November-December 1997

In His Service

Whatever you did to the least, you did it to me

by Jennifer Ferranti

She received too many awards to count, including the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet she no sooner received a trophy than she sold it to buy food and medicine for the poor.

Her handwritten notes on the cheapest of stationery are framed and displayed on the walls of presidents and prime ministers. Yet she was known to casually discard their replies after reading them.

She addressed the United Nations, the National Prayer Breakfast and many other powerful political audiences. Yet she never signed a petition nor joined a peace march. "If I get stuck in politics, I will stop loving because I will have to stand by one, not by all," she explained.

Although one of the most renowned figures of the 20th century, she never read a single article or book about herself. "We are called upon not to be successful, but to be faithful," she maintained.

She never held elected office; her constituency was the poor and least powerful. Yet she has been called the most powerful woman in the world. "I wish I was," she would reply. "Then I would bring peace to the whole world."

We will remember her as Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Saint of the Gutters.

It is June 5, 1997, and Mother Teresa is headline news in the nation's capital. Today, she will receive the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor Congress can confer. By lunchtime, the Capitol Rotunda is filled to capacity. A black children's choir performs for the congressmen and staffers who eagerly await the woman known by many as the world's oldest living saint.

A standing ovation builds row by row as the celebrated nun from Calcutta is wheeled up the aisle. The heroes commemorated in marble around the Rotunda walls pale in her wake.

Congressional leaders take turns praising her from the podium, but it is as if Mother Teresa doesn't hear their words. She sits patiently in her wheelchair, head bent, hands serenely folded in her lap, eyes closed. She is praying.

At last, it is time to accept the award. Mother Teresa stands, so tiny the senators must stoop to kiss the top of her head or shake her hand. But her voice, wrapped in a warm Albanian-Bengali accent, is strong and robust.

"Jesus has said it so clearly," she begins. "Whatever you did to the least, you did it to me."

"You did it to ME," she emphasizes (Matthew 25:40). "I was hungry, you give me to eat. I was thirsty, you give me to drink. I was naked, you clothed me. I was homeless, you took me in. I was sick and in prison, and you visited me."

For almost half a century, the Missionaries of Charity have worked with the poorest of the poor, Mother Teresa explains. The unwanted, the unloved, the uncared for -- each is Jesus in disguise. And the more we are in love with the poor, the closer we come to the heart of Jesus.

She proceeds to tell the audience about her order's many projects and what each person can do to help. But this awards ceremony is not the real reason Mother Teresa has come to Washington today.

In an inner-city neighborhood not far from Capitol Hill, there stands a modest building on Otis Street where another ceremony is about to take place. This is a home where the terminally ill and destitute come to die. Many have AIDS. It is also the place where Mother Teresa's sisters work the year before making their final commitment to the order.

Today, in the presence of their founder, 50 proven women kneel and take their final vows.

It is late now and the house on Otis Street is quiet. But Mother Teresa sits up, comforting and praying with those who lie awake in the night. She takes the hand of a young man who is dying of AIDS. And as she looks down at him, she sees the face of Jesus.

A Nun Is Born

She was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on Aug. 26, 1910, to an Albanian family in Skopje, Macedonia. Raised in a happy, middle-class, Catholic family, Agnes first sensed the calling to be a nun at the age of 12.

Her mother discouraged her, but by the time Agnes was 17, her calling had only grown stronger. Specifically, she felt drawn to be a missionary in India, a work performed by the Irish Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto. So in 1928, at the railway station in Zagreb, Agnes waved good-bye to her mother. It was the last time they ever saw each other.

After two months at the Loreto Abbey in Rathfarman, Ireland, Agnes was sent to Darjeeling, a picturesque town tucked in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains, 400 miles north of Calcutta, India.

In 1931, she took her temporary vows and her new name, Sister Teresa, after the French nun St. Therese of Lisieux (the Little Flower), who loved humble tasks and prayed for missionaries. Because a fellow nun also had the name Therese, Sister Teresa decided to spell her name differently.

