Before she died (and several times after), Mother Theresa of Calcutta sat down with me to offer career advice.
“Cascading Style Sheets will always be important,” she’d say. “Do you think Our Lord would have been as effective delivering The Sermon on the Mount from the back of a fancy carriage draped in jewels? The content is aided by the presentation.”
Sometimes we’d find a coffeeshop in some shantytown and she’d look over my resume.
“Keep your references updated,” she warned, tapping my ivory CV to test its weight, frowning that I’d included Christopher Hitchens. “Brief them about the types of jobs you’re applying for. If they know you from one field, they may be poor references for another.”
Occasionally we would pass through crowds of supplicants with running, open sores.
“And wear a sensible shirt.”
We would share a whiteboard in rooms full of nuns and the poor. She’d correct my PHP and my grammar. She’d allow herself an occasional rant about animated GIFs, and then she’d hurry off to do a little penance by drinking water straight from the Ganges (“That tastes awful lol,” she’d text from her ancient phone. “Vomiting”). I would help out, lifting 50-lb. drums of chcken stock for the day’s soup.
“Make sure to write down your volunteer work,” she’d say, “if anything to cover that gap when you got laid off.”
Mother Theresa has been beatified and still requires a second miracle before she can be recognized as a saint.
“You get a job, THAT will be a miracle,” she wrote in an email. “Lol.”
