Mother Teresa

My first sight of her was in her “Home of the Pure Heart” in Calcutta 25 years ago. She was on her knees feeding with a plate of rice and a spoon a man who looked more like a cadaver than a human being. Suddenly, she sensed my presence behind her. She turned around and abruptly handed me her plate: “Go on feeding this man,” she said, “and love him.” Those words — and actions — reflect Mother Teresa’s message. To love those who have never been loved. To love the unwanted, the homeless, the abandoned, as if each one were Jesus Christ himself. For nearly 40 years, the Saint of Calcutta spread this message throughout India and the rest of the world.

And yet, on her arrival in Calcutta in 1929 as a young Albanian nun of the Loreto missionary order, her life had begun in a very different way.

For years, she taught history and geography in Loreto schools in Calcutta and elsewhere. But on Sept. 10, 1946, she heard a call while on a train taking her for a retreat in Darjeeling at the foot of the Himalayas. The inner voice told her to give up the comfort of her surroundings, and to go and share the life of the inhabitants of the nearest slum. She wrote to the Vatican for permission, and went to the bazaar to buy a cheap piece of white cotton cloth bordered with blue. This humble sari was to become the uniform of the exceptional congregation she then set up to serve the poorest of the poor, wherever they were: the homeless, the hungry, lepers, unwanted babies, AIDS victims. In 1979, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in recognition of this work.

Today, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity carry on her ideal of compassion to all suffering human beings — with the same message I heard from her lips the very first day I met her in Calcutta: “Love them.”