True Grit

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An acquaintance of mine has always been a caregiver, in her profession and in her life. Recently, however, she has drastically reduced her contact with family and friends, telling one of them that she has focused too much attention on others and it’s time to focus on herself.

Who can argue with that or judge her? Since it’s unlike her, however, you could presume she’s going through a temporary crisis or a bout of depression. Whatever, patience and understanding are called for.

But her situation calls to mind the importance of perseverance in the search for God because it’s easy to become weary, to get burned out, to get the feeling that others are indifferent and not doing their part in making for a better world.

Love Your Enemies?

Fact is, the search for God is hard and we need grit to be the best people possible. But we may balk at doing what we need to do, like following Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Luke that says, “…Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.”

Jesus’ admonition may be something we think is important, and maybe even be willing to follow now, but what about a year from now? Will I replace that desire with something else? Seems to me, the search for God is only as authentic as my determination to persevere.

Because the gospels are a treasury of wisdom, we can turn to another Jesus story, this time in Mathew’s gospel and the famous parable of the sower who went out to sow seed. Some fell on a path and birds ate them. Some on rocky ground, where they had little soil. Since they had no roots, they “withered away.” Others fell among thorns that choked them. Others, however, fell on good soil and produced grain, “some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.” The meaning should be obvious.

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In another section of Mathew’s gospel, Jesus is talking to his disciples about their future, which won’t always be wonderful, and says, “…he who endures to the end will be saved.”

(“Salvation,” by the way, is one of those churchy words that may leave some of us scratching our heads, but it is mentioned over and over in the Bible. In short, it’s God’s assurance of liberation from evil, evident in the Christian Bible in Jesus’ healing of body and soul.)

I can’t think of a better example of perseverance than Mother Teresa, who died in 1997. She was known for her years of tenderly caring for India’s poorest, day in and day out. Unfortunately, due to the amount of publicity she received – especially after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 – mentioning her is somewhat of a cliché. People say things like, “What, do I look like a Mother Teresa?” meaning, “Do you expect me to be so clueless as to put other people before me?”

Mother Teresa continued her difficult tasks despite a struggle with faith that lasted years. A lengthy article in Time Magazine by David Van Biema in 2007 tells that story. Commenting on a batch of letters she had written mostly to spiritual directors over a long period, Van Biema wrote:

Self-Contradiction?

“…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.”

Starting in the early 1960s, however, “Teresa found ways to live with it and abandoned neither her belief nor her work.”

Father James Martin, then an editor of America Magazine, explains Teresa’s apparent struggle with faith this way: "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."