Johnson - An unquenchable thirst: a memoir

Copyright 2011 by Mary Johnson
Reading group guide copyright 2013 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Mary.
An unquenchable thirst : following Mother Teresa in search of love, service, and an authentic life / Mary Johnson.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-986-4
1. Johnson, Mary. 2. NunsUnited StatesBiography. 3. NunsItaly Biography. 4. Missionaries of Charity. I. Title.
BX4705.J6723A3 2011
271.97dc22

[B] 2010038858

www.spiegelandgrau.com

Cover design: Abby Weintraub
Cover photograph: Jacqueline Veissid/Getty Images

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I chose these stories from many. So that the reader may enter more seamlessly into my experience, Ive reconstructed conversations; dialogue is not meant as a direct quotation. No one who appears in these pages expected that I would one day recount conversations and events that they assumed would remain private. Out of respect for them, Ive sometimes disguised names and identities. Missionaries of Charity who in these pages held elected or appointed office appear under their real names, as do others who played largely public roles.

All people hunger for love,
whether they are Christian or Muslim, Hindu or atheist.

M OTHER T ERESA OF C ALCUTTA

I came that they may have life, and have it to the full.

J ESUS OF N AZARETH

I was in New York on my way to meet a literary agent when Mother Teresas stubborn brown eyes stopped me at a newsstand on West Twenty-third Street. I handed five dollars to the guy in the kiosk. If Id still believed in signs, this would have been a big one.

Mother stared out from the cover of Time magazine with nearly the identical expression her face had borne the last time wed spoken, a little over ten years earlier. I saw the disappointment in her eyes. Mother would have no more approved of the meeting I was about to have than she would have approved of the cover of that magazine, which promised to reveal her Secret Life. Mothers secrets werent the type normally associated with magazine coversno adulterous affairs, no shady financial profiteering. Mothers were secrets of the soul.

Though Mother Teresa was one of the most admired women in the world, she always kept her inner life close. She discouraged questions about her original inspiration or about her prayer life, usually by simply smiling in response. She instructed us to keep quiet, too, especially about events in the convent. When I was handed two sheets of paper to write my first home letter as an aspirant in the Missionaries of Charity, the sister in charge issued detailed instructions: Write an uplifting letter. Dont tell your family of your difficulties, and never mention what happens in the community. Urge your people to pray the rosary every night. My letters home were so boring I was sometimes ashamed.

The fine print on the cover of Time read, Newly published letters reveal a beloved icons 50-year crisis of faith. Mother Teresas spiritual crisis was not news to me. Several years earlier, Id read a report of the dark night Mother had described in letters to her spiritual directors. Some sisters had been shocked to imagine that the sweet certainty wed heard in Mothers prayers had been the result of stubborn faith, not ecstatic vision. During my days as a sister, nothing had wrapped me more surely in the presence of God than Mothers steady voice intoning, In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit as she traced the cross over her sari.

Yet I hadnt been too surprised to learn that Mother sometimes wondered where God was, even whether God was out there at all. Desolation in prayer was not uncommon, especially when one lived and served among the desperately poor, slept less than five hours a night, as Mother did, and deliberately deprived oneself of human intimacy as we all did, or were supposed to do. Mothers feelings of desolation distressed her all the more because they contrasted so dramatically with the consolation shed known when she heard Jesus ask her to found a community of sisters to care for the poorest of the poor. Mother eventually came to see the feelings of abandonment as a gift, a way of sharing Jesus passion. She often referred to herself as the spouse of Jesus Crucified and to suffering as the kiss of Jesus.

On my way to the literary agency that day, I crossed West Twenty-fifth Street and glanced again at the magazine in my hand. As I looked at Mothers frown, I remembered another Time cover, some thirty years earlier.

I had first met Mother on the cover of Time in 1975, an image that rendered Mother in watercolor under the headline Living Saints. When Id spotted the magazine in my southeast Texas high school library, Id dropped into a chair to read it, skipping French class, drawn by the magnetic call of the nuns soulful eyes. I read of the desperate needs of the poor dying on the streets, of babies abandoned in dustbins. The photo that impressed me most showed a young Indian nun peacefully bent over a man whose legs, nowhere thicker than a baseball bat, were bound in rags. The mans ribs formed prominent ridges on his bare chest, while his eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, were riveted on the face of the nun cutting his nails. I felt as if the world had suddenly opened itself and revealed my place in it. Since my preparation for First Communion, Id known that loving others was lifes most important calling. That conviction had grown through the years as Id experienced loves power, and the pain of its lack, for myself. There in the library, with a seventeen-year-olds clarity, I knew that I was meant to follow this nun in Calcutta who loved those most in need of it.

That week I wrote my first letter to her, addressing it simply Mother Teresa, Missionaries of Charity, Calcutta, India, begging her to take me as one of her own sisters. Eighteen months later, in a convent in the South Bronx, over my parents objections, Mother pinned a crucifix to my blouse, saying, Receive the symbol of your Crucified Spouse. Carry His light and His love into the homes of the poor everywhere you go. I did just that for twenty years.

I tucked the latest issue of Time under my arm and climbed the agencys front steps. I uttered no prayer. Through years of wrestling with my own dark nights, Id replaced marriage to God with a different sort of integrity. I reached to ring the bell, ready to tell my secrets to the agent and to anyone else who would listen. I would have told them to Mother if I could. Mother Teresa would have called my secrets blasphemy, but I call them freedom. I even call them love.

T he cardboard box on the rack above my bus seat held what was left of my possessions. In a few hours they would belong to God, and so would I.