What Mother Teresa said

At Easter time, I am reminded of the words of Mother Teresa. She had a lot to say about living in the modern world, about loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted. At mass this past Sunday, the priest spoke about the very same things, and talked about the heavy crosses that many people in our society live with each day—depression, loneliness, unemployment, a demoralizing job, family problems--the list goes on. The priest meant that these conditions are our chance to share in the cross of Christ, and while that idea is very unappealing—to have a cross on our shoulders weighing us down that may ultimately lead to our demise--the fact remains that this is the human condition from time to time. I find some reassurance in knowing that my faith is founded on the suffering and death of a man who cared for others. His life was remarkable; the circumstances surrounding his death were not. He was treated as a common criminal and left to die, and before he died, he struggled with not wanting to fulfill his mission here on earth. How many times have we had that feeling ourselves? How many times have we wanted to run away from our problems, from unhappiness, from depression, from heavy responsibilities, from unpleasant situations, from unpleasant people? How many times has it been hard to smile after being pushed down one more time, after being trampled on one more time? How difficult it is to smile in the face of injustice, abuse, and ridicule. And yet there are people who do this every day. Get up and keep on going. Smile kindly and accept what others would not accept. Are these people crazy? Do they have something to teach us? Even Mother Teresa knew that most of us could never live her life. She was adamant about starting at home, that we had to learn to love the ones we live with before we could go out into society to do the same. Her wisdom is timeless and precious and too important not to share again. I read her books when I was younger, and here I am many years later, and her words make even more sense to me now.

·         Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.

·         Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.

·         Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.

·         Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.

·         I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor?

·         If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

·         If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.

·         If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.

·         Intense love does not measure, it just gives.

·         Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.

·         Peace begins with a smile.

·         We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.

·         Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.

·         Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.

·         Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.

·         Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do... but how much love we put in that action.

·         Love begins by taking care of the closest ones - the ones at home.

·         We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

·         Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

·         The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

·         The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.

·         There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in - that we do it to God, to Christ, and that's why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

·         Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.

·         There must be a reason why some people can afford to live well. They must have worked for it. I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things that we could use.

·         We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.

·         Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.

·         We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.

Nowhere to run to

And so it happened again, a major earthquake that generated a devastating tsunami—this time off the coast of northeast Japan. The horrific images of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that rolled in over Thailand and Indonesia are still vivid in my memory. This quake in Japan was a major one—a magnitude of 8.9 on the Richter scale is being reported, and that is scary enough. Just as disturbing are the video footages of the tsunami sweeping across coastal farmland carrying boats, cars and burning houses in its wake. Other videos show submerged cars and boats being pushed toward a highway overpass, and it is both terrifying and amazing to see how boat masts are just crushed like plastic toys. I watch such scenes and cannot help but think of the Mayan prophecy that says that the world will end in 2012 (more precisely, the Mayan calendar ends on the Gregorian calendar date of December 21, 2012 which has led to intense speculation about what this means for the planet). And if you have seen the film 2012 (not very good except for the special effects for earthquake scenes and subsequent destruction) you will understand that there really is nowhere to run when these types of things happen, because there is usually very little warning. I am glad that we do not live in a geographical area that is prone to earthquakes. My thoughts go to the Japanese people—I hope and pray that there will not be a huge loss of life as there was in Indonesia.

The power and fury of nature and of water never cease to amaze me. I just wrote about the Akerselva river and how its fish and insect life died in the space of one night due to a chemical spill. But the river itself keeps running down to the sea and hopefully always will. Back in November 2000, unusually large amounts of rainfall in Oslo resulted in extremely high water levels in the Akerselva that threatened to flood surrounding areas. We live about a five-minutes’ walk from the river, at a point where there are small waterfalls. When we opened our apartment windows facing toward the river, we could hear the river as it roared past. We joined many others who stood watching from a safe distance as this ordinarily peaceful river roared mightily past us. The spray from these falls was so intense as to take your breath away. I have never seen so many people out late in the evening, watching the river, photographing and filming its wildness. We are drawn to that which scares us. We watch even though we don’t want to. Even in the current video footage from Japan, there are motorists on the highway overpass who got out of their cars to see what was going on, in spite of the huge danger. I would like to think that I would have floored my car and sped off. But who knows, perhaps it was smartest to stay on the overpass bridge. It seemed to be made of solid cement and to be able to withstand the onslaught of the ocean water, and it was not submerged, at least not at the time point that the video footage was shot. I hope so anyway. The tanker truck that stopped on the bridge remained there. Perhaps the driver understood that there was nowhere to go. That must be the scariest thought of all—that there is nowhere to go, nowhere to run to. The digital age, with the ability to send live footage in the space of a few seconds via iPhones and cell phones generally has brought with it the possibility of literally stepping into another person’s shoes, for better or for worse. We know how they must feel. We see how horrific it is and know what they face. Nowhere to run to—a sobering thought that pulls us out of ourselves for some minutes and makes us see what is happening elsewhere. We are forced to face our mortality. And it is not war but nature that does this to us. 

