在特蕾莎墓前
南方周末 2006-08-03 15:45:36
□杜欣欣
加尔各答的5月不宜出行!虽然不像拉贾斯坦的气温高达48摄氏度,但是因为潮湿,此地似乎更热。在一个不宜出行的下午,碧迪莎、普拉塔和我走在公园大道上。两个姑娘都是加尔各答大学人权专业的研究生,为了给我省钱,也为了尽地主之谊,一路上,她们一定要和我一起搭公车,还代我买车票。我对她们说,时间比钱更重要,请让我来付车资。在我的坚持下,我们终于搭了一段出租车。
下车拐进一条僻静的小巷,巷口没有英文路牌。走了几步就见三扇敞开的窗户,挂着蓝白格布的窗帘。白粉墙上刻着“仁爱传教修女会”(Missionaries of Charity)。从刻字牌,我基本断定特蕾莎(Mother Teresa)的修女会就在此巷中。走到一个门口,门牌是54A。然而,大门紧闭。从门上的开放时间表来看,还要等半个小时,访客才能进入。我冒失地去敲门,应门的是一位修女,白衣白巾光脚。
这是一座非常普通的两层楼房,朝内的走廊圈起一方院子。一楼主厅的门口放了一座基督雕像。楼道拐弯处,贴着特蕾莎修女和教皇保罗二世的合影。二楼走廊上,一座黑色的特蕾莎雕像站在白色大理石上。她脸上的皱纹,似乎并非雕刀刻出,也非时间之印,而是他人的苦难刻在心上的痕迹。她光着脚,右手伸出,掌心朝下,左手轻挽袍袖,似乎在触摸一个孩子的头顶,又似乎准备为临终者洗浴。
在修女的引领下,我们走进二楼的一间房子。屋子很静很空,窗外的鸟语好像来自另一个世界。屋子很大很暗,光从窗口进来,流泻在黑色的地面上。一座白色大理石的墓静静地躺在微光里。
我们轻轻地跟在修女身后,惟恐惊扰安息者。修女跪下来,她吻着白色的石头,吻了很久。我也弯下腰,双手合十,将额头放在冰凉墓石上。
一支红烛,一圈心形的花,一方白石碑:
彼此互爱犹如我爱你(约翰福音15∶12)
特蕾莎修女
1910年8月26日-1997年5月9日
我们深深热爱着的仁爱传教修女会的创立者
1929年1月,特蕾莎来到加尔各答。她出身于阿尔巴尼亚的富裕家庭,当时做修女刚满一年。两年之后,特蕾沙被派往圣玛丽高中教授地理。在做教师的近20年间,特蕾莎目睹着悲惨世界———那是高温热带中永远的冰冷,那是身体随时碰撞的人群里永远的冷漠,那里不仅仅是贫穷,也不仅仅是悲伤,那是一个赤贫和极度悲惨的世界。
一日,在加尔各答的街道旁,特蕾莎看到一个临死的妇人,老鼠和蛆正在咀嚼着她的身体,她坐在妇人身旁,陪着她,直到她死去。此后不久,特蕾莎就决定离开学校创立修女会。从那之后,她将自己完全献给异族最悲惨的人———那些赤贫的人,他们临死时都无人投上一眼。那些被丢在街上的孩子,他们像野草像虫子一样地活着。那些被亲人踢出家门的人,因为艾滋病,因为麻风或是残疾。1979年,特蕾莎以“无人想要,无人介意,无人关爱的人”的名义接受了诺贝尔和平奖,并将奖金连同诺奖庆祝盛宴的钱全部捐出。
1950年至1997年,在近半个世纪里,当政治家们喋喋不休地讨论着贫穷问题,并信誓旦旦地保证一定要解决这个问题的时候,特蕾莎正握住一只又一只临终者的手。当那些救助贫穷的专款还在官僚手中,或变成某个“形象工程”,特蕾莎已经给无家可归者一个又一个安身之处。她不在意那些时髦的经济发展致富理论,更不会注意“领袖”们在沙龙里讨论着什么,她只是走出去,去改变一个又一个人的生活,让他们有尊严地活着,有尊严地死去。
特蕾莎生前,做的都是小事情———抚慰临终者,抱起弃婴,为病人清洗伤口,替老弱铺上床单……但是她的去世却是全球的一件大事,无数的人为她送行,不分种族,也不分宗教。那个夜晚,人们哭泣叹息———这个星球少了一点儿光亮,少了一点儿仁爱,少了一点儿同情。
她曾说过,“我从穷人那里得益良多。”(注:特蕾莎修女获得诺贝尔奖感言)她总是微笑,“因为微笑就是爱的开端,一旦我们开始彼此自然地相爱,我们就会想着为对方做点什么。”(注:同上)
我坐在特蕾莎的墓前,背靠着她。我想到了佛祖。他也因目睹人生之苦难而离家,继而苦苦求索。他和她一样,当绝大多数人选择富贵的时候,他们都选择了贫穷,他们都曾努力地解除人生的苦难。然而,他和她又是这样的不同,他的悟道和解脱是出世的,她却如此地入世。
一个冬夜,我走在菩提迦耶(佛祖得道处)的街上,我看见一团黑影在滑动,又一个同样卷曲的黑影,再一个!走近了,才发现那些无腿的孩子们正在水泥地上移动。他们的滑板就是手中的木拖鞋,在“活着”的欲望上挣扎着滑行。对于这些孩子来说,佛祖的“四谛说”不过是让那些不仅仅只有“活着”欲望的人发点儿善心。
我坐在特蕾莎的墓前,背靠着她。没来由地想起了比尔·盖茨———一个和她完全不同的人。他一面用自己的头脑,和平理性地赚钱,一面访问印度和孟加拉的贫民窟,并将此称为“学习之旅”。他是世界首富,去超市买冰淇淋却用折扣券。他拒绝子女世袭财富,却捐出几百亿回报社会。
一个修女走进来,轻轻地触吻墓石,另一位修女走进来,跪下合十祷告。无论僧俗,每一个进入房间的人所做的第一件事,都是向特蕾莎修女表示敬意。她或他,或跪下或弯腰,或吻或以额头相触。
我,碧迪莎和普拉塔静静地跪着。不远处,跪着两个姑娘,一黑一白,她们比我们跪得更久。一只苍蝇飞了进来,嗡嗡地叫着。记得偶然看过一个印度人的文章,他指责特蕾莎只向世界展示加尔各答悲惨的一面,也有人批评她接受捐款不问来源。面对这些,特蕾莎轻声地说,“无论是谁,他说了什么,你都要面带微笑地接受,同时继续做你的工作。”那只苍蝇在大理石墓石上飞飞停停,最后不见踪影。哪位伟人身边没有几只苍蝇的噪声?
