On a wall of the weight room in my gym is a quote attributed to Mother Teresa that’s been sneaking up on me for the last few months. Many of you probably already know it:
People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered; forgive them anyway. / If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway. / If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true friends; succeed anyway. /If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway. / What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; build anyway. / If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; be happy anyway. / The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; do good anyway. / Give the world your best anyway. / You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God; / It was never between you and them anyway.
That sentiment will be quite unremarkable to the faith community. But I think there is meaning in there for the secular world as well, wisdom so profound it has found expression in any number of mundane ways: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Keep your eye on the prize. Stop and smell the roses. I was not put on this earth to live up to your expectations.
There’s nothing especially metaphysical in that.
In fact, the original version of the “Do it anyway” meditation doesn’t even mention God. Called “The Paradoxical Commandments,” it was written by Kent M. Keith, who later became president of Pacific Rim Christian University, in 1968 when he was a Harvard University sophomore.
The ending of the piece, as he wrote it, went: If you give the world the best you have, you may get kicked in the teeth, but give the world the best you have anyway.
The commandments went through many versions, and one of them ended up on the wall of a children’s home Mother Teresa ran in Calcutta. A 1995 book about her included that version, and it has been attributed to her ever since.
Keith was once asked about the Mother Teresa version, and he said he was troubled by how the ending had been changed:
“ . . . they can be read in a way that is inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus, the life of Mother Teresa, and the message of the Paradoxical Commandments themselves. The statement that ‘it was never between you and them anyway’ seems to justify giving up on, or ignoring, or discounting other people.
“That is what Jesus told us we should not do. Jesus said that there are two great commandments — to love God, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. So in the final analysis, it is between you and God, but it is also between you and ‘them.’”
The two versions of the endings provide quite a challenge, I think. We can’t let the opinions of others divert us from what we know should be most important to us. But unless we live on a desert island, we have to accommodate those people, make allowances for the way they perceive us.
I’ve negotiated that anxiety, on the edge of uncertainty, for most of my career. I became an opinion writer to pursue the truth as I saw it, despite the admonitions of so many that the truth was unknowable. Yet, if I do not believe I can convince others that, even if we’ll never know the ultimate truth, it’s worth seeking small glimpses of it, why I am I writing in the first place?
Mother Teresa had something to say about that, too.
A posthumously published book exploring some of her letters revealed a terrible darkness in her, a profound doubt about the self-sacrifice of her mission for the poor, even about the existence of God. “The silence and the emptiness is so great,” she wrote, “that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”
Many people were shocked to learn of Mother Teresa’s doubt. It just made me like her more.
Faith does not exist without doubt. The purpose of faith is not to deny doubt but to overcome it. Mother Teresa ignored the opinion of others and worked through the great emptiness inside her to alleviate profound suffering for the world’s most desperate.
Doubt can crush us or inspire us. That’s what I would write on the wall.
Leo Morris is a columnist for the Indiana Policy Review. Send comments to [email protected].
