Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta
Founder of the Missionaries of Charity
(1910-1997)
by Robert Ellsberg

“If I ever become a Saint – I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will continually be absent from Heaven – to lit the light of those in darkness on earth,” wrote Mother Teresa to one of her advisors.  From almost the moment that she began the great work of compassion in Calcutta for which she is known and admired throughout the world, she experienced an inner desolation that seemed the polar opposite of her peaceful, even radiantly joyful, public demeanor.   The acute spiritual loneliness she suffered was compounded by feelings of hypocrisy as she wondered how she could go on smiling and speaking as if she was in love with God when God seemed a million miles away:  “The silence and emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”  Within this framework of her humanity, we see that the intention to love regardless of feelings – even amidst tormenting self-doubt – is its own form of holiness.  Mother Teresa, a great beacon of compassion, becomes also someone to whom we want to extend compassion and, in so doing, embrace our own contradictions.  
– Patricia Carlson

On September 10, 1946, the woman who would become Mother Teresa was traveling on a train to Darjeeling, a hill station in the Himalayas. At the time she was simply Sister Agnes, a thirty-six-year-old Loreto Sister of Albanian extraction, who had spent the past twenty years teaching in her order’s schools in India.  Though she was a devoted nun, beloved by her mostly middle-class students, there was nothing to suggest that she would one day be regarded as one of the most compelling Christian witnesses of the twentieth century.  But on this day she received “a call within a call.”  God, she suddenly felt, wanted something more from her.  “He wanted me to be poor with the poor and to love him in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor.”

So, with the permission of her congregations, she left her convent.  In place of her traditional religious habit she donned a simple white sari with blue border and went out to seek Jesus in the desperate byways of Calcutta.  Eventually she was joined by others—including many of her former students.  They became the Missionaries of Charity.  And she became Mother Teresa.

With time Mother Teresa would establish centers of service around the globe for the sick, the homeless, the unwanted.  But she was particularly identified with her home for the dying in Calcutta.  There, destitute and dying men and women, gathered off the streets of the city, were welcomed to receive loving care and respect until they died.  Those who had lived like “animals in the gutter” were enabled, in Mother Teresa’s home, to “die like angels”—knowing that they were truly valued and loved as precious children of God.

It was not Mother Teresa’s way to change social structures.  “We are not social workers,” she said, but “contemplatives in the heart of the world.  For we are touching the body of Christ twenty-four hours a day.”  It was this mystical insight, which she obviously lived, that made Mother Teresa such a widely inspiring figure.  She did not simply practice charity; she embodied it.

God has identified himself with the hungry, the sick, the naked, the homeless; hunger, not only for bread, but for love, for care, to be somebody to someone; nakedness, not of clothing only, but nakedness of that compassion that very few people give to the unknown; homelessness, not only just for a shelter made of stone, but that homelessness that come from having no one to call your own.

For many years Mother Teresa toiled in obscurity.  But eventually she was “discovered” by the world.  She became the subject of documentary films and biographies; she received honorary degrees from prestigious universities and countless honors, including the Nobel Peace Prize for 1979.  Widely regarded as a “living saint,” she nevertheless remained remarkably unburdened by such adulation.  Nor did she have any exalted sense of her own vocation.  “We can do no great things,” she said, “only small things with great love.”  Often when people begged to join her in her “wonderful work” in Calcutta she would respond gently but firmly “Find your own Calcutta!”  As she explained,

Don’t search for God in far lands—he is not there.  He is close to you, he is with you.  Just keep the lamp burning and you will always see him.  Watch and pray.  Keep kindling the lamp and you will see his love and you will see how sweet is the Lord you love.

In later life Mother Teresa traveled widely around the world.  In the affluent West she had no trouble finding poverty—both the material kind and a no less destructive impoverishment of the spirit.  The answer in both cases was love, a love that would begin with persons and ultimately transform the world.  But before we try to love the entire world we should start by trying to love one other person—someone apparently unlovable, unwanted, or rejected.  “You can save only one at a time.  We can love only one at a time.”  That, she believed, is what we were put on earth to do:  “Something beautiful for God.”  Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997.

She was beatified with unusual speed in 2003.

Additional Resources
See:  Eileen Egan, Such a Vision of the Street (New York:  Doubleday, 1985); Mother Teresa:  Essential Writings, ed. Jean Maalouf (Maryknoll, N.Y.:  Orbis Books, 2001).

Read an appreciation of Mother Teresa's unconditional love.