For the next 17 years, Sister Teresa taught history and geography at St. Mary's School at the Loreto convent in Entally, a suburb of Calcutta. While most of her students came from prosperous families, her classroom looked out over a garden wall onto Motijhil, the city's most ghastly slum. In all those years, however, she never imagined nor aspired to work in the bustees (slums).

In 1939, Sister Teresa took her final vows and was named as superior at St. Mary's. Now she was known as Mother Teresa. But it was not for seven more years that the work for which she would become famous began.

It happened on Sept. 10, 1946, as she was traveling to Darjeeling by train for a spiritual retreat. "I was quietly praying when I clearly felt a call within my calling," Mother Teresa would often say. "The message was quite clear. I was to give up all and follow Jesus into the slums. It was an order." She added, "When that happens, the only thing to do is say yes."

But leaving her order was no easy task. "It was the most difficult thing I have ever done," she said. "It was a greater sacrifice than to leave my family and country to enter religious life."

Her archbishop was appalled when she requested permission to live outside the order. In fact, it took two years to overcome his resistance and receive Vatican permission for exclaustration.

Finally, in 1948, Mother Teresa removed the habit of the Sisters of Loreto and put on a white sari like the ones worn by the poorest women in India, adding a blue border to symbolize her desire to imitate the Virgin Mary. And with only five rupees in her pocket, she headed for the bustees.

After completing an accelerated three-month course in basic nursing with the Medical Mission Sisters in Patna, Mother Teresa returned to Motijhil. Up close, it was even worse than she had realized from her garden wall. Sewage flowed into open drains in the street. The garbage piled up for days before it was removed. Beggars lay on the streets dying of tuberculosis and rotting with leprosy.

She decided to begin with a school for the children. "The only open spot was under a tree near a stinking pool," she said. "We began right on the ground. I took a stick and used it as a marker, writing out the letters of the Bengali alphabet."

Within two months, Mother Teresa persuaded someone to donate a schoolhouse, with room for a small dispensary. Her work expanded even more as former students arrived and volunteered to join her.

Missionaries of Charity

On Oct. 7, 1950, with 10 sisters, the Vatican approved the new Order of the Missionaries of Charity. To the traditional vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, Mother Teresa added a fourth: wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor.

Each morning, the sisters set out in pairs to minister to those who lived on the streets of Calcutta -- the abandoned, the unwanted, the unloved. Mother Teresa was indefatigable. With each need she encountered, she determined a way to fill it.

One morning, Mother Teresa set out on another of her notorious begging expeditions, this time to call on the manager of a pharmaceutical firm who had promised to donate medicine. It was monsoon season and rain poured down as she boarded the tram.

Along the route, she noticed a man, soaked to the skin, slumped under a tree. As the tram didn't stop anywhere nearby, Mother Teresa decided to look for the man on her way back. When she returned, the man was still there. But his head had fallen into a pool of water and he was dead.

"He died so alone with no one to hear his last words," Mother Teresa lamented to her companion. "If only we could find a place where people can die in dignity." This was the beginning of a search that led her to Kalighat in 1952.

Kalighat is a dirty, congested bustee in South Calcutta, known principally for its temple where devout Hindus bring their dead for cremation. To the rear of the temple, there stands not a door, but an open entryway that leads down two long hallways, one for men and one for women. More than 100 low stretcher beds line the hallways, each occupied by yet another person the sisters have rescued from the streets. This is Nirmal Hriday, a home Mother Teresa opened for dying destitutes.

By anyone's standards, the work here is grisly. Navin Chawla, Mother Teresa's authorized biographer, recounts a scene he witnessed as one young novice attempted to clean a man's wounds.

The raw flesh was alive with squirming maggots and the novice, quite understandably, was removing them with a pair of tweezers held at arm's length. In an instant, Mother Teresa was by her side. Using a scalpel, she deftly began to cleanse the wound, her face close to the repulsive mass, apparently oblivious to the stench that was intensified by her probings.

"You must understand that this is Jesus. We are cleansing the wounds of our Lord," was the instruction she delivered to the young girl, who obediently took the scalpel and bent over the patient until her face was within inches of the putrid flesh.

Mother Teresa said: "If we did not believe this was the body of Christ, we would never be able to do this work. No amount of money could make us do it." But she continued, "When you see each person as Jesus in disguise, this work is beautiful and attractive because it fills the heart with great joy and great love."

