Mother Teresa: Truth, Beauty, and Goodness
How do you celebrate truth, beauty, and goodness?
Our Guest Blogger today is: Kyle Lechtenberg, Director of Music and Liturgy at OLIH.
My recent meeting with my spiritual director brought up my longing for a little more order and rhythm (along with my need to look into my life for the rhythms and orders that are present). As a husband and father to a toddler (who prefers entropy to order!), the rhythm and order of our lives doesn’t right now look like a fixed monastic prayer schedule but more like, “after dinner” or “after Sage goes to bed” or “before work.”
My director encouraged me to try to slow down some of the regular and ordinary tasks like cleaning the kitchen or putting toys away at the end of the day and allow God into those moments of stewardship of our home. Instead of “after,” or “before,” perhaps the words “while” or “during” can be helpful at this time in my life, inviting me to open the gifts of each moment as a response to St. Paul’s command to pray without ceasing.
Right after we hear about Mother Teresa’s consummate life of service and care for those whom the world had expelled and cast aside, we often hear about the decades of deep struggle to know and believe God’s presence revealed in her personal journals. I was surprised that Matthew Kelly made no hint of her great desolation in this reflection, a desolation which tested her deeply and caused her great and private anguish.
Mother Teresa persisted in faith through her reliance on spiritual practices and rhythms like journaling, prayer, and the sacraments. But she also persisted in each moment of her life as she doubted God and shared God’s healing presence to those suffering terrible diseases or painful deaths. She did have to remind herself and seek the assistance of others each day in order to persist in this work and in her quest for faith in God. Her routines weren’t magic, she wasn’t free from temptation or error, and her life of service wasn’t an easy one to maintain or to stay committed to. But she persisted, moment by moment, across at least five decades. This is a treasure, a teaching, and an invitation: how can we persist in opening up the gifts of each moment and each day, thereby praying without ceasing, especially when experiencing difficulty, doubt, or despair? How has God sustained us even though we didn’t recognize the sustenance at the time? St. Teresa of Kolkata, pray for us!