Page 23 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

When I search my mental Rolodex for icons of human sanity, Mother Theresa comes to

mind. I read an interview once in which she said that, as a young woman, she had felt

the presence of God, but only briefly. She never felt it again, but lived her life in hopes

that it/He would return if only she could make herself sufficiently hospitable to God’s

presence as she understood it. And so, she is reputed to have picked maggots from the

infected wounds of the forgotten. It seems that even the radical kindness of Mother

Theresa was mostly hype. She was more in love with suffering than with the sufferers.

Apparently her Missionaries of Charity did not spend the millions of dollars they raised

on medical care, pain relief, or sterilized needles. She said, “I think it is very beautiful for

the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being

11
much helped by the suffering of the poor people.But even if all the publicity were all

true, it would have been compromised because salvation is not external. Charity, in

general, is unidirectional rather than reciprocal, and, therefore, can neither address the

plight of the less fortunate nor fill the void inside those that wish to give. Western charity

is by its nature an anomalous, palliative generosity enacted within a social milieu whose

axiomatic illusion holds that it is not only possible but acceptable for whole segments of

the larger community to languish, unattended, without causing damage to the whole.

This is why most aid programs, NGO’s, charities, philanthropy and, in the long run, most

businesses are doomed: They consider themselves separate from those they seek to

assist, and separate from the rhythms of the Earth. They are fragmented rather than

fractal. They are non-elephantine.

I knew a man in Liberia whom we called Uncle Robert. One day he grabbed my arm and

said, I want to ask you a question. When I go home to my village, I know everyone there.

I know their children, the people they married and all their relatives on both sides. I know

their grandparents, their aunts and their uncles. I know their clans and their taboos

(totem animals). I know where they make their farms and what they grow, or what

business they are in. In the same way, I know all the people in all the villages around us.

I have heard that in America, people sometimes don’t even know the people who live

next door or across the street. Is this really true? How can this be possible?

11
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2016/09/sadistic-religious-fanatic-

mother-teresa-was-no-saint/

10