Dear Sisters, while the title of this post may seem grim or intimidating, I promise you there will be just as much light as there is dark in this musing on 2014’s The Letters, a film that covers the beginnings of St. Mother Teresa’s work and road to beatification. Now this choice may seem odd to find at an infertility ministry, but I hope you will walk away from this post with a different view of not only Mother Teresa but infertility as well. I admit when I started watching it, I was wondering what, if anything, would stand out to me, and I certainly was not expecting to ponder on infertility as much as I did. But sitting there, reflecting quietly after watching a movie about a nun who wanted nothing more than to simply serve, I couldn’t help but feel hopeful in my own infertility journey that can so easily be riddled with despair. So let’s grab some tea and walk with St. Mother Teresa in The Letters.
Feeling abandoned
The movie is framed within the narrative of Fr. Praggh who, charged with investigating Mother Teresa’s cause for canonization in 2003, receives a box of Mother Teresa’s letters while talking with Fr. van Exem, who knew Mother Teresa over decades. From the start, Fr. van Exem makes sure that the fellow priest knew what content the letters would have: while Mother Teresa was careful not to let it show to her fellow Sisters or those they were helping, she struggled deeply with despair, particularly abandonment by God. At one point, she writes that she had such a deep longing for God that was “painful, a suffering continual, and yet not wanted by God, repulsed, empty, no faith, no love no zeal.” In other words: torturous. How often have we felt that way with God? Whether with infertility, some other health crisis, work, family, it can truly seem like God does not care, when God assures us that He is Love. It makes sense that for someone who worked with the suffering and dying day in and day out, Mother Teresa also felt such despair. We are not alone in our darkness, and it does not make us weak or lesser than any other person.
The need to feel seen
Most of the movie covers the 50 years of Mother Teresa’s work with the poor, starting in 1946 with her time in a Loreto convent where she taught young Indian women. At this point, Mother Teresa was a member of the cloistered order the Sisters of Loreto and stayed within the convent walls with her fellow nuns. When Shubashani expresses worries about her family being unsafe due to the conflict as India was fighting to get freedom from Great Britain, Mother Teresa says phrases like “trust in God,” or “try not to worry.” It isn’t until she looks outside and sees a starving man staring right back at her do we see this naive attitude change. Moved, she goes outside and gives bread to him and his family. She is only moved when she dares to go out and sit with those who are otherwise unacknowledged. Sound familiar? Sometimes in the midst of my own infertility journey, I just want to be seen and heard as a whole person, not just a broken body. How aware were any of us with our language regarding (in)fertility before experiencing our own diagnosis or the diagnosis of someone close to us? Where can we both be seen and sit with people where they need help? When is “try not to worry” just not what needs to be said? Just like Mother Teresa, we can learn to see those who need healing, whether emotionally or physically. Maybe it's bringing dinner to a friend or checking in after a relative has a medical appointment, or volunteering at a local food kitchen or after school program. Whatever your path, you too can sit with those who otherwise are feeling either a physical or emotional poverty.
Answering the call
From that moment of breaking the rules to leave the convent, the rest of the movie is about Mother Teresa’s push to realize God’s true calling for her: to serve the poor. After being granted permission to leave the cloister, she spends the next four years among the poorest of the poor of Calcutta. The nun helps doctors tend to patients and gives out what food she can, but to me the most telling work was with children. By showing them nothing but love and patience, she teaches them how to read and you can see the genuine joy in both the children’s and Mother Teresa’s eyes. It is through serving the children that she is also able to win the parents to her side. Despite opposition from both the nuns and locals, her determination to follow God’s will eventually wins: she gets to have a larger space to help tend the poor and her followers begin to grow, including some of her former students. By 1950, her dream of her own order was realized and the Missionaries of Charity was formed.
The obstacles along the way
While we may not be called to serve as a missionary or enter religious life, we are all called to fulfill God’s plan for us. The pain, as Mother Teresa experienced, is the obstacles along the way. Maybe there’s no medical cure, maybe it’s the weeks or months of recovery after surgeries. Or maybe it’s bearing the “what are your plans for kids?” questions or being involved in planning a friend's baby shower. When month after month, doctor’s visit after doctor’s visit, you feel like God and the world is refusing you the very thing you most desire. Mother Teresa understood that all too well. Let her sit with you when you are frustrated with all the roadblocks along your path.
Changed, inside and out
One visual aspect I want to point out is the change in Mother Teresa’s wardrobe throughout the movie. She is unrecognizable to us at first in the black and white habit of the Sisters of Loreto, living out a vocation she is not fully called to. When she spent four years building up her mission, her habit became a more familiar looking white sari with a blue stripe as she served the poor, which was slightly altered to have additional blue stripes when the Missionaries of Charity were formed. As her soul was altered through listening to God’s call, so were her day-to-day garments that we now identify so easily with her and the other Missionaries of Charity.
The most terrible poverty is loneliness
A last note: I was able to attend the canonization mass of Mother Teresa. I lined up the night before in order to get a decent seat, and I am so glad I did because St. Peter’s Square was packed hours before the Mass started, filled with people who were touched by the loving service of this saint, drawn to her, not despite her times of deep sorrow but because of them. I mentioned at the beginning that Mother Teresa kept all her despair and loneliness to herself, never letting her fellow nuns or those she was serving see her pain. It seems fitting for someone who wrote, “the most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved” to devote her life to making sure no one died alone on the streets. But sisters, Fr. van Exem makes the remark that he was sure that there would be “no stronger testimony to her holiness, or her worthiness of sainthood” than those exact letters that detailed her despair. You are never alone in your grief sister, and that is what we at The Fruitful Hollow want you to know more than anything. Know that I am always praying for you, and that you do not carry this burden alone.
Let us end on a favorite prayer of St. Mother Teresa:
Dear Jesus, help me to spread Thy fragrance everywhere I go. Flood my soul with Thy spirit and love. Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly that all my life may only be a radiance of Thine. Shine through me and be so in me that every soul I come in contact with may feel Thy presence in my soul. Let them look up and see no longer me but only Jesus. Stay with me and then I shall begin to shine as you shine, so to shine as to be a light to others. Amen.
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