"Seeing Jesus" - A damn fine LTE in my paper this morning. Read, it will lift you up

[Mira]

Seeing Jesus

Mother Teresa ruined my life.

Asked how she withstood decades working in Calcutta's slums with heartbreaking dregs of humanity, she answered that, no matter how bad the person or circumstances, she knew it was just Jesus in one of his many distressing disguises.

I doubted the mother. Like Diogenes with his lamp, I walked Chicago's Broadway Street. Predictably, of the destitute, panhandlers, drunks, stoned, runaways, transvestite whores, plain ol' whores, gangbangers and assorted broken humanity, I found not one person I could say was Jesus in disguise. But what I never expected, and to this day makes me profoundly uneasy, is that I encountered not one single person that night that I could say with any certainty was not Jesus.

I thought about this when I heard the Rev. Charles Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church prattling on about gays. Some are like Mother Teresa and some like Worley: some cannot help but see Jesus, and some refuse to see Jesus. Some build faith up, and some tear it down. Some dedicate their lives to serving others, and some to controlling others. Some empower, and some enslave. Some save, and some judge. Some uplift, and some crucify.

Surely Rev. Worley, by all appearances a worthless, hypocritical bigot, a whitewashed tomb with a soul as dead as Pontius Pilate's, cannot possibly be Jesus in one of his many distressing disguises?

Thanks for nothing, Mother Teresa.

ANDY G. MILLER

www.journalnow.com
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Letters to the Editor June 1, 2012

[Aerows]

1. Some refuse to see Jesus, and some cannot help but see Jesus

That is Christianity at its best.

[bupkus]

2. Whitewashed tomb reference

Matthew 23:27

New International Version (NIV)

27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean."

[Mira]

11. WOW = I'm a Preacher's kid

and did not know that. Makes the letter even better, doesn't it.
Thanks

[Scootaloo]

3. "Thanks for nothing, Mother Teresa"

Y'know what? I agree with that sentiment. She was a fucking black-hearted, withered crazy person who "saw Jesus" in the suffering of others - but did not actually "see Jesus" in alleviating that suffering. She wasn't in Calcutta to help, she was there to bask. All that money people sent to her and her foundation? None of it went towards medical treatment for her wards. none of it went to improving their conditions. A great deal of it went towards alleviating Teresa's suffering - while her wards are dying of treatable illnesses, she gets rushed to New York when she came down with the flu.

As far as I can tell, Teresa and Worley are both despicable people who spend (spent) their time controlling others in thename of their faith, in order to make themselves feel faithful.

[lapislzi]

7. Whoa, tiger.

I am the last person to be defending a religious. I do not disagree with your opinion that Mother Teresa was a massive ego. It's true, although a little documentation to back up your claim would be helpful.

But, she did do good work; she did work in the slums; she did bring awareness to the plight of the poor in Calcutta. Just because she also worked for her own aggrandizement (and the aggrandizement of that hideously bloated institution who was her boss), does not make her a terrible person. Criticize the motive, not the means.

It's never all black or all white. We don't like it when we learn of serious character defects in people we respect and admire. It causes a really uncomfortable level of cognitive dissonance.

So, I can accept that Mother Teresa was a self-promoting marketing monster in a nun's habit who did some good stuff for a lot of people who might not otherwise have received help, as little as it may have been. That means I also have to accept the womanizing tendencies of some of the public figures I admire (and have admired in the past), and all the warts on all the people I love.

This christian thing, it's not easy, especially when you're an atheist like me.

[Scootaloo]

8. Okay, I'll grant, she did "raise awareness"

But she also raised funds that went into her - and her "boss's" - personal accounts. Funds that the donors by and large thought would go to improve conditions for the people in her mission... which did not happen.

