Hope Endures : Leaving Mother Teresa, Losing Faith, and Searching for Meaning

by Livermore, Colette

• ISBN13: 9781439109595
• ISBN10: 1439109591
• Copyright: 2008-12-02
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

The searing memoir of an extraordinary woman who served as a nun for eleven years in Mother Teresa's order,Hope Enduresis a compelling chronicle of idealistic determination, rigid discipline, and shattering disillusionment. In her life's journey from certainty to doubt, Colette Livermore enters the Missionaries of Charity order in 1973 with unwavering faith and total surrender of her will and intellect after seeing a documentary on the order's work in India. Only eighteen at the time, Livermore has been studying to enter medical school -- a lifelong goal -- but virtually overnight severs her many ties with family, friends, and the life she's known in beautiful, rural New South Wales in order to train as a sister to aid the poor. In the process, she also gives herself over to the order's unexpectedly severe, ascetic regime, which demands blind obedience and submission.Given the religious name Sister Tobit, Livermore serves in some of the poorest places in the world -- the garbage dump slums of Manila, Papua New Guinea, and Calcutta -- bringing hope and care to people who are desperately ill, hungry, abandoned, and even dying, and comforting whomever she can. Although she draws inspiration and strength from her humanitarian work, Livermore and other nuns risk their own physical health, as they are sent to dangerous areas while being unschooled in the languages and cultures, untrained in medical care, and sometimes unprotected by vaccines. Livermore herself succumbs to bouts of drug-resistant cerebral malaria that almost kill her and to a new strain of hepatitis. Over time she also begins to notice that the order's rigid insistence on unquestioning obedience harms the young sisters mentally, emotionally, and spiritually -- and she experiences a terrible inner struggle to find the right path for herself. As she tries to respond to the suffering around her, she often falls into an incomprehensible conflict between her vow to obey and her vow to serve, between religious strictures and the practice of compassion, between authority and personal conscience.Pressured to stay with the order by Mother Teresa and other superiors, as well as by the younger nuns, Livermore nonetheless decides to leave at age thirty and attain her medical degree, continuing to take health care and relief to impoverished people in remote areas -- the isolated aboriginal communities of the Outback and war-torn East Timor. Even as she serves others as a medical doctor, she continues in a crisis of faith that eventually leads her to become an agnostic.Hope Enduresis the eye-opening, deeply affecting story of a brave woman's search for meaning in a world that is rent with tragedies and contradictions. It is also an unflinching critique of any faith that insists on blind obedience. For true hope to endure, Dr. Livermore demonstrates, we must always strive to question, to face the hard truths, and to discover the courage to follow our convictions.

Table of Contents

Author's Note

Prologue

Path to Mother Teresa

The Novitiate

Becoming a Missionary of Charity

The Professed Life: Still in Australia

Bilums and Betel Nuts

The Garbage Mountain

Rickshaws and Reality

Return to Manila: Novice Mistress

Banished

The Back of Beyond

Transitions: Emerging from Mother Teresa's Shadow

Air Medical

East Timor: A Land Laid Waste

"I Will Give Saints to Mother Church"

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Prologue

When I was seventeen I watched a TV documentary about Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who was shown to respond to the needs of the poor and dying with a strong, practical love. The documentary was called Something Beautiful for God and it changed my life. I became determined to work with Mother Teresa.

Thirty years later, tears of confusion welled up from within me as I stood at the back of St. Peter's Square in Rome amid the throng of flag-waving, hymn-singing pilgrims, who had traveled there to witness the beatification of Mother Teresa. Some distance away, at the front of the crowd, a sea of blue-and-white habits swirled as the sisters of the Missionaries of Charity (MCs) gathered together to celebrate the holiness of their founder. I had been one of them for eleven years and wondered what had gone wrong.

The assembly cheered as a giant, gold-bordered tapestry depicting the "Saint of the Gutters" smiling, wrinkled, and clothed in her iconic sari was unfurled from above the entrance to the Basilica. Swept along by the crowd and the music, I was happy for Mother Teresa. All her life she strove to become a saint, and now, in 2003, six years after her death, she was on the verge of becoming one.

I had given all I had to live Mother Teresa's ideal of "serving Christ in the distressing disguise of the poor," but had left her order in 1984 disillusioned and far short of wholeness. My youthful beliefs and ideals had not withstood the realities of that life.

The square in front of the papal altar was a sea of festive color. A multitude of flags fluttered above the three hundred thousand people gathered to celebrate Mother Teresa's life: the Indian tricolor of saffron, green, and white; the black double-headed eagle of Albania flying in crimson skies; and the austere red and white flag of Poland were the most common. India and Kolkata (known as Calcutta until the Bengali pronunciation was reintroduced in 2001) had been Mother's home for sixty years, Albania the land of her birth, and Poland the country of her pope, who, now frail and inarticulate, struggled to beatify his friend before death also claimed him.

Chants, songs, and prayers rose in many languages -- Latin, Bengali, Arabic, Albanian, English, French...

"I thirst not for water, I thirst for love."

"It is Jesus who feels in himself the hunger of the poor, their thirst and their tears."

Mother Teresa's teachings have been seared into my spirit, and they cast both light and shadow over my life. In that square I decided to write my story. To have remained silent would have been dishonest.Copyright © 2008 by Colette Livermore

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Excerpted from Hope Endures: Leaving Mother Teresa, Losing Faith, and Searching for Meaning by Colette Livermore
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