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A review by rachelgertrude
An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service, and an Authentic Life by Mary Johnson
3.0
I'm finding it hard to write a review on this book, since my feelings on it are very mixed. I always appreciate an honestly-told experience, and I think Mary Johnson's account of life as a Missionary of Charity is nothing if not honest. Many times, her candidly expressed questions resonated deeply with me, and many times, the conclusions she came to pushed my buttons and led me to more questions.
I stumbled on this book looking for a devotional related to Mother Teresa, and quickly saw this cover and made a snap judgment that this was that type of book (it definitely was not). However, it did bring up some questions:
1) Mother Teresa and the superiors in the book often stressed the importance of obedience to one's superiors as being something the sisters should receive as coming from the will of God, but Mary begins to challenge this point of view as she sees that sometimes her superiors are motivated by power, greed, or politics. Is it better to trust blindly that God is able and does work perfectly through the hands of imperfect people, or better to trust our own instincts and discernment of a situation - or is it a combination of both? I can see both how obedience in our faith could be very good for us spiritually (helping break down the walls of our pride, helping us to see that we are small in connection to God's plans, helping demolish our desires to be great and to be saviors of our own instead of "a pencil in the hand of God" as Mother Teresa put it) but also damaging, when the person in a position of power is able to continue to do evil things without questioning. We often choose one way of obedience over another, either by taking the extreme of trusting no one but our inner voice, or what we believe Scripture or God might be telling us, or taking the extreme of trusting authority without question. Somewhere in the middle seems the best path, but how do we find that middle?
2) Mary showed aspects of Mother Teresa's humanity that, at times, caused her to see her as a saint, and at other times, made her question Mother Teresa's approach. Examples - when Mother Teresa mentions as a joke that the sisters should die as soon as possible because the Pope was canonizing "everybody," and Mary thought this revealed a desire on Mother's part, not just for holiness, but for recognized holiness. But at other times, Mary marveled at Mother Teresa's tirelessness, her endless thirst to love and serve the poor. I wondered if this more intimate view of Mother Teresa might damage how she appears to me, as a modern saint. It didn't. Another reviewer mentioned that it was surprising to see that, contrary to her vision of Mother Teresa walking the streets of Calcutta every day, she was often on planes, going back and forth to the convents of her order and visiting the MCs. I found myself marveling on how much Mother Teresa packed into her life, how many places she went, and how hard she worked. Mary also wrote that, in part because of Mother Teresa's faithfulness to the pope and to the teachings of the church, she thought Mother Teresa was allowing herself to be held back from the highest holiness, because she wanted to be approved of by the church and church leaders. That seemed to me a very shallow and unlikely take on Mother Theresa's motives for respecting and promoting the teachings of the Catholic faith.
3) The other big theme that emerged for me is a confusion about sexuality experienced by many of the people in religious life. Many of the sisters appeared to mistrust it and themselves. The alternatives I saw presented in the book were to completely suppress one's sexuality by not allowing any physical touch at all, and acting out sexually - neither of which strikes me as the answer for how to live a chaste, celibate life in a healthy way. I disliked Mary's apparent conclusion that she had to act sexually outside of the vows she had made in order to feel whole, healthy, and loved, and saw it more as a reflection of her calling to the married life than as a blanket statement that celibacy is unliveable.
4) A final theme that came to mind while reading this was the idealized version of a vision of life, versus its lived reality. I've read a lot about Mother Teresa's "call within a call," her spiritual vision, her meditations on the thirst of Jesus, and how to serve the poor. To hear her thoughts and words is a beautiful, life changing experience. Learning about the Missionaries of Charity through Mary's eyes, I was struck by her struggle between the attraction to that ideal, and to the vision, and the experience of living the daily realities of religious life, which often fell short: sisters could be catty and small-minded, they might be gossipy, a lot of time had to be spent on administrative duties or folding clothes, not just working directly with the poor out on the streets. It seems to me now that one of the hardest things in living out your vocation in life is keeping the vision always in your heart, while also being faithful to the less beautiful daily realities of that call. I think we often are drawn either to disillusionment and bitterness, losing the vision altogether, because we get bogged down in the drudgery and the details, or we can't connect with or commit adequately to the reality before us because it doesn't match how great the vision appeared in our heads.
