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By Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D. 

If there is anyone who personified the essence of the dubious Christian belief that Jesus wants you to be broke, it was Mother Teresa.

For years, she was widely revered as an example of Christian selflessness. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in Calcutta among the poorest of the poor.

The mega-hit movie, “The Secret,” perpetuates this assessment of Mother Teresa. According to the movie, she knew and used the “Law of Attraction,” and did “so much good in the world.”

To challenge this public image of Mother Teresa as the epitome of Christian virtue is something like saying you don’t like dogs, that you are against motherhood, and apple pie, that you hate baseball. It is a taboo, a sacred cow. Who could possibly say anything critical of Mother Teresa?

The most recent issue of Time magazine (September 3, 2007 issue) devotes its cover story to Mother Theresa.
 
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html

The article, “The Secret Life Of Mother Teresa,” concerns a book about letters that Mother Teresa wrote over a period of fifty years. These were letters that she herself wanted destroyed. At this point, I have not read the book. I have only read the excerpts from the article in Time Magazine.

The letters make clear that Mother Teresa was a woman who lived with great conflict at her core about her relationship with God and with Jesus.

I must acknowledge that I always had my doubts about Mother Teresa, and her model of Christian service. Contrary to widespread belief that Mother Teresa was living the exemplary life of a true saint, I saw Mother Teresa as a prime exemplar of misguided devotion in the service of profoundly unbiblical theology.

Although I cannot explain everything I mean by this statement in a single article, the place to begin is with her apparent core belief that she herself was worth nothing.

She wrote that Jesus commanded her to serve the poor with these words:
“You are I know the most incapable person.-weak and sinful but just because you are that-I want to use you for My glory.”

In other words, the only way she could glorify Jesus was to serve the poorest of the poor, and to be poor herself. Yet, despite her willingness to be poor to glorify Jesus, she could not feel that God or Jesus loved her.

Behind Mother Teresa’s noble service was her belief that she herself was nothing. She wrote pained letters to spiritual advisors for more than fifty years. While Mother Teresa shared her anguish with spiritual advisors, she spoke publicly about living with the kind of love and joy that she herself didn’t feel.

Her letters, which are so contrary to her public image, leads to the question:  Was Mother Teresa a hypocrite?  At one level, she was. She knew that her public image didn’t match her inner experience.

Yet, hypocrisy is not the deepest truth about Mother Teresa. At her core, Mother Teresa endured anguish because she never felt loved.

This is not all that surprising. How can someone who is nothing feel that she is loved?  Nothing is nothing. How do you love nothing?  

Mother Teresa devoted her life to Jesus but had no assurance that she mattered as a person. While she spoke of God’s love for others, she herself felt abandoned, alone, unloved, and bereft of God’s love.
  
In this brief post, I can only begin to write about how much this core belief lies at the heart of so much Christian anguish, not just for Mother Teresa, but for others, including myself as a young child.

My own Christian education taught me what Mother Teresa learned. I was nothing. I was worth nothing. I deserved nothing. At the same time, I was obligated to meet the needs of others. This is a burden that is especially heavy on girls and women, who often learn that loving God means surrender of self in the service of others.

As a young female child growing up in a family where being female meant that I was flawed to the core, I learned from church that “God loves all men.”  There was never a moment when I felt included in that love, because I was that most defective of all creatures. I was a female child, and I believed at the deepest core of my being that God the Father had no love for me.

My book in progress, “Going Broke With Jesus,” is my own response to the anguish I read about in the letters of Mother Teresa and the anguish I experienced as a child growing up convinced that I mattered only to God as a servant, not as a person. I know that I am not alone in this core belief. 

I have encountered so many others who doubt their own worth, and much of it goes back to a distorted Christian teaching that the only people who matter are other people.
 
I have spent much of my adult life as a biblical scholar. I learned the biblical languages of Greek and Hebrew. I studied the economic and social conditions of the ancient world. I immersed myself in religious beliefs of the era.  My study demonstrated to me how much of what I learned violated the Bible itself.

After all of my study, I understand how Christian teaching can create anguish in the lives of both believers and non-believers because of what I call “Bad Bible.” Bad Bible” distorts the original intentions behind biblical writings to create human beings who believe that they are not worthy of love. They do not understand how the Bible has been used as a weapon against the weak. 

For me, Mother Teresa is the best example I know of the effect of “Bad Bible” on the weak. The tragedy is that she devoted herself, with utterly selfless devotion, to be an instrument of the kind of love that she herself could not feel. She offered compassion that she herself did not experience. She tried to relieve suffering while she herself endured anguish. In reality, no one can feel truly loved who is taught to think of herself as nothing.

Although Mother Teresa deserves compassion for her suffering, I return again to my central point. Mother Teresa is a prime example of misguided devotion in the service of profoundly unbiblical theology.

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