 Mother Teresa’s Paper Dolls © 1996 Ginger Henry Geyer glazed porcelain with underglaze pencil 14 pieces, installed app. 10” x 8” x 3” Mother Teresa was addressing some folks at an American civic club and a guy asked her, “How do you stand it when you have to touch some truly despicable person? You know, the real scum of society?” She signed and replied, “I look deeply into their eyes and say to myself, ‘My, Jesus, what an interesting disguise you’re wearing today.’” Whether the story is accurate or not, it seems true to the usual accounts of Mother Teresa. Some criticize her saintliness, demanding that she did nothing to really improve the unjust conditions of poverty. She was just charitable. Maybe the truth is that her gift of charity makes some of us feel guilty. Regardless, the civic club story prompted an imaginary set of paper dolls for Mother Teresa, made of porcelain. It dovetailed with a sermon I heard by Chuck Merrill, who said that “the problem is that God is always incognito, has a costume on. We never get a clean look at the divine face. Jesus says when we look in the face of a neighbor in need, we see God. Sometimes it’s just a movement in the bush...” He continued, “Scripture gives no formula for who deserves hospitality--it is all left up to us. The great sin of the Church is the criteria we set up which lets us rationalize and keep our hospitality to ourselves. We need to find the face of God in the lowly, in the one who has the wrong ideas...if we can’t find it in these how will we recognize it when God shows his face to us??” The paper dolls are of a few persecuted stereotypes--stereotypes being one way we lessen humanity. Each of these, despicable to some other segment of society, can hang onto the Jesus figure. I had to ask myself: where is my prejudice, what character can I not tolerate? So I had to make a skin-head, a neo-Nazi type. I must admit I have trouble hanging this paper doll onto Jesus. It is not my fault that the Nazi has a broken arm... Jesus's call to compassion isn’t to sentimentalize the downtrodden, to scapegoat the unworthy, or to turn victims into mere symbols. He makes this call, this demand perfectly clear by phrasing it both frontwards and backwards: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me.” and “Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” (Matthew 25: 40, 45) Are we cut out for it? |