UniBrow

Here’s a Time magazine report on the revelation that the late Mother Teresa, who’s been put on a fast track to sainthood by the Vatican boys who decide these things, was tormented for the last several decades of her life by spiritual doubts that look an awful lot like simple unbelief. All this is according to letters M.T. wrote throughout her life, as quoted in a new book titled Come Be My Light. You can’t help feeling for the woman; she must have been completely miserable–and the light it casts both on her and the motivations for her good works (if that’s what they were; see Christopher Hitchens’s The Missionary Position for a very different point of view) must trouble her admirers. Or so I would think–but the spin is on. From the Time article:

Two very different Catholics predict that the book will be a landmark. The Rev. Matthew Lamb, chairman of the theology department at the conservative Ave Maria University in Florida, thinks Come Be My Light will eventually rank with St. Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain as an autobiography of spiritual ascent. Martin of America, a much more liberal institution, calls the book “a new ministry for Mother Teresa, a written ministry of her interior life,” and says, “It may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone.”

Some have also predictably drawn an analogy with St. John of the Cross–except that Mother Teresa seems never to have emerged from her dark night of the soul as St. John, St. Augustine, and Merton did to find the peace she sought. Hers seems a tale of unrelieved pain, anguish, and disillusionment and nothing at all like ”an autobiography of spiritual ascent.” See for yourself–and here are Hitchens’s and Sam Harris’s reactions. 

It’s with no intention to mock Caitlin Upton (Miss Teen South Carolina) that I embed the video of her now famously incoherent response to a pageant judge’s question. Far from it; I mostly feel bad for her, because it’s not her fault–or not primarily her fault–if this is the best she can do. All we can conclude for sure on the evidence of her immaculately unstocked mind and her jaw-dropping ineptitude with language is that the adults in her life have failed her criminally. Also, you can’t decently relish the spectacle of an 18-year-old kid becoming an object of worldwide ridicule over a thing like this, and a notably gleeful and slavering ridicule at that. I’m left wondering how representative of American teenagers Upton is, and thus how panicked I should be about the future of the Republic. My only regular exposure to teenagers these days comes courtesy of my 15-year-old daughter, who–it goes without saying–is nothing at all like Ms. Upton. In fact she’s almost certainly wittier, better-informed, and more articulate than–well, than you are. She’s seen the video on YouTube and tells me that Upton is fairly typical: that most of her peers are little better when required to stand and deliver in the classroom. And another lady of my acquaintance, not so long ago a high-school English teacher, agrees, alleging further that there is even the kernel of a decent idea somewhere in the rubble. (Just don’t ask me what it is.) I, meanwhile, cling to the scrap of a possibility that my daughter, who has a taste for hyperbole, is exaggerating some, and that in Ms. Upton–on whom be peace, and even if she is symptomatic of larger social, cultural, and educational calamities–we have something special. I would be pleased to have your thoughts. In the meantime, here’s Caitlin:

And here she is on the Today show a day or so later, “explaining”: