Darling (25 page)

The stable of Christ's birth was probably a cave that was used to pen sheep or goats or donkeys. The venerated site of the nativity in Bethlehem is the remnant of a rock cave. At the nether-end of the Christ narrative, six miles away, Jesus's broken body was laid on a shelf of rock in a cave, and it was there—in the darkness of that tomb—that light or voice or pulse or rush of wings found and raised him.

Since September 11, I have watched Muslims—Muslim men, I mean—at prayer with an admiration that is nearly unease. On Fridays, in the squares of the desert cities, men form themselves
into rows, facing in one direction—a carpet of faith, a militia, if need be. It is not the posture of humility that makes me uneasy. It is the performance of single-mindedness that defines me as a spectator.

I pulled this instruction from the Internet. This is the proper way of performing Salah:
Stand at attention, put the world behind you. Then, creating tunnel vision, bring your hands to your ears, palms forward, thumbs behind earlobes . . .

Prayer shawl, monk's hood, tunnel vision, the cloister of hands—the cave technique of prayer is common to all religions, all people.

The Prophet Muhammad hid from his enemies in a cave. In an hour's time, a spider sealed the mouth of the cave with a year's worth of web; the enemies of the Prophet passed the cave by.

It was in a dark cave that enlightenment came to the Prophet—that is the happy paradox of Islam. The gift of revelation was confusing and frightening to Muhammad; Muhammad described the imminence of revelation as like the approach of a concentric reverberation, as of a bell.
Read!
The Angel Gabriel commanded. The angel seized hold of the Prophet's body thoroughly, as though he would squeeze the Prophet's life from his mouth.
Read!
Muhammad pleaded with the angel; he could not read.
Read!
The Angel once more demanded.
Recite!

The first revelation left Muhammad fearing for his sanity. He sought his wife, Khadijah; he trembled in her presence; he asked that she cover him with a blanket, as if that were a cave where the angel could not find him. It was Khadijah's faith that gave the Prophet courage not to deny or mistrust the revelation that had come to him. Henceforth, when Muhammad recited the revelations to followers, he would wrap himself in a blanket.

•   •   •

On a dark and drizzly morning in spring, I am delighted to find the garden snails schooning the sidewalk in front of my house. I suppose it is slickness that calls them forth. Lovely creatures like Viking ships. I pluck one up.
Surely you were better off where you were.
What destiny summons you from the shelter of the underside of the leaf?
My impulse is to repatriate this pilgrim to the nasturtium patch in the park across the street—land of milk and honey (and probably slug bait). But I do not interfere. Despite the dangers, he is called. He has brought his cave with him. Even a snail must have a story.

As a very young woman, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu journeyed from Skopje, Macedonia, to Ireland, because she had decided to join the Sisters of Loretto, a teaching order of nuns. She took the name of Sister Mary Teresa, after her patron saint, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Sister Teresa was sent by her order to St. Mary's Bengali Medium School for girls in Calcutta. She arrived there on January 6, 1929. Sister Teresa professed her final vows on May 24, 1937, after which time she was called, according to the custom of India, Mother Teresa. She was known among her sisters for her readiness to work and for her unfailing good cheer.

In September of 1946, on a train journey to Darjeeling for a week's retreat of prayer and reflection, Mother Teresa was inspired with the idea that she must leave the Loretto convent and venture into the slums of Calcutta to care for the poor of India. The inspiration was in response to a voice that spoke to Mother Teresa within her solitude. Teresa's rendition of the voice, in her notes and letters, has the urgency of a lover's groan. Mother Teresa characterized the urgency of the voice as thirst:

My little one—come—come—carry me into the holes of the poor.—Come be My light—I cannot go alone—they don't know Me—so
they don't want Me. You come—go amongst them, carry Me with you into them.—How I long to enter their holes—their dark unhappy homes . . . You will suffer—suffer very much—but remember I am with you.—Even if the whole world rejects you—remember you are My own—and I am yours only. Fear not. It is I. . . .

