REVIEW: TO LOVE AND BE LOVED: A PERSONAL PORTRAIT OF MOTHER TERESA by Jim Towey, Simon & Schuster
The time-honored adage is obvious: By no means meet your heroes as a result of they’ll most certainly allow you to down.
Jim Towey, the devoted pal and longtime lawyer of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, had no such misgiving when that occurred to him. A high-flying Republican Senate aide whose psychological equilibrium had been rocked by the suicide of a detailed pal, Towey was attempting to fill an ache in his soul when he booked a ticket to India in 1985. On the time Mom Teresa was as common as any rock star, celebrated and revered for her ground-breaking work treating lepers in India and AIDS sufferers in America. She was constructing a non secular order which had attracted hundreds to emulate her dedication to serving to the poorest of the poor.
Towey tells us in his e-book To Love and Be Liked, that he shamelessly used his political connections to satisfy Mom Teresa for the primary time and that the second modified his life. He discovered the petite, Albanian-born nun awe-inspiring, somebody who radiated goodness, goal and stuffed his non secular bucket which had run dry.
“Immediately, I noticed that she was every thing I wasn’t,” he writes within the memoir about their 12-year friendship. “She was targeted, purposeful, cheerful — I used to be struck by how totally alive she appeared.”
Towey has produced a slender however insightful e-book concerning the Catholic Church’s most well-known trendy saint, a girl whose devotion to the poor and marginalized sadly stays as pressing a calling because it did when she based her Missionaries of Charity virtually 75 years in the past. What Towey units out to do is to cement her popularity in a world which has, in some ways, grown extra materialistic, brutal and unequal.
Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu Aug. 26, 1910 in Skopje, in what’s now Macedonia, the contemplative younger girl left dwelling at age 17, traveled to Eire to affix a venerable order of nuns after which traveled midway around the globe to India to dedicate herself to the poor in Southeast Asia. By the point she died in 1997, her non secular order had established itself in additional than 30 nations.
Towey was drawn into voluntary service with the Missionaries of Charity within the late Nineteen Eighties. He then turned the order’s authorized adviser. His e-book particulars among the methods wherein he helped form Mom Teresa’s popularity as she walked the tightrope between the secular world and the saintly. Inside his pages he helps paint a extra full portrait of a girl who is usually described in hagiographic phrases.
Towey supplies anecdotes about Mom Teresa’s irritating stubbornness as she aged to just accept physician’s orders, her candy tooth — in her ultimate days she loved her favourite custard, for instance — in addition to her zealous insistence that struggling was the pathway to understanding Jesus.
For Catholics like myself who adopted her journey to canonization and sainthood, Mom Teresa’s years of doubting God and her personal calling is well-trodden info — after her dying, her confessor revealed letters she had written and wished to maintain non-public. Towey particulars this non secular battle for example of how us mere mortals can hook up with the struggles of a saint.
However Towey’s e-book holds again in a single key a part of Mom Teresa’s life: He sheds no gentle on how the nun reacted to or mirrored on the fierce criticism that her pastoral care and actions have evoked over the a long time.
Mom Teresa radically broke taboos in the midst of her work. She and the MC sisters introduced consideration to tens of millions of individuals forgotten and ignored inside their very own societies: AIDS sufferers dying alone in Washington D.C., orphans of the so-called “untouchable” households in India. In some ways her MC motion popularized hospice care. However she and her non secular order drew scrutiny and condemnation for a scarcity of hygienic requirements and perceived callousness and rigidity to vary, at the same time as medical requirements and obligation of care protocols had advanced.
Towey cursorily dismisses Mom Teresa’s naysayers by decreasing them to ideological firebrands whose progressive and leftist political opinions are unworthy of contemplation. “In all of the years I represented her, she by no means defended herself publicly towards the false claims or disparagement leveled towards her. She felt God would defend her identify if He had want of it,” Towey writes. That view is difficult to digest, nevertheless, when some critics have revealed that the Missionaries of Charity stored ache medicine from struggling sufferers and that the sisters themselves had been put in hurt’s approach by a scarcity of sanitary circumstances in MC facilities. In these instances, those that consider Mom Teresa’s popularity have to be defended on the expense of the security or wellbeing of the folks she and her order need to assist are troubling.
Historical past reveals that the ethical and non secular leaders shine brighter when acknowledging their failings in addition to successes. Towey describes Mom Teresa who was not afraid to ask forgiveness in her on a regular basis interactions. When it comes to structural or institutional missteps, nevertheless, she stays aloof and an enigma.
By recounting his 12-year relationship with Mom Teresa, Towey clearly hopes to maintain her reminiscence alive lest the secular gods of historical past tarnish her mountain of excellent deeds. For Christian readers, the e-book will seemingly accomplish that. For nonbelievers, or skeptics of sainthood, the e-book will seemingly fail to deliver them nearer to this extraordinary girl.
