jerjonji had something from Mother Teresa on her post today, and I started to write this is as a comment but it was too long so I’m putting it here. This is my Mother Teresa story.
For some time I studied with Bernie. I should have been calling him “Master,” as you do with the great teachers, but people still called him by his adopted name. He told me this story when I was ready to hear it. Back then I didn’t believe in God. But I had learned about that powerful force, that energy Taoists call chi. Every time he invited a new master to teach a workshop, I’d sign up. They’d come from all over the world. Juan Li was one of those visiting masters. Our group spent a week living in a place called Manuka, practicing night and day. I remember we even had to eat in silence.
Several years later, Master Li took a year off to visit all the holy people in the world. When he got to Calcutta, Mother Teresa’s people said she could give him a little time, but first he was needed in the courtyard. The only thing I ever saw him wear were linen pants and a gauzy shirt, both off-white. Never having children of his own, I can’t imagine he knew how to change a diaper, especially a stinky one. He was assigned a grubby little boy with shit running down the inside of his pants.
He rolled up his sleeves and did the best he could with no running water. When he was done, the sister told him he could go in. He was ushered into the inner office where she sat at a desk. He sat down in front of her and within minutes he was sobbing like a baby. He described it as coming up against a wall of love like nothing he had ever felt before. And this is a man who had spent most of his time in the presence of God, in prayer, in practice.
I wouldn’t say this fell on deaf ears, but my opinion of Mother Teresa then was that she was a wrinkled old goody two-shoes. I got home and my youngest said she needed a book on fables so I went to Annie Bloom’s and found the section with Aesop’s Fables. Wanting to get something a bit different I reached for the next book and sitting next to that I saw this little book by Mother Teresa. I couldn’t believe my eyes. How did Bernie get it here? It was a simple book on prayer. I had no use for it but I knew I was supposed to have it so I took it home. It might have been called prayer 101 for it was a how-to book.
The fact that it was Mother Teresa blew me away, but what was really freaky was that it was the perfect book for me. Really, it read much like my Taoist books. All she was suggesting was to get somewhere quiet, clear your mind, and have the intention of love, or peace, or just emptying yourself to let God in. That’s exactly what I had been doing, only I thought it was letting chi in. Turns out it’s all the same. She’d left out the semantics that always throw me with religion. That little book of hers allowed me to segue into a more mainstream philosophy. I could speak of God. Granted, my God was nothing like my Baptist sister’s, and by the time I got done going to most of the churches in Portland, I knew that the best place to be with mine was under this old oak tree I found in the Arboretum. My God fit nicely with the unique spiritual practice I had honed over the years. Every time I had another surgery, instead of reading the last 4 chapters in the medical book so I could test out of the class, I bought another book on religion and spiritual practices. I took the best parts of all of them and created my own rituals. I had an alter in my room. And I would take some of it to my oak tree. I meditated every morning from 6:00 to 7:00. My poor husband didn’t know what to make of it. He told the kids I was nuts.
Mother Teresa reached millions, but the fact that she finally got to me was nothing short of a miracle.
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