By Mr. Hitchens’s logic, only a cow should be truly qualified to run a dairy farm. Still, the notion that it is generally unwise to make pronouncements in areas that lie outside one’s expertise remains a sound principle. I only wish that Mr. Hitchens himself would abide by it.
In the very first chapter of his pamphlet, before fully launching into his diatribe against Mother Teresa, Mr. Hitchens makes a fantastic reference to an episode in the life of Jesus Christ, which exposes an ignorance that is so staggering, it simply takes your breath away. In this new Gospel-according-to-Christopher, Jesus himself once broke a costly box of unguent on his own feet. (Presumably in homage to himself — another instance of his notorious sense of self-importance?) At this point, the innocent reader is positively hit by a sudden fit of dizziness and rubs his eyes in disbelief.
How should I describe this feeling? Imagine a new book, a critical essay on — let us say — some fundamental aspects of Western cultural history; the book in question is attracting much attention; it is controversial and has already provoked earnest debate. Yet, on the first page, you come across this statement: the Trojan horse was a famous stratagem invented by Joan of Arc at the siege of Orléans.
Mr. Hitchens goes on to blame Mother Teresa for not doing what she never intended to do in the first instance; and he finds it scandalous that she is doing precisely what she originally vowed to do. Yet she had stated her purpose with blinding clarity: “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”
The problem is: he takes it for granted that Mother Teresa should be some sort of philanthropist, whose aim in life is to distribute financial grants among the needy and to provide them with efficient social services and up-to-date medical care.
Mother Teresa is not a philanthropist. She is a Christian. A philanthropist is a person who has a fondness for anthropoids. A Christian is a person who loves Christ. Nay, this latter definition is still too bold (by its standard I myself would stand in great danger of being found abysmally wanting); the best definition was probably the one provided 1,900 years ago by a cool observer — a sceptical Roman bureaucrat, an official from the colonial service reporting to his superiors in Rome on the latest antics of some troublesome Jewish natives under his administration: these people were squabbling “about a dead man called Jesus, whom Paul declares to be alive.”
This weird belief that a dead man called Jesus is still alive should command all the deeds and all the thoughts of a Christian. It is the key to understanding Mother Teresa’s vocation. Surely it is not mere prejudice if we distrust music criticism written by the deaf, or art criticism written by the blind; and to assess literary works, you need to be literate. In the realm of the spirit, there is such a thing as spiritual literacy.
Make no mistake here: I am not claiming some sort of monopoly over enlightenment that should be the exclusive preserve of Christians — far from it. Spiritual illiterates are to be found everywhere; actually, we form quite a crowd every Sunday in church!
Since Mr. Hitchens found the Christianity of Mother Teresa mystifying and abhorrent, would he have more luck with a Hindu saint? I happen to have encountered one and was struck by the fact that his message was quite similar, though put in a different language. I met him in the pages of an obscure and long-forgotten book, dating back to the beginning of this century. The passage is long, but deserves to be quoted in full as I believe it to be directly relevant to the very heart of our discussion. The narrator, D.G. Mukerji, returning home to India after a long stay in the United States, describes his visit to the sage:
On the floor were seated two young ladies, an old gentleman, their father, and a young monk in yellow, crouching before the Master, as though bowed by his sanctity. The Holy One bade me be seated.
“I am glad,” he said, “that thy feet pain thee. That will start the easing of the pain in thy soul.”… He turned to the others. “What was I talking about?… I remember: the hospital which is a punishment for doing good.”
“How could that be, my Lord?” questioned the old gentleman.
“Even thou, an old man, dost ask me that question also? Well — it all began one day about eleven years ago. I, who was meditating with a brother disciple under a big tree, decided to stop meditating and care for a man who had fallen sick by the roadside. He was a lean moneylender from Marwar and he had come to Benares to make a rich gift to some temple in order to have his way to Heaven paved in solid gold. Poor fellow, he did not know that all the flowery good deeds done to catch the eye of God will in the end become the bitter fruits of desire.
“I ministered to him until he recovered and could return to Marwar, to lend more money, I suppose. But the rascal did me an evil turn. He spread the news all along the way that if people fell sick near my big tree, I took care of them. So very soon, two more people came and fell sick at the pre-arranged place. What else could my brother disciple and I do, but care for them? Hardly had we cured them when we were pelted with more sick folk. It was a blinding shower. I saw in it all a terrible snare: beyond doubt, I felt, if I went on tending the sick, by and by I would lose sight of God.
“Pity can be a ghastly entanglement to those who do not discriminate, and there I stood, with a wall of sick men between me and God. I said to myself: ‘Like Hanuman, the monkey, leap over them and fling thyself upon the Infinite.’ But somehow I could not leap and I felt lame. Just at that juncture, a lay disciple of mine came to see me: he recognised my predicament and, good soul that he was, he at once got hold of a doctor and an architect and set to work to build the hospital. Very strange though it seems, other illusions co-operated with that good man to help him — the moneylender, the first fellow I cured, sent an additional load of gold and built the day clinic. In six years the place was a solid home of delusion where men put their soul-evolution back by doing good. Shiva, Shiva!”
“But, Master, I notice that your own disciples, boys and young girls, work there?” I put in my question.
“Yes, like these two young ladies here, other young people come to me to serve God. Well, youth suffers from a delusion that it can do good. But I have remedied that somewhat; I let them take care of the sick as long as their outlook on God remains vivid and untarnished, but the moment any of my disciples show signs of being caught in the routine of good works — like the scavenger’s cart that follows the routine of removing dirt every morning — I send that person off to our retreat in the Himalayas, there to meditate and purify his soul. When he regains his God-outlook to the fullest, if he wishes, I let him return to the hospital. Beware, beware: good can choke up a soul as much as evil.”
“But if someone does not do it, how will good be done?” questioned the old gentleman in a voice full of perplexity.
“Live so,” replied the Master in a voice suddenly stern, “live so that by the sanctity of thy life all good will be performed involuntarily.”
Mother Teresa has occasionally hobnobbed with the wealthy, the powerful and the corrupt. In Mr. Hitchens’s eyes this is a cause for deepest scandal. In his indignation and obsessive denunciations, I wonder if he is not the victim of a common syndrome, which was best diagnosed in the ancient parable of “The Crow and the Phoenix.”
The phoenix is a rare and delicate bird, most fastidious in all its habits: it roosts only on the tallest branches of one certain species of tree, the lofty catalpa; it drinks nothing but the purest dewdrops; it eats nothing but the inner petals of precious orchids. Once, as the phoenix was circling above the forest at dusk, preparing to alight for the night on a tall catalpa, down below in the mud a crow that was busy gobbling up a rotten dead rat saw the shadow of the noble bird and lifting up its head screeched angrily at him: “Don’t you dare steal my dinner!”