Mother Teresa - an Atheist or a Saint of Darkness?

An article in Time hints that Mother Teresa of Calcutta was an agnostic or even an atheist deep inside. A book due to be released on September 4, "Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light", includes letters of the mother written over 66 years to colleagues, confessors and superiors.
The author of this book is not any anti-religious investigative reporter, but a member of the Missionaries of Charity she founded, and a staunch supporter for her sainthood, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk.

The letters are on various topics, but strikingly reveal her inner torment. The excerpts quoted in the article vividly bring out the angst she suppressed within her for decades (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html).

• "Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself -- for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead". "It has been like this more or less from the time I started 'the work.'" (1953)
  
• "Such deep longing for God -- and ... repulsed -- empty -- no faith -- no love -- no zeal. (Saving) souls holds no attraction -- Heaven means nothing -- pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything." (1956)
  
• "If there be no God -- there can be no soul -- if there is no Soul then Jesus -- You also are not true." (1959)
  
• "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." (1962)
  
• "Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear," (1979).
  
• "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God -- tender, personal love," she wrote to a friend. "If you were (there), you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'"
  "I utter words of community prayers -- and try my utmost to get out of every word the sweetness it has to give -- but my prayer of union is not there any longer -- I no longer pray."

Her anguish continued till her death in 1997.

The letters are unlikely to affect her cause for sainthood as the church is waiting for a second “miracle” to complete her canonization. The church has already come out with arguments to justify her torment. Her successor, Sr. Nirmala, said that the darkness experienced by Mother Teresa (for over 50 years!) was God’s way of leading her towards the path of purification and transformation .(http://www.hindu.com/2007/08/27/stories/2007082761202200.htm ). A former Ambassador to the Vatican said that Mother Teresa’s torment was a struggle with Satan himself and should not block her ascension to sainthood (http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=1019490 ).

I have always wondered about the inner feelings of people who spent a “life time serving God” – i.e. what do these professional servants of god think of their elusive master. It appears that there could be no better example than the letters of Mother Teresa written over such a long period of time.

In fact, Mother Teresa wrote in 1946 that Jesus called her to abandon her work as a teacher with Loreto Sisters to be with "the slums" of the city of Calcutta (Kolkotta), dealing directly with "the poorest of the poor" — the sick, the dying, beggars and street children. "Come, Come, carry Me into the holes of the poor," he told her. "Come be My light."

Thus, she abandoned everything and plunged deep into the service of the “poorest of poor”, with a strong belief that "actually we are touching Christ's body in the poor. In the poor it is the hungry Christ that we are feeding, it is the naked Christ that we are clothing, it is the homeless Christ that we are giving shelter".
(http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1979/presentation-speech.html)

Then for some reason, Jesus decides that enough is enough, and turns off that light. For the next 50 or so years, she leads a miserable life, struggling and yearning for the light that eluded her for ever.

Now, imagine yourself in the company of the poorest of the poor. You see nothing but hunger, desolation, sickness, and malnutrition all around you. Sooner or later, wouldn’t you start to have doubts about a naked, hungry, or even a homeless Christ? Did He bring suffering to a select group of people in a third-world country, so that certain other pious people like Mother Teresa could serve them and thus touch the body of Christ? How could you reconcile to that justice? Is the suffering of the poorest of poor in India and other third-world countries a gift from God? A toy for the rich to play with – to realize and touch their God by serving the poor?

For the church, Mother Teresa alive was a huge money-making machine – Millions of dollars poured in from every corner of the world supposedly to serve the multitude of homeless and hungry Christs in Calcutta and elsewhere. Skeptics ask “Where are those Millions?”(http://members.lycos.co.uk/bajuu/ ) – According to them, there is no visible evidence to show that money is spent to alleviate suffering – there are no real hospitals, no real schools, no orphanages with humane facilities etc., they say. A video clip available at You tube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q1m-8npkJ4) may help you to make up your mind.

No doubt, the Vatican will canonize Mother Teresa sooner than later – they know a Saint Teresa will bring in billions!

Do Gods Read Newspapers?

Do gods read newspapers? It is a question that has been troubling me for some time. If so, do they subscribe to all the newspapers published around the world? Or only a select few? What languages do the gods prefer? English? Arabic? Hebrew? Malayalam? I will never know.

These nagging questions rake my mind whenever I see advertisements praying “eternal peace to departed souls” or for “favours received” addressed seemingly to an “Almighty”. The former category of advertisements is prevalent in Dubai, the latter I see mostly in the Malayalam dailies from the southern state of Kerala India.

An example is the two condolence advertisements (3 col x 21 cms.) by a large Dubai based FMCG company (Gulf News, August 22, 2007) for two of their managers who lost their dear fathers recently. The ads read “We express our heartfelt condolences to” [Name, and designation of the employee], “and his family on the sad demise of his,” [father/mother/wife and name of the deceased] “who passed away on” [date]. The company also implores “We pray to God to rest his soul in eternal peace”. There is a similar ad inserted by yet another company condoling the death of the wife of a top executive (Gulf News, August 23, 2007). The template of all three ads is identical, you just insert different names.

Now there is confusion; a lot of confusion.

1. It appears that one of the dead men is a Muslim and the other a Christian. The unfortunate (or fortunate – depending on your viewpoint) lady is a Hindu. They all probably believed in entirely different gods (assuming none of them were atheists). That means Gulf News must have subscriptions from all gods and deities or deliver complimentary copies every day to their abodes, wherever that might be (ads are not published in their on-line edition, so that possibility is ruled out).
   
