Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa
"You can do something I can’t do. I can do something you can’t do. Together let us do something beautiful to God."
She took literally Jesus’ words: Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me. From this arose the conviction that in touching the bodies of the poor, she and her sisters were actually touching the body of Christ. It is this mystical vision of Christ crying out for love in the broken bodies of the poor.
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje, Albania, in 1910. In 1928, at the age of eighteen, she entered the novitiate of the Loreto Sisters in Dublin, Ireland. Three months later, set sail for India. She would spend the rest of her life there. Sr. Teresa taught in a Catholic school run by the order in Calcutta. The mission of the Loreto Sisters focused on tackling the problems of poverty through education. In 1937, she pronounced her perpetual vows. A few years later, Mother Teresa made a private vow, with the consent of her spiritual director, to give God anything he may ask and not to refuse him anything.
On September 10, 1946, Mother Teresa began a long, dusty train ride to Darjeeling. It was on this train ride that Mother Teresa experienced what she described as a “call within a call” She heard a voice in her prayer, “Wouldst thou not help?” “Wouldst thou refuse to do this for me?” MT wrote to Mother General and later to Pope Pius XII, for permission to leave the order. In April, 1948, MT request had been granted.
Thus began her life of total service, familiar to believers and nonbelievers alike. She founded Nirmal Hriday, “Place of the Immaculate heart” housed in a building that had originally served as a pilgrims’ rest home Hindus visiting the Kali temple next door. Despite her charitable work and her welcoming of people from all faiths, there was noticeable hostility directed toward MT. People threw stones at them and threatened them, and one man tried to Kill MT. But their hostility was met with love and, more service.
The rest of her life would be characterized by nonstop activity and compassionate service to the poor. As mother Teresa and her order became increasingly well know, honours and accolades were showered on her by governments, universities, religious organizations, and charitable groups around the world.
Some of her quotes, “Today it is very fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately it is very unfashionable to talk with them.” In the developed countries there is a poverty of intimacy, a poverty of spirit, of loneliness, a lack of love. There is no greater sickness in the world than that one. God does not demand that I be successful. God demands that I be faithful. True holiness consists in doing God’s will with a smile.
Like other saints she also experienced an “interior darkness”, “In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing.” What remains clear is that MT struggled intensely in her spiritual life. And this makes what she accomplished even more extraordinary and her example more meaningful.
Throughout her life, MT regularly set aside her personal and physical needs, embracing the hardships that came with her ministry as a way of identifying with the hardships of Jesus.
In 1997, she died at the age of eighty seven. Her body was carried through the streets of Calcutta by the same gun carriage that had borne the bodies of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, with tens of thousands of Indians lining the route. At her death she was almost universally hailed as a “living saint”
Just six years later – record time – she was declared “Blessed Teresa of Calcutta” by one of her many admirers, Pope John Paul II
Mother Teresa’s prayer, “The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is Love, The fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.”