The Life Poured out upon a Cross

"Unless you hate your mother and your father, you cannot be my disciple." In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

He could scarcely have said it more plainly, more often, nor from so many, different directions:

"My ways are not your ways, nor my thoughts your thoughts."
This passage, of course, is from Isaiah, but its theme is an echoing song down through all the Sacred Scriptures: in the Psalms, in the Prophets, and, this morning, quite vividly from the lips of our Master, the Lord Jesus Christ.

What must be the thoughts of pious mothers everywhere this morning? They drag their bumptious broods out of bed, wash them, feed them, dress them, and then bid them sit silently in the pews ... only to hear this from the deacon or priest: "Unless you hate your mother and your father, you cannot be my disciple." How can this be right? I hear the mothers of Christendom say. Is this from the Bible?! To be sure, a tender nerve is touched today.

How often have we read in the Pauline Correspondence that the Apostle is a fool for Christ, a slave for Christ, and in this morning's Epistle, a prisoner for Christ? And he invites us to rise from our comfortable chairs to join him. The Psalmist declares that God is our rock and our crag. I wonder how often we stop to consider what life in a crag might be like. A little hard on the knees, isn't it? And where is the bathroom? Oh, this Christian life! ... so unlike anything in the world! And that is the point: it is the ultimate counterculture. The Didache, the earliest text of the teachings of the Apostles, begins with these few words: "Two ways there are: life and death." And today, September 4th, a saint who rightly saw the path of worldly values and aspirations to be the way of death, goes into the books of the Roman Church as a canonized saint. She was an antagonist of that Church and particularly of the privileged prelates she encountered in Rome, yet her sanctity was too great to be denied. The world knew her as a saint long before her saint-day was granted by the Vatican.

Meanwhile, in the world, whose hallmarks are irony, archness, sarcasm and a love of satire delivered with an air of superiority (viz. "Saturday Night Live" or "Wait, Wait! Don't Tell Me"), in this world the face of love to the destitute is judged to be a fraud, a sham, a sadist, a religious fantatic, an antagonist to modern medical science, and even a closet atheist. Those of you who have followed the news these past few days will recognize the bold phrases of Christopher Hitchens, which have been so widely circulated by his sympathetic network of like-minded media. The late Mr Hitchens -- a graduate of Baliol College, Oxford, gadfly on many subjects, and an atheist -- has descended on Mother Teresa with such force that he appointed himself to be a "devil's advocate" principal in the cause for her eventual canonization. He favored the term medieval obscurantism as he considered the diminutive nun who gave her life to the people whom the world rejected. And here he gives the game away. For this colorful phrase was beloved by exponents of the so-called "Enlightenment" -- the eighteenth-century movement that saw human reason as the only true faculty of human sentience and reflection and who saw religious life as being a mental disease. These worthies joined in the gutting of the Cathedral of Notre Dame imposing a Statue of Reason upon once sacred space. It goes without saying that once you have jettisoned the existence of an eternal, divine soul, which Christians take to be the seat of highest perception and meditation, then all that departs from the claims of the scientific method might be labeled "delusional." On these grounds, all spiritual writings -- intent on sharing divine mysteries among souls who would recognize them instantly and unerringly -- are condemned as obscurantist.

No mystery on earth provokes the atheist's indignation more surely than the mystery of suffering. The Christian embrace of suffering only pours fuel on the bonfire of the critic's vanities. And this weekend, the saint most associated with suffering in our time is bathed in their lime light. Suffering. Can any of us claim to understand it? Perhaps not, but we can live in and amongst it and hope to relay to others what we hope are sensitive and intelligible reports through the medium of the living soul, one tuning fork resonating sympathetically with another.

Reason might dictate that our lives are determined according our own decisions together with the causation they set into action. By contrast, Wordsworth believed that human life was organized around epiphanies, bursts of light, indelibly impressed upon the soul forming a sort of string of pearls. These "spots of time" as he called them make sense of our lives revealing the hidden order and ultimate purpose of each. These circles of light form an archipelago in the dark seas of dimmed memories and half-forgotten events, and the island that has shone brightest for me, and which has disclosed the ordering of my life, was my arrival to Haiti. Sitting in a tiny airport, where I was the only non-Haitian I felt a great peace sweep over me -- an impossible lightness of being and a sense of relief that I could not understand, and which in fact seemed vaguely indecent. For I had just seen Port-au-Prince, mostly a "bombed-out" city of refugees huddled by fires with debris lying all around. Open sewers were everywhere to be seen. Many people lived under two pieces of cardboard or the more fortunate among them under sheets of rusted corrugated metal. The city gave off a stench of stagnant water, urine, human waste, and burnt particulates, which seared the eyes. And now I sat among people who could afford, though barely, to ride in a small, prop plane. But upon all one could still feel the musty, tattered blanket of suffering weighing down on every Haitian man, woman, and child. At no time in subsequent years did I fail to perceive that weight. And during those years it gradually dawned on me ... why I should have felt such relief in that tiny, crowded room. I realized that I had received a wonderful gift: the death of a lie, one which had propped up my life in large measure, though I did not know it. It was the lie that so many of us depend upon for our happiness and sanity: that all is well, that we are secure in our blessings, and that all we need do is work hard and acknowledge our neighbor. I am okay, and most people are okay. Yes, there are people who suffer ... and we need to do something about that. This was the lie that breathed the air of reality and died.

