The happiness of faults

“Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God.” So said Christopher Hitchens of the modern world’s most hallowed saint. Hitchens considered Mother Teresa a fraud who had garnered undeserved renown for her missionary work, of which he claimed “the point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection.” Hitchens grounds his denunciations in the fact that the Missionaries of Charity do not emphasize systemic change of the kind that might erase the preconditions of suffering from places like Calcutta, but instead encourage the indigent to view their agony as beautiful, a way of uniting themselves with the suffering of Christ on the cross and partaking in His redemption of mankind.

Catholics are taught to perceive suffering in this manner, but when we consider the plight of those buffeted about by ceaseless misfortunes, enduring indignities that a denizen of the first world can scarcely envision, the idea does become a bit odious. For most of my life, I fell instinctively within the Hitchens camp. It is all well and good to help those wracked with unavoidable suffering to unearth meaning in their pain by turning to the crucified Christ, but surely we should also make every effort to eliminate the sources of suffering. In fact, the only reason charity workers have anything at all to give is due to the prosperity of their home countries and the endurance of their institutions. In the third world the forces of entropy have been little subdued and it is impossible to have faith in the future. Mother Teresa, Hitchens notes, received treatment for her own health problems in the finest western hospitals. So why would she make the incredible claim that suffering is a gift from God? Surely only a monster would suggest that the agony of the indigent is a blessing? I have not attained the wisdom or compassion to confidently proclaim from my own lips that suffering is a gift, but I would like to share a personal experience of the type of “non-systemic” charity that Mother Teresa advocated. It did not make me worship suffering, but something good came from it.

During a prolonged bout of depression following several years of working in my first real job - which was about as unreal as a thing could be - I experienced a profound sense of meaninglessness. This feeling became so intolerable that I essentially dropped everything to volunteer at a Peruvian orphanage. While I was self-conscious about embodying an embarrassing stereotype (the white savior “voluntourist” chasing meaning among impoverished brown people), I forced myself to remain open and see what the experience would bring. My time there was a protracted lesson in perspective, humility, the injustice of the world and the power of love.

author’s picture from Peru

There was one particular moment which I would term a peak experience. I and some other volunteers had accompanied Rosmery, the head of the orphanage and the closest thing to a saint I have encountered in my short life, “up the hill” to visit the homes of the poorest residents. These people were living a life so far removed from the comforts and security of my own that we may as well have been raised on different planets. I felt ashamed to show my face, as if my very existence were an insult. This was preparation.

We came to one particular hovel towards the end of our rounds that reeked of urine. It was oppressively hot inside and a constellation of gnats and flies orbited around the residents’ heads. We lingered near the door. The mere thought of entering brought the dread of disease to my mind. Rosmery entered without ceremony and conversed with the mother, asking about a daughter whom we could not see. After a few moments, the mother retreated into the back corner of the house and returned carrying a child of about 14, whose body was contorted and disfigured, frozen in a perpetual fetal position. Her hair was ragged and she wore a diaper that had not been changed. Our leader made much of the girl, trying to engage her in conversation to which the child only returned a thousand-yard stare. Some air feebly escaped her lips in a barely audible sigh but no words emerged. Our leader turned to us, shaking her head in dismay, “She used to talk a little bit...used to talk a little bit.” She valiantly tried to converse with the child, but after it became clear that it was no use she simply took her in her arms and held her like a baby.

As I watched the two of them in that moment, it felt as if everything had dropped away. I saw myself as almost nothing. I recalled the scene from A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge expresses his apathy toward the “surplus population” but soon betrays concern at Tiny Tim’s imminent death. The ghost of Christmas present upbraids Scrooge for his earlier indifference, saying, “Perhaps next time you will hold your tongue until you realize what the surplus population is? It may well be that in the eyes of heaven you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child.” The import of that statement had never struck home before that moment. I became conscious of how I deserved nothing that I had been given, that the vast chasm between myself and this girl had formed for reasons I could not fathom. It was at this moment that I had an insistent realization that ‘This is what matters. This is what Jesus wanted us to see. This is the love that he said would save us.’ Everything else seemed like wisps of smoke curling away, leaving only this fire in front of me. The spiritual energy was palpable, and I was humbled. I felt that if I had been struck dead at that moment I would have accepted it without question.

An infatuation with systemic change can bring with it a pernicious myopia which overlooks the necessity of love. The urge to alleviate suffering has its roots in the soil of compassion, which is to experience others’ pain as your own. The conditions in that Peruvian slum were beyond any individual’s power to change, and most would prefer to ignore its existence. I myself, like Scrooge, would have continued to turn a blind eye, perhaps donating here and there as the spirit moved me but never reckoning with the terrible reality. If I hadn’t watched that saintly woman hold a child of God in her arms I would have, like a Newtonian billiard ball, persisted forever in my self-involved inertia.

I have always found the notion of the ‘happy fault’ to be a perplexing one. The idea that the world is somehow better for its fall from grace because it occasioned God’s incarnation and redemption is truly shocking to me. I had always thought that it would surely have been preferable to simply maintain the garden of Eden and sidestep all the suffering. Yet, the paradoxical truth of the happy fault hit home that day in Peru. If the world were perfect, I would never have witnessed Rosmery, a woman of no great means herself, giving all she had to those whom no one else loved. I was even thankful for my own interior darkness that had drawn me to that place. In the gospels, Jesus endlessly exhorts his followers to shake the scales from their eyes and see the face of God in their neighbor. We can outsource systemic change, but not the love that makes it a worthy pursuit - we have to be shaken awake by that.