It was inevitable. We always knew she would be a saint. Everybody knew. She had to have known, too, as much as she didn’t want to.
One thing the Catholic Church does pretty well is teach people to be humble. I watched as the most brilliant kids in our local Jesuit high school were told that their talents were gifts from God, during the awards ceremony at their graduation. Now it was their responsibility to go use them to help others. They were to put their God given superintellects to work to improve this world.
No public pats on the back for all of the hard work, for beating everybody else, (there was some fierce competition), for being way above and beyond smart; no ‘Glory be to (fill in the student name)‘.
Ego is the enemy; helping others is the point – without letting ego get in the way, which it does so easily. It can be a little confusing because even helping others is really about our own needs, because ultimately we are doing whatever we are doing to make us feel good.
So from this environment comes my role model from afar… Calcutta (Kolkata) India to be exact. Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Mother Teresa. I’ve been enthralled with her for a long time.
Just how can anyone be so selfless? So extremely devoted to everyone else? I can be pretty darned devoted to the others in my life, but honestly, not to the exclusion of my own comfort and happiness. I have definitely not taken the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience that she has. Nor have I taken her fourth vow of ‘wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor’. I can’t find it right now, but I think Missionaries of Charity are allowed to own, like, five things. The list went something like: a Bible, a comb, a plate, a fork and a cup. Oh my heart..my stuff, my closets full of stuff…
Mother Teresa thought that she wanted to become a nun at the age of twelve. I’ll never forget reading in one of her biographies that when at the age of eighteen she told her mother (who was a widow; Agnes’ father had died suddenly when she was eight), her mother went and locked herself in her bedroom for twenty-four hours and wept. When she came out, she had accepted her daughter’s decision, and helped her leave for Ireland from The Republic of Macedonia, to teach as a Sister of Loreto.
Macedonia is in southeastern Europe. It’s bordering countries are Kosova, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania (where her folks were from, and where she was born). Her mom knew that she would likely never see Agnes again, as this was in 1928, and the distance was dramatic. They never did see each other again. I don’t think I could do that, either.
She only taught in Ireland for a year, where she was given the title of ‘Mother’, and the name ‘Teresa’ after Saint Therese of Liseux. All of the nuns in the order were addressed as ‘Mother’. After a year of teaching, she was assigned to be an educator in a school for girls in a poor part of Calcutta, India, where she spent seventeen years and eventually became the principal.
It bothered her very much to see the sick and destitute outside the fences of the school, so she basically petitioned the powers that be within the church and eventually was allowed to start her own order. Her order, the Missionaries of Charity, wear plain and simple white robes with blue lines, and a head covering that makes me want to wrap my clean hair in it after I have showered, made of the same simple white fabric with blue lines. These women are nuns dedicated to helping ‘the unwanted, the unloved, and the uncared for’.
Mother Teresa talked the City of Calcutta into giving her a dilapidated building. She took six months of medical training, and then she went to work helping these poor, hungry, sick people who had no one taking care of them. The first thing that she started was a facility for them to come to instead of being on the street – to have a place to be, and people to take care of them, while they died. Um, I haven’t done that yet, either.
I remember that when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for ‘bringing help to suffering humanity’, what I loved the most was that there was a banquet budget of $7,000, and she was aghast at how much was going to be spent. She wanted to know if she could have the money instead, which they gave her. She asked, apparently with incredulity, ‘Do you know how many people I can feed with this much money?’
Oh, I could never live up to her. She was phenomenal to watch. Inspiring to say the least. Pretty cool that we had this quiet, petite little dynamo in our lifetime. It’s been such a pleasure.
Here’s a copy of her Nobel Lecture in case you might be interested in reading it.
Her life was lived between 1910 and 1997.
Somebody Else's Wisdom 