Christopher Hitchens vs. the Blessed Venerable Unassailable Saint Mātā-ji, aka Mother Teresa

15th December 2011

Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual ought to be someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them."

This morning I got further confirmation that Mother Teresa is not what the world would like us to believe she was. As I was reading that the Missionaries of Charity worldwide are praying for the soul of Christopher Hitchens, the touching sentiment arrived within seconds of news from India that her followers rejected my then partner’s offer to teach English in one of their schools because--his words a loose translation from the Hindi--“we don’t want fags.” Ah! homophobes. I was not surprised, but what a loss for the kids who might have really learned something from a very smart, educated guy, fluent in Hindi and English.

I’ve had history with the Missionaries here in San Francisco, though my personal contact has been no more than smiling at some of them on the bus.

Back in 1991, when I was running Maitri Hospice, I got a panicked call from the sister of a man who wound up in the Arc of Love, the Missionaries AIDS Hospice. The woman was completely outraged: her brother felt that he had been taken captive by religious fanatics who cut off his TV, made him say the rosary and beat the devil out of him with bunches of peacock feathers attached to the beds of recalcitrant patients.

I was never able to verify these practices because the Missionaries did not accept public funding and escaped the normal oversight required for hospice. So it’s only hearsay. I did speak with the guy who felt trapped there, and moved him up to the top of our waiting list. He moved to Peter Claver House and died before we had a bed.

After leaving Maitri, and dealing with my own PTSD, I went to work as the Assistant Director of The Spiritual Center for AIDS Services in Oakland, soon to become just “The Center” as the street folks, sex workers called us. The Center had been started by a few of the men Missionaries, and particularly one American guy with a deep sense of compassion and commitment to the poor. But he was also gay, came out, and left.

When Mātā-ji learned that a good portion of the infected sex industry workers still worked and that the majority of the injection drug users did not embrace total abstinence, she pulled her support. The Center was taken over by a ragtag group of outsider nuns, priests, gays, blacks, catholic lay people and Jews--Jacinta from the Sisters of the Holy Family was the main stay of the program, really our priest, who did the memorial services, hospital visits, and many hours of counseling; Anne who was a Franciscan ran a day care for kids with HIV and the children of women with HIV; an older Dominican woman, perhaps in her late 80’s, who sat at the door and greeted everyone warmly; a gay priest who did the reports to the CDC; a full cadre of catholic lay people from the suburbs who prepared meals everyday for about a hundred or so. The staff was rounded out with a few other gay men, a Latino Jew who was the social worker, case manager, a black lesbian who did drug and alcohol counseling, a huge handsome grounded brother who drove the van, getting folks to medical appointments.

So what’s my point other than my walk into the past to feel deep gratitude and love for a whole bunch of people who really did step up and gave of themselves during a terrible epidemic? When I wrote to foundations for money, the board chair, a good friend, told me to milk the Mother Teresa thing as much as possible. Which I did--until we heard through the grapevine that Mātā-ji was not going to be happy if she discovered that her name was associated with the project--that we’d bowed to the idols of case-management, drug counseling, and infectious disease control.

After all, her nuns had ripped out the carpet of the abandoned convent that they’d occupied on Church St. So of course they had the blessing of the Most-High on her hijacking social services to covertly turn the world to Jesus.

I throw my total support to Hitchens in the controversy, and will add some Buddhist prayer that his soul wind up No-Where, and not in a constricted heaven presided over by fanatics. It seems to me that there is more than enough evidence that “Mother Teresa makes no real effort at medical or social relief, and that her mission is religious and propagandistic and includes surreptitious baptism of unbelievers.”

And finally, from an interview with Christopher who makes my point very concisely:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_16_4.html

Free Inquiry: According to polls, Mother Teresa is the most respected woman in the world. Her name is a by-word for selfless dedication in the service of humanity. So why are you picking on this sainted old woman?

Christopher Hitchens: Partly because that impression is so widespread. But also because the sheer fact that this is considered unquestionable is a sign of what we are up against, namely the problem of credulity. One of the most salient examples of people's willingness to believe anything if it is garbed in the appearance of holiness is the uncritical acceptance of the idea of Mother Teresa as a saint by people who would normally be thinking - however lazily - in a secular or rational manner. In other words, in every sense it is an unexamined claim.