Mother Teresa confessed to her spiritual adviser, Father Van Exem, that she had experienced a voice; she did not immediately identify the voice as that of Jesus or, specifically, as it was in her mind, the voice of Jesus thirsting on the cross. She confessed she had conceived a desire to establish an order of nuns to serve the poorest of the poor. She asked Father Van Exem to write to the bishop.

There must always be a bishop.

Even divine inspiration, if such it was, must find its way around a bishop. In Mother Teresa's case, the bishop was unmoved, unconvinced, unwilling. Mother Teresa knew no better than to wheedle and plead in her letters. But it came to pass, as it must, that divine inspiration—for such I believe it was—prevailed.

On August 8, 1948, Mother Teresa received permission from the Vatican Office of the Sacred Congregation for Religious to leave her order and to begin her new mission. On August 17, Mother Teresa walked through the gates of the Loretto convent, dressed in a cheap white linen sari trimmed in blue, and with five rupees knotted in a bandana. The gates closed behind her. She was thirty-eight years old; she was alone in vast India; she was a beggar.

If this were a film, I would pan backward at this point to show the solitary figure standing outside the gates, on a street, in a maze of streets, in the huge city smoldering in the mist of early sunlight, to show how thoroughly this woman entrusted herself to God.

•   •   •

The doors opened. Christopher Hitchens entered the elevator. He was smiling Felix-like; some thought or quarrel playing upon his lips. He smelled of liquor. And gossip. He carried some files under his arm; he had evidentially forgotten them, for as he lifted his arm to push a button on the elevator panel, all his papers fell to the floor. He bent over; I bent over to pick up his papers.

Mr. Hitchens was in New York for an international literary conference called “Faith and Reason,” as was I. I suspect the organizers of the conference trusted their title to convey “Faith as Opposed to Reason,” and they were not disappointed; the tenor of the discourse was irreligious. In another time it might have been assumed of such a gathering that writers would share, at least poetically, in the religious imaginations of their countries. During the three days I attended the conference, among the several hundred writers I met, only three confessed a religiosity that animated their fiction or non-. Indeed, so pervasive was atheism to the proceedings, a reporter from the
Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung,
who audited a panel discussion in which I took part, assumed I am and thus described me as a “non-believer.”

Christopher Hitchens, a British subject who several years ago converted to America, earned his screaming-eagle badge by his support of America's war in Iraq—defending Churchillian saber-lines in the sand. Before that endeavor, Hitchens became famous in America with an article he published in
Vanity Fair
attacking the holiest of cows, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. (A book on Mother Teresa followed:
The Missionary Position
.) Hitchens criticized Mother Teresa for accepting donations from persons whose fortunes were ill gotten; he criticized her for campaigning against abortion and birth control; he criticized her for gathering the poor to her death house, but not curing them; he mocked her for being
an ugly woman. That last bit was, rhetorically, a reversion to the English public school sneer.

I suppose he was charming. Everyone said so. I didn't like him—I mean his public persona; I didn't like it. Still, his was a brilliant career at a time when writers do not matter much in the public life of America. Opinions on Orwell and Wilde with a Washington dateline are uncommon. As the Iraq invasion proved an exercise in neocolonial overreach, Hitchens, tripping over the stars and stripes in which he had wrapped himself, published a catechism for atheists called
God Is Not Great
. That book successfully reconciled Hitchens to bloggers of Left-lane bandwidth like my brother.

So, there we were, the two of us, stooping, improbably picking up a peck of (I presume) prickly papers as the elevator shunted us heavenward.

Hitchens straightened up; he smiled, mumbled thanks. The elevator doors opened.

A few years later Hitchens chronicled his cancer in
Vanity Fair
. He finished two books. He never backed down. He died on the front page. He reposes now in
Vanity Fair
's Tomb of the Well-Known.

Mother Teresa, the animus of so much of Hitchens's black ink, lived, by her own testimony, and for many years, in “terrible darkness,” unable to discern the presence of God in her life. After Mother Teresa's death, a collection of her letters to various bishops, confessors, and superiors was published under the title
Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.

