…was that my friend tried to have a screening of a Mother Teresa biography. So we made up posters and put them up in the lifts here at school. On Thursday morning, we wake up and find new posters in the lift–not right next to ours, but conspicuously on the opposite side–with a Christopher Hitchens quote (from The Missionary Position) and a link to Hitchens’ documentary on Mother Teresa, Hell’s Angel.
We were upset. Someone else who we knew quite well had asked another friend if she did not feel that us Christians had an obligation to hold a student dialogue session to promote ‘critical thinking’ about the issue, and to screen Hitchens alongside whatever it was they screened. She said, ‘No,’ and her interlocutor said, ‘That’s too bad.’
Lots of stuff went wrong and there are probably fifty different things weird, like the idea that representation is the be-all, end-all of things, or the idea that we should have had a student dialogue among people who almost universally have never met Mother Teresa nor done any work with the sisters nor had any other first-hand experience of whatever it was we were supposed to ‘discuss’, or the idea that a contrary guy must be Speaking Truth to Power… and so on. But anyway. We were all sniffly and out-of-sorts, late for class, but then my friend J said something really wonderful.
We know that we were doing a good thing. The devil hates anything good, even if no one turned up, and tries to spoil it all, and tries to do so through anyone. Maybe here he is, or maybe it’s just people being fallen as usual, just as we are ourselves. We just pray and trust God and do our best and offer Him our sufferings–and keep the faith. Gladly suffer humiliation for Him, as the martyrs did as exemplars for us.
She is very often a beacon of sense.
(My completely unreligious professor’s comment on Hitchens’ titles: ‘Well, there’s an example of thinking of the title before you’ve really got anything to go on.’)
the lexical form 