FEAST DAY SEPTEMBER 5
INTRODUCTION
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 Missonaries of Charity the order Mother Teresa founded.
BACKGROUND
Born in Skopje (North Macedonia) 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.
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.
“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 – in your love for Me – they will see Me, know Me, want Me…. For them I long –”
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.
REFLECTION
QUOTES FROM MOTHER TERESA
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
Each person is Jesus in disguise. I say to myself, this is hungry Jesus, I must feed him. This one has leprosy. I must wash him and tend to him….
People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them 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.
.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.
There is no need 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 Calcutta of our own life.