I'm sorry, but when you're raking in money hand over fist, and yet allow people under your care to languish with leprosy and cholera and all this shit that can be treated with simple antibiotics that you do not buy? And the reason you aren't buying them is because of some "christian suffering" fetish you have? You are an EVIL PERSON. It absolutely is black and white.

http://mostlywater.org/mother_teresa_faithless_fraud_and_hypocrite
http://mukto-mona.net/Articles/mother_teresa/sanal_ed.htm
http://arcticbeacon.com/articles/6-Jun-2007.html

[SemperEadem]

14. thank you

anyone who believes that women should be chained to reproduction that keeps them mired in poverty is abhorrent.

[Mira]

10. I like your response

You're not missing a beat here, and are being kind, too.

[Warpy]

9. It's true that she never doled out an aspirin to ease pain

and that she raged against birth control, something that might have decreased the number of the dying destitute, but she did what her mission set out to do: give the dying and forgotten the experience of a soft bed, clean sheets, and care at the end of life even if they'd had no experience of any of those for the rest of their lives. That's what she focused on and that's what she did and there's no way I can second guess that sort of mission. It was certainly better than the alternative of doing nothing, even if we see housing the dying without alleviating their pain as an incomplete one.

She had enough ego to be a great fundraiser. She had little enough ego to sell luxury cars to buy economy cars and dedicate the difference to supporting her mission.

[geckosfeet]

12. Yea. Right. If I had to walk her road or yours, guess whose I would take.

On edit: everything you do is "bad" for somebody. Does devoting your life to comforting the sick and dying hurt you so much? As far as fundraising goes, political machines exist for that. And we all know that politics is a big part of religion. Now I am reminded of the man in the glass house.

On edit two: Raising "awareness"? Whose "awareness"? She devoted her life to comforting the sick and dying. Your "awareness" was probably completely off her radar.

[Scootaloo]

15. Comforting the sick and dying? Is that what you call it?

I say this as someone who does provide some measure of care and comfort for the ill and dying. I am not a doctor or a nurse, but I work at a nursing home. It's small and intimate, we have ~70 residents, with an assisted living wing, a skilled nursing-needs wing, and several rooms set aside for hospice.

We do not put our residents on foam mats on the floor.
Our floor is not a mix of dirt, rotten concrete, and wooden pallets.
We do not segregate our residents.
We interact with our residents as whole human beings, even those who are unable to interact back.
We do not re-use our medical supplies between residents.
We do not deny our residents' requests for quality-of-life improvements, including pain treatments.
We absolutely most certainly do not prevent our residents from receiving all medical treatment they need.

We can somehow manage to do all this with a shoestring budget that is going to get even stringier when the state cuts funding for facilities like ours.

Teresa however, was raking in millions. every stop she made on her global tour, people were cramming checks into her hand. Did you know the Nobel Peace prize isn't just prestige? it has a pretty nice monetary bounty as well; it averages out to a million dollars or so, depending on exchange rates. Where did Teresa put that money?

Do you know what my facility could do with a million dollars? Good lord, man.

Don't give me this "comforting the dying" bullshit. The only people she comforted were gullible westerners who would otherwise be wary of writing checks to fund the pope's gold-embossed toilet tissue.

[Maraya1969]

16. I just looked her up on Wiki after reading your posts and some

others and I'm pretty shocked. To deny someone pain medications is just not right. I remember hearing of the problems with her and birth control but I had no idea she was so rigid about these other ideas.

You sound like you are doing good work. Thank you.

[Scootaloo]

17. Sadly, she's one of those "unchecked celebrities"

You know, the sort that people say are really great people, because everyone else says they're really great people, never really bothering to check in? I feel more or less the same about the Dalai Lama, though for different reasons.

And thank you, I try; I'm a minor cog in the system, but I definitely wouldn't be there if I didn't care

[LiberalLoner]

4. Thank you for this.

[xchrom]

5. Du rec. Nt

[msongs]

6. jesus in toast, jesus in tree trunks, jesus in leaking faucets. neither good nor evil nt

[lunatica]

13. Jesus is everywhere

[D23MIURG23]

18. You can see Jesus or you can see King Arthur.

You can see any mythological figure you want, and use it as a poetic device for finding meaning in the rubble we often have to sift through in life.

Just appreciate the fact that what you are doing is putting meaning into rubble, and not the other way around.