Church Membership and Mother Theresa
Some friends and I were discussing the requirements of church membership last weekend. The topic centered upon baptismal requirements, which are an important discussion. For me, though, the more difficult issue is the dark night of the soul.
I was raised in a church where believing a set of doctrines, not terribly strict, but none too lax, neither, was the be-all and end-all. The church I currently attend also requires a statement of belief to become a member. I did not join the first church for family reasons. I haven’t joined my current church because I just don’t know what to think about statements of belief.
There is currently media coverage of the publication of Mother Theresa’s diaries. From the New York Times opinion article by Jesuit Priest James Martin, ““In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss,” she wrote in 1959, “of God not wanting me — of God not being God — of God not existing.” According to the book, this inner turmoil, known by only a handful of her closest colleagues, lasted until her death in 1997.”
“Even the most sophisticated believers sometimes believe that the saints enjoyed a stress-free spiritual life — suffering little personal doubt. For many saints this is accurate: St. Francis de Sales, the 17th-century author of “An Introduction to the Devout Life,” said that he never went more than 15 minutes without being aware of God’s presence. Yet the opposite experience is so common it even has a name. St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic, labeled it the “dark night,” the time when a person feels completely abandoned by God, and which can lead even ardent believers to doubt God’s existence.”
“In time, with the aid of the priest who acted as her spiritual director, Mother Teresa concluded that these painful experiences could help her identify not only with the abandonment that Jesus Christ felt during the crucifixion, but also with the abandonment that the poor faced daily. In this way she hoped to enter, in her words, the “dark holes” of the lives of the people with whom she worked. Paradoxically, then, Mother Teresa’s doubt may have contributed to the efficacy of one of the more notable faith-based initiatives of the last century.
“Few of us, even the most devout believers, are willing to leave everything behind to serve the poor. Consequently, Mother Teresa’s work can seem far removed from our daily lives. Yet in its relentless and even obsessive questioning, her life intersects with that of the modern atheist and agnostic. “If I ever become a saint,” she wrote, “I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ ”
“Mother Teresa’s ministry with the poor won her the Nobel Prize and the admiration of a believing world. Her ministry to a doubting modern world may have just begun.”
Is acceptance into the Christian community predicated upon not experiencing dark nights of the soul? If I am currently in a dark night, I can not enter into membership with a clear conscience. If I leave such a dark night, can I promise never to have one again and thus join the church? Must Christian community be tied only to belief, and not to action or desire? I desire to act as Christ did, as Mother Theresa did. I desire to know my creator more fully. But I cannot at this current moment claim that I know God exists beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Bible is without fault the word of such a being, and that I will or will not go to hell for saying such things.
Whew! What a heretic I am!
New Haven
I’m in New Haven now. Erik came to visit me on the weekend and we had a very nice time. The Yale Beinecke Library is the first special collections at a university I’ve been to where the entire building is devoted to special collections. There are no external windows above the basement and first floors, which are surrounded by windows (the basement reading room has one wall of windows open onto a sculpture park that is a floor below ground, but open to the sky). Above the first floor, the building has panels of marble that glow on the inside. The inside has a tower of glass where one can see all the shelves of books that must be accessed from an internal elevator. It is quite a marvel of architecture. The building is also open to researchers from 8:30 to 8:00, so I haven’t been doing much else. I’m staying at a B&B a nice 30 minute walk up the way. I planned too many days here, so I might take the train to NY tomorrow to go to the Schomburg. I’m also thinking of cutting my stay in NY short. The school year is rapidly approaching and I only have a draft syllabus. I also miss home. And Erik’s project ended, so I’m feeling budget conscious.
New Haven has a very sharp distinction between town and gown. I think the town used to be rather crime ridden and is now rather police ridden–in every walk I encounter multiple police cars and other signs of municipal power.
I decided that my discomfort in Washington was culture shock more than anything else. I still have a terrible time breaking out of my comfort zone and I become terribly introverted on trips. It frustrates me–I chose history over physics in part because I wanted to be dealing with the problems of humans rather than objects. Yet, it is still so much easier to deal with those problems at the theoretical level, the level of books and words, than at the level of real people.
I thought even more about this when I read the following quote from Langston Hughes’ autobiography, The Big Sea. In this quote, he is in Venice for the first time, after working his way to Europe on a steam ship and staying in Paris for the winter as a busy boy:
“But before the week was up, I got a little tired of palaces and churches and famous paintings and English tourists. And I began to wonder if there were no back alleys in Venice and no poor people and no sums and nothing that looked like the districts down by the markets on Woodland Avenue in Cleveland, where the American Italians lived. So I went off by myself a couple of times and wandered around in sections not stressed in the guide books. And I found that there were plenty of poor people in Venice and plenty of back alleys off canals too dirty to be picturesque” (154).
That is the temperament I needed to truly explore the “Secret City” of Washington DC. I started to wander a bit more my last week, but I never successfully made the transition. And I’m still deeply attached to the “picturesque” of art and architecture.
I did see “Talk to Me” while I was there. It is set in 1960s black Washington and is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. When I went to see Harry Potter at the same theater, it was pretty much a white audience. When I went to see “Talk to Me” it was mostly a black audience. The guy next to me, a retired teacher who had long lived in Washington, and I had a nice chat. I thought the movie showed the development of two men as they matured, and their friendship developed, beautifully. It was also amazing to see the movie there, when so many people in the theatre remembered the events portrayed, including the riots after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
Perhaps it is unclear why my discomfort living at Howard is so distressing to me. In the words of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, in a letter I just read:
“If this enterprise [Encyclopedia of the Negro] is to be dominated by men like Thomas Jesse Jones and Thomas Jackson Woofter, however, I desire to register against it a militant protest. These men have already demonstrated their narrowness and bias in works which they have produced. They do not live among Negroes, they do not work in their institutions, and they never approach them except in the case of an investigation. Consequently they have no conception of the thought, feeling, or aspiration of Negroes and, therefore, cannot properly evaluate their achievements or interpret their philosophy of life.
“Instead of encouraging men of this type to write further on the Negro we who have some regard for the future of the race should do all we can to prevent them from producing any more treatises in this field. If these men have twenty-five or fifty hundred thousand dollars or can raise such an amount, let them go off somewhere with it and study the Eskimos, investigate the evils of the boll-weevil or devise some means for the prevention of pellagra. By all mens, [sic] however, deliver the Negroes from their hands.”
And from a different letter:
“What do you suppose the Italians of this country would say to the Jews if they proposed to write an Encyclopedia of this element and came to them to have their scholars and leaders endorse the plan to carry out such a project? They would tell them the same thing that the Negroes should say today tot eh Phelps Stokes Fund or to any other such organization with such a proposal, namely, that we should be glad to have any person sufficiently interested in our people to provide funds for a scientific appraisal of its achievements but by no means would we tolerate their evaluation by persons from without who do not appreciate the feeling, though, and aspirations of the Negro and, therefore, cannot think black.”
My dissertation does feel impossible at the moment.
