Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, & the Media

I watched the ABC coverage of the funeral. “Princess Diana — The Final Farewell,” the television screen announced, as if to say I was about to watch the last episode of a long made-for-TV mini-series. The most photographed woman in the world was dead, at 36, at the height of her beauty and influence, but after her fairy-tale life had taken a distinctly modern turn. This woman deftly co-operated in giving the old-fashioned institution of royalty the brittle gloss of media celebrity. If Diana had not existed, the media would have had to invent her. And, in a way, they did.

We compose the image again in our minds: a virgin teenager (daughter of an apparently dysfunctional family with royal ties) and a nanny and teacher’s aide with hopes of being a princess, who wins her dream. At 19 she is borne by carriage to her new position, and by some readings performs wonderfully. An heir to the throne and another healthy boy later, she grows into adulthood before the hungry cameras of an intrusive press and an overly curious public. She learns well the social graces and the philanthropic expressions of noblesse oblige. And she earns a reputation for a kind of unprecedented intimacy — an odd kind of love affair — with her people. But the subplot overtakes the fairy tale: a loveless marriage, rumors of indiscretion and disrespect within the royal family, infidelity on one side that eventually becomes mutual, an eating disorder, and struggles with self-esteem. Then a divorce. And extended vacations with various boyfriends. And, then, her body is carried to its grave.

Our People magazine princess is gone. The piles upon piles of flowers (40 million dollars worth in Britain alone), the endless television programs, and queues of the devoted waiting in line to sign a book of condolences, and all the tired eyes — including my own — forced open early in the morning to watch the funeral live: They seem to say that the moment of Diana’s death is somehow ours, strangely ours, particularly among us who are near her in age, and most especially among women of her generation. Her life and her death evoked extravagant feelings of empathy, desire, admiration. They gave us a kind of release, an opportunity to mourn the twists and turns of life and to remember our own dreams. But they didn’t really change us much, did they?

Eventually the tellings and retellings of her story wound down, and perhaps we tired of the editorial rehashing of her fate. The cue enters the text here to shift focus to Mother Teresa, with history having made these two women odd partners in a week of worldwide mourning. An eerie juxtaposition, at best. Did Mother Teresa’s death, coming hard on the heels of Diana’s, perhaps invite us to sober up?

I would have liked my transition here to be more effortless. I wish I could draw upon a clever rhetorical strategy to make a smooth modulation from Diana Spencer to Mother Teresa. I wish I could reinforce the ties that coincidence has woven between these two women. The networks and newspapers certainly did, digging up that picture of Diana bending down to shake Mother’s hand. We were reminded, with convenient exaggeration, that Diana and Mother Teresa were “friends” — a typical media manipulation, as if they were two peas in a pod.

One of the first rules of rhetoric is that the eulogies called for at funerals should gather together rather than separate. So one might consider the links between these deaths. One could describe Diana’s charitable work and what the media has called her willingness to touch the common person, and one could associate that with the humble service Mother Teresa has given the poor in Calcutta and throughout the world. One could compare the list of causes — from AIDS to breast cancer to land-mine extraction — boosted by Diana with the 300 homes for the dying, destitute, and unwanted in 105 countries that Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity have opened since 1950. One could acknowledge the unusual vulnerability Diana showed in revealing her personal struggles and failings, and call that an example of a courageous step toward the humility to which Mother Teresa spent her ministry calling each one of us. One could speak of the importance of caring for others that we learn from these two lives, and end with a love feast of good feeling. But something in my spirit resists such a direct and seamless linkage.

I must admit that I was troubled by the media’s canonization of Diana. I mean no dishonor to Diana when I resist a facile association with Mother Teresa. But I am loath to interpret sainthood through the eyes of celebrity, or to equate the leading of a rather good life with intimacy with God. In a way, Diana may be our cousin, but for us who worship a risen Lord, Teresa, born Agnes Bojaxhiu, is our sister — and our mother. It is tempting to interpret the call of God on Agnes Bojaxhiu’s life as though it were that rare call to which few of us are subject, and to proffer Diana’s life as the one that we can emulate. But when you look beneath the surface, you find that the opposite is true.

Can any one of us tomorrow come anywhere near the life of Princess Di? Were her struggles really ours? Stripped of her title or not, Diana led a life that was royal. And the essence of royalty is the essence we reproduce in all celebrities: distance, difference, unapproachability, even when they are allowed, or forced, to condescend to be with hoi polloi. Even through her vulnerability and apparent personableness, she remained royal. Her condescension was never, quite, an incarnation — and that may be part of why she has been so fascinating to the world. We felt she was one of us, but if we thought about it we knew she wasn’t.

Now, I must admit that there is also a kind of celebrity attending Mother Teresa. There’s no doubt that were it not for the accident of media attention, this nun would not have accomplished the quantity of work she did. Like many other missionaries, she and her order would have worked faithfully, lovingly, locally, and in obscurity. But a closer look at her life can’t help but reveal that even while accepting the benefit that celebrity gave her ministry, she continually refused to allow herself the distance such celebrity sought to impose. Celebrity did not change the quality of her work, did not change her. Celebrity was the Princess’s work. In contrast to Diana, we feel Teresa is different from us, but we Christians know she is one of us.

