44
Mother Teresa
A Pencil in God’s Hand
She sat hunched on the edge of the bed, bending low over the emaciated figure, murmuring softly and gazing into his half-closed eyes as her gnarled fingers worked the rosary beads. The man was days from death. She’d discovered him lying half naked in the gutter, delirious with fever, his face gaunt, lips cracked, eyes glazed with pain. She had brought him back to the Missionaries of Charity, like she had hundreds of other outcasts, where he could die with dignity.
Beginnings
At age eighteen, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu announced to her mother that she intended to join the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto to serve as a missionary in India. Initially her mother refused consent, but when it became clear that Agnes would not relent, her mother retreated to her bedroom, shutting the door behind her. When she emerged twenty-four hours later, she offered Agnes her blessing with these words: “Put your hand in His—in His hand—and walk all the way with Him.”1 On December 1, 1928, Agnes set sail for India under her new name: Sister Mary Teresa. She never saw her mother again.
Because of her reluctance to talk with reporters or even her official biographers about her youth (she preferred instead to focus solely on her mission to serve the poor), we know little about Mother Teresa’s early years in Albania. We do know that the years of her childhood were rife with political turbulence as Albania struggled for independence from Serbia. Her father, a successful merchant and entrepreneur, was committed to Albanian nationalism, a position that his family believed contributed to his sudden death (they suspected poisoning) as he was returning home from a political convention.
Agnes was only eight years old when her father died. “Home,” she would state later, “is where the mother is.” Her mother often opened the Bojaxhiu home to people in need of food and shelter, and Mother Teresa remembered her mother’s response to her brother’s question about the strangers who shared their table: “Some of them are our relations, but all of them are our people.”2
Patience and Persistence
Sister Teresa, as she was called in the early years of her ministry, began her service in the Calcutta convent as a geography teacher before becoming headmistress in 1937. She spent nineteen years as a Loreto nun, rarely venturing outside the convent walls, aside from an annual retreat to Darjeeling. It was en route to this retreat, on September 10, 1946, that Sister Teresa, then thirty-six years old, experienced what she came to refer to as “the call within a call.” Settled into her seat while traveling the four hundred miles from Calcutta to the foothills of the Himalayas, she experienced a clear mystical encounter with Jesus. “It was in that train, I heard the call to give up all and follow Him into the slums—to serve Him in the poorest of the poor,” she said later. “I knew it was His will and that I had to follow Him. There was no doubt that it was going to be His work.”3 On the Missionaries of Charity’s entrance registrar, the record of all who join the congregation, Mother Teresa later noted under her own name: “Entrance into the Society—10 September 1946.” She celebrated September 10 as “Inspiration Day,” the official start of the Missionaries of Charity, for the rest of her life.4
Simply hearing the call, of course, didn’t necessarily entail that it would automatically and immediately come to fruition. In fact, Mother Teresa waited nearly two years to the day before she was granted permission from Rome to leave Loreto and launch her new mission. And she did not always wait patiently during those long months. She wrote numerous letters to her mentor and spiritual director, Father Van Exem, to Archbishop Périer, and to the cardinal prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Religious Rome, detailing the specificities of her call and her plan for putting it into action. She was not beneath outright begging, but time and time again her pleas were answered the same way: she was told to wait. “I told her she had to live only in the present and not at all in the future and be the perfect Nun,” Father Van Exem wrote to Archbishop Périer.5
Mother Teresa struggled to obey both her superiors and Jesus himself. While she sought to put the calling out of her mind, she also wrestled with the fear that in doing so, she was disregarding Jesus’ clear calling for her life. She simply could not suppress the desire to fulfill his command, despite the fact that she was fully aware this calling should unfold in his time. She was determined yet impatient. “Like the woman in the Gospel here I come again—to beg you to let me go,” she wrote again to the archbishop. “Forgive me if I tire you with so many letters, forgive this child of yours—who is longing with many desires to give up all to God, to give herself in absolute Poverty to Christ in His suffering poor. . . . Please, Your Grace, do let me go soon.”6 Later, after only approval from Rome remained, she wrote this to Archbishop Périer:
Don’t you think it is time for us to make a more fervent appeal to Rome? It is nearly four months that you sent my letter—Why are they not answering? Please, Your Grace, let us make a stronger appeal to Rome, for I must go—and go quickly. . . . Souls are being lost in the slums and in the streets, the Sacred Heart of Jesus is more and more suffering—and here I am waiting—for just only one “Yes” which the Holy Father I am sure would give, if he knew of it.7
Finally, on August 8, 1948, Mother Teresa received the news from Rome: Pope Pius XII had granted her permission to leave Loreto and begin her new mission to serve the poorest of the poor. Nine days after receiving the letter, Mother Teresa walked out of the convent toward the Calcutta slums. She wore a simple white sari and carried five rupees in her pocket.