2. The position of an employee within the company, who is bereaved of a kin, determines the size of the condolence ad. In general, they do not insert ads for low ranking workers. The quota goes some thing like this - a small ad for middle managers, quarter page for senior managers, half-page for owners of smaller companies and full page ads for owners or directors of large companies. Does size matter to God? Is there a direct correlation between the size of an ad and the duration of ‘eternal peace’ granted to that individual soul?
   
3. Do all these gods read English? Perhaps Jesus can – as asserted by a Texas Governor who said “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.” (MA Ferguson 1875-1961). However, scholars disagree; they say Jesus spoke Aramaic, with a smattering of Hebrew and Greek. We in this part of the world firmly believe that God only speaks classical Arabic – his sayings lose validity if anyone attempts translation into other languages. I do not know what the Hindu gods speak, perhaps Sanskrit, the ancient but dead language of India. Then again, if Sanskrit is indeed the language of gods, why did they let it die?
   
4. A prayer for eternal peace implies the existence of eternal pandemonium or hell awaiting certain other souls. None of the scriptures seem to agree on the criteria for awarding this judgment; it varies from religion to religion and is in general, mutually inconsistent. What will happen to the poor souls, whose sponsors do not insert ads in their favour? Will they never attain “eternal peace”?
   
5. Most people believe their God is omniscient – in that case, He already knows about the bereavement and has decided what to do with that soul. Will He be swayed by an imploration through the print media? Use your common sense to arrive at your own conclusion. In that case, what is the whole purpose of these advertisements?

These are questions with irrefutability attached to any answers you will come up with. Nobody can prove or disprove their answers. It is just a matter or faith!

Inserting an ad in a newspaper like Gulf News will cost a lot of money. It goes without saying that the only party that benefits from this exercise is the newspaper. It is a good source of income for them without any marketing efforts and they will never discourage this practice. Perhaps the advertisers believe these newspapers are peace brokers for the departed souls.

I have one last question. Are these companies not on talking terms with their employees? Can’t their MD or somebody senior, give a personal call to the concerned employee and console him/her or even sent them a condolence by email? And thus save the company a lot of money? Or donate it to charity?

A City That Cares….

We know pretty well that newsmen create some of the news these days wittingly or unwittingly. The intense competition to be there first for “breaking news” by print and television journalists sometimes results in news that is their own creation. I never thought that policemen ever faced such competition. Now, according to recent news reports, the policemen in Dubai started to create their own crimes.

Take a look at a story published yesterday in the Gulf News “CID man gets suspended jail term for firing at car” (http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/07/08/22/10148332.html ). Apparently, a Dubai court sentenced a suspended jail term to a 25-year-old “Yemeni policeman” (it must be a citizen of Yemen working for Dubai Police, not a policeman from Yemen) who fired five bullets and endangered the lives of a young unmarried U.A.E. National couple. The court also found the couple guilty of having sex in a tinted car and sentenced them also a suspended jail term. Another policeman also was handed a suspended jail term for chasing them and blocking their car.

How did the police man notice the couple having an intimate private moment in a tinted car? UAE law stipulates that films with 70 per cent or higher visible light transmission (VLT) may only be used in car windows. Not in these cars. No way. If you live in Dubai, you will notice that most of the cars on the roads have films with less than 1% VLT – they are almost opaque. Probably they did the act in a desolate place, and the policeman’s suspicion was aroused by movements of a stationary car caused by the passionate act of the couple. Who wouldn’t be? Can’t you see an opportunity here? I could see a great marketing potential for a safe AVS in addition to the ABS standard in such cars – an Anti Vibration System that locks a vehicles’s suspension system when needed. An AVS that is guaranteed to arrest any external manifestation of vibration even at the height of intense passion by its occupiers.

P.S. None of our friends, neither the policemen nor the couple, will spend time in prison. They are free as long as each individual will not commit another crime during the term of their suspended sentence. Can there be anything more impressive– a court finds both parties (on either side of the law) guilty, and then serve all parties suspended jail terms. This can happen only in a city that cares.

Advantages of Not Reading a News Paper

“Shop selling offensive T-shirts referred to panel” screams the headline of a local news item recently published in the Gulf News (a popular daily news paper in the United Arab Emirates). (http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/07/08/17/10147241.html )
The news report says that a good humored vendor put on sale a bunch of T-shirts with the name “God” emblazoned on it. This is a sacrilegious crime in this part of the world. Some residents complained to the authorities about the serious offence and inspectors seized all material from the shop and probably closed it forever. The vendor may say in court that he has the permission of God to do so, or even He ordered him to do so in a dream or something like that. But I do not think that will be a sufficient argument. According to common belief, God has stopped preaching to humans centuries ago. Perhaps, He wisely understood that there is no point in doing that.

Another recent news item from India describes the attack on a Bangladeshi writer currently in exile in India. She is issued a "death warrant" if she did not pack her bags and leave India. "Anybody eliminating her would be given Rs100,000 (Dh8,333) and unlimited rewards if she does not leave the country immediately. Her crime - “she has insulted a particular group of people and continued to create problems in this country," as told to a news agency by its top spokesperson. He did not specify what the unlimited rewards are (http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/07/08/18/10147431.html ).

One good thing about such nice people is that none of them reads tabloids like Weekend Review that comes with Gulf News every Friday. For example, Weekend Review carries a list of best seller books and a very interesting book is on that list for the past thirteen or so weeks. I cannot find a link to that page, but the book in question is listed currently at No. 3. Even though, it is the name of a book, it is a bold statement that the Weekend Review carries every week. To me it is a greater offence than the one attributed to recent cartoon controversy. Let us see how long the fun will last. Meanwhile, congratulations to the editorial team of Gulf News for their bravery.