sorry.. this will be a long one.
I'm going to tell you a story of Mother Teresa that i found in the bood "irresistable revolution" (a very great book) Shane Clairborne went to work in Calcutta in the House of the Dying and he says this:
"Mother Teresa was one of thosepeople who sacrificed great privelage because seh encountered such great need. People often ask me what Mother Teresa was like. Sometimes it's like they wonder if she glowed in the dark or had a halo. She was short, wrinkled, and precious, maybe even a little ornery, like a beautiful wise old granny. But there is one thing i will never forget - her feet. Her feet were deformed. Each morning in Mass, I would stare at them. I wondered if she had contracted leprosy. But I wasn't going to ask, of course. 'Hey mother, whats wrong with your feet?' One day a sister said to us, 'Have you noticed her feet?' We nodded curious. She said, 'Her feet are deformed because we get just enough donated shoes for everyone, and Mother does not want anyone to get stuck with the worst pair, so she digs through and finds them. And years of doing that have deformed her feet.' Years of loving her neighbor as herself deformed her feet."
I think about Perfection. We are taught and know that we can never be perfect. That we will always sin, that we will always fall short. But, I think of people like Mother Teresa, And i don't really believe it. We are told to die to ourselves. To abandon our 'self' and be Christ-like figures. If we are truly Christ-like figures then i think we can be perfect. If we abandon all of our crap, our selfish desires, our need for success and to impress, if we are seperated from this world, then we leave a lot more room for Jesus. If we truly die to ourselves, then Jesus can truly live in us, and if Jesus can truly, ultimately live in us, then i do think we can be perfect. Just as Christ is perfect. Don't sell yourself short, don't cop-out, saying, well we can't be perfect so it doesn't matter that i sinned against God. I think God desires us to be perfect. Just as he is perfect. Just as i don't think there was much of mother Teresa left in her when her soul left this earth, but I think there was a whole lot of God, a whole lot of perfection.
1 comment:
I think that when we act in love then we are the closest we can get to perfection. I once though that to love wasn't perfect because it's so hard to love and people who do love so often screw up and hurt people. But I now see that I was confusing our inadequacy to achieve perfection with what is perfect. Now I don’t mean a romantic type of love, but instead a love that is self sacrificial where you give up your needs in order that others can meet that need. For it is when one becomes nothing that perfection is achieved. I also think that to be perfect you have to be consistently perfect, just as logic is perfect in its consistency, (one plus one is always two, there is no deviance in its rules), so must love be consistent. Perfection is to love at all times for all of time. And i think people like Mother Tereasa, ghandi and Jesus lived live like this
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