Lenten Reading

I'm going back through the collection of Mother Teresa's writings and commentary on them in Come Be My Light this year. The following quotations have caught my eye, for conviction and for encouragement.

Another nun, in the convent where Mother Teresa first served (as a teacher, among other duties) shortly after taking her final vows, wrote of her: "I notice that every day she tries to please Jesus in everything. She is very busy but she does not spare herself. [. . .] Admittedly, her deeds are entirely simple, but the perfection with which she does them, is just what Jesus asks of us."

Mother Teresa tells the sisters under her care: "Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love. . . . The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love."

On her willingness to wait for the Calcutta mission to come into being despite her longing to start the work right away: "[B]ecause she had consecrated her life to God through a vow of obedience, she could proceed only with the approval of her superiors. To her their blessing was not a mere formality but a protection and assurance that God's hand was in her undertaking. Only their permission would give her the certainty that this call was indeed God's will and not some delusion."

On her own abilities for the work she was called to: "I feel sometimes afraid, for I have nothing, no brains, no learning, no qualities required for such a work, and yet I tell Him that my heart is free from everything, and so it belongs to Him, and Him alone. He can use me just as it will please Him best. To please Him only is the joy I seek."

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Sabbatical update: I am a much slower writer than I realized! Two essays ready to be set aside for awhile, and an interest in one for publication (have not received a deadline yet). Thanks to all for your encouragement and prayers.

Choosing His Light

I’ve been dragging myself about all the summer thus far, weary and wearier, longing for sleep (except even good sleep doesn’t help), just wanting to feel half-way normal and genuinely rested. I spend a lot of time tired even at my best; I have never had much energy, even when I was young. But this has been extraordinarily severe.

So I took stock the other day and decided I should be grateful that I’m on my feet at all. (My partial stock-taking list is below if you’re really interested. I’m selfish enough to post it, but you needn’t be so masochistic as to pay it any heed.)

I know that everyone is busy, and to many I’m sure my list would look small enough and I seem quite sluggish to find it too much. But combine it all with chronic pain and difficulty sleeping (and exhausted, burning eyes), and for me and the level of energy I am endowed with . . . . well, it is too much and I begin to feel hopelessly overwhelmed.

I’ve just finished Paul Mariani’s biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poor man was responsible for grading thousands of exams every year in classical languages for university entrance, on top of his teaching. He was always exhausted; of course, he may have been ill with Crohn’s disease, unknown in his day – that, combined with typhoid, probably caused his death at 44. But what struck me in the biography (so much of which makes remarkable use of Hopkins’ own words) was this sense of never-ending exhaustion. A holiday – a genuine holiday of no work at his schoolmaster’s tasks – would revive him remarkably, but within a week or two of return to exams and classes he would be worn down again.

And this weariness and overwhelming work kept him from the writing he loved; he seems to have had far more unfinished projects and ideas for projects in his 44 years than the hundreds that languish in my own drawers and the corners of my mind with over a decade more to concoct them. Of course, he was a genius, and his genius seemed to be slowly wasted away in grading schoolboys’ Latin translations.

He complained of this at times to dear friends. But they and all others who knew him spoke of him invariably as a man who loved life, who laughed, who gave generously and kindly of his time and his mind, who lifted the spirits of those around him. His poetry, of course, explains why: even in the very darkest of the Terrible Sonnets, he cannot waver in his knowledge of God’s love for him; he cannot waver from his obedience no matter how onerous and purposeless it might seem. And he keeps coming back, in his yearly meditations and in his sermons and in his poetry, to this: it is not I who name myself and choose my work, it is God.

Some say of Hopkins – certainly his friend Bridges did, and I’ve read contemporary critics who agree – that he was indeed wasted by the Jesuits, his genius destroyed in make-work, his life itself cut short by their not understanding who and what he was. How much more he could have given us, they say, had he lived in honored ease and into old age. Perhaps. But the poems that mean the most to us were wrought of great weariness of body and soul, out of despair that arose directly from his circumstances. Would some larger body of work created in an easier life carry as much value for us today, would he speak to us as he does if he had never known despair and weariness and yet clung to his Lord in faith and hope?

Well, he is my hero, all the more so now that I know yet more of his life. I pray to struggle on with the burning eyes and the weariness and the chronic pain and, yes, the all-too-often despair, to struggle on, as Mother Teresa prayed, with “a hearty Yes to God and a big smile for all.” If life seems hard to me, how much harder for such as these and for so many, many others – and surely I can find the strength in His strength for the simple yes and the heartfelt smile in the midst of my own such lesser trials. I fall so short: I am part of a broken humanity in a broken world and I demand to name myself. Yet His name for me, the story He has written for me, is enough, if I find the faith to live that truth and not merely know it. "Come be My light," Mother Teresa heard Jesus call to her; I long to desire that call, to desire to be His reflected light in the darkness of this world, no matter what of light or dark may be mine.

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(for those who might care: what taking stock reminded me of)

* I haven’t had a break from work since last August: Fall Break and Christmas break I spent developing the online course of the second semester of freshman composition; Spring Break I spent developing the online course of Intro to Lit.

* I taught the online comp course in the spring, as an overload above my four regular courses – the first time I’d ever taught online. The learning curve and the time investment in discussions and feedback was far more time- and energy-intensive than just a normal overload, even though the class number was small. And I was involved in intense committee work and department changes which took both time and emotional energy. (Same committee work in the fall; I don’t remember much else from that semester except that it was harried, very harried.)

* Spring semester I became very ill from an infected tooth; lost two weeks of teaching that had to be made up for and didn’t feel physically recovered for a month or more.

* My daddy went into hospice care in March. I reworked all my classes to complete them before finals week so we could leave as early as possible to visit with him.

* We drove to Texas and back, gone for only a little over a week – exhausting physically and emotionally. I worked every day during that time on finishing up the development of the Intro to Lit, and got home the day before the course actually began. I’ve been working on it hours a day every day since, with two more weeks to go.

* I’m also reading new texts for preparation of one completely new course, one nearly completely new course, and one old course with almost completely new books, all of which spin in the mind constantly. I’ve created the tentative schedule for one of these (the two sections of our new freshman comp I’ll be teaching in my 5-course load). I’ve exchanged innumerable emails over departmental business because of the changes made last spring.

* I ought to be hemming our curtains and doing some legal research and editing a colleague’s dissertation. Because I’m not, these weigh on the mind and create the weariness of guilt. And I’m obligated to revise the online comp course for the fall semester and I wonder if I will get so much as one full week of not working before the new round – 5 classes! – begins again in August. After all, July is almost here.

Pleasing People; Pleasing God

The boy has had a wonderful attitude about his schoolwork lately. We started his semester formally last week, and he’s worked hard and been quite cheerful. The other day he asked me, “Have I had a better attitude this year?” I’d complimented him on it several times, but he can always use more affirmation and I’m glad to reassure him. I want him to know that I’m pleased with him.

A couple of weeks ago he told me about a Sunday School occurrence. They had visitors in class and the teacher asked him to bring them up to date on the discussion they’d been having. He said his classmates laughed at the request, apparently thinking he wouldn’t be able to do it. I was glad to hear that he was clearly proud that he proved them wrong, and proud to have pleased his teacher.

This morning I was praying for him, asking the Lord to remind him to retain that cheerful attitude and the desire to please his authorities. And a little voice said accusingly, “So, you want him to be a people-pleaser?”

It’s a question to consider. We’re told to do our work to the Lord, not as to men, to be God-pleasers, not man-pleasers. But . . .

How do we learn to please the Lord? He places authorities in our lives, mainly our parents and then certain teachers and other adults. We are expected to obey these authorities with a good will, and often (sadly, not always, because it’s a broken world) we will receive the reward of their pleasure.

I think this reward is intended to be our taste of divine pleasure, to prepare us for understanding the Lord’s pleasure in our cheerful obedience when the pleasure of man is nowhere to be found, when obedience to Him brings silence, mockery, or persecution. The child who does not experience the pleasure of adults in his attempts to please them will surely, sad to say, struggle more to understand this, though through God’s grace all things are possible.

I have a friend who grew up being told she couldn’t experience problems because problems meant she wasn’t right with the Lord; thus, the fear of those around her – the fear of losing God’s pleasure, even His grace for salvation – precluded any real rest in Him, any picture of His pleasure in her. She now walks with Him in a lovely faithfulness which awes me. But perhaps she could have been spared at least a few of the extraordinary struggles to trust that she’s experienced if she’d been allowed the freedom to be fallen along with true simple pleasure in her efforts to “get it right,” however successful or flawed those efforts might have been on any given day.

Oh, I know the Lord is sovereign, and even when we sin He is still in control (and it’s a good thing, too). He has used my friend in ways that would otherwise have been impossible because of those very struggles she has endured. Still, knowing that He can bring good from even our sin doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to get it right in the first place.

May we have the grace each day to let our pleasure in our son lead him to desire obedience, even when we must correct him. And may his delight in our pleasure help him to understand and experience God’s pleasure as he learns to walk with and for Him instead of us.