St. Teresa of Calcutta
Born: August 26, 1910
Died: September 5, 1997
Feast Day: September 5
Patron of: Doubters
Mother Teresa owned a Lincoln Continental once- for about five minutes back in 1964. A gift of Pope Paul VI, who rode in it during his visit to India, it never had the honor of carrying its new owner, who raffled it off and made $98,000- many times the worth of the car-for her ministry. Mother Teresa is nothing if not practical.
When she left the Sisters of Loretto at the age of 38 to found her own order of sisters to serve India's poor, she had five rupees in her pocket, about 55 cents. Although she had no place to hold school for the children of the streets, she gathered them outdoors, drawing in the dirt with a stick as the children sat on the ground. After she demanded that city authorities give her some space to open a shelter for the dying, she was delighted to get two large rooms adjoining a temple of Kali, the fearsome Hindu goddess of death. The Hindu priests of Kali were not delighted, however, to have a Catholic nun on the premises, and they spied on her for weeks with the intent to do away with her if necessary. Finally, she won them over.
Although her name and her order are now known across the globe, Mother Teresa still prefers the "little way" of doing things, much like the saint whose name she took, Therese of Lisieux. She shuns complicated bookkeeping and organized appeals for money. "I do not agree with the big way of doing things, '' she says in Boniface Hanley's Ten Christians. "To us what matters is an individual. If we wait till we get a big operation, then we will be lost in the numbers."
As part of their respect for the poor, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity choose to live like the poor themselves. The film "Mother Teresa" shows her looking over a house being prepared for the nuns in San Francisco. A priest narrates, "I was gently informed that the springs could go, the mattresses could go, the carpeting…” A workman explains the workings of the building's hot water heater, and a nun lightly tells him, "I do not think we will be needing it."
"Many people don’t understand why we don't have a washing machine, why we don't go to cinema, '' says Mother Teresa in the film. "These are natural things, and there's nothing wrong with them. But we have chosen not to have them. For us to be able to understand the poor, we must know what is poverty."
When she began to open communities of sisters in Western nations, Mother Teresa found a new kind of poverty, one that in her opinion is harder to solve than India's. "You can find Calcutta all over the world
if you have eyes to see. People completely left alone-that is the greatest tragedy of the rich countries,” she says in the film. She challenged Harvard's graduates to fill the hunger around them: "maybe not the hunger for a piece of bread, but a terrible hunger for love." She asked them to have "the courage to recognize the poor you may have in your own family."
Although it may seem that one must do great things to give addresses at Harvard commencements and to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa insists, "We can do no great things only small things with great love."
Originally published in Salt magazine, ©Claretian Publications.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
