Chapter Sixty-Three: Until It Hurts (~jinghan)

I heard a quote from Mother Theresa “The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.” I have to admit that I know very little else about this woman, but from this one line I felt like she was someone who saw a lot of truth and was someone to be respected.

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So I mentioned that I was going to bible studies each week. I haven’t written anything about it yet because at first I was filled with passion curiosity and interest, but I did not know what to write because it was merely interest and not really understanding.

Now, I am slowly coming to understand just how little I know of what religion truly is. We can regard ourselves as believers or non-believers. I, for one, regarded myself as someone who had a great respect for religion but and we sure that my middle-ground belief in spirituality that transgresses organised religion was good and would allow me to relate to people who belong to religion. But when you come in contact with people who really derive the essence of their life from their beliefs then you realise how pale and un-thought-through your own beliefs are.

By this, I refer to both Atheist, Theists, Agnostics and what ever other label you prefer. I am coming to realise that it is easy to say “yes, I believe in God(s)” and “no, I don’t believe in any God”. I am coming to realise that believing – and I mean believing in such a way that your view of the world will not be shaken by moral relativity, pretty pictures or colourful speech –  believing  “yes, I believe in God(s)” and “no, I don’t believe in any God” are both statements that require equal magnitude of spiritual conviction.

I read a novel called The Life Of Pi by Yan Martel. The main character was an interesting one who was a devout believer of christianity, hinduism and muslim tradition all at once. And at one point he says that he can respect Atheists because at least they have the conviction to believe something, but he cannot respect Agnostics because of their lack of conviction. I was offended at the time of my reading this, since I considered myself agnostic and I told myself “I believe something, I just choose to call it Agnostic because I do not want to meddle with the religious arguments that other people like to enage with so much.”

I do not think I truly understood what he meant until just now.

I still hold to my latter argument, that what I call myself Agnostic or otherwise is irrelevant. Where my flaw was was thinking that I believed something. People who are Christian, Muslim, Atheist etc. etc. probably also make this same mistake as my humble little agnostic self makes. We think we have conviction in our world view, but we do not realise how little we have thought about our opinions, and how fallible and malleable our world view is.

This is a dangerous thing. Because, our lives and our world views are slowly being defined by other people and mass media.

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I went to bible studies yesterday. And came across this speech by the aforementioned Mother Theresa:

I was surprised in the West to see so many young boys and girls given to drugs. And I tried to find out why. Why is it like that, when those in the West have so many more things than those in the East? And the answer was: “Because there is no one in the family to receive them.” Our children depend on us for everything – their health, their nutrition, their security, their coming to know and love God. For all of this, they look to us with trust, hope and expectation. But often father and mother are so busy they have no time for their children, or perhaps they are not even married or have given up on their marriage. So the children go to the streets and get involved in drugs or other things. We are talking of love of the child which is where love and peace must begin. These are the things that break peace.

But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.

And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even His life to love us. So, the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts.

By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems.

And, by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion.

Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.

Many people are very, very concerned with the children of India, with the children of Africa where quite a few die of hunger, and so on. Many people are also concerned about all the violence in this great country of the United States. These concerns are very good. But often these same people are not concerned with the millions who are being killed by the deliberate decision of their own mothers. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today – abortion which brings people to such blindness.

[This is just an excerpt if you want to read the full speech, in which she talks about people’s capacity to give until it hurts. Of how a starving family asked her to provide food for their neighbour and their neighbours first reaction is to share the food with the previous neighbour. She talks of the love she has seen in people who are lying in the gutter being eaten by worms. It is in fact a very powerful speech about much more than mere abortion: http://www.priestsforlife.org/brochures/mtspeech.html]

I went home. And as I was taking a shower and preparing for bed, I was very suddenly racked with tears. And I just cried and cried and cried. It felt as if a part of my world had been destroyed. Like my God had left me (for even though I was agnostic I had thought about the idea of God enough that I knew what having a God in your heart feels like) and that all my sense of truth had been destroyed.

I couldn’t work out why I was so miserable.

Was it because of what Mother Theresa said about abortion? Was it because all my life I have believed that it would be dangerous to make abortion illegal (I still feel this is true) and that it was good for society to provide this choice to people (I am not so sure about this anymore) and hearing Mother Theresa’s speech had challenged my opinion?

I cried myself to sleep and when I woke up I still felt like I had no truth. I felt like curling up in a ball and ignoring everything I had ever learnt about anything because every piece of knowledge was hurting me as it hit me because I didn’t know where I stood anymore.

Was it because of what Mother Theresa said about abortion? No. I realise now, it was because she said what she believed with such conviction and belief, with the sort of unwavering compassion that I had admired in the first quote of hers that I had come across: “The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.” It was because she said all this with her heart and I realised that all my life I have been filling my head with a lot of opinions but haven’t put enough effort into filling my heart with convictions (call them beliefs if you like) such that I can stand against other peoples convictions against my own.

I look around, and don’t we all make this mistake? We think we believe something because it seems attractive to hold a certain opinion? Sometimes its because it’s against what everyone else says, sometimes its because it’s what other people say. But in the end you have to take what you hear, and decide for yourself, and plant it in your heart in a way that not even the greatest moral dilemma can shake your sense of truth and justice.

I have been Agnostic all my life.

I have never been more Agnostic in my life.

I hope I come out of this a Believer. (Be that atheist or theist or agnostic with conviction, I don’t know yet.)