During her lifetime, Mother Teresa and her sisters carried an estimated 54,000 people into Nirmal Hriday, about half of whom died. "But here, one dies a beautiful death," Mother Teresa said. "When people die in peace, in the love of God, it is a wonderful thing."

Her biography tells the story of a man she picked up from an open drain.

"His body was full of sores. I took him to our home (Nirmal Hriday). We cleaned and bathed him, and tended to his sores. All the while, he made no complaint and there was no fear on his face. All he said to me was, 'I have lived all my life like an animal on the streets, but now I am going to die like an angel!' He gave me a smile and, within three hours of my bringing him in, he died."

"Nirmal Hriday is the most joyful place I know," she said.

A Growing Ministry

Nirmal Hriday was only the first home Mother Teresa established. In those early years, she also opened a Shishu Bhawan home for abandoned and orphaned slum children. Many more orphanages followed.

"Everyone in Calcutta knows I am willing to take every single child," claimed "the Mother" -- as she was know by millions. "If there is an unwanted child, don't let it die. Send it to me," she would say.

In her lifetime, she facilitated the adoption of about 8,000 Indian children.

In 1957, Mother Teresa established Calcutta's first mobile clinics for lepers. Shortly thereafter, she opened Titagarh and Shantinagar, rehabilitation centers on the outskirts of the city where 50,000 lepers enjoy self-sufficient lives.

In 1963, Mother Teresa expanded the Missionaries of Charity to include religious brothers. And in 1965, when Pope Paul VI publicly praised the order, invitations began to pour in for Mother Teresa to open homes of various kinds around the world.

In 1979, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She accepted the honor in the name of the poor and used this platform to plead for an end to abortion. "Abortion is the greatest destroyer of peace today," she said. "Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want."

An International Ministry

Today, with about 4,500 sisters and 500 brothers, the Missionaries of Charity operate almost 600 homes in 120 countries. Their work includes hospitals, nursing homes, AIDS hospices, and leprosy and TB clinics. They run schools, soup kitchens and homes for the poor, the crippled and mentally retarded, unwed mothers, alcoholics and drug abusers.

Through their programs, a half-million families are being fed and a quarter-million sick are being treated right now.

Despite the scope of this international ministry, however, communications continue to be handled with just three old typewriters and one telephone line at the original Motherhouse -- a complex of three small buildings crammed amidst the small pavement shops and food stalls of Motijhil.

At Motherhouse, there is no oven in the kitchen; the sisters continue to cook on a charcoal fire. There is no washing machine or generator. No television or VCR. When asked if she needed at least a radio to know what was happening in the world, Mother Teresa replied, "No, we have the reality."

While she was living the world had already proclaimed her Saint of the Gutters, but Mother Teresa insisted she was no one special. "It is his work," she explained. "I am like a little pencil in his hand. That is 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."

Anyone can be holy she suggested. "It's a work of love, love in action," she said. "We can do no great things; only small things with great love." Her point is illustrated with a story.

Once upon a time, a good man returned a fish to the water. People told him: So what? You save one fish. Tomorrow the sea will drop hundreds onto the shore. What difference did you make? The man answered: For that single fish, I made all the difference in the world. I saved him.

A life of sacrifice left Mother Teresa's body bent and gnarled. Yet her face emanated a beauty fashion magazines could not prescribe. "Sometimes a good feeling from inside is worth much more than a beautician," she would offer.

Mother Teresa astounded even those closest to her when she recovered from her third angioplasty, as well as malaria and a broken collarbone last year. "I just take one day," she said. "Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not come. We only have today to love Jesus."

"When it is my time to die," Mother Teresa said, "I will just take a bed in the house of Kalighat and wait for the end. That is where he sent me, and that is where he expects to find me."

True to her word, the living saint's compassionate heart beat its last on Sept. 5, as she lay resting at her convent in Calcutta, her work on earth complete. 

Jennifer Ferranti is a freelance writer living in Fairfax Station, Virginia. She says, "After writing this tribute, I have started trying to see each person as Jesus in disguise. After reading it, I hope you will, too."

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