From Pat dowling : I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.
Blessed Mother Teresa
Posted June 25, 2012 by Tom Hoopes
“If we don’t love the poor, and do all we can to improve their lot,” says
Archbishop Charles Chaput, “we’re going to go to Hell.”
If that sounds like a harsh way to put it, reread the Last Judgment parable
in the Gospel of Matthew, and try to see if Jesus left any wiggle room.
In his first encyclical upon becoming Pope,
Deus Caritas Est (God Is
Love), Pope Benedict summed up Christian duties this way: “The Church’s deepest
nature is expressed in her three-fold responsibility: of proclaiming the word of
God, celebrating the sacraments, and exercising the ministry of charity.”
So far we have recommended only two of those in our suggestions for promoting
Catholic identity. Now for the third: serving others.
God sends saints to show the world how he wants us to behave. His message was
crystal clear when he sent us Mother Teresa: Serve the poor. Here are several
characteristics we should imitate in this great saint.
- Do the hard thing: Love.
We religious people care a lot about the Ten Commandments — if we steal
something, our consciences won’t let us forget it. If we violate the sixth or
ninth commandments, our consciences sting.
That’s good. But Jesus called two commandments the greatest — and those two
are about love: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all
your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” and “You shall love
your neighbor as yourself.”
After all, even self-centered people like the Gospel of Luke’s “Rich Young
Man” can fulfill those “thou shalt nots.” But it takes radical change to love
like God wants. That radical change is absolutely necessary.
Pope Benedict XVI says it over and over again in his encyclical on charity.
“Only if I serve my neighbor can my eyes be opened to what God does for me and
how much he loves me,” he writes. “The saints — consider the example of Blessed
Teresa of Calcutta — constantly renewed their capacity for love of neighbor from
their encounter with the Eucharistic Lord, and conversely this encounter
acquired its realism and depth in their service to others.” Four separate times
in the encyclical e recommends imitating Mother Teresa.
In an age that hates hypocrisy, Mother Teresa had no trace of duplicity. She
simply loved God above all and others as herself, even when it was hard.
- Do Something Today.
Service for us is often an isolated act, which is fine as far as it goes. The
more such isolated acts, the better. But what Mother Teresa modeled was an
attitude of service, which is very different.
After author Malcolm Muggeridge spent time with Mother Terasa he asked her
what the title of his book about her should be. She told him to name it whatever
he liked. He insisted that Mother should suggest a title. After a moment, she
said, “Something Beautiful for God.”
She explained: “Every day on awaking, my desire and my enthusiasm is this:
Today I must do something beautiful for God.”
That's a good attitude to ask God for. Throughout the day there are lots of
opportunities to “do something beautiful for God” -- most of them very small.
Remember Mother Teresa's "Gospel on Five Fingers" (the words of Jesus in
Matthew's Last Judgement, one word per finger): "You did it to me."
- Don’t judge, just serve.
Mother Teresa famously said, “If you judge people, you have no time to love
them.”
It’s a lesson my friends and I learned when we volunteered at Mother Teresa’s
“Gift of Love” home in San Francisco in college. We spent our time there
chatting (and smoking lots of cigarettes) with men who were dying of AIDS. We
were pious Catholic college students — they were homosexual men active in the
gay scene of San Francisco. They had a totally different worldview from ours,
but they loved having someone to talk to.
They were startled by the Missionaries of Charity. “I don’t understand these
women,” said one man. “They clean our vomit, they clean our
[
censored!], and they keep smiling. What is wrong with them?”
But at the time I helped out there, the sisters had never had a patient die
in their house who hadn’t first asked for admittance to the Catholic Church.
Loving service won them over in ways no harsh judgment ever would. My friend
Jack Smith described that experience, that changed us as much as them,
here.
- Be joyful.
Mother Teresa suffered spiritual desolation — the horrifying feeling that God
had abandoned her— for an astonishing 50 years. Yet during that time she was
known as the “Apostle of Joy.”
How did she do it? I think there are two aspects of her life that allowed her
to endure that terrible trial.
First was the nature of her calling. In her private letters published after
her death, she described the very personal experience of Jesus Christ she had
when she was called to serve the poor in Calcutta. After she agreed, she had a
months-long “real, close, intense union with Jesus in 1946 and 1947.” This is
the kind of experience of God’s beauty and love that caused St. Thomas Aquinas
to declare all his life’s work “straw” and stop writing. Mother Teresa’s
months-long experience of intimate union with Christ, renewed throughout her
life in Eucharistic adoration, was enough to sustain her for decades.
Second was the nature of her work. It is a paradox that the more human beings
try to grab happiness for themselves, the more it slips through their grasp. But
the more they freely try to provide happiness for others, the more joy they feel
themselves. Mother Teresa, radically and completely, lived her life entirely for
others, “giving until it hurts,” and that was enough to fill her with joy.
So, how is all of this relevant for the Fortnight for Religious Freedom?
Mother Teresa herself explained how. At the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast,
she urged Americans to live up to our founding principles — by loving.
Not just by heroic love, but by ordinary love. By deciding that in America
“no child will be unwanted, unloved, uncared for, or killed and thrown
away.”
“Then,” she said, “you will really be true to what the founders of this
country stood for.”
TO: The Following Members Of The United States Senate: The Hon. Lamar Alexander, The Hon. Kelly Ayotte, The Hon. Scott Brown, The Hon. Thad Cochran, The Hon. Susan Collins, The Hon. Bob Corker, The Hon. Michael Enzi, The Hon. Lindsey Graham, The Hon. Charles Grassley, The Hon. Kay Bailey Hutchison, The Hon. Johnny Isakson, The Hon. Mike Johanns, The Hon. Mark Kirk, The Hon. Richard Lugar, The Hon. John McCain, The Hon. Mitch McConnell, The Hon. Lisa Murkowski, The Hon. Rob Portman, The Hon. Olympia Snowe and The Hon. Patrick Toomey 
RUSH: Hey, folks, have you seen the economic news today? Have you heard about the unemployment numbers today? (laughing) Gross domestic product, have you heard about any of that? Because I have it here, and it sucks. It’s a disaster. The economy of this country remains a disaster. And we, the American people, have just been deceived in ways that nobody contemplated. And what we now have is the biggest tax increase in the history of the world. What we have been told by the chief justice of the Supreme Court and four liberals on the court: Obamacare is just a massive tax increase. That’s all it is. Obama lied to us about that. The Democrats lied. “It wasn’t a tax. There was no way it was a tax.” Cont. Reading
Justice Roberts argued that the healthcare bill is constitutional if it operates as a tax. President Obama assured us that it “absolutely not a tax increase.” As a Supreme Justice, with a research staff at his disposal, why didn’t Justice Roberts mention this in his decision? It seems to me that the ruling of the court is nullified because they ruled on a non-existent bill, one that was NOT to be a tax increase.
