an interview I read recently with a woman involved in a "polyamorous" relationship. Her explanation for their choice of this arrangement was very simple. She and her husband had initially been very much "in love", but over time they settled down, had a child, and now the "thrill" was gone from their relationship. They tried everything—everything—to get it back. But nothing worked. Until she got the brilliant idea to bring a third person into their marriage. Into their home. Into their bed. Apparently that has done the trick, so to speak. I spent much of my adult life traveling around the world, speaking to teenagers and young adults about the diž erence between "pizza love" and "real love." It was based on St. John Paul II's concept of the "personalistic norm," which states that since everyone is created in the image and likeness of God for his or her own sake and loved unconditionally by God, the only appropriate response to a human person is love—recognizing the inherent dignity of that person, and desiring what is absolutely best for him or her, even to the point of personal sacrifi ce. The opposite of love is using—seeing a person as merely an instrument to facil- itate my own pleasure or satisfaction, without regard for what is in fact best for that person. My relationship with pizza isn't centered on what is best for the pizza, but only on my pleasure in eating it. Which is a perfectly fi ne relationship to have with a food product, but not with a person. I don't consider myself particularly qualifi ed to know the entirety of any one relationship, but I can "call it like I see it" when aspects of that relationship are made public. Here's what I know: a woman prepared to leave a basically healthy marriage relationship because she is no longer experiencing a "thrill" is not loving her spouse. She is seeing him as means to her own emotional experience, to be discarded when he no longer fulfi lls that function. She is using him. Likewise, a couple who attempt to revive that thrill by bringing a third person into the sacredness of their marriage bed is not loving that third person. They are seeing him or her as merely a means to an emotional experi- ence. They are using him or her, just as an actor who obsesses over, sexually uses and then discards a woman is not loving her. We have utterly lost any sense of what the word "love" actually means. This, as one might imagine, is a recipe for disaster when it comes to the universal moral imperative to love our neighbor. Talk to your kids. Teach them the dif- ference between "real love" and "pizza love." Apply it to specifi c situations they see on television, in movies and on the news. It will help them to better under- stand what is going on in the world. And it may save them from the fate like that of Brando's 22 women. Bonacci is a syndicated columnist based in Denver and the author of We're On a Mission from God and Real Love. Guest Column MARY BETH BONACCI

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