I'm no Mother Teresa

This is a long one, but I am a horrible editor. Skip to the end if you are too busy today.

If you know me you can count on this one thing: I believe you are better than you really are and I'll do a hell of a lot to make sure you believe I am better than I truly am too.  I can't help it. Probably I started shining you up from the moment we met.  I have beautiful friends who make it look natural, but in reality they are probably anxiously plucking and tweezing and buffing in secret til all hours of the night. If you don't believe how invested we girls are in passing ourselves off as better versions of ourselves, check out the revenue that SPANX is bringing in yearly.

Believe me, I've learned many times over the dangers of allowing my imaginative you to have a more prominent position in my life than the actual you.  You can bet that lots of relationships ended with me feeling like this:

So I planned to talk about the value of Living in Reality for a few posts and when I say I'm making you up to be so much better than you are, I'm not saying anything bad about YOU. I'm asking that you see how this filter I have keeps me from actually, really seeing the real wonderful or maybe not at all wonderful YOU. And I'm asking you to look at me without any filters or lenses also. Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about how we sometimes really prefer not living in reality in regard to the people we love and the people we don't even know that we admire and whether that's a good thing or not and to tell you the truth, I'm pretty sure it's not.

Here's something that I've been thinking about that you (being awesome in my head) probably already knew.  Mother Teresa heard Jesus (literally) when she was 38 years old and received instruction from him to leave the Sisters of Loreto in Calcutta after her already 20 years there and begin the work that we are all familiar with among the "poorest of the poor."  She described this instruction and God's closeness in all its intensity in her letters (the word she used was "violent") and she immediately set out gathering support for her mission to comfort the least of these. After her death in 1997, her letters were revealed, letters that she had instructed her friend and confidant to burn (not sure why he didn't honor that request).  These letters showed a very different, very desolate Teresa who had never heard the voice of God again during her remaining 50 years of work.  She wrote, "Jesus has a very special love for you. But as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see- listen and do not hear - the tongue moves (in prayer) but does not speak."  And later, "What do I labor for? If there be no God - there can be no soul - if there be no soul, then Jesus - You are also not true."  She described her condition as "darkness" and "torture" and this estrangement lasted for the rest of her life. That she wrote, "Please pray for me - for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead" isn't the worst part of it to me.  That she pleaded with her advisor to hear her anguish and pray for her relief isn't the worst part either - really, I admire that she could be honest with someone about it. What's the saddest part is that she recognized the great inconsistency in her public persona and her private one and that she felt fraudulent because of it.  Here's how she described this discrepancy to her confidant: "The smile is a mask or a cloak that covers everything.  I spoke as if my heart was in love with God. If you were there, you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'" 

  

Mother Teresa hid her agony, her isolation from God for almost 50 years. Sleeping, eating, helping even the LEPERS in India - having to use GOD KNOWS WHAT to go to the bathroom (I am just bathroom sensitive), and stumbling to her bed every night exhausted, spent from using her own hands to offer kindness to people suffering in ways you and I cannot imagine, dumbfounded probably from an up-close view of the absolute worst that humans can do to one another, raising ridiculous amounts of money and awareness to the least of these, Mother Teresa closed her eyes each night feeling disconnected from God and abandoned.  Not to get into a debate about it, but some folks say that her crisis of faith actually makes her MORE saintly (she did the work God asked her to do in spite of his subsequent silence) while others say it disqualifies her from sainthood. I'm interested in that, but MORE interested in discussing this desire, even among the best of folks to hide our realities from one another.  

Mother Teresa had pretty good reasons to keep these inconsistencies between public and private quiet. In her correspondence, it sounds as if she feared those revelations might cause another's crisis of faith and undermine the work God had asked of her - and regardless of where she stood in her faith, it was GOOD work to do.  But here's my point and it's the thing you probably already know:  I'm no Mother Teresa. My reasons (and yours) for promoting our own public personas aren't anywhere near as noble. I do it so I am not embarrassed, not exposed as imperfect I think, and because we humans are just pretty prideful.  I'm not trying to secure millions of dollars in relief money, I'm just trying no make sure nobody knows that sometimes we shout at each other on the way to church on Sundays and that we've not always been as happy as we are now.  I'd rather you not know how often I forget to shave one leg and that I have all manner of social anxieties and that there's never, ever going to be a session of trying on jeans or bathing suits that doesn't end in cursing and self loathing. The weird part is, when people have shown me their imperfections, I've always found that I like them MORE. 

Imagine what relief it must have been for Mother Teresa to write her agonies to her friend, to show just one person her despair.  You are not Mother Teresa, but I understand if you feel the weight of exposure and I'm telling you, in writing, that I think I'd like you even better if you trusted me a little with your reality.  Talk soon. I'm off to shave BOTH legs now.