In “Starry, Starry Night,” Don McLean’s paean to Vincent van Gogh, McLean sang of the doomed artist, “But I could’ve told you, Vincent/This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.” The lyrics could also describe a woman whose wrinkled visage and shrunken body placed a light in a darkened sky.
If ever a person embodied the biblical proverb that faith can move mountains, it was Gonxha (Rosebud) Agnes Bojaxhiu, from Skopje, in a Muslim area of present-day Yugoslavia. In addition to being a member of a religious minority, her father, Nikola, who fought for Albanian autonomy, died when she was eight: Rumor has it that his demise was at the hand of Serbian agents. A further hardship was her club foot and susceptibility to malaria and whooping cough. Dranafile, widowed mother of three, kept despair at bay through her staunch Roman Catholic faith.
While most preteens dream of clothes, parties, and boys, Gonxha knew there could only be one man in her life, Jesus, and she resolved to be a nun. At age eighteen, devastated at leaving her mother, Gonxha boarded a ship to the Order of Loreto in Ireland, a choice dictated by its sisters who worked in India, the country she knew was her destiny. She adopted the name Sister Mary Teresa of the Child Jesus―after St. Therese, “Little Flower,” who, in 1897, at the age twenty-four, died of tuberculosis in a convent at Lisieux. Later that year, she journeyed to her promised land of Calcutta, where she taught geography at St. Mary’s, an exclusive girls’ school. The building was near the notorious Motijhil slum, and between classes, Sister Mary Teresa delivered medicine and clothing to the poor. She took her final vows in 1937, and as Mother Teresa, became the headmistress. Although she was popular among her students, letters from her mother reinforced her own conviction that her fate lay beyond the walls of her sheltered enclave.
Mother Teresa’s purpose appeared while the thirty-six-year-old was on a train bound for Darjeeling, when she received her “call within a call.” She entertained no doubt that the message came from God ordering her to be His light: to serve the poorest of the poor and to live among them. To her great chagrin, there were obstacles in starting her own Order: no money, no accommodation, no backing from the Church in Rome. There was also the issue of getting released from her Loreto vows. Yet, with Mother Teresa’s steely willpower, and her equally strong faith that God would admit no impediment, she soldiered on. In 1948, a year and a day after India became an independent nation, Mother Teresa left her upscale school for the streets and slums of Calcutta, armed with five rupees and immeasurable drive. To blend more easily with the downtrodden she had set herself to serve, she adopted the garb of the women who swept the streets as her new habit—a white cotton sari with three sky-blue stripes; her only adornment was a small cross. Upon completion of a nurses’ training course with the Medical Missionaries at Patna, though inclined to faint at the sight of blood, she ventured into the pestilential horrors of Calcutta. Two years later, she won canonical recognition for her new order, the Missionaries of Charity. The sisters who joined her took vows of chastity, obedience, and service. Their adherence to poverty was extreme because, as their indefatigable leader explained, “To be able to love the poor and know the poor, we must be poor ourselves.” Each member possessed two sets of clothes, wearing one while she washed the other in a bucket. When people suggested her Order should have fans, as the heat was intolerable, she replied, “The poor whom they are to serve have no fans. Most of the girls come from village homes where they had no fans. They should not be more comfortable here than at home.” Under pain of expulsion, its members could not leave their living quarters without permission, entertain guests, or receive private mail. In addition, the strict rules forbade them to watch films, read novels, or call each other by nicknames. The sisters rescued newborn babies abandoned in garbage bins, sought out the sick, and took in lepers and the mentally ill. They taught the street children how to read by drawing letters in the dirt. The first woman the nun rescued lay dying in a gutter, half eaten by rats. “I knew she was dying,” the diminutive dynamo said. “After I did what I could, she took my hand, gave me a beautiful smile and thanked me. She gave me more than I gave her.”
Mother Teresa’s mission was to alleviate the suffering of the Untouchables—the lowest caste of Indian society—but at that time she was an unknown Albanian nun nearing age forty, armed with nothing more than faith. As it transpired, faith proved enough, along with her single-minded devotion. She approached the local government and, under her relentless onslaught, they offered her a building that had fallen into disrepair, one local thugs used as a gambling den. Mother Teresa and her Order, which had increased to twenty-six, moved in. Then they went in search of the destitute and the dying. In the humble structure, the nuns provided clean sheets, clean clothing, and a clean environment for those at death’s door. The Order christened the building Nirmal Hriday, the place for the pure of heart. Further undertakings continued: mobile health clinics, centers for the hungry, hospices for lepers and victims of AIDS, homes for alcoholics and drug addicts, shelters for the homeless. Mother Teresa gladly accepted donations to fund her enterprises. She liked to say that money was “really no problem, we depend on divine providence.” And for the times when providence did not come through, she resorted to her own tactics. Once, having bought $800 worth of groceries for the needy, she refused to move from the checkout line until someone paid the bill. Similarly, as she flew around the world visiting the places she had once taught her geography class about, she resented the cost of the tickets, money that could have been earmarked for charity. She offered to work as a hostess in lieu of a ticket; the owners did not take her up on her offer, but the government agreed tickets on Indian airlines and railroads would be complimentary. Eventually, the Missionaries of Charity expanded to ninety countries and the woman with the shrunken body and cavernous eyes seemed to be everywhere at once. In 1982, at age seventy-two, she worked for a number of days in Beirut, Lebanon, crisscrossing the Green Line that divided Christian East Beirut from Muslim West Beirut. She rescued dozens of mentally ill children from the dangers of warfare in the Muslim sector of the city. In 1986, she escaped unscathed when her plane crashed in Tanzania.
