FEAST DAY SEPTEMBER 5
INTRODUCTION
Saints are models for us. The saints are not only models for us, they are intercessors on our behalf. Mother Teresa is one of my favorite saints. Years ago she inspired our whole family, teenage girls included, to spend time in the poorest of poor nations, Haiti to work with the poor and dying. One of the places was a hospice run by the Missionaries of Charity the order Mother Teresa founded.
We have never been the same since. It is true when you give your life for another, you save your life and that life becomes more abundant. God keeps His promises. “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Matthew 16:25
BACKGROUND
Born in Skopje in 1910, MOTHER TERESA joined the Sisters of Loreto in Dublin in 1928 and was sent to India, where she began her novitiate. She taught at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta from 1931 to 1948, until leaving the Loreto order to begin the Missionaries of Charity.
Through her sisters, brothers, and priests, her service of the poorest of the poor spread all around the world. She won many awards, including the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. After her death in 1997, the process for sainthood quickly began and she was beatified in 2003 and canonized by Pope Francis in 2016.
In 1946, Mother Teresa had a mystical encounter with Christ on a train to Darjeeling September 26, 1946 in which He asked her to take her love for Him a large step further. He asked her to leave the convent of Loreto and begin an order which would serve the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta.
During the time of her mystical experiences leading to the founding of the new order, she experienced deep spiritual union and the sensible awareness of God’s Presence in her life.
Here is a small sample of Jesus’ words to her: “My little one – come – carry Me into the holes of the poor. – Come be My light – I cannot go alone – they don’t know Me – How I long to enter their holes – in your love for Me – they will see Me, know Me, want Me…. For them I long –Wilt thou refuse?”
During her lifelong service to the poorest of the poor, Mother Teresa became an icon of compassion to people of all religions; her extraordinary contributions to the care of the sick, the dying, and thousands of others nobody else was prepared to look after, has been recognized and acclaimed throughout the world.
Mother Teresa’s passionate love for God motivated her throughout her life: “I want to love Him as He has never been loved before—with a tender, personal, intimate love.” With the permission of my confessor, I made a vow to God – binding under Mortal Sin – to give to God anything that He may ask, ‘Not to refuse Him anything.’”
As Mother Teresa’s life as a Missionary of Charity began, her mystical experiences and deep awareness of God’s Presence within her soul ended. With the help of her confessors she gradually began to see this darkness as a dark night of the soul that enabled her to identify more completely with the darkness and alienation of the people to whom she ministered.
There were indeed times when she thought the darkness was more than she could bear, times when she prayed desperately for healing and relief. But she learned to accept the darkness without allowing it to impede her work. Her determination is expressed beautifully in these words: “The greater the pain and darker the darkness the sweeter will be my smile at God” (“Come Be My Light” p.222)
QUOTES OF MOTHER TERESA
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
Each person is Jesus in disguise.
I see Jesus in every human being. I say to myself, this is hungry Jesus, I must feed him. This is sick Jesus. This one has leprosy. I must wash him and tend to him. I serve because I love Jesus..
It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start.
People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway. If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.
The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway. For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.
At the hour of death when we come face-to-face with God, we are going to be judged on love; not how much we have done, but how much love we put into the doing.
CONCLUSION
We are each called and equipped by God to not only survive our personal Calcutta, but to contribute to those around us whose individual Calcutta intersects our own. There is no need, then, to travel to far-off lands to contribute… Wherever we are, with whatever talents and relationships God has entrusted us, we are each called not to do what Mother Teresa did, but– to love as she loved in the Calcuttas of our own life.
Made in the very image and likeness of God, We on earth, are God’s love, God’s compassion, God’s will, God’s caregivers, His smile, His tears. We must show the presence of God in this world because He is not coming again until the end of time.
So many have forgotten what saints of the Old Testament knew that God is one, Lord of all and there is no other. So many floods, fires. earthquakes pestilence, wars so many man-made disasters. Why aren’t our churches filled with a call for repentance and mercy from a God that loves us.
Mother Teresa’s 1979 Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech
Lord, make me a channel of Thy peace that,
where there is hatred, I may bring love;
that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness; that, where there is discord, I may bring harmony; that, where there is error, I may bring truth; that, where there is doubt, I may bring faith; that, where there is despair, I may bring hope; that, where there are shadows, I may bring light; that, where there is sadness, I may bring joy. Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted, to love than to be loved; for it is by forgetting self that one finds; it is forgiving that one is forgiven; it is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.
Loved this. Thank you Tom.