For believers it must seem somehow sacrilegious to speak of Mother Teresa and Christopher Hitchens in the same breath. One was a lover, the other, as far as I can make out, a hater. If you want to learn more about the bible and it’s references, then consider taking a bible certificate online course.
Mother Teresa needs no introduction, she being the icon of unselfish love for Christians and nonbelievers alike. The little Albanian nun spent almost her whole life bathing the wounds of the discarded dying in Calcutta.
Hitchens is the bellicose nonbeliever who has made it his goal to bring down Mother Teresa, a Nobel Prize recipient and candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church. He is one of the regulars trotted out by the media when it’s time to bash Christianity. He is perhaps most noted for his attack on Mother Teresa in a book titled The Missionary Position. That title pretty much sums up who Christopher Hitchens is and how he thinks.
All of this and more came to my attention weeks ago at Borders in Brighton when I stumbled across Hitchens and Mother Teresa in a series of coincidences that puzzle me to this day. I took a look at Time magazine’s special edition celebrating the 100th anniversary of Mother Teresa’s birth. Hitchens is mentioned in it as the “self-appointed nemesis” of that saintly lady. I had more than once watched him on TV reveling in his role as a political and religious attack dog. He was entertaining if not persuasive. I always wondered what it was about Mother Teresa that he found so irritating. Or was it just a way to get attention and make money?
Replacing the Mother Teresa magazine, I opened the pages of Vanity Fair magazine, where I learned that Hitchens is a columnist, although apparently not for much longer. I was saddened to discover that he has cancer of the esophagus, and, if I understand him correctly, he is unlikely to survive it. Although I consider some of his writings vile, I always found it impossible to wish him any ill.
In Vanity Fair he wrote about what it’s like to undergo chemo treatment. His picture attached to the column showed the effects of the chemo. He said he would talk in his next column about the people who have written him to tell him he is in their prayers.
Needless to say, I was curious about how he would treat the news that many Christians were praying for him. I did not expect much, and I was not disappointed. The next issue of Vanity Fair came out a week or so later and carried his column on what he thought of prayer, the afterlife, and religious people in general.
Christopher is determined to end his days defiant to the last breath. In his latest column he fastens on a nasty and unchristian internet letter that says he is getting what he deserves. He pays less attention to the many Christians who pray for him to get well and wish him Godspeed in the afterlife (which he doesn’t believe in). He does at least seem to acknowledge their good hearts, but he announces ahead of time that any reports of his deathbed conversion will be false. Not for him a Lord Brideshead last-gasp reconciliation with the Almighty.
But on that first occasion, when I learned of his illness upon looking at the magazine, another coincidence occurred. Walking through the store, I glanced at one of the shelves and saw a book written by Peter Hitchens, titled The Rage against God. Of course I wondered if the two were related. It turned out that they are brothers.
Peter is a British-born journalist. At age 15, during his Cambridge boarding school days, he proudly burned his Bible. But somewhere in his adult years he lost his faith in an atheistic progression of humanity toward a state of perfection. He concluded that the dazzling goodies the world promises are really illusions based on lies.
Peter came back to Christianity, and now has penned a book in which he seeks to explain the ferocity of the current attacks on faith and the belief in God. The book is also a reply to his brother’s tome, God is not great. At one point he talks of the public debate he and his brother had over religion and how they almost came to blows, leading him to vow never to publicly debate with Christopher again. Apparently the brothers do meet in private on amiable terms. In light of Christopher’s illness, one trusts so.
Like so many British intellectuals and writers, both of the brothers were attracted to Communism and the promise of a new world. The tradition goes back to people like Malcolm Muggeridge and other British educated elite, some of whom, like Kim Philby, the infamous Third Man, betrayed their country by spying for the Soviet Union.
Interestingly, Muggeridge was the writer who “discovered” Mother Teresa. He helped make her known worldwide. This is a man who went to the Soviet Union as a journalist convinced that it was the beginning of heaven on earth. He and his wife tossed their passports overboard on the way. Muggeridge, unlike some journalists, quickly became disillusioned with Soviet Communism after seeing it firsthand.
Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent, was sending back false dispatches describing the idyllic life lived by the Russian people, but Muggeridge told it like it was: peasants deliberately starved to death to make way for the collectivization of farms; dissidents executed in Lubyanka prison or sent to Siberia; religion suppressed in the name of atheistic freedom from superstition.
For his troubles Muggeridge was sent packing home, his version of the truth ridiculed by Lenin’s “useful idiots.” Still, he went on to a successful media career, and, like Peter, eventually turned to Christianity when atheism provided no answers.
Strange how on that one day all three names—Peter, Christopher, and Teresa—caught my attention. Weeks later I find myself wondering what it all means. I have no ready answer.
I think I will pray for Christopher. It may not mean anything to him, but it does to me, and to Someone else.
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