After a visit, Pope Paul VI gifted Mother Teresa the white Lincoln Continental whose air-conditioning saved him from the sweltering Indian heat. She immediately raffled it off, earning many times more than would have been gained by an outright sale. When told she should keep the gift for her Order, she replied, “Just think of how many orphans I could feed.” Although she was well known for years in religious circles, her international reputation really took off through Malcolm Muggeridge’s 1969 BBC film, Something Beautiful for God. The movie evoked a huge buzz and made the nun into an international star. Before long, she was sharing television studios with David Frost, Norman Mailer, and Barbara Walters. The Saint of the Gutter, as the media dubbed her, dealt with the mighty in the same manner as she did the humble. Upon meeting Queen Elizabeth II, Mother Teresa casually asked about Her Majesty’s latest grandchild; she gave Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a plastic statuette of the Virgin Mary. She told the Prince of Wales, “You know you could not do my work and I could not do yours. We are both working for God.”
News of the little woman who did great acts resulted in Mother Teresa’s nomination for the Nobel Prize in 1979, when she was sixty-nine years old. The nun with her simple gold cross stood in marked contrast to the glittering jewels worn by the world’s elite. Not surprisingly, she used the $190,000 award for the betterment of others. She explained, “Just think of how many orphans I can feed.” When word first broke that she was to be a candidate for the Peace Prize, the international press descended on her mission in droves. Self-effacing when it came to personal glory, Mother Teresa told her sisters, “I am going to hide somewhere.”
Yet, not everyone was in Camp Mother Teresa; uber-feminist Germaine Greer launched a full-blooded attack on the nun for her anti-abortion views. Christopher Hitchens’ 1995 book, The Missionary Position, and his 1994 documentary, Hell’s Angel, were highly critical of what he felt was a holier-than-thou woman; he described her as a “Catholic fundamentalist with a mission against abortion and some rather dodgy friends.” The latter was in reference to the Haitian dictator Baby Doc Duvalier, whose ill-gotten gains were accepted into the Order’s coffers. Other critics chimed in by claiming the Missionaries of Charity could better serve the world by providing condoms rather than charity. Mother Teresa’s response, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
A life of traversing the world’s most dangerous places in saris and sandals, sleeping four hours a night, and subsisting on a meager diet of dhal and rice never fazed the living saint. However, a low period in her life occurred when Dranafile was dying, and her sixty-two-year-old daughter could not be with her because of Albania’s communist regime. Mother Teresa prayed nonstop and stormed the Albanian Embassy in Rome for help. Her considerable power of rhetoric convinced a group of prominent individuals, including Indira Gandhi, to intervene with the government. However, to Mother Teresa’s dismay, Enver Hoxha’s anti-religious administration ignored all her pleas. The fervently Catholic Dranafile’s burial place could not bear a cross, per the regime. Her daughter, who had not seen her mother since she left home, accepted her sorrow as the will of God.
A half-century of tireless devotion gnarled her hands, creased her face, and bent her back (she was only four feet ten inches tall), and her late-in-life appearance became the photographic icon that held a mirror to the conscience of the world. At age eighty, she suffered a heart attack while visiting the Pope, and doctors implanted a pacemaker. Mother Teresa sent in her resignation as head of the Missionaries of Charity to Pope John Paul II, stating that she was stepping down from the Order she had launched. “The time,” she said, had come for “younger hands.” Nevertheless, when it came time to step down, she decided not to relinquish her role because she believed it was God’s will she continue in the path He had chosen for her long ago. Death held no terror for the woman who had lived alongside it for most of her life. In a reverential tone, she expressed her faith saying, “Heaven for me will be the joy of being with Jesus and Mary and all of the other saints and angels, and all our poor, all going home to God.” The woman, who had undergone the name changes from Gonxha Agnes Bolaxhiu, to Sister Mary Teresa, to Mother Teresa, became Saint Teresa with her 2016 canonization. No doubt she would have remarked upon the news of her beatification with the same words she had uttered when the Nobel Committee had called the nun with her nomination: “I am unworthy.”