In my new situation, the scales had fallen from my eyes. In fact, the world suffers. 800 million people go to sleep each night hungry. Half the world's people live on slightly more than $2 a day. 80% of the world's population lives on less than $10 per day. The facts of life crowded in: three-quarters of the earth is covered with water; a tiny fraction of the land is arable; a very small minority of the world's inhabitants control nearly all of its wealth; and most humans live in poverty, want, disease, or suffering. Soon after settling in, I knew that I never wanted to leave Haiti. If these were the people who were "out," then I would prefer to throw in my lot in with them than return to those who were "in."

Among the most fascinating inhabitants of Haiti were the religious women and men who had lived there for decades -- girls and boys who had given their lives to the poor at age 17 and 18 who were now turning 70 and 80, still living amongst the squalor of those they loved in a personal bid to relieve whatever suffering they saw, even if only one person at a time. Most were talented, personable people, able to speak multiple languages, ministering to diverse peoples, and shining with a radiance that baffles human reason. I knew one religious, in particular, who had spent years living amongst lepers in India (until the government deported her for being too positive an image of Christian life) and who had come to Haiti asking only the lowliest place. I saw her when she should have been at her worst -- during a cholera epidemic, surrounded by people exploding out of both ends, and with far too few staff to cope with the ever larger crowds of sufferers. Without a mask or gloves, I watched her embrace a woman who could no longer stand, holding her close, reassuring her, loving her. I doubt that this woman will ever forget the love she saw in God's face through the visage of my friend.

Not long after her arrival, she was asked to administer a small, though promising, public health outreach. During twenty-five years of her administration, she developed it with others to become the principal lifeline for all people in Southwest Haiti, reaching a quarter-million people in 113 villages and one capital city. I marveled at how the Holy Spirit had prospered this acceptable instrument -- humble, chaste, impoverished, faithful -- making her a center of gravity for many others and the gifts they might safely bring under her governance.

She had been born into the affluent family of a dentist and community leader. Her mother was a social worker, holding a master's degree granted during the 1930s. And, when her friends were marrying and moving into their own homes with their own families, she went against the grain of the culture and gave her life to the poor. Most of what I have learned about her I learned from listening to others and from watching the reverence accorded her in whatever village she visited. She would never relate her experiences in India, China, or Haiti (though the stories about her were legion). I do know that she was the most charitable person I had ever met and one who did not brook unkind words being spoken in her presence. I saw her intelligence, her perfect faithfulness in devout life, her fine sensitivity (I began to suspect she could read minds), and her simplicity. For she would sit in silence enjoying merely the presence of another, and the force of her spirit would fill the place.

Had she chosen the world, she would have "gone far" by the worldly standard. In trenchant thought, administrative ability, analytical capacity, and common sense, she towered above the candidates we presently see for the U.S. presidency. But she did not choose the world. She chose the poor. She chose suffering, for it is impossible truly to serve the poor without becoming poor.

I cannot say that I understood this instance of suffering any more than I could understand the world's suffering to which she gave her life. But I knew this as I watched her go about her duties each day in Haiti: her suffering had relieved the suffering of millions of people. I thought of the thousands of houses she had built, the millions of patients her ministry saw and cared for, the students who attended the school she built, the expectant mothers who were saved at the Center of Hope, which was built by a millionaire who admired her life. Yes, she had consoled, changed, and saved millions of lives. And in all of this I learned a very great truth -- that within the mystery of suffering lies another mystery: to relieve suffering, you must suffer. Because she embraced this life rather than one that "sought happiness," a whole world in Southwest Haiti was saved. And then something else occurred to me as I watched her walk through door after door with Crucifixes hanging over each: the world suffers, and our God hangs on a Cross.

Through our friendship and the trust that gradually built up between us, I came to know the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whom she met in India. In time, the MCs, as they were called, began a conversation that led to my being accepted as their future chaplain in Jeremie, Haiti (the Roman Church in the U.S. was not to ratify my appointment). During my conversations with them, I took some small steps toward understanding "the atheism," "the sham," and "the fraud" that Christoper Hitchens attributed to their founder. The superior in Jeremie shared with me the desolation they all felt, sensing God's absence as they poured themselves out day after day, year after year, in their hard, hard work. I pondered these young women who ministered ceaselessly to the "hardest cases," which was the charter of their religious order. These were afflicted people who (just one of them) might overwhelm a religious community. Yet, their compound was bursting with these disfigured, diseased, and raving men and women, not to mention an enormous room filled with white, iron cribs of sick and dying infants. And these dormitories, one for men and one for women, were packed. Most were dying and had only recently been lying in the gutter, covered with flies, ignored by passersby. But here were masses of these lost cases overseen by a handful of young women -- women going to the furthest place, to the greatest concentration of evil, the evil of a world that had rejected, and still rejects, these precious lives.

This past week, reading the various articles and essays that filter in, I considered Christopher Hitchens, as he sat with his friends in their Oxford-connected clubs. Men of soft hands wearing soft shoes sitting in soft leather chairs trading clever and cutting remarks concerning a tiny Albanian nun. And I can hear the sisters in Jeremie, Haiti, in Calcutta, India, and all over the world saying quietly and politely, "A little less noise please, for, you see, we are kneeling beside the beloved of God, who are being received at the empyreal gates of Heaven." Amen.