The most convincing aspect of Mother Teresa's story is the strangest: At the moment her request to establish a new order of nuns was granted by Rome and she was able, after years of
petitions, to realize what she believed was God's will for her—the same moment we saw her outside the convent gates—God withdrew consolation from Mother Teresa's life. Henceforward, she must live in poverty of spirit; she must live, as so many live, without hope. She could not feel the once-proximate God; she could no longer hear the voice of Jesus. She did not doubt the existence of God. All she knew was that God had withdrawn from her personally. Several years later, in the tiny chapel of her fledging order, Mother Teresa watched the other nuns at their prayers. She wrote, “I see them love God . . . and . . . am ‘just alone'—empty—excluded—just not wanted.”

Darkness became the banal motif of Mother Teresa's life during her years of international celebrity, of flashing bulbs and television lights, of crowds applauding her entrance, of hands reaching to touch the hem of her sari. In November 1958, Mother Teresa wrote of herself in dejection to Archbishop Périer: “Our Lord thought it better for me to be in the tunnel—so He is gone again—leaving me alone.”

So it was, also, with her namesake, the great small Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who, in the agony of her death from tuberculosis, felt herself continually “in the night” or “in an underground passage.” Gazing into the cloister garden, from her bed in the infirmary, Saint Thérèse noticed what she described as “a black hole” among the trees. “I am in a hole just like that, body and soul,” she said. “Ah! What darkness!” In the final passages of her autobiography, Saint Thérèse likened herself to a small bird in a hedge that wishes to fly to the sun but cannot; she is too small, too weak. Dark clouds cover the sun. The little bird can no longer see the sun or feel its warmth; the wind blows cold; nevertheless, the little bird believes the sun is still there, behind the clouds. She will wait.

From Washington, Christopher Hitchens remarked that the
private letters of Mother Teresa proved her to have been a hypocrite all along. “She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself.”

Atheism is wasted on the non-believer.

Until the end of her long life, Mother Teresa fed the poor; she gathered the sick and the dying; she cleaned and blessed the bodies of those whose deaths would not be mourned otherwise by anyone in the world.

Mother Teresa died on the night of September 5, 1997, in Calcutta. The electrical power failed in the convent in which she lay. The convent had two emergency generators, but they, too, failed. The breathing machine at her side was silent. She died in the dark.

•   •   •

There is a rustling, as of silks; there is a tinkling of ornaments and bells and tambourines behind the scrim of heaven; a whispering, too, and a fluttering, as of birds in the rafters, foxes, mice, fairies, parakeets, rain; there is a sound of the flexion of tall trees, as the host of heaven assembles on risers behind the great curtain—a turning of halos this way and that, halos inclining toward one another in collegial candor, like interested satellite dishes, and light shines from the parliament of faces as light from Pharos; lidless eyes these are, drawn with the black pencil of sorrow, the eyes of saints in icons, eyes that flamenco dancers also adopt to celebrate our passions as the victims of love on earth.

I am indebted to two editors at Viking Penguin, Kathryn Court and Ben George, for their editorial guidance, and for permitting me a literary freedom appropriate to an age when words literally mattered. John Jusino has been a special blessing—a copyeditor both sharp-eyed and sensitive, like no other I have ever worked with. Georges Borchardt, my excellent friend and literary agent, remains one of my best readers.

Besides being my intellectual conspirator and closest friend, Sandy Close, the managing editor of New America Media, financially supported the writing of this book.

Franz Schurmann and Alberto Huerta, S.J., were intellectual companions of mine for many years. Their influence on my thinking—evident throughout this book—survives their deaths.

I dedicate this book to my earliest teachers, young Irish women, members of the order of the Sisters of Mercy, who traversed an ocean and a continent to teach me. It was their lives and example remembered that has led me to the conclusion that the future of the Abrahamic religions will be determined by women, not men.

Jim Armistead, who, for more than thirty years, has completed my life, read and edited every page of this book with a rigor and compassion that define for me the meaning of love.