Resolution #3

I remember seeing televisions in the cafeteria of Bellarmine Preparatory School only once during my 3-year, 5-day attendance. Mother Theresa had died. All around me those carefully groomed girls with their Gap jeans, their lightly glossed lips and their barely budding breasts (some naturally, some magically inflated over the Summer months) forced tears from their vacant eyes. I don’t know if they truly cried, or, if they truly cried, what they truly cried for. But the seed of the saintly selfless archetype loomed large.

I grew up in a home where you apologized without thinking. And it wasn’t that you weren’t sorry. It’s just that you were truly sorry for everything. For breathing, for moving, for thinking, for any motion that interfered with another’s existence.

Selflessness always seemed like the ultimate goal. To need was selfish. To want was selfish. To resent was selfish. Practice compassion. Practice patience. Practice empathy. Everything you feel is selfish, you’re thinking of yourself, think how others must feel!

The thing is, I’ve never met a truly selfless person. Mostly the people I meet who talk about selflessness are terribly selfish messes really just labeling other people as selfish. The most selfless people I know have needs and boundaries. They need something to build all that strength on.

What were we crying for, Mother Theresa? What did she really think, that Mother Theresa? What did she feel? Was she sorry?