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

by Colette Livermore

Overview

The searing memoir of an extraordinary woman who served as a nun for eleven years in Mother Teresa's order, Hope Endures is a compelling chronicle of idealistic determination, rigid discipline, and shattering disillusionment. InÊher life's journey from certainty to doubt, Colette Livermore enters the Missionaries of Charity order in 1973 with unwavering faith and total surrender ofÊher 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 beginsÊto 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 thatÊeventually leads her to become an agnostic.

Hope Endures is 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439109595
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	12/02/2008
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Colette Livermore was born in Mittagong, Australia, in 1954. At 17, she had been accepted to medical school but chose to join Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity instead, after seeing a film about Mother's work with the poor.  As a nun she was called Sister Tobit and was with the order for 11 years, serving in India, Hong Kong, Timor, and the poor outback of Australia. After she left the order in 1983, at age 30, Livermore went back to medical school and ultimately attained her medical degree from the University of Queensland. Since then, she has worked in Australia's Northern Territory, where the despair facing the aboriginal and other people in remote communities affected her deeply, in Aileu, East Timor, where she worked with local staff at a rural clinic to overcome tuberculosis, malnutrition, and infectious disease, and again in Australia, where she currently lives.

Read an Excerpt

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

Table of Contents

Author's Note

Prologue

CHAPTER ONE Path to Mother Teresa

CHAPTER TWO The Novitiate

CHAPTER THREE Becoming a Missionary of Charity

CHAPTER FOUR The Professed Life: Still in Australia

CHAPTER FIVE Bilums and Betel Nuts

CHAPTER SIX The Garbage Mountain

CHAPTER SEVEN Rickshaws and Reality

CHAPTER EIGHT Return to Manila: Novice Mistress

CHAPTER NINE Banished

CHAPTER TEN The Back of Beyond

CHAPTER ELEVEN Transitions: Emerging from Mother Teresa's Shadow

CHAPTER TWELVE Air Medical

CHAPTER THIRTEEN East Timor: A Land Laid Waste

CHAPTER FOURTEEN "I Will Give Saints to Mother Church"

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Livermore, a general practitioner living in Australia, discusses her time in the Missionaries of Charity (MCs), a religious group formed by Mother Teresa. Livermore had been accepted to study medicine when, as a Catholic schoolgirl, she watched a documentary on Mother Teresa's work and decided to change the course of her life to become a nun and serve the world's poor and suffering. What she didn't expect was the austere lifestyle and rigid regime of the MCs. Questions she asked about apparent inconsistencies in religious doctrines were brushed aside with the insistence that all that was required of an MC sister was blind faith, complete obedience, and a total sacrifice of self. After 11 years in the order, Livermore's inability to reconcile the contradictions of her commitment to the principles of the MCs and her original commitment to serve the poor led her to abandon the life of a nun, return to her native country, and become a doctor. Her autobiography serves as a deliberate critique of any religion or organization that requires such unquestioning submission from its members. Even after her break from the MCs, her crisis of faith continued, leading her to agnosticism, though she continues to aid the underserved by bringing medical care to East Timor and Australia's Aboriginal communities. This poignant, controversial, well-written volume is very highly recommended for all libraries with an interest in personal memoirs, modern history, women's studies, and religious studies.
—Crystal Goldman

Library Journal

"Hope Endures is one of the most fascinating accounts of the spiritual journey I have ever read. It emphasizes the importance of a direct, unmediated approach to the Source, the Absolute, God, however named. The Christian version of Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, this book is an affirmation for those to whom blind obedience and submission to established creeds do not ring true, and who hunger for something more authentic than dogma. This ringing endorsement of spiritual freedom is more important than ever, in view of the threat posed by religious fundamentalism around the world." — Larry Dossey, M.D., author of Healing Words and Reinventing Medicine

"Hope Endures is compelling. Livermore perfectly captures our yearning to want life to fit our spiritual ideals, only to learn it never will. But we cannot help but continue to walk the path. This book is superb." — Caroline Myss, author of Entering the Castle, Invisible Acts of Power, and Anatomy of the Spirit

"This penetrating book unveils the blindness that lurks in many spiritual organizations and traditions, and confronts an issue that still corrupts contemporary religious organizations — naïve belief used to justify ignorance, obedience, and neglect rather than to galvanize social change, improve lives, and foster spiritual connections. As her compelling story unfolds, Ms. Livermore slowly realizes that she and her fellow nuns are being taught to 'spiritualize' their own emotional abuse, and she can no longer submit to it. Like all good stories, this one involves a strong, public personality — Mother Teresa — and the clash between extremes of innocence and authority. Reading this clear-eyed book is a good first step toward dealing with the shadow side of spirituality and to opening a door to a brighter, more mature way of being in the world." — Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul

From the Publisher