Mother Teresa wasn’t one for pedicures. In fact, her feet were so gnarled and hard-skinned they looked more like the roots belonging to a knobby old tree than the feet of a saintly, beautiful woman. In his book The Irresistible Revolution, activist Shane Claiborne writes when he served alongside her in Calcutta, he couldn’t stop staring.
But it wasn’t Mother Teresa’s lack of pedicures that made her feet so markedly deformed, Claiborne explains:
When donations came in (which she and the sisters relied on for everything), she would dig through the shoes and choose the worst pair for herself so that others could walk comfortably. Years of doing this had deteriorated her feet and left calloused toes overlapping each other.
After reading this story for the first time in high school, I glanced at my own feet and felt the guilt of my self-indulgent, First World ways. I decided I wanted to live and love sacrificially, serving others’ interests before my own. I saw Mother Teresa’s choice as inspiring and praiseworthy, and wanted to imitate her way of living in my own life.
And I got really good at it.
I organized a car wash to raise money for relief aid in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. I helped lead World Vision’s 30 Hour Famine events at school. I gathered my classmates together to serve lunches to the homeless downtown. Basically, if anything had the tag “charity,” “fundraiser,” or “volunteer,” I was there.
My obsessive altruism carried over to career planning, when I decided I wanted to work for NGOs advocating for human rights in developing countries. While some of my classmates tried desperately to avoid the continual stream of questions from well-meaning adults asking, “So what are you doing after you graduate?” I relished the opportunity to tell people about my big, selfless life plans.
Until one day, when my response to another of these questions suddenly revealed to me how much pride was infused in my humility. I realized every reply to those questions began with, “Well, I want to…” and ended with smug satisfaction, knowing I was truly the most wonderful, charitable person in the world.
I saw myself as being a good enough person to do something about these issues, while everyone else was either lazy or heartless; either way, I was better than them. I was doing incredibly selfless acts in an incredibly selfish way.
When I started to realize this truth, I began to wonder if true selflessness was just a myth. As self-interested human beings, can we really put others’ interests before our own? Can we ever escape feeling good about ourselves when we do selfless acts?
The same problem is illustrated in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. After coming to the full realization of Mr. Hyde’s hideously selfish nature, Dr. Jekyll resolves to never again become Hyde. He tries to counter Hyde’s selfishness with acts of selflessness, and for a while he does a good job. Until one afternoon, when Jekyll is sitting on a park bench, contemplating his success.
“I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me… and left me faint; and then as in its turn the faintness subsided, I began to be aware of a change… I was once more Edward Hyde.”
Jekyll’s focus on being selfless turned him back into a fully prideful, selfish character.
You can’t suddenly cultivate selflessness, in the same way you can’t will yourself to be more humble — if you dwell on your success, you’ll become proud and selfish.
Even though I was truly passionate about humanitarian causes, my participation in car wash fundraisers and 30 Hour Famines was really an attempt to smother my selfishness in selfless acts. I was looking for my identity in an overdone humanitarian performance instead of simply finding it in Jesus.
Jesus taught us that everything comes down to these two things: loving God and loving others. When we truly love God, we can’t help but love people. From there, I’ve learned selflessness will naturally emerge.
Flickr photo (cc) by DFID – UK Department for International Development