我随修女来到祈祷室。在圣像面前,修女们就地而跪。据说她们没有任何私人财物,有些人甚至连鞋子都没有。她们拥有的只是几件镶蓝边的白衣和一本圣经。然而,在卡利盖临终关怀院(Kalighat Home for the Dying),当这些蓝白色衣衫停留在临终者的床前,那灰暗空洞的眼睛闪出光亮。当一双手从蓝白色的衣袖中伸出,握住另一只冰凉的手,那只枯瘦的手开始有了暖意。
修女会创建之初,只有12个成员,如今已经超过4000。当年特蕾莎只有一座由废弃的印度神殿改建的临终关怀院,如今由修女会创立并管理的各类庇护救助机构已经散布到全球几个大洲的100多个国家。然而,如今飘动在那些救助机构的衣衫已经不仅是蓝白两色,那里有不同的肤色和许多颜色的衣衫。死是冰冷的,但爱却是温暖的,贫病是悲惨的乌云,但是志愿者之光终究穿越它,明亮而恒久!
修女们齐声祈祷。我听不懂她们的语言。她们开始唱诗,音乐却是相通的。突然,我看到了特蕾莎修女也在她们中间。她靠着门口,跪坐着,腰背佝偻。仔细再看,原来是一座非常逼真的雕像。一位白人老年修女离我不远,她的跪姿几乎和雕像一模一样,让我无法分清。
出门时,我捐出一些钱,得到两张画片和一枚小小的铁十字架。画片很小,也不精美。画片上的特蕾莎双手合十,一如既往的简朴,一如既往地微笑着。
(P1173633)
特蕾莎修女:“我从穷人那里得益良多。”
在仁爱传教修女会,修女们没有任何私人财物,有些人甚至连鞋子都没有 杜欣欣/摄
====
特蕾莎这名字好象与修女有缘。我就知道另两位有名的圣女:
Teresa of Avila 1515-1582, Canonized in 1622
Thérèse of Lisieux - The "Little Flower", Canonized by Pope Pius XI 1925
The Flower -- By St Theresa
All the earth with snow is covered,
Everywhere the white frosts reign;
Winter and his gloomy courtiers
Hold their court on earth again.
But for you has bloomed the Flower
Of the fields, Who comes to earth
From the fatherland of heaven,
Where eternal spring has birth.
Near the Rose of Christmas, Sister!
In the lowly grasses hide,
And be like the humble flowerets, --
Of heaven’s King the lowly bride!
&
咖啡里的母亲给孩子取名时得留意着点:-)。
- Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/08/2006
Very touching. She is a Saint.
杜欣欣
她脸上的皱纹,似乎并非雕刀刻出,也非时间之印,而是他人的苦难刻在心上的痕迹。 - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/08/2006
欣欣的故事讲得很动人。
应门的是一位修女,白衣白巾光脚
‘光脚’不如‘赤脚’有美感。 :-) - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/08/2006
现代文化是以解构一切光辉光环人物为特征的。没有一点灰暗心灵和不光彩的作为,就叫做人性不具体,不健全。没有考察出肮脏举止的游纪,就不能算现代游记。结构和增光的东西是古典派,所以我们说杜侠女是个古典派的旅游家。:) - Re: 令胡,没人把你当哑巴posted on 08/08/2006
令胡冲 wrote:
现代文化是以解构一切光辉光环人物为特征的。没有一点灰暗心灵和不光彩的作为,就叫做人性不具体,不健全。没有考察出肮脏举止的游纪,就不能算现代游记。结构和增光的东西是古典派,所以我们说杜侠女是个古典派的旅游家。:)
世界上的事情,不好“都”这样看的。 - posted on 08/08/2006
我一个左派朋友憎恨 Mother Teresa,说她特法西斯,不讲人性,比希特勒还残忍。具体事例我也不记得了,大概就是她手下的修女病了,她不准她们看医生,不让她们吃药休息,告诉她们祈祷就好了。如果是真的,倒跟xx功有些象。还说她是个自私的巫婆,为了自己成名,不惜牺牲周围修女的幸福和健康。每每讲到 Teresa 我朋友就咬牙切齿的,见到她的照片就想吐吐沫。所以我也不喜欢她了。Teresa 说过,If you judge people, you have no time to love them。我想,与其从道听途说的事来评价她,不如多多留心和关怀周围的朋友。
另外,中学时,一个同学就叫 Theresa,因为她是虔诚的天主教徒。我们学校是天主教办的。 - posted on 08/09/2006
令胡冲 wrote:
现代文化是以解构一切光辉光环人物为特征的。没有一点灰暗心灵和不光彩的作为,就叫做人性不具体,不健全。没有考察出肮脏举止的游纪,就不能算现代游记。结构和增光的东西是古典派,所以我们说杜侠女是个古典派的旅游家。:)
I concur with this view to the extent that modern life demands critical thinking and therefore rejects the classic notion of sainthood or heroism in individuals. This view, although apparently iconoclastic and suspiciously cynical, is actually not entirely at odds with our tendency to search for, and to create if the search turns futile, a pseudo-religious model for us to worship and to derive inspirational power from. A common knowledge of the limitations of such a model makes it more accessible and its intended utility more effective. - posted on 08/09/2006
特蕾莎应该比希特勒好一些,但阿姗说的故事比Sainthood要可信得多。哪里读到过,人都是自私的,这样去分析一个人的行为,一般不会错的。
名的诱惑不压于钱,而且,真心信上帝的,怎么行善,也含有求一张进天堂的门票的动机。只要行善结果是好的,也不必管动机了,但sainthood之类,咽不下。
阿姗 wrote:
我一个左派朋友憎恨 Mother Teresa,说她特法西斯,不讲人性,比希特勒还残忍。具体事例我也不记得了,大概就是她手下的修女病了,她不准她们看医生,不让她们吃药休息,告诉她们祈祷就好了。如果是真的,倒跟xx功有些象。还说她是个自私的巫婆,为了自己成名,不惜牺牲周围修女的幸福和健康。每每讲到 Teresa 我朋友就咬牙切齿的,见到她的照片就想吐吐沫。所以我也不喜欢她了。Teresa 说过,If you judge people, you have no time to love them。我想,与其从道听途说的事来评价她,不如多多留心和关怀周围的朋友。
另外,中学时,一个同学就叫 Theresa,因为她是虔诚的天主教徒。我们学校是天主教办的。 - posted on 08/09/2006
大家好。谢谢大家费时费心读拙作。
XW,不好意思,让你受累,将这篇文章贴出来。我本不欲贴出,此文刊登时,因为众所周知的原因,略有删节。既然你已贴了,想想还是贴到伊甸去吧,这样也许会全面一点。
回阿珊,如拙作所言,再伟大的人物,也总会有人对其表示不满。印度人中也有,主要觉得她破坏了印度的形象。
回令胡,我确实是古典派。我是一个悲观主义者,我不是看不到那些负面的东西,有时甚至会将世界想得漆黑一片。但是写东西,我还是喜欢写光明的事情,这样心情会好些。
回九九兄,建议很好,改过了。 - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/09/2006
sorry I cannot type chinese today...
it's always good to write Mother Theresa, and, also it's important
to discuss.
thanks & take care!
- Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/10/2006
我倒不认为Teresa一定是为名行善,虽然也没有什么证据。但我感觉,一个有一定影响的人,按自己的思维定势行事(行善是其中一种),总会得罪一些人。尤其是思维比较极端、苛刻的人,待自己苛,自己能做到,但别人未必能做到,矛盾是必然的。
总的来说,名人没有一个不得罪人。:) - posted on 08/10/2006
杜欣欣 wrote:
大家好。谢谢大家费时费心读拙作。
回令胡,我确实是古典派。我是一个悲观主义者,我不是看不到那些负面的东西,有时甚至会将世界想得漆黑一片。但是写东西,我还是喜欢写光明的事情,这样心情会好些。
唉,这怎么象伊甸园里爱太阳老兄的签名。大家都是扇子,喜欢读啊。:)
友给人这种印象不知道
马惠元的话也越来越露骨地准确和理性了。女性网友给人这种印象不知道好不好。这毕竟是咱江湖汉子的方式。听说有种东西叫文学,专门是要把露骨的道理给包装架构起来,涂上令人迷惘的风光色彩,营造一个迷宫般的空间,再画进去几个性格鲜明的小角色,扯来扯去没个完。读者跟着角色走啊地走,绕啊地绕,基本快累得半死的时候,突然看见了出口,大喜之下,赶快把书合上 -- 总算读完了。出去透一口新鲜空气,这才反应过来,嗨,不就是想说这么个屁道理嘛。两句话就说完的事情,愣能扯出二十万字来。当然了,这破道理就由于文学带来的种种劳累,而因此显得贵重了很多。要是一个江湖汉子随随便便地扔出来,恐怕没人能拿正眼瞧一下。马妹妹要注意方式。:) - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/10/2006
很多人和事如果从心理学的角度看,也许就很简单了。Teresa的动机在别人分析起来可能很复杂,能说出正反道理,但对她自己来说也许没什么道理可讲,就是习惯了而已。心理被信仰定型,一切直觉都从此出发,认为由此形成的想法和决定都是信仰的结果,所以她可以不在乎周围的人怎么说怎么看她。很多圣徒、伟人等等恐怕都如此:固执己见,死不改悔,行为可能有益多数人但让身边的人感到不近人情。 - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/10/2006
“唉,这怎么象伊甸园里爱太阳老兄的签名。”---令胡老弟,这里正好用上你的名言:“我说的不一定。。。”。说起你名言,不知道你自己可有个记录,有网友向我谈起,说你的评论很有意思,想收集起来。老氓的也很有意思。
慧元,久不见问声好。“行为可能有益多数人但让身边的人感到不近人情。”---远香近臭,古来有之,一贯如此。我们父母对我们的爱有时不是也是这样吗。爱得让人受不了,我们只能努力被爱^0^ - posted on 08/10/2006
杜欣欣 wrote:
“唉,这怎么象伊甸园里爱太阳老兄的签名。”---令胡老弟,这里正好用上你的名言:“我说的不一定。。。”。说起你名言,不知道你自己可有个记录,有网友向我谈起,说你的评论很有意思,想收集起来。老氓的也很有意思。
杜侠女是我见过的网上最会说话的网友。专捡老虻爱听的说。估计说得他老兄心里一动一动的。:)
我哪里写过一贴正经的评论。只不过喜欢跟网友大伙儿一起混个热闹面熟。这些年来不断地换网名,就怕别人揪着过去的老账不放,昨天的口水甩不掉。还敢自己收集起来,不让人骂死也得笑死。老虻还不如我。把他的那几句”评论“收集起来,干脆绝了他再有颜面回来上网的念头了。:)
- posted on 08/10/2006
不是会说话,而是被吓不得不如此~~。我说的是真话,这个人就是老尚。
令胡冲 wrote:
杜欣欣 wrote:杜侠女是我见过的网上最会说话的网友。专捡老虻爱听的说。估计说得他老兄心里一动一动的。:)
“唉,这怎么象伊甸园里爱太阳老兄的签名。”---令胡老弟,这里正好用上你的名言:“我说的不一定。。。”。说起你名言,不知道你自己可有个记录,有网友向我谈起,说你的评论很有意思,想收集起来。老氓的也很有意思。
我哪里写过一贴正经的评论。只不过喜欢跟网友大伙儿一起混个热闹面熟。这些年来不断地换网名,就怕别人揪着过去的老账不放,昨天的口水甩不掉。还敢自己收集起来,不让人骂死也得笑死。老虻还不如我。把他的那几句”评论“收集起来,干脆绝了他再有颜面回来上网的念头了。:)
- Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/10/2006
如果去跟每个人解释你的想法,就没时间去实现它了,也没时间去为他们做事了。
阿姗 wrote:
Teresa 说过,If you judge people, you have no time to love them。 - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/10/2006
" 行为可能有益多数人 " 这是关键。
马慧元 wrote:
很多人和事如果从心理学的角度看,也许就很简单了。Teresa的动机在别人分析起来可能很复杂,能说出正反道理,但对她自己来说也许没什么道理可讲,就是习惯了而已。心理被信仰定型,一切直觉都从此出发,认为由此形成的想法和决定都是信仰的结果,所以她可以不在乎周围的人怎么说怎么看她。很多圣徒、伟人等等恐怕都如此:固执己见,死不改悔,行为可能有益多数人但让身边的人感到不近人情。 - posted on 08/10/2006
对了,我最近去CND看中东的讨论。印象深刻的是尚能笑。尚能笑。SUSAN可以去看一眼:)
GADFLY 哪去了?
