Student Voices

 

Student Voices: Hope Embodied

Drawing of Mother Teresa-1I am writing this on Tuesday, September 22nd, while holding vigil for William LeCroy. In a little less than an hour, he will become the sixth person executed by the federal government this year. By the time you read this, Christopher Vialva will have become the seventh.

Tomorrow morning, Justice Ginsburg’s casket will arrive at the Supreme Court.

The official COVID-19 death toll in the United States reached 200,000 this morning.

It can be a bit awkward for a Catholic to admit she’s feeling hopeless. Because we’re an Easter people. Hope is a virtue. Our hope is not of this world. All of this is true.

But there can be a delicate balance between hoping for God to carry us through and abdicating our responsibility to carry others. We can slide between the idea that our hope is not of this world and the idea that it’s somehow okay for the world to be in a hopeless state.

So I do not find it comforting, at times like these, to be reminded that hope is our Christian obligation.

What I find comforting is Mother Teresa.

From the time she began her ministry in Calcutta until her death, Mother Teresa experienced a profound and ongoing crisis of faith. She had begun her work because she believed in a big picture. And then her vision of that big picture disappeared.

The big picture is blurry these days.

“I am told God loves me, and yet the reality of the darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul,” Mother Teresa wrote. “Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call?”

And then she went out and cared for the dying, every single day, working and doing through forty years of existential doubt.

That is hope embodied. And that kind of embodied hope—a hope you do, even when you do not feel—is the hope on which I rely.

Mother Teresa tells me to do the things that make sense even when nothing else does. When the big picture is blurry, do the biggest thing that’s clear. And that’s often a very small thing, indeed.

In that spirit of Mother Teresa, I’d like to share a benediction from Woodie White, a Methodist bishop, that has carried me further than I can say. I hope it does the same for you:

“And now, may the Lord torment you.

May the Lord keep before you the faces of the hungry, the lonely, the rejected and the despised.

May the Lord afflict you with pain for the hurt, the wounded, the oppressed, the abused, the victims of violence.

May God grant you with agony, with a burning thirst for justice and righteousness.

May the Lord give you courage and strength and compassion to make ours a better world, to make your community a better community, to make your church a better church.

May you do your best to make it so, and after you have done your best—

May God grant you peace.”

Jacqui Oesterblad GRD '22

Jacqui Oesterblad is pursuing her graduate degree at Yale Law School.