Ecstasy of Mother Teresa: be careful who you vilify
Toronto: When I was a small boy I asked my mother why we didn’t go to church like people on television. She answered that she stopped going to church when she discovered that the Bible contradicted itself on practically every other page. After a brief pause, I answered “okay” and went back to watching Star Trek reruns as my Sunday devotion.
This indulgent preamble is just to say I grew up in a rabidly agnostic household (my dad would have been an atheist but he liked to hedge his bets). So, seeing nuns with their tits out or priests with devil horns or Christian icons dancing around in homo-erotic ecstasy has zero impact on me. In addition, having lived through 20 odd years of Catholic transgression on stage, screen and literature – including among other edifications, someone pissing on the cross and someone dressed as priest shoving a crucifix up his arse – it all just seems, well, a little stale and kind of easy. I wonder when this group of – I assume – lapsed Catholics (and if they aren’t lapsed I’m even more puzzled why they care) will finally escape the clutches of the Mother Church and shout to the world: “I don’t need to shock you anymore Daddy”.
It is therefore strange to see young – and clearly very talented – theatre artists such as Ecce Homo who are performing The Ecstasy of Mother Teresa as part of this year’s SummerWorks Festival, going after the same moth-eaten targets and using transgressive imagery that is centuries old (does anyone, for example, really believe that the exquisite homo-eroticism of so much Christian art was really unconscious on the part of the artists responsible? Are we really so sophisticated and they so dumb?).
I don’t have a particular take on Mother Teresa but if Christopher Hitchens doesn’t like her then that’s probably good enough for me. As near as I can make out from this production, her biggest crimes were that she was a fundamentalist and that, according to her personal diaries, she had doubts (imagine!). Now, I don’t know about you but finding out that a Catholic nun is a fundamentalist isn’t exactly a lightning bolt and – whatever the dogma of the Church on the issue – the struggle with doubt is core to the Christian experience. MT’s doubts are shown towards the end of the piece in an extended chat with Jesus. I’m not sure if this was writer/director Alastair Newton’s intention or not, but I found that this rather humanized the old bird. And doesn’t a private crisis of faith on the part of a fundamentalist sound like great material for a play?
Alas, the arguments against MT are not nuanced. She’s against abortion and this is bad not because of any argument provided by Newton but simply because it doesn’t conform to OUR preconceptions. When asked to comment on the Bhopal disaster, an old woman in service to a massive bureaucracy advocates submission to authority when clearly protest was the RIGHT answer (which is also an easy argument to make sitting in Canada over your Americano). Did MT see herself as a potential saint, I’m not sure but this production leads me to think that maybe she did. Ironically, that just makes her a more intriguing character. She probably was unhinged after all. Still, whatever her personal thoughts on the matter, the process of deification set in motion by the odious John Paul II – which is satirized in the piece – is a story external to MT. I assume this rush to sainthood was designed to give the sub-continent its very own shining light in the Catholic firmament. If this is the case, then it was more about a religious turf war than MT herself – but Ecstasy doesn’t bother to go there in its exploration.
But, hey, it’s a cabaret, right!
It is certainly in the musical numbers that the show delivers the goods. Unfortunately there were a few technical glitches during the performance I saw – and the music did drown out the singers quite frequently – but this is a talented and committed group of performers who do entertain well (when they’re not trying to “educate”). I just wish they had used this abundance of creativity in the pursuit of more interesting game: they could do something really special.
In his director’s notes, Newton makes a valid point about hero-worship, citing an example from his own life when his respect for the current Dalai Lama was lost because of the spiritual leader’s rather regressive attitude towards homosexuality. Now, I would be careful saying this in Vancouver, where the Dalai Lama is revered almost as much as the trees in Stanley Park – but is it really so surprising that a man who was selected for his post through a mystical process (which, if I understand the details correctly, is usually limited to a few select families) and who hails from a remote corner of the world may not always have views that align completely with ours? And does one lapse invalidate a whole philosophy? And doesn’t our collective deification of the man have as much to do with the terrible suffering of his homeland as any vague pronouncements he might make on peace? Newton is right, we should be careful over whom we revere as a hero. Equally, we should be careful in whom we select as villains and the manner in which we demonize them.
Was MT a bad person? Did she do more harm than good? Was she misguided or unstable? I have no idea and this show provided little insight.