Learning empathy

I was thinking the other day about some of the children’s stories that helped shape my view of the world and my outlook on helping others and having empathy for others. Empathy (understanding, sympathy, compassion) is in rather short supply in the world today. I can’t help but think that if there was more empathy there would be less hatred and fewer problems, because if you can step into another person’s shoes and see how he or she lives life with all of the attendant problems, then you have opened your mind and heart to that person and it won’t be possible to ignore his or her sufferings. Empathy means putting yourself in someone else’s place. It’s not easy because it may mean suffering along with another person, shedding tears with them, grieving with them, and just being there for them without having your own agenda. The latter is hard at times because we all have our own agendas and we would like them to come first, especially if we have often put our own wishes and goals on the back burner. But sometimes the needs of others must come first.

The Lame Squirrel's Thanksgiving by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey is one of those children’s books that had a huge emotional impact on me as a child and that I remember all these years later. It tells the story of a little squirrel that got his foot caught in a trap which led to him limping about and being unable to gather nuts for the winter quickly enough compared to the other squirrels. So when autumn arrives he doesn’t have enough food saved for the winter. Thanksgiving comes and he starts to cry because he is alone and hungry. Mrs. Striped Chipmunk thinks about the little squirrel and wonders how he is doing. She puts together a basket of food for him and goes to visit him with her gift. As she is walking to his house, she meets the other animals in the neighborhood—the woodchuck, the rabbit, two field mice--who ask her what she is doing. When she tells them they all contribute some food item to the basket, so that it becomes so heavy that she needs help to carry it. The field mice step up to the plate to help her carry it. The little squirrel is overjoyed and grateful as Mrs. Striped Chipmunk sets the table for his dinner and the field mice help him to the table so he can eat. There is enough food in the basket to last him the whole winter. This little story is all about empathy—thinking about the plight of others, stepping in to help, finding help along the way from others who also want to help, and making someone happy. It may be a sentimental story that tugs at your heartstrings, but perhaps we need more of these kinds of stories in the world, as adults and as children. Parents and teachers didn’t need to pester us about the importance of empathy when this type of story presented the value of empathy so simply and so beautifully. I also remember my mother telling us about her own mother and some of the women in her mother’s neighborhood in Brooklyn—that they would feed the vagabonds who knocked on their doors asking for food. There was apparently some kind of innate civility and respect on both sides. The vagabonds did not steal from these women and the women did not appear to be afraid of them. It is such a different world today—one would almost never think of doing this out of fear of being robbed. The codes of conduct have changed. Yet there are still people who help the poor and the hungry in the ways that they can, apart from the official charitable organizations that are set up to do this type of work. The churches I attended in New York and New Jersey sponsored soup lines and food baskets and gift trees at Christmas-time—I remember all those attempts at helping others. They made an impression too and it felt good to be a part of them.

There are other children’s stories that made an impression on me as well. One of them—In the Great Walled Country by Raymond MacDonald Alden--had to do with a far-off land of children where there was a forest of Christmas trees that were covered with gifts at Christmas time, and the children could go to the forest and seek gifts for others from the trees. It was never the case that they picked gifts just for themselves. But one year a ‘well-meaning’ stranger to the kingdom convinces the king to issue a proclamation stating that each person could pick his or her own gift in an attempt to make the whole process more effective. There was a little boy named Inge who did not like this new arrangement since his sister was crippled and could not go into the forest to get her own presents. So he ignores the proclamation and picks gifts for his sister, filling his bag full with presents. As he leaves the forest he meets many other children who wonder where he got all the gifts, because when they entered the forest they didn’t ‘see’ any gifts on the trees. He tells them that he had no problems finding gifts, and they stand there, puzzled and unhappy. They go to visit Grandfather Christmas to ask why he left no gifts on the trees this year. He answers them “The presents were there, but they were never intended for children who were looking only for themselves”. The moral of this story is crystal clear. A steady diet of such stories and you end up learning that it is a good thing to think of others, to put others first. And you learn empathy—putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. And that’s a good thing.