A sinner stands before you.
I call myself that not because I have broken the Ten Commandments.
I may have done that, of course, breaking not all ten of them perhaps, but some of them and also those not figuring in the ten but beyond them unknowingly and worse, knowing what I am doing.
That is a matter of little import.
I do not share the conventional horror of sins. Nor do I share the standard conception of guilt.
I have a sense of what is sinful and what constitutes guilt.
That is different from what I was taught to believe by people who were taught to believe by others who were taught to believe in the same Noah’s Ark of what is sin, what is guilt.
I have a body; I hearken to its physics. I have a mind; I rise or fall to its beckoning; and I have a soul; I can vanish into its mystic pull.
I call myself a sinner for a very different reason. I have no authority, really, no moral right, to speak on Mother Teresa, or in her name.
The feeling hurts
Why do I have no right to speak on, about, or even around Mother Teresa?
Because, I have never given until it hurts. I have not even given until it begins to scratch the skin, leaving a small scar visible where the act of giving drew a line which comes in very handy to show (“See, I have given”).
I have not even given until it tickles one into a night’s good sleep – a reason why many ‘give’.
Not even that. As I hold speaking under false pretences to be a cardinal sin, or at least a bishop among sins, so I am sinning.
Thirst of Christ
I have never suffered so that others’ suffering may lessen. I have refused to heed Christ’s thirst; Christ’s thirst. Yes, His thirst.
He was thirsty. He was in pain. He was human, with a skin that had nerve endings, stubble that would have hurt if pulled, shoulder blades that must have shrieked in pain when the bars of the cross-weighed them down.
No one disputes the crucifixion.
Even those who do not believe in God, do not dispute that Jesus of Nazareth was nailed to a cross 2012 years ago. A pin’s prick sends us into paroxysms.
He was nailed.
Nailing does not kill instantly.
Knowing He is dying, slowly, surely, He asked for water, did He not? There, nailed to the Cross, like anyone would, in inexpressible pain, He asked for what Barabbas, or anyone who has a tongue that has gone dry, gone parched, perhaps blackened by now, or turned white, would have asked for.
“I thirst”, He said.
And at the end of a pole, a wetted sponge was pressed against His lips.
Thirst.
I have not slaked one thirst.
That of course is wrong. I have. I have slaked one thirst.
Mine.
Repeatedly, knowing that others thirst where I, as thirsty as a fountain in full flow, have just coveted more and more of the waters of the earth, call them water, call them by other names.
Offering to Mother
This talk is not about me.
It is not about Ma either. I shall call Mother Teresa that, Ma.
It is an offering to you, Ma.
Again, I am not giving, only asking; asking for more.
But it is not forgiveness that I am going to ask for, Ma.
I am not asking for that. ‘Get you lost!’, you could well say to me, Ma. ‘I have things to do’.
You almost said that to me just now, didn’t you, Ma?
I dare not have this congregation hear you say that to me, Ma.
You remember the day when you came calling on the President of India in New Delhi. You were driven up the capacious forecourt and the grand cobbled frontage of Rashtrapati Bhavan where India’s First Citizen resides.
As one on his staff, I seized the chance – such are the ingenuities of opportunism – to receive you and seek your blessing.
You emerged from the car, Ma, slight, almost weightless, smiling cautiously through all those creases on your face. I swung into a bow, a bow so deep and so selfishly long that I convinced myself that you were showering a prolonged blessing on me.
You were of course doing nothing of the kind.
The Space Manager
You were, as I saw when I lifted myself up, looking with a fixed and very practical gaze at the expanse of the presidential palace, and you said : “This building will do nicely for our work.”
I had seized the chance to bow to you, ineffectually as it turned out; you had seized the chance to make a quick assessment of that massive pile as a space-manager.
Ineffectually, of course.
And then, in the anteroom, as you waited for the ADC to the President to usher you in, you gave me a little card. Not one of those stiff, gold-edged ones, but still, very much a card.
Do you remember that, Ma ?
Yes, with your own ancient fingers, removing it from the tiny folds of your blue-bordered white attire like a mother sparrow might take out of its beak a little morsel for its hungry young.
Giving it to me, you said, ‘This is my Business Card.”
If I was being an opportunist for your blessing, you were being no less, Ma.
For you, Mother Teresa, besides being Mother, going to be Beatified, going to become a Saint, you had a certain job as well, albeit honorary – that of a space manager, so many sick men and women to so many square feet, so many cribs to so many not so square feet.
You needed your Business Card.
You were an opportunist, Ma.
But for others, for others in need, others in pain, others in thirst.
His thirst.
Confusing darkness
You had another task as well. Bringing darkness to light.
Say that again? Darkness to light? You got it wrong, Mr Gandhi! It is ‘light to darkness’.