杜欣欣 wrote:
不是会说话,而是被吓不得不如此~~。我说的是真话,这个人就是老尚。
令胡冲 wrote:
杜欣欣 wrote:杜侠女是我见过的网上最会说话的网友。专捡老虻爱听的说。估计说得他老兄心里一动一动的。:)
“唉,这怎么象伊甸园里爱太阳老兄的签名。”---令胡老弟,这里正好用上你的名言:“我说的不一定。。。”。说起你名言,不知道你自己可有个记录,有网友向我谈起,说你的评论很有意思,想收集起来。老氓的也很有意思。
我哪里写过一贴正经的评论。只不过喜欢跟网友大伙儿一起混个热闹面熟。这些年来不断地换网名,就怕别人揪着过去的老账不放,昨天的口水甩不掉。还敢自己收集起来,不让人骂死也得笑死。老虻还不如我。把他的那几句”评论“收集起来,干脆绝了他再有颜面回来上网的念头了。:)
- Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/11/2006
CND's discussion went deeper but it also paid a higher price: it is messier and messier now. Just like middle-east. :)
ben ben wrote:
对了,我最近去CND看中东的讨论。印象深刻的是尚能笑。尚能笑。SUSAN可以去看一眼:) - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 09/04/2006
人间有喜亦有悲,一个人太过单薄,两个人便有依靠,一群人在一起,你就能看到奇迹。
当我们本源的善良指引我们去做一些力所能及的善事,那天国里的大爱便像阳光一样,普照人间。
造自己的福田,也莫忘耕耘悲田,这样的人生才是向上的,积极的人生。
而当我们像爱自己一样的爱别人的时候,回报我们的是内心的感动与快乐。 - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 09/04/2006
helen wrote:
人间有喜亦有悲,一个人太过单薄,两个人便有依靠,一群人在一起,你就能看到奇迹。
当我们本源的善良指引我们去做一些力所能及的善事,那天国里的大爱便像阳光一样,普照人间。
造自己的福田,也莫忘耕耘悲田,这样的人生才是向上的,积极的人生。
而当我们像爱自己一样的爱别人的时候,回报我们的是内心的感动与快乐。
:) is it a joke to get me lost? :) - posted on 08/24/2007
阿姗 wrote:
我一个左派朋友憎恨 Mother Teresa,说她特法西斯,不讲人性,... 还说她是个自私的巫婆,为了自己成名,不惜牺牲周围修女的幸福和健康。
怪不得 Teresa 做出的事令一些人憎恨呢。她的灵魂里有太多痛苦和黑暗 ("so much pain and darkness in my soul")。
不知道为什么我有些幸灾乐祸。可能我最受不了虚伪的人。不过 Teresa 也可怜,一直在黑暗和痛苦中挣扎,还要装成圣女的样子给人看。
====
Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith
By DAVID VAN BIEMA
Thu Aug 23, 12:05 PM ET
Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.
- Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979
On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one - the naked one - the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere - "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive."
Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[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 ... I want you to pray for me - that I let Him have [a] free hand."
The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction - that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.
And in fact, that appears to be the case. A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever - or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."
That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and - except for a five-week break in 1959 - never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God - tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'" Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa's doubts: "I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented." Recalls Kolodiejchuk, Come Be My Light's editor: "I read one letter to the Sisters [of Teresa's Missionaries of Charity], and their mouths just dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her."
The book is hardly the work of some antireligious investigative reporter who Dumpster-dived for Teresa's correspondence. Kolodiejchuk, a senior Missionaries of Charity member, is her postulator, responsible for petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supporting materials. (Thus far she has been beatified; the next step is canonization.) The letters in the book were gathered as part of that process.
The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the "dark night" of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the growth of some spiritual masters. Teresa's may be the most extensive such case on record. (The "dark night" of the 18th century mystic St. Paul of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.) Yet Kolodiejchuk sees it in St. John's context, as darkness within faith. Teresa found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it and abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Kolodiejchuk produced the book as proof of the faith-filled perseverance that he sees as her most spiritually heroic act.
Two very different Catholics predict that the book will be a landmark. The Rev. Matthew Lamb, chairman of the theology department at the conservative Ave Maria University in Florida, thinks Come Be My Light will eventually rank with St. Augustine's Confessions and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain as an autobiography of spiritual ascent. Martin of America, a much more liberal institution, calls the book "a new ministry for Mother Teresa, a written ministry of her interior life," and says, "It may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone."
Not all atheists and doubters will agree. Both Kolodiejchuk and Martin assume that Teresa's inability to perceive Christ in her life did not mean he wasn't there. In fact, they see his absence as part of the divine gift that enabled her to do great work. But to the U.S.'s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem absurd. They will see the book's Teresa more like the woman in the archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband 30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Says Christopher Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a scathing polemic on Teresa, and more recently of the atheist manifesto God Is Not Great: "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself." Meanwhile, some familiar with the smiling mother's extraordinary drive may diagnose her condition less as a gift of God than as a subconscious attempt at the most radical kind of humility: she punished herself with a crippling failure to counterbalance her great successes.
Come Be My Light is that rare thing, a posthumous autobiography that could cause a wholesale reconsideration of a major public figure - one way or another. It raises questions about God and faith, the engine behind great achievement, and the persistence of love, divine and human. That it does so not in any organized, intentional form but as a hodgepodge of desperate notes not intended for daylight should leave readers only more convinced that it is authentic - and that they are, somewhat shockingly, touching the true inner life of a modern saint.
Prequel: Near Ecstatic Communion
[Jesus:] Wilt thou refuse to do this for me? ... You have become my Spouse for my love - you have come to India for Me. The thirst you had for souls brought you so far - Are you afraid to take one more step for Your Spouse - for me - for souls? Is your generosity grown cold? Am I a second to you?
[Teresa:] Jesus, my own Jesus - I am only Thine - I am so stupid - I do not know what to say but do with me whatever You wish - as You wish - as long as you wish. [But] why can't I be a perfect Loreto Nun - here - why can't I be like everybody else.
[Jesus:] I want Indian Nuns, Missionaries of Charity, who would be my fire of love amongst the poor, the sick, the dying and the little children ... 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. Wilt thou refuse?
- in a prayer dialogue recounted to Archbishop Ferdinand Perier, January 1947
On Sept. 10, 1946, after 17 years as a teacher in Calcutta with the Loreto Sisters (an uncloistered, education-oriented community based in Ireland), Mother Mary Teresa, 36, took the 400-mile (645-km) train trip to Darjeeling. She had been working herself sick, and her superiors ordered her to relax during her annual retreat in the Himalayan foothills. On the ride out, she reported, Christ spoke to her. He called her to abandon teaching and work instead in "the slums" of the city, dealing directly with "the poorest of the poor" - the sick, the dying, beggars and street children. "Come, Come, carry Me into the holes of the poor," he told her. "Come be My light." The goal was to be both material and evangelistic - as Kolodiejchuk puts it, "to help them live their lives with dignity [and so] encounter God's infinite love, and having come to know Him, to love and serve Him in return."
