Love Must Hurt – The Suffering Of Mother Teresa

It is not enough for us to say: ‘I love God,’ but I also have to love my neighbor. St. John says that you are a liar if you say you love God and you don’t love your neighbor. How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live? And so it is very important for us to realize that love, to be true, has to hurt. I must be willing to give whatever it takes not to harm other people and, in fact, to do good to them. This requires that I be willing to give until it hurts. Otherwise, there is not true love in me and I bring injustice, not peace, to those around me.” – Mother Teresa

I am familiar with love and with pain; and when I have felt pain, while loving, the pain was never caused by the act of loving, it was caused by the actions of the ones I loved. To me, it is like a hose – the faucet is turned on, the hose fills up and the water pours out. And so the process is like this, one’s being is filled with love – so filled that it must be released out towards another being, towards God, or even towards nature itself. Still, it is a filling up of the heart and soul with love and so long as that love is being released, the vessel is being constantly filled. Being filled with love leaves no room for pain. I recall a story that Wayne Dyer told about a woman with a disabled daughter, totally bedridden for many years, and for all of those years the mother lovingly stayed by her side, changing her diaper, feeding her, loving her. She did this without it hurting, other than perhaps the empathy that she felt for her daughter. After being moved by the enormous suffering of Mother Teresa I went back over the things that she had said, and I cannot imagine an instance where love hurts.

The act of giving does not hurt either. Again, giving is a gesture from the heart. What does hurt is when we do not give from our hearts but we give because we feel we must. In doing this, we are not giving in essence we are taking from ourselves. Another quote from Mother Teresa which stood out to me was this:

“I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.”

I was never much on placing importance on the death of Jesus, but I was deeply inspired by his life. I don’t believe that the value of a life should be overshadowed by the manner of death. After all, no matter how you cut it, living takes a lot more work than dying, and living an exemplary life, at any time, trumps an exemplary death. I read a bumper sticker the other day that really brought the point home, it said, “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you are car.” In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus’ followers asked him, basically, how to get to Heaven, a question he never seemed to answer to the satisfaction of the questioner.

[6]. His disciples asked and said to him: “Do you want us to fast? How shall we pray, how shall we give alms, what rules concerning eating shall we follow?” Jesus says: “Tell no lie, and whatever you hate, do not do: for all these things are manifest to the face of heaven; nothing hidden will fail to be revealed and nothing disguised will fail before long to be made public!”

When I was young, I was given the impression that I was not really capable of amounting to anything in the world. So, when I became successful in my own business I bought many very expensive things, jewelry, art – things that said I had made it. These were my trophies that I told myself I would never let go of, they proved my ability to succeed. But as my life would have it, my health caused me to leave my business and it reached a point in my life that to keep a roof over the heads of my children, I would have to sell my trophies. They were the only proof that I had left. While I was struggling with this I read a book on the Kabala and it said that we should gather everything that we believe that we can live without in order to give it away, but then, after we have gathered everything that we feel we can manage without we should then double it and give it away. The essence of it was that only the ego attaches to things, only the ego benefits from things, and not the soul. This allowed me to ‘give’ those things for the good of my family without pain, because I knew that in doing so I was purging my ego. My husband, feeling badly for the sacrifice that I had made promised to replace all that I had given, but I did not want them back, giving it opened my heart and freed my ego, I felt gratitude and joy.

Using the parable of the seeds as an example, the things that we do so that God will know our love for Him, are the seeds that fall by the wayside. They are a lie, the heart is not in the action itself. For Mother Teresa to see a leper and feel to herself that she wouldn’t touch him for a thousand pounds, says that in the depth of her heart she does not see Jesus in that leper. The act of curing that leper is an act of doing what you should do, like fasting or going to church, but it is not heartfelt and so the heart derives no joy from the act, in fact, it causes pain because of the feeling of uselessness of the sacrifice. To sacrifice is to make sacred, but only the heart can make sacred.

In Mother Teresa’s youth she was filled with an ecstatic love for Jesus and for the work that he did in his life. She was filled with the spirit of Christianity, but the church robbed her of that. The church robbed her of the loving Jesus, the joyous Jesus, the Jesus free of ego attachments and laws, filled only with the desire to Love, teach and heal his brothers. The church forced her to believe that only through suffering could she find the love of Jesus, only through suffering would she feel the love of Jesus, and worst of all, that only through teaching the value of suffering to others could she save their souls for Jesus. The teachings of the church were in direct contradiction to the yearnings of her heart, and because she believed the church to be the appointed messenger of God, she deafened her heart to its cries, and dedicated herself to the work, but without the spirit in the work, without the love in the work, she was empty and alone, not seeing God and not feeling his Love. She loved Jesus, but she could not feel his love because she was indoctrinated only towards his suffering. There are many Saints who are marked by their “Dark Night Of The Soul”, but each one emerged with a greater sense of mysticism and spirituality and a far lesser sense of righteousness of religious doctrine.

