From the Christian Tradition
Mother Teresa needs
barely any introduction. Born in 1910 of Albanian parents in Skopje in
Macedonia she became a nun in 1928 and went on to found her own order, the
Order of the Missionaries of Charity in 1950. By the time of her death in 1997
some 3,000 sisters had been attracted to join this order which had as its aim
the service of the poor around the world, but famously in Calcutta.
An extract from her writings
Suffering is increasing in the world today. People are hungry for something beautiful, for something greater than people round about can give. There is great hunger for God in the world today. Everywhere there is much suffering, but there is also great hunger for God and love for each other.
There is hunger for ordinary bread, and there is hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness; and this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so much…All the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty, but their spiritual destitution, must be redeemed. And we must share it, for only by being one with them can we redeem them by bringing God into their lives and bringing them to God.
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is remembered on 9th April and the following extract is from Letters and Papers from Prison.
Man is summoned to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world.
He must therefore really live in the godless world, without attempting to gloss over or explain its ungodliness in some religious way or other. He must live a “secular” life, and thereby share in God’s sufferings. He may live a “secular” life (as one who has been freed from false religious obligations and inhibitions). To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself (a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man – not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life. That is metanoia: not in the first place thinking about one’s own needs, problems, sins, and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ, into the messianic event.
I am still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian (cf Jer 45!). How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God’s sufferings through a life of this kind?
selected by J Myers