It was wildly audacious - an unfunded, single-handed crusade (Teresa stipulated that she and her nuns would share their beneficiaries' poverty and started out alone) to provide individualized service to the poorest in a poor city made desperate by riots. The local Archbishop, Ferdinand PÉrier, was initially skeptical. But her letters to him, preserved, illustrate two linked characteristics - extreme tenacity and a profound personal bond to Christ. When PÉrier hesitated, Teresa, while calling herself a "little nothing," bombarded him with notes suggesting that he refer the question to an escalating list of authorities - the local apostolic delegation, her Mother General, the Pope. And when she felt all else had failed, she revealed the spiritual topper: a dramatic (melodramatic, really) dialogue with a "Voice" she eventually revealed to be Christ's. It ended with Jesus' emphatic reiteration of his call to her: "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. Wilt thou refuse?"
Mother Teresa had visions, including one of herself conversing with Christ on the Cross. Her confessor, Father Celeste Van Exem, was convinced that her mystical experiences were genuine. "[Her] union with Our Lord has been continual and so deep and violent that rapture does not seem very far," he commented. Teresa later wrote simply, "Jesus gave Himself to me."
Then on Jan. 6, 1948, PÉrier, after consulting the Vatican, finally gave permission for Teresa to embark on her second calling. And Jesus took himself away again.
The Onset
Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love - and now become as the most hated one - the one - You have thrown away as unwanted - unloved. I call, I cling, I want - and there is no One to answer - no One on Whom I can cling - no, No One. - Alone ... Where is my Faith - even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness - My God - how painful is this unknown pain - I have no Faith - I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart - & make me suffer untold agony.
So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them - because of the blasphemy - If there be God - please forgive me - When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven - there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. - I am told God loves me - and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?
- addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated
In the first half of 1948, Teresa took a basic medical course before launching herself alone onto the streets of Calcutta. She wrote, "My soul at present is in perfect peace and joy." Kolodiejchuk includes her moving description of her first day on the job: "The old man lying on the street - not wanted - all alone just sick and dying - I gave him carborsone and water to drink and the old Man - was so strangely grateful ... Then we went to Taltala Bazaar, and there was a very poor woman dying I think of starvation more than TB ... I gave her something which will help her to sleep. - I wonder how long she will last." But two months later, shortly after her major triumph of locating a space for her headquarters, Kolodiejchuk's files find her troubled. "What tortures of loneliness," she wrote. "I wonder how long will my heart suffer this?" This complaint could be understood as an initial response to solitude and hardship were it not for subsequent letters. The more success Teresa had - and half a year later so many young women had joined her society that she needed to move again - the worse she felt. In March 1953, she wrote PÉrier, "Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself - for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started 'the work.'"
PÉrier may have missed the note of desperation. "God guides you, dear Mother," he answered avuncularly. "You are not so much in the dark as you think ... You have exterior facts enough to see that God blesses your work ... Feelings are not required and often may be misleading." And yet feelings - or rather, their lack - became her life's secret torment. How can you assume the lover's ardor when he no longer grants you his voice, his touch, his very presence? The problem was exacerbated by an inhibition to even describe it. Teresa reported on several occasions inviting a confessor to visit and then being unable to speak. Eventually, one thought to ask her to write the problem down, and she complied. "The more I want him - the less I am wanted," she wrote PÉrier in 1955. A year later she sounded desolate: "Such deep longing for God - and ... repulsed - empty - no faith - no love - no zeal. - [The saving of] Souls holds no attraction - Heaven means nothing - pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything."
At the suggestion of a confessor, she wrote the agonized plea that begins this section, in which she explored the theological worst-possible-case implications of her dilemma. That letter and another one from 1959 ("What do I labour for? If there be no God - there can be no soul - if there is no Soul then Jesus - You also are not true") are the only two that sound any note of doubt of God's existence. But she frequently bemoaned an inability to pray: "I utter words of Community prayers - and try my utmost to get out of every word the sweetness it has to give - But my prayer of union is not there any longer - I no longer pray."
As the Missionaries of Charity flourished and gradually gained the attention of her church and the world at large, Teresa progressed from confessor to confessor the way some patients move through their psychoanalysts. Van Exem gave way to PÉrier, who gave way in 1959 to the Rev. (later Cardinal) Lawrence Picachy, who was succeeded by the Rev. Joseph Neuner in 1961. By the 1980s the chain included figures such as Bishop William Curlin of Charlotte, N.C. For these confessors, she developed a kind of shorthand of pain, referring almost casually to "my darkness" and to Jesus as "the Absent One." There was one respite. In October 1958, Pope Pius XII died, and requiem Masses were celebrated around the Catholic world. Teresa prayed to the deceased Pope for a "proof that God is pleased with the Society." And "then and there," she rejoiced, "disappeared the long darkness ... that strange suffering of 10 years." Unfortunately, five weeks later she reported being "in the tunnel" once more. And although, as we shall see, she found a way to accept the absence, it never lifted again. Five years after her Nobel, a Jesuit priest in the Calcutta province noted that "Mother came ... to speak about the excruciating night in her soul. It was not a passing phase but had gone on for years." A 1995 letter discussed her "spiritual dryness." She died in 1997.
Explanations
Tell me, Father, why is there so much pain and darkness in my soul?
- to the Rev. Lawrence Picachy, August 1959
Why did Teresa's communication with Jesus, so vivid and nourishing in the months before the founding of the Missionaries, evaporate so suddenly? Interestingly, secular and religious explanations travel for a while on parallel tracks. Both understand (although only one celebrates) that identification with Christ's extended suffering on the Cross, undertaken to redeem humanity, is a key aspect of Catholic spirituality. Teresa told her nuns that physical poverty ensured empathy in "giving themselves" to the suffering poor and established a stronger bond with Christ's redemptive agony. She wrote in 1951 that the Passion was the only aspect of Jesus' life that she was interested in sharing: "I want to ... drink ONLY [her emphasis] from His chalice of pain." And so she did, although by all indications not in a way she had expected.
Kolodiejchuk finds divine purpose in the fact that Teresa's spiritual spigot went dry just as she prevailed over her church's perceived hesitations and saw a successful way to realize Jesus' call for her. "She was a very strong personality," he suggests. "And a strong personality needs stronger purification" as an antidote to pride. As proof that it worked, he cites her written comment after receiving an important prize in the Philippines in the 1960s: "This means nothing to me, because I don't have Him."
