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A Life Bathed in Light

After Mother Teresa’s passing in 1997, a world that had come to admire her was hungry for details of her remarkable life. A multitude of books and articles appeared in those ensuing years, chronicling every aspect of her person and life, from her public accomplishments to the private mystery of her inner darkness. But as celebrated as she was in both life and death, after all these years Mother Teresa’s central message, and the one great secret of her soul, remains almost entirely unknown.

What was deepest in her, what motivated and energized her, is still a mystery even to her most ardent admirers. But it was not her wish that this secret remain forever unknown. The answer to her mystery is there, like a golden thread, woven throughout the teachings she left for her religious family, particularly in the months leading up to her death. Scattered throughout Mother Teresa’s letters and spiritual conferences, the full richness of her soul still awaits us.

Looking Back on an Extraordinary