She gave her life to the God that she loved, but she was denied the fullness of His love in her heart, not by God but by the church that taught not the beauty and joy of love, but only the vows of suffering. I feel that it is a crime for her suffering to be used by atheists as proof that there is no God, but I believe equally that it is a crime for the church to use her suffering as an example of the natural path of a true Christian.

A Little Story

They stood at the edge, all of them this time, staring at Him, in awe, in wonder, in pain, and asked, “Why?” This is not the why of a mother, who lost her child, or the why of a grieving lover, or even the why of a dying man before his last breath, but the why of mankind lost, the why of mankind hopeless, and He answered:

When I lay dying on the cross, you watched, in pain, in horror perhaps, but you watched, what did you learn? Perhaps many things to pass down in words, that became no more than words recited in many different tongues, in many different ways not but lived? Did you live those words? No, you did not. And how many chances did you have to act, how many chances did you have to change? Do you remember the greatest sins?

You have ears, but refuse to hear, and you have eyes but refuse to see? You learned nothing. You learned nothing through plagues. You learned nothing through holocausts. You have learned nothing through every suffering body that I have inhabited since the cross, you chose not to see, you have decided that you are not your brother’s keeper, you are selfish, you limit love by how it limits you. I hear not your cries for you heed neither my works, nor my suffering, my love does not touch you, do not ask now why God has forsaken you, ask why you have forsaken God. Should this Day of Judgment come? Is there a need for these admonitions? Look around you, look within your hearts – covered with indifference. Were I to say that I grant you one more chance, what would you then do? I tell you now, that you would forget this moment and go back to your selfish petty lives.

You would continue to praise my name, not for my words, but for my appearance. I am the homeless man on the street that you walk over. I am the AIDS victim that you scorn. I am the innocent mother and child who is murdered because I was there when you dropped a bomb. I am the child who is aborted by a mother only because you refuse to get involved and give help. Instead, you picket; you make noise, but do not inconvenience your lives to save me, to nurture me, to welcome me into your own home. When you turn away from the earth, for greed, you turn away from me, when you turn away from the hungry; you turn away from me. I am not only Love, but I am those who need love. I am not a religion – I am the Word. I am the Life that the Father has breathed into every living creature on the earth. I am the Blood that runs through the veins, and the heart that beats with the sounds of life in all beings. I am neither to be worshipped, nor to be preached. I am to be lived – as I lived and died for you. Why should you be saved? When I said on the cross, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do”, I sought forgiveness for your ignorance – that ignorance, is a luxury, that you no longer have.

There is enough food on this planet for all to be fed. There is enough money on this planet for all to have shelter and abundance. Why is there starvation? Why is there hunger? Surely, it is not because God does not give. It is because no sooner can God provide than the greedy consume. What do you need? How can you measure your worth by the money in the bank, the millions that you may amass? Do you know what you are amassing?

It is not money that you amass, no, it is the bodies of the starving children, for whom that money was intended by God to feed. Perhaps if poverty were as visible to you, as it is to God, it would cause you as much pain as it does Him. Yet, you move to neighborhoods where you do not have to see, and where you do not have to hear. God does not have that luxury. In Gods neighborhood, all suffering is seen, and all cries are heard. How much is enough for you? No one deserves more than another does; no one earns more than another in the eyes of the Lord. There is no extra until not one child goes hungry. Keep your money in your bank, and keep your time for yourself, but do not look to God to cure the ills of your world. The only ill in your world is your greed.

There will not be salvation for you until you stop blaming, stop judging, and begin pointing the finger at yourselves. Search within for the courage to Love at any cost, to accept that yes, you are not only your brothers keeper, but you are your brother, for your brother and you are God.

Save yourselves, save your souls for this day will surely come, and not by God’s doing, but by your own. Remember it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Do as you choose, this is the planet of choice, but take responsibility for what you do. Fool yourself, but do not try to fool the Lord. God created man in His own image, stop trying to recreate God in yours.

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