And yet "the question is, Who determined the abandonment she experienced?" says Dr. Richard Gottlieb, a teacher at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute who has written about the church and who was provided a copy of the book by TIME. "Could she have imposed it on herself?" Psychologists have long recognized that people of a certain personality type are conflicted about their high achievement and find ways to punish themselves. Gottlieb notes that Teresa's ambitions for her ministry were tremendous. Both he and Kolodiejchuk are fascinated by her statement, "I want to love Jesus as he has never been loved before." Remarks the priest: "That's a kind of daring thing to say." Yet her letters are full of inner conflict about her accomplishments. Rather than simply giving all credit to God, Gottlieb observes, she agonizes incessantly that "any taking credit for her accomplishments - if only internally - is sinful" and hence, perhaps, requires a price to be paid. A mild secular analog, he says, might be an executive who commits a horrific social gaffe at the instant of a crucial promotion. For Teresa, "an occasion for a modicum of joy initiated a significant quantity of misery," and her subsequent successes led her to perpetuate it.
Gottlieb also suggests that starting her ministry "may have marked a turning point in her relationship with Jesus," whose urgent claims she was finally in a position to fulfill. Being the active party, he speculates, might have scared her, and in the end, the only way to accomplish great things might have been in the permanent and less risky role of the spurned yet faithful lover.
The atheist position is simpler. In 1948, Hitchens ventures, Teresa finally woke up, although she could not admit it. He likens her to die-hard Western communists late in the cold war: "There was a huge amount of cognitive dissonance," he says. "They thought, 'Jesus, the Soviet Union is a failure, [but] I'm not supposed to think that. It means my life is meaningless.' They carried on somehow, but the mainspring was gone. And I think once the mainspring is gone, it cannot be repaired." That, he says, was Teresa.
Most religious readers will reject that explanation, along with any that makes her the author of her own misery - or even defines it as true misery. Martin, responding to the torch-song image of Teresa, counterproposes her as the heroically constant spouse. "Let's say you're married and you fall in love and you believe with all your heart that marriage is a sacrament. And your wife, God forbid, gets a stroke and she's comatose. And you will never experience her love again. It's like loving and caring for a person for 50 years and once in a while you complain to your spiritual director, but you know on the deepest level that she loves you even though she's silent and that what you're doing makes sense. Mother Teresa knew that what she was doing made sense."
Integration
I can't express in words - the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me - for the first time in ... years - I have come to love the darkness - for I believe now that it is part of a very, very small part of Jesus' darkness & pain on earth. You have taught me to accept it [as] a 'spiritual side of your work' as you wrote - Today really I felt a deep joy - that Jesus can't go anymore through the agony - but that He wants to go through it in me.
- to Neuner, Circa 1961
There are two responses to trauma: to hold onto it in all its vividness and remain its captive, or without necessarily "conquering" it, to gradually integrate it into the day-by-day. After more than a decade of open-wound agony, Teresa seems to have begun regaining her spiritual equilibrium with the help of a particularly perceptive adviser. The Rev. Joseph Neuner, whom she met in the late 1950s and confided in somewhat later, was already a well-known theologian, and when she turned to him with her "darkness," he seems to have told her the three things she needed to hear: that there was no human remedy for it (that is, she should not feel responsible for affecting it); that feeling Jesus is not the only proof of his being there, and her very craving for God was a "sure sign" of his "hidden presence" in her life; and that the absence was in fact part of the "spiritual side" of her work for Jesus.
This counsel clearly granted Teresa a tremendous sense of release. For all that she had expected and even craved to share in Christ's Passion, she had not anticipated that she might recapitulate the particular moment on the Cross when he asks, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" The idea that rather than a nihilistic vacuum, his felt absence might be the ordeal she had prayed for, that her perseverance in its face might echo his faith unto death on the Cross, that it might indeed be a grace, enhancing the efficacy of her calling, made sense of her pain. Neuner would later write, "It was the redeeming experience of her life when she realized that the night of her heart was the special share she had in Jesus' passion." And she thanked Neuner profusely: "I can't express in words - the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me - for the first time in ... years - I have come to love the darkness. "
Not that it didn't continue to torment her. Years later, describing the joy in Jesus experienced by some of her nuns, she observed dryly to Neuner, "I just have the joy of having nothing - not even the reality of the Presence of God [in the Eucharist]." She described her soul as like an "ice block." Yet she recognized Neuner's key distinction, writing, "I accept not in my feelings - but with my will, the Will of God - I accept His will." Although she still occasionally worried that she might "turn a Judas to Jesus in this painful darkness," with the passage of years the absence morphed from a potential wrecking ball into a kind of ragged cornerstone. Says Gottlieb, the psychoanalyst: "What is remarkable is that she integrated it in a way that enabled her to make it the organizing center of her personality, the beacon for her ongoing spiritual life." Certainly, she understood it as essential enough to project it into her afterlife. "If I ever become a Saint - I will surely be one of 'darkness.' I will continually be absent from Heaven - to [light] the light of those in darkness on earth," she wrote in 1962. Theologically, this is a bit odd since most orthodox Christianity defines heaven as God's eternal presence and doesn't really provide for regular no-shows at the heavenly feast. But it is, Kolodiejchuk suggests, her most moving statement, since the sacrifice involved is infinite. "When she wrote, 'I am willing to suffer ... for all eternity, if this [is] possible,'" he says, "I said, Wow."
He contends that the letters reveal her as holier than anyone knew. However formidable her efforts on Christ's behalf, it is even more astounding to realize that she achieved them when he was not available to her - a bit like a person who believes she can't walk winning the Olympic 100 meters. Kolodiejchuk goes even further. Catholic theologians recognize two types of "dark night": the first is purgative, cleansing the contemplative for a "final union" with Christ; the second is "reparative," and continues after such a union, so that he or she may participate in a state of purity even closer to that of Jesus and Mary, who suffered for human salvation despite being without sin. By the end, writes Kolodiejchuk, "by all indications this was the case with Mother Teresa." That puts her in rarefied company.
A New Ministry
If this brings You glory - if souls are brought to you - with joy I accept all to the end of my life.
- to Jesus, undated
But for most people, Teresa's ranking among Catholic saints may be less important than a more general implication of Come Be My Light: that if she could carry on for a half-century without God in her head or heart, then perhaps people not quite as saintly can cope with less extreme versions of the same problem. One powerful instance of this may have occurred very early on. In 1968, British writer-turned-filmmaker Malcolm Muggeridge visited Teresa. Muggeridge had been an outspoken agnostic, but by the time he arrived with a film crew in Calcutta he was in full spiritual-search mode. Beyond impressing him with her work and her holiness, she wrote a letter to him in 1970 that addressed his doubts full-bore. "Your longing for God is so deep and yet He keeps Himself away from you," she wrote. "He must be forcing Himself to do so - because he loves you so much - the personal love Christ has for you is infinite - The Small difficulty you have re His Church is finite - Overcome the finite with the infinite." Muggeridge apparently did. He became an outspoken Christian apologist and converted to Catholicism in 1982. His 1969 film, Something Beautiful for God, supported by a 1971 book of the same title, made Teresa an international sensation.
