An Albanian woman’s message to Czechs

Mother Teresa, canonized by Pope Francis on this day, is a saint as uncomfortable in these times as when she took care of her first dying Hindu, in Calcutta. Her sisters around the world continue to take care of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, atheists and all God’s People around the world.

Central to her lifelong inspiration was Jesus’s Parable from Chapter 25 of the Gospel of St Matthew. Here, Jesus says of Himself:  “Come, you whom my Father has blessed, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome, lacking clothes and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me,” and “In truth I tell you, insofar as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me.”

Like Jesus in his time, Mother Teresa also attacked the extant social order by her Indian engagement. Jesus’s and her absolute priority was the poorest man as the image and child of God. She shunned the logic dictating that the earthly life of man is but an opportunity for his better life after death, and the poorer death that one suffers is an invitation for him to fare much better in his next life. Her activity was a spiritual-social challenge to the Hindu society; just like her sisters pose it to all societies they work in (I have heard criticism and slander levelled on them even in this country). Although it might not be readily apparent from outside, her sisters do not engage in social work and “taking care of the poor” is not their ultimate mission. Their goal here is to identify the poorest of the society’s poor and show them, by virtue of their work and presence, that they are in fact the preferred object of Divine love.

It is common occurrence in the Western society, which ours certainly is, that people “love poverty but recoil from the poor”.  It is easier to donate a thousand crowns to nuns “for the homeless” and then avoid a person on the street or shy away from him on the tram. The common wisdom is that they are, after all, “the charges of the Sisters of Mercy” and there is the “state to take care of them”. Anyway, “the homeless are masters of their fate” and “living on the street is their choice” (two most common lies).

But the Sisters don’t think so, in concert with Mother Teresa. They can hear Jesus on the cross crying, “I am thirsty!”  (written under every crucifix on the Sisters’ homes)  Symptomatically, Mother Teresa is being canonized at a time when the whole world is in motion. Jesus says in the Gospel text cited above: “I was a stranger and you made me welcome,” which says, in Greek, “I was xenos, a stranger.”  So how come that precisely the Czech “Christian” culture can be so xenophobic?

The Saints—the only authentic artists of life—primarily teach us mortals that if we want to present our European culture as Christian, we should again start discerning the outside world through the eyes of Jesus and make ever new excursions in an endevour to take his Gospel in a serious manner. The Gospel is not a Sharia—the rules for society to go by. It is rather a guidebook on the personal change of a concrete human being, who can make society more humane and the future shape of what it stands for. Angela Merkel is one of such bright examples to me.