On January 11, 2016, I began a daily practice of writing a joke meditation of the day, called Cracked Pot Meditations. I was still recovering from the treatment of cancer, and I was having very challenging cognitive issues, so I chose just to put something simple and easy to write every day. Posting it to the blog allowed me to hold myself accountable. Some of those meditations were poorly written and unedited. I have gone back and begun editing these and adding an illustration, starting with the April 27th meditation. I hope you enjoy.
Meditation for August 30th
Mother Teresa Is A Horrible Person
Mother Teresa was canonized today as a saint in the Holy Roman Catholic Church. She spent her entire adult life in the service of Indian poverty. When someone wants to express how pure someone or something is, Mother Teresa might be named to express it: “That person is so good, they are a Mother Teresa.”
Did you know that Mother Teresa isn’t as great as the Catholic Church might want you to think? She is held in such high regard, but isn’t criticized.
She was pro-poverty
She believed that poverty, like wealth, good health, and a coveted parking spot, was a gift from God. She believed that God would bestow horrible famine and drought as gifts for His children to suffer through. Why would this make her an awful person? Because she wouldn’t use her resources to improve the lives of the poor. They were just given enough food, water, medical care, and shelter not to die, but were made to suffer the brutality of an impoverished life, even if they didn’t have to.
She kept any program away that might have helped people experiencing poverty to empower themselves or work their way out of this damaged life.
She kept diagnostic health away from these people and kept pain medicine away because suffering is a gift from the God she worshipped.
She is anti-women’s health.
Even as a woman herself, she kept women’s health away from the women because of her strict religious beliefs in pro-life politics, even at the detriment of many women under her care. Even rape was not a significant enough reason to perform an abortion. She would not allow any safe sex methods to be taught, even when lessening the number of children being born would ease the suffering of some. Because of the stigma of women’s health rights, some of the other practices that have nothing to do with fetal survival were kept away from these women. Women having choice, especially choices over their own bodies, menstrual cycles, and birth control, is the main cure for poverty.
She had strange bedfellows.
She visited the CIA-backed Contras, who were terrorizing the El Salvadoran and Nicaraguan countryside and were armed by Iran for the money that we sent to let the Iranian hostages go, and perhaps also funded their guerrilla war with cocaine money that came back from the United States, which in turn started the drug war and gang wars. She received 1.2 million dollars from Charles Keating of the Savings and Loan scandal, and she went to his trial and spoke on his behalf, even though he stole hundreds of millions of dollars from hard-working Americans.
She may have helped with and been okay with genocide.
She is half-Albanian, and in 1990, she visited the Mother Albania statue in the then-fractured and crumbling Yugoslavia. The statue is a nationalistic symbol of Albania, representing the expansion of Catholicism in the region. Both Albania and Croatia tried to be Catholic only states, and they tried to do this several times by ‘getting rid’ of non Catholics.
She stood up for the very companies that hurt the poor
After the Bhopal disaster in 1984, where over half a million Indians were exposed to methyl isocyanate and other terrible pesticide chemicals, she stood by the guilty company, Union Carbide (A Dow Chemical subsidiary).
I mean, c’mon, she was a friend of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan!
I don’t need to say a lot about this.
She had different standards for the rich and the poor
She was very adamantly against divorce, and even made a speech to the Irish about how bad it was in God’s eyes to remarry after being divorced in 1995. Still, she was fine with Princess Diana’s divorce from Prince Charles that same year.
That miracle is questionable.
A person who was said to be suffering from a cancerous cyst said she saw a picture of Mother Teresa, and the cyst was gone. A doctor who was treating her said that it was, in fact, not a cancerous cyst, but a cyst caused by tuberculosis, and she was taking medicine for it for a year.
Faith
She would act a Catholic even when she felt deep down that there was no God at all. It’s one thing to be nice to others for no reason at all or needing a reward after you die, but there is another thing to keep people in suffering because you are religious over having faith. This is where religion is so hurtful. One might see where religion is wrong, but because religion is the relationship with God and not any personal relationship, people get fucked.