At the time, Muggeridge was something of a unique case. A child of privilege who became a minor celebrity, he was hardly Teresa's target audience. Now, with the publication of Come Be My Light, we can all play Muggeridge. Kolodiejchuk thinks the book may act as an antidote to a cultural problem. "The tendency in our spiritual life but also in our more general attitude toward love is that our feelings are all that is going on," he says. "And so to us the totality of love is what we feel. But to really love someone requires commitment, fidelity and vulnerability. Mother Teresa wasn't 'feeling' Christ's love, and she could have shut down. But she was up at 4:30 every morning for Jesus, and still writing to him, 'Your happiness is all I want.' That's a powerful example even if you are not talking in exclusively religious terms."
America's Martin wants to talk precisely in religious terms. "Everything she's experiencing," he says, "is what average believers experience in their spiritual lives writ large. I have known scores of people who have felt abandoned by God and had doubts about God's existence. And this book expresses that in such a stunning way but shows her full of complete trust at the same time." He takes a breath. "Who would have thought that the person who was considered the most faithful woman in the world struggled like that with her faith?" he asks. "And who would have thought that the one thought to be the most ardent of believers could be a saint to the skeptics?" Martin has long used Teresa as an example to parishioners of self-emptying love. Now, he says, he will use her extraordinary faith in the face of overwhelming silence to illustrate how doubt is a natural part of everyone's life, be it an average believer's or a world-famous saint's.
Into the Light of Day
Please destroy any letters or anything I have written. - to Picachy, April 1959
Consistent with her ongoing fight against pride, Teresa's rationale for suppressing her personal correspondence was "I want the work to remain only His." If the letters became public, she explained to Picachy, "people will think more of me - less of Jesus."
The particularly holy are no less prone than the rest of us to misjudge the workings of history - or, if you will, of God's providence. Teresa considered the perceived absence of God in her life as her most shameful secret but eventually learned that it could be seen as a gift abetting her calling. If her worries about publicizing it also turn out to be misplaced - if a book of hasty, troubled notes turns out to ease the spiritual road of thousands of fellow believers, there would be no shame in having been wrong - but happily, even wonderfully wrong - twice.
View this article on Time.com - posted on 08/24/2007
阿姗 wrote:
怪不得 Teresa 做出的事令一些人憎恨呢。她的灵魂里有太多痛苦和黑暗 ("so much pain and darkness in my soul")。
谢阿姗转的文章。对高尚的人我总是充满怀疑,可能是我自己心里比较黑暗:)不过读了这个,若是这样的话,我倒觉着Mother Teresa是真的“圣人“呢(可能还是因为我自己心里黑暗)。
That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and - except for a five-week break in 1959 - never abated.
Disillusionment? But she didn't give up. 被放到pedestal上下不来,也许是不幸也许是幸。 - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/24/2007
唉,你们两个黑人。;)
有些人燃烬自己的黑来照亮别人。变废为宝嘛。;)
我推理圣人大半都是如此的:克服自己的黑暗缺陷而达成超常成就。
灰人就可能没戏。;) - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/24/2007
这么说我是有潜力成为“圣人“的了?多谢touche点拨。阿姗是不用替她操心了,反正是要做教主的了。 - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/24/2007
- posted on 08/24/2007
谢谢这个录像。看来这个 mother theresa 真的是有问题。她自己丢了耶稣,还想隐瞒,误以为追求吃苦就是圣人的表现。真是害人害己。倒是没觉得她“燃烬自己的黑来照亮别人”。看她的样子,阴阴的,死气沉沉的,没有那种圣人自然散发的光芒,让人不想接近她。
- posted on 08/25/2007
我怎麽觉得她 其实就是一个普通的女人,没有男人的爱和家庭, 当然不happy了。。。:-)很多修女不就是情世受挫, 才出世的吗?但是帮助穷人还是一件好事情啊。譬如说,我的朋友Jim和Marry在一个慈善机构工作,他们的工作就是帮助中国留学生,有一个中国女孩得癌住在医院里,他们天天去看望她, 她真得非常需要他们的关怀。他们的工资是靠人捐助的,最近,捐助人死了,连工资都几乎没有了。不论如何,我是佩服那些做善事的人,不论他或她内心有多少痛苦和黑暗。人就是人, 圣人也是人。人性的需要得不到满足就会痛苦。她说那些话也是为她自己打气就是了,也不见得就是多虚伪。 - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/25/2007
谢voodoo,这三段录象都挺好看的,还有么?看来我只好stay in my darkness了。要不阿姗你快创你的教吧,我看你挺有亲和力的,且估计信你的教肯定不会吃苦,也不会有战争 :) - posted on 08/25/2007
浮生 wrote:
谢voodoo,这三段录象都挺好看的,还有么?
关于动物保护组织:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ijLulwUTY
这段送给那些追求“最好的xx”的小资::D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9J1b3MqiX8
如果你认为 Al Gore的 Inconvenient Truth 很有道理:
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-3028847519933351566
- Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/25/2007
Agree with July.
"不论如何,我是佩服那些做善事的人,不论他或她内心有多少痛苦和黑暗。人就是人, 圣人也是人。人性的需要得不到满足就会痛苦。她说那些话也是为她自己打气就是了,也不见得就是多虚伪。 " - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/25/2007
- Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/28/2007
在此以前,我不了解特蕾莎修女。读了这篇报道,长叹一声,圣女特蕾莎,当之无愧。
我已经很多年不说佩服一个人了。今天想说,对特蕾莎,衷心佩服。 - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 08/28/2007
DingLin2 wrote:
在此以前,我不了解特蕾莎修女。读了这篇报道,长叹一声,圣女特蕾莎,当之无愧。
我已经很多年不说佩服一个人了。今天想说,对特蕾莎,衷心佩服。
是这样的,保罗也曾“扫罗”,人无完人。
更何况要干一点点事,哪里容易啊。纽约市冬天街头都有救世军的老
太太在风中摇铃,就是这救世军,当年还救济了在纽约落难的张受玲
,做一点事情哪里容易呢?
说实在的,印度次大陆让我旅行还行,住在那里实在难。
- posted on 08/28/2007
xw wrote:
是这样的,保罗也曾“扫罗”,人无完人。
更何况要干一点点事,哪里容易啊。纽约市冬天街头都有救世军的老
太太在风中摇铃,就是这救世军,当年还救济了在纽约落难的张受玲
,做一点事情哪里容易呢?