No, I am not wrong. Ma, where there was light, you brought darkness.
‘If I ever become a saint – I will surely be one of ‘darkness’, you said, did you not?
Malcolm Muggeridge has told us how when his cameraman, the great Ken Macmillan filmed you in Calcutta’s Home for the Dying, which is very dark and dank and has virtually no lighting, and he himself had brought but one small light.
When Ken filmed you, he was not just filming in darkness. He was filming darkness.
You and darkness were one and the same, Ma.
You, Ma and darkness – one and the same?
How?
Only you would know. Perhaps even you would not.
He, on the Cross, thirsted. Your life in Calcutta was dark, with darkness, about darkness.
You know Ma.
When they say you were a miracle-worker, you healed miraculously, that your miracles will make you a saint, I am not so wowed.
The Confession
I am, when I hear you say with the scalding honesty of a sparrow screaming to see its nest ravaged, when I hear you say – in 1953 – to Archbishop Perier “There is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead.”
Not your miracles great as they were, not your courage magnificent as it was, not your compassion of continental size as that was, not your hunger with the hungry, your pain with those in pain, not your space-management, medal-management, air travel management, VIP-management, your handling of births, legit and un-legit, your holding the dying and the dead, not these, Ma, but your human confession of the darkness within you that gives my skin those bump-heads Ma.
What happened after you said what you felt with such candour ?
You realised that the darkness of whatever it was, of doubt, fear of failure, of betrayal, of weakness, was also God-given.
God is not factory of electric bulbs, to enlighten our lives. He gives, if He lives, what He gives. Hopefully with something like ‘mental application!’
God give God some good purpose!
But you were in a hurry. You always were, were you not, Ma? Scurrying about, prodding others, nudging and even pushing, elbowing.
Yes, you made your rudeness beautiful!
You were in a hurry.
But in one moment, somewhere, sometime, in the midst of all your hurrying, scurrying, worrying, you found it.
Moment of truth
You found the moment of the truth that you were in darkness and that darkness was all you had. And that when the something you have is all that you have you have to do something with it.
You made darkness level with light, you made it as high, as low, as bright, as dim as light. You made darkness share the same space as light.
You made darkness the envy of light.
Ma, you made waters thirst for the thirsty, food hunger for the hungry, the rich go-abegging to for beggars.
You made the rich feel criminal in their wealth, communists feel chastened in their little red books, socialists feel sentimental, priests feel hypocritical, models look not so lovely, and sportsmen feel their muscles go suddenly slack before your electricity.
You made dying make living look like a sin.
But Ma…
You are yet to do something.
From the high perch where you now sit, like a sparrow of course, you have yet to do something.
You have to help each of us discover the darkness within us.
Not the darkness which needs to come to light, but the darkness that needs to stay in the darkness not because the ‘dark’ is a sad or a bad place but because He who made the light made the dark and He who has given us both has not given us both to love the one and fight the other but to see what may be the purpose of both working in unison or separately.
Doubt is dark. Grief is dark. Dismay is dark. Pain is dark. Thirst, hunger are dark. Why dark , not bright? Because, when things are pretty and bright we see our way around.
Road to light
How many of us have taken the right road in light? ‘I stumbled when I saw’, says Gloucester in King Lear.
Make us, Ma, use all that is dark in us, including ‘sin’ which is called black for what reason goodness knows, to do even a fraction, no more than a fibre-wide, a titch little, a very particle of what your darkness did for you Ma.
Lead Kindly Light, the hymn says. And so it should.
But in our age of dangers so dreadful, we dare not believe they exist, made by man, so greedy, so vengeful, and of angers gathering in the sky and on our surfaces by the way we have heated up our earth, and of scarcities among plentifulness and of plenitude among misery, in that darkness of contrasts, Lead us also, Kindly Night, to see what treasures lie in your dark bosom, so bright.
Ma of my Kalighat, of the Home of my great Goddess so Black, Mayamma Kalika Bhavani, I bow before you again.
And ignoring me, what are you looking at this time?
Indian Newslink usually does not reproduce speeches but quotes speakers as a part of its news reports and analyses. But the address given by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, former Governor of West Bengal (India) and grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and C Rajagopalachari (first Governor-General of Independent India) at the Mother Teresa Interfaith Meeting held on Sunday, November 18, 2012 at Catholic Church of Christ the King in Mt Roskill, Auckland was so illuminating that we decided to reproduce it verbatim here. This was also the desire of many readers who wrote to us. Another speech of Mr Gandhi delivered at the Indian Newslink Indian Business Awards Presentation Ceremony held on Monday, November 19, 2012 at Sky City Convention Centre, Auckland, appears in our Awards Special in this issue.