Altogether, I'm glad I read this book because of how much it made me think!
I stumbled on this book looking for a devotional related to Mother Teresa, and quickly saw this cover and made a snap judgment that this was that type of book (it definitely was not). However, it did bring up some questions:
1) Mother Teresa and the superiors in the book often stressed the importance of obedience to one's superiors as being something the sisters should receive as coming from the will of God, but Mary begins to challenge this point of view as she sees that sometimes her superiors are motivated by power, greed, or politics. Is it better to trust blindly that God is able and does work perfectly through the hands of imperfect people, or better to trust our own instincts and discernment of a situation - or is it a combination of both? I can see both how obedience in our faith could be very good for us spiritually (helping break down the walls of our pride, helping us to see that we are small in connection to God's plans, helping demolish our desires to be great and to be saviors of our own instead of "a pencil in the hand of God" as Mother Teresa put it) but also damaging, when the person in a position of power is able to continue to do evil things without questioning. We often choose one way of obedience over another, either by taking the extreme of trusting no one but our inner voice, or what we believe Scripture or God might be telling us, or taking the extreme of trusting authority without question. Somewhere in the middle seems the best path, but how do we find that middle?
2) Mary showed aspects of Mother Teresa's humanity that, at times, caused her to see her as a saint, and at other times, made her question Mother Teresa's approach. Examples - when Mother Teresa mentions as a joke that the sisters should die as soon as possible because the Pope was canonizing "everybody," and Mary thought this revealed a desire on Mother's part, not just for holiness, but for recognized holiness. But at other times, Mary marveled at Mother Teresa's tirelessness, her endless thirst to love and serve the poor. I wondered if this more intimate view of Mother Teresa might damage how she appears to me, as a modern saint. It didn't. Another reviewer mentioned that it was surprising to see that, contrary to her vision of Mother Teresa walking the streets of Calcutta every day, she was often on planes, going back and forth to the convents of her order and visiting the MCs. I found myself marveling on how much Mother Teresa packed into her life, how many places she went, and how hard she worked. Mary also wrote that, in part because of Mother Teresa's faithfulness to the pope and to the teachings of the church, she thought Mother Teresa was allowing herself to be held back from the highest holiness, because she wanted to be approved of by the church and church leaders. That seemed to me a very shallow and unlikely take on Mother Theresa's motives for respecting and promoting the teachings of the Catholic faith.
3) The other big theme that emerged for me is a confusion about sexuality experienced by many of the people in religious life. Many of the sisters appeared to mistrust it and themselves. The alternatives I saw presented in the book were to completely suppress one's sexuality by not allowing any physical touch at all, and acting out sexually - neither of which strikes me as the answer for how to live a chaste, celibate life in a healthy way. I disliked Mary's apparent conclusion that she had to act sexually outside of the vows she had made in order to feel whole, healthy, and loved, and saw it more as a reflection of her calling to the married life than as a blanket statement that celibacy is unliveable.
4) A final theme that came to mind while reading this was the idealized version of a vision of life, versus its lived reality. I've read a lot about Mother Teresa's "call within a call," her spiritual vision, her meditations on the thirst of Jesus, and how to serve the poor. To hear her thoughts and words is a beautiful, life changing experience. Learning about the Missionaries of Charity through Mary's eyes, I was struck by her struggle between the attraction to that ideal, and to the vision, and the experience of living the daily realities of religious life, which often fell short: sisters could be catty and small-minded, they might be gossipy, a lot of time had to be spent on administrative duties or folding clothes, not just working directly with the poor out on the streets. It seems to me now that one of the hardest things in living out your vocation in life is keeping the vision always in your heart, while also being faithful to the less beautiful daily realities of that call. I think we often are drawn either to disillusionment and bitterness, losing the vision altogether, because we get bogged down in the drudgery and the details, or we can't connect with or commit adequately to the reality before us because it doesn't match how great the vision appeared in our heads.
Altogether, I'm glad I read this book because of how much it made me think!