“I Have Come to Love the Darkness”
One would assume that serving the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta would be the most arduous and challenging work of Mother Teresa’s life, but we know from her letters, which were published after her death, that this was not the case. We know now that Mother Teresa faced a far graver struggle during the second half of her life as she battled the demons of doubt and an unrelenting estrangement from God. She described this personal turmoil as a “terrible darkness,” a “terrible emptiness,” and a “feeling of absence of God.” She wrote often about this pain to the archbishop and to her spiritual mentors, begging for their prayers and guidance.
At one point, at the suggestion of her spiritual director, Mother Teresa wrote a letter to Jesus himself:
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 (Jesus, please forgive my blasphemies—I have been told to write everything). . . . In my heart this is not faith—not light—not trust—there is so much pain—the pain of longing, the pain of not being wanted. . . . I want God with all the powers of my soul—and yet there between us—there is a terrible separation.8
Even in the midst of complete darkness and seeming hopelessness, Mother Teresa gave herself fully to God. In that same intimate letter to Jesus, she pleaded with him to do as he wished. “Don’t mind my feelings—Don’t mind even, my pain,” she wrote. “If my separation from You—brings others to You and in their love and company You find joy and pleasure—why Jesus, I am willing with all my heart to suffer all that I suffer—not only now—but for all eternity.”9
This letter and the many she wrote to her spiritual directors exemplify the extraordinary depth of Mother Teresa’s faith. Those who worked with her, knew her personally, or even connected only briefly with her always commented on her persistent joy, her gentle demeanor, and her beaming smile. The irony is that she was not pretending to feel this joy—it was genuine, a flame fanned by her connection with the most destitute of India.
Instead of stifling her missionary zeal, Mother Teresa’s desperate inner struggles increased her compassion and fueled her dedication to India’s poor. She endeavored to shine the light of Jesus’ love into their existence. The poor gave her something as well, as she explained in a 1961 letter to friend and spiritual mentor Father Joseph Neuner: “When outside—in the work—or meeting people—there is a presence—of somebody living very close—in me. I don’t know what this is—but very often even every day—that love in me for God grows more real.”10 This correspondence marked a dramatic turning point for Mother Teresa as she began to understand her darkness as a gift that allowed her to share very personally and intimately in Christ’s suffering. “For the first time in 11 years—I have come to love the darkness,” she wrote to Father Neuner. “For I believe now that it is a part, a very, very small part of Jesus’ darkness and pain on earth. . . . Today really I feel a deep joy—that Jesus can’t go anymore through the agony—but that He wants to go through it in me.”11 The darkness did not diminish, but Mother Teresa eventually felt a peace, an answer, that carried her through to the end of her life.
Mother Teresa’s ministry was not without controversy. Her critics accused her of applying a Band-Aid to a cancer, of being naive about the root causes of poverty, and of not being political or radical enough. “Mother Teresa takes care of the poorest of the poor but never deals with why they are poor,” said a Catholic charities official in a newspaper article. “She deals only with the disease [of poverty] and not with preventing it,” said another aid worker.12 Yet her intention from the start was to demonstrate compassion one person at a time. It wasn’t that she didn’t think globally; she simply chose to act deliberately in small ways and with small gestures: a cool cloth on a feverish forehead, a murmured prayer, a warm smile and comforting hand. This is the very reason she chose the name Mary Teresa, emphasizing that she strove to emulate Thérèse of Lisieux, who had praised the way to holiness through small acts, rather than the more dramatic Teresa of Ávila. “There are many people who can do big things,” she said, “but there are few people who will do the small things.”13
Mother Teresa told the story of a dying man half eaten by worms who was picked up from the gutter and brought to the Home for the Dying in Kalighat. “I have lived like an animal in the street, but I am going to die as an angel, loved and cared for,” the man told the nuns who cleaned his ravaged body. Mother Teresa didn’t need to know how the man had ended up destitute on the street. She didn’t need to know how or why he had been abandoned. She was concerned with only one small thing: to offer the dying man dignity and peace. After the nuns had removed the worms from his body, Mother Teresa reported that the man smiled broadly before making a final declaration: “Sister, I’m going home to God,” and he died.14
Although she dedicated forty years of her life to the Missionaries of Charity and saved thousands from destitution in the streets of Calcutta and around the globe, Mother Teresa always maintained that the work was God’s alone—she was simply his instrument. “I don’t claim anything of the work. It’s His work,” she said in a 1989 interview for Time magazine. “I’m like a little pencil in His hand. That’s all. He does the thinking. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do [with] it. The pencil has only to be allowed to be used.”15 She died on September 5, 1997, fulfilling the parting words her mother had offered nearly seventy years earlier. Through thick darkness, loneliness, and despair, against nearly insurmountable challenges, Mother Teresa had kept her hand firmly in God’s and walked all the way with him.16