Mother believed, and continually asserted, that her calling to seek to redeem the neediest ones is the same call any believer can hear. Indeed, it comes in ways fashioned by God for any person who will hear and in a way that fits his own circumstances, but it is a call that comes irrespective of our birthright or privilege.

With both humility and tenacity, Mother Teresa continually called on believing people to participate in her life. That doesn’t mean going to Calcutta, unless one is called to. That doesn’t mean donning the one-dollar sari that she and her sisters have worn before both princes and paupers, though in one way or another it might call one to that. But it does mean that participating in her life is both as simple and as complicated as finding one’s purpose in life within the compassion, love, and truth of Christ: learning to be led by God; learning to see need and the dignity of those who need; learning to give and receive gifts of love with no strings attached; learning to forgive, forgive, and forgive again, and not from weakness or fear but from the wonderful strength that the reconciling spirit of God can give; learning to respect life in deep and simple ways, including the life of the unborn; learning the peace that purity and singleness of heart can give.

Hear her own words:

Without our suffering, our work would just be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the Redemption. Jesus wanted to help by sharing our life, our loneliness, our agony, our death…. We are allowed to do the same: all the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty, but their spiritual destitution, must be redeemed, and we must share it, for only by being with them can we redeem them, that is, by bringing God into their lives and bringing them to God.

“We are at his disposal,” Mother Teresa said about Jesus to a group of monks. “If he wants you to be sick in bed, if he wants you to proclaim his word in the street, if he wants you to clean the toilets all day, that’s all right, everything is all right. We must say, ‘I belong to you. You can do whatever you like.’ And this, Brothers, is our strength and this is the joy of the Lord.”

I must acknowledge the discomfort I feel when confronted by these words. Don’t they seem to us educated folk to display an almost quaint devotion to an overly pious kind of Christian faith? And what about her insistence that so many of the values upon which we’ve based our lives — like our cherished convictions about personal freedom, making money, and protecting institutions — are lies? I could explain away her innocence as the naiveté born from lack of theological sophistication, or as the vestige of an outdated Catholicism that my fellow Protestants and I should tolerate, with a wink or two, because of the good she has done. And by explaining it away, I could stay comfortably above her — sort of royal in her presence, bending down to shake her hand — and satisfy myself by praising her social usefulness.

And I would reveal my shame. For she is the one who will walk up to you and me, listen to us while we’re thinking we know more than she, kiss us on the cheek, and simply bid us to join her in finding joy in guileless love. There are some things she and her movement said and did that I and most of my friends are not ready to say or do. But that doesn’t mean we know more. She may have known some things about which we don’t yet have a clue.

This tiny, soft-spoken woman embodied Christian tradition and showed the Holy Spirit through love in action. She shifted our attention away from producing results and toward making or rescuing lives. She believed what she said, and obeyed what she prayed. Who among us can question her when our own hearts are not yet so pure?

Hear what Robert Inchausti has written about the message of Mother Teresa’s example:

In our often-mad dash for wealth and self-improvement we sometimes forget that it is possible to be too rich, to have too many choices and too many resources; they can crowd out the essential and obscure that higher calling that alone can provide inner sustenance…. We may be simply too wealthy and too well-informed to confront ourselves. There are far too many books to read, projects to accomplish, meditation techniques to master, for us to embrace the wisdom found only on the far side of grief, poverty, absence, and pain. And yet we must move through this if we are to escape the barrenness of one-dimensional lives.

Some have heard this message and are already living it. Others, and I am among them, are still trying to clear their heads enough to begin. And still others, even Christians, may think this is all very strange, as though from an incomprehensible plane of reality. But we must start from wherever we are, with little more than willingness, if that is all we can give. We are to learn, bit by bit, to allow ourselves to be led. Mother was already 36, Diana’s age, when she first heard what she was to describe as her “call within a call” to serve and live among the poor. And to our blessing, she did not think of herself as too old, too weak, too strong, too simple, too smart, too rich, or too poor to respond. She just responded.

And now she, perhaps the world’s most misunderstood woman, is dead, at 87. When the news spread through Calcutta that Friday, poor people, sick people, and homeless people, as well as others whom she had touched, began to come to the house where she lay. It was already late, past when the buses ran, and so they came on foot. The police tried to keep them away, but they kept coming. Eventually, the police relented and, following custom by putting the women in one line and the men in another, allowed the people to pass by the convent and give their condolences. Meanwhile more and more flowers honoring Princess Di were piling up in front of British embassies all over the world, and lines wound around the block outside the Wrigley Building here in Chicago, which houses the British Consulate. The lines weren’t as long at the Indian Consulate in Chicago, but “intense love does not measure,” as Mother Teresa once said, “it just gives.”