说实在的,印度次大陆让我旅行还行,住在那里实在难。
是的是的。长长的一辈子,如此度过,如果没有过动摇,没有过怀疑,没有过困惑,没有过失望,没有过沮丧,没有过后悔,没有过绝望,什么七情六欲也没有过,那才是很难理解的。有过,是再正常不过的事情。有过,可依然如此度过一生,那是非常非常难的。
人家并没有说,这是每个人度过一生的唯一方式,并没有强迫我们也这样度过一生,那么,我们最好也不要苛求人家。
- posted on 09/05/2007
Mother Teresa anniversary marked
By Sanjoy Majunder
BBC News, Calcutta
Wednesday, 5 September 2007
Special prayers have been held at the tomb of Mother Teresa in the Indian city of Calcutta to mark the 10th anniversary of her death.
They were attended by hundreds of people, many of them drawn from some of the city's poorest communities, to whom she had dedicated her life's work.
The Albanian-born nun suffered a crisis of faith, it was revealed recently.
But despite this, followers insist she should be canonised at the earliest opportunity.
As dawn broke over Calcutta, hundreds of people gathered by her simple tomb at the headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity, the order she founded more than 60 years ago.
They were drawn from all sections of society and also included a sizeable number of international visitors, who paid homage to the woman who was known as the saint of the gutters.
In a special service led by the city's archbishop, Lucas Sirkar, urged the authorities to speed up the process of a canonisation.
"Our expectation is that she be soon declared a saint because she was living as a saint and she lives as a saint in heaven," he said.
"Saints are not only for themselves. Saints are for others, the church and all mankind."
Mother Teresa was beatified in 2003 by Pope John Paul II.
The Pope so admired Mother Teresa that he waived the standard waiting period for beatification to bring forward the honour.
But the recent publication of her letters in which she spoke of being tormented by doubts over her faith has raised concerns that the further process of canonisation could be jeopardised. - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 09/18/2007
特雷莎修女居然是神秘主义者,有40年之久没有找到上帝了。她自己说她是一个没有信仰的人,但是她被封为圣徒。-----------这是在别人那里看到的,嗬嗬,,,, - Re: 在特蕾莎墓前(杜欣欣)posted on 09/20/2007
这个问题,我非常同意丁先生的意见。即使看到特雷莎修女的另一面,仍然不会影响我对她的敬仰。 - posted on 09/21/2007
关于这个问题,我碰巧在一个博客上看到下面一篇。
Desolation
Monday, September 03, 2007
Regarding the apparent "scandal" of Mother Teresa's doubt, has anyone consulted the locus classicus of spiritual direction, Saint Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises? The ninth rule in the discernment section (very worth your time, found here, continued here) reads:
There are three principal reasons why we find ourselves desolate.
The first is, because of our being tepid, lazy or negligent in our spiritual exercises; and so through our faults, spiritual consolation withdraws from us.
The second, to try us and see how much we are and how much we let ourselves out in His service and praise without such great pay of consolation and great graces.
The third, to give us true acquaintance and knowledge, that we may interiorly feel that it is not ours to get or keep great devotion, intense love, tears, or any other spiritual consolation, but that all is the gift and grace of God our Lord, and that we may not build a nest in a thing not ours, raising our intellect into some pride or vainglory, attributing to us devotion or the other things of the spiritual consolation.
Is it news that a woman so far along the path to sainthood was being taught advanced lessons in the spiritual life? I suppose ignorance about basic Christianity ensures it is.
update: For more extended treatment, do consult this article from 2003:
We may prefer to think that she spent her days in a state of ecstatic mystical union with God, because that would get us ordinary worldlings off the hook. How else could this unremarkable woman, no different from the rest of us, bear to throw her lot in with the poorest of the poor, sharing their meager diet and rough clothing, wiping leprous sores and enduring the agonies of the dying, for so many years without respite, unless she were somehow lifted above it all, shielded by spiritual endorphins? Yet we have her own testimony that what made her self-negating work possible was not a subjective experience of ecstasy but an objective relationship to God shorn of the sensible awareness of God's presence...
Mother Teresa learned to deal with her trial of faith by converting her feeling of abandonment by God into an act of abandonment to God. It would be her Gethsemane, she came to believe, and her participation in the thirst Jesus suffered on the Cross. And it gave her access to the deepest poverty of the modern world: the poverty of meaninglessness and loneliness. To endure this trial of faith would be to bear witness to the fidelity for which the world is starving. "Keep smiling," Mother Teresa used to tell her community and guests, and somehow, coming from her, it doesn't seem trite. For when she kept smiling during her night of faith, it was not a cover-up but a manifestation of her loving resolve to be "an apostle of joy."
- posted on 09/21/2007
唉,如果这个修女被完全证实是一个谎言,或者说是一个纯度为80%的骗子,我也丝毫不会感到奇怪。
特蕾莎是个什么人并不重要。重要的是这对写文章的贴手是一个教训。写良好的写手都不得不始终谨慎论题,保持朴素的洞察力,和本分的常识感。切忌盲目追星捧月,虚言粉饰名流。一个是你很难真正接触了解所谓的名流风头人物;二是他们也不需要你锦上添花;三是建立在道听途说盲目景仰之上的文字,很容易失真失诚;四是名流一旦“真相”流露成为丑闻,自己文字很容易成为笑柄。
前一段我记着有网友大家煽情歌颂查尔斯和卡米拉的伟大爱情故事,让人掉满地鸡皮疙瘩。如果愿意保持一点生活常识感,就知道那点纨挎子弟姐弟恋恐实在没什么值钱东西在里面,比网恋还easy、cheap得多。距离产生美感,贴手多半不在英国。
说到底,那些货色不值得花几个小时的时间敲篇帖子。图个啥?从那些人身上还能沾点仙气?:)
Please paste HTML code and press Enter.
- xw
- #1 July
- #2 八十一子
- #3 令胡冲
- #4 DingLin2
- #5 阿姗
- #6 Fengzi
- #7 QQ
- #8 杜欣欣
- #9 xw
- #10 马慧元
- #11 令胡冲
- #12 马慧元
- #13 杜欣欣
- #14 令胡冲
- #15 杜欣欣
- #16 ben ben
- #17 ben ben
- #18 ben ben
- #19 Susan
- #20 helen
- #21 令胡冲
- #22 阿姗
- #23 浮生
- #24 touche
- #25 浮生
- #26 voodoo
- #27 阿姗
- #28 July
- #29 浮生
- #30 voodoo
- #31 reader
- #32 guanzhong
- #33 DingLin2
- #34 xw
- #35 DingLin2
- #36 阿姗
- #37 阿拉丁燃灯
- #38 守望古典
- #39 chloe
- #40 令胡冲
(c) 2010 Maya Chilam Foundation