Driving in India as Spriritual Practice

Let’s begin our journey by taking a spin around an Indian traffic circle. For rigid westerners the driving here is totally insane; thinking that the roadside altar dedicated to Mother Teresa of Calcutta actually points to an Indian Catholic church is as misdirected as believing that the road crew in charge of installing shrines had a master plan. 

I wondered if following the blue dot on Google maps could help me trace the route that the Apostle Thomas took to India. After an interesting side trip into Nestorian Christianity, and questions about the exact nature of Jesus as both divine and human, I decided to return to the original focus of my exploration. 

Continuing my madcap trip around the Indian traffic circle, I wound up in Chennai where completed an informal pilgrimage to the three basilicas dedicated to one of the Apostles of Jesus. I visited the Basilica of Apostle Thomas, and felt that it pointed to something larger than just maintaining the prevailing view of what Christianity.

I’m going to try to construct a meditation about Thomas. Let me try to rip away some of the garbage I think surrounds Thomas, and point to why I think we might pay attention to him as we meander through India, or the world.

I will posit that we don’t know much about Thomas is because he was not a church guy. I think he actually might have been the smart ass geeky kid, maybe even an obnoxious asshole.  I found this brief article about the “Gospel of Thomas” by Elaine Pagels and a talk she delivered at Stanford 17 years ago, My friend Bonnie Johnson would have loved Pagels’ work, and you might appreciate how Thomas sides with the slaves who are unwillingly forced to disrupt things trying to get a high caste lady’s sedan chair to the front of the crowd. 

After Jesus was crucified, the Apostle James and a few others stayed in Jerusalem, preached about the risen Jesus and kept kosher. Paul went off trying to translate his take on radical conversion into Greek, adopting the first non-Jewish cultural idiom. Peter traveled to Rome where he, according to legend, set the course for the Teaching of Jesus to dominate the western world. 

But Thomas apparently went in the exact opposite direction; he struck out for India, alone or with maybe a few followers. The churches, the communities he established were not as cohesive as the ones established in the Greek and Roman worlds. Maybe my speculation that the Indians were just just not going to submit to conforming beliefs way back then, like right now, is basically correct, and any communities he established disappeared or were absorbed by local cults. India in the first years of the common era was religiously similar to what I experience today, mystics and wandering sadhus.

The most famous story about Thomas, and he is only mentioned a few times in the official record, is that he did not believe that Jesus had risen from the dead because he hadn’t seen him, that he would not believe until he actually placed his hands into the wounds of the torture that had killed Jesus. So Jesus appeared and held out his hands with the wounds still open. Thomas says, My Lord and my God, I believe. Then Jesus says:  "Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed [are] they that have not seen, and [yet] have believed.” Pagles says that this is the formal, or dominant church getting a recalcitrant believer to cast aside his or her doubts and enter into the fold. But something else might have been going on.

What if our Thomas was really just a stubborn guy who not only demanded a different kind of evidence when it came to belief, but insisted on an interpretation of the message of Jesus that included everyone, not just the proper ladies but also her slaves, the outcasts, even the homeless? And since the older Apostles who were in charge couldn't forbid him coming to the Lord’s table, they just sent him to India, and told stories about him, barring him from the proper European landholdings.

You don’t have to join me in India to upset the picnic table. That is not a rhetorical question.

The ride around India (or anywhere) is much better with a companion; I remember Ashish Gupta driving for the first time in India, in Goa where the traffic rules are slightly more recognizable for the likes of us. It is the main headquarters of the Jesuits in India and has been since about 1543 plus or minus so there is a bit more ingrained European sense of order in some things. But Ash still almost got us killed. My last longish trip here was twice to Amritsar where I got my Covid Vaccination. 12 hours round trip to a private hospital that would give foreigners a jab. It really did save my life, and I was scared to death on the highway across Punjab where drivers think nothing of driving against traffic on a two lane divided highway if it gets them closer to home. 

So I don't have any real question. It is more of a floating inquiry--how we open to the Spirit for more than just pinpointing a destination. My observation is that it's almost as if to thwart our good intentions, sometimes the movement of the Spirit is like barreling up the freeway in the wrong direction, or maybe to be accurate, facing that guy who needs to get back to his cows who's barreling towards us, and we know we really shouldn't trust his driving. 

And if you can't join me in India, (not a declaration or assessment but a kind of wild daydream--you, me and Rinku driving across the high Himalayan plains in Kashmir!), we still travel as spiritual companions and check out Saint Thomas. What a blessing.

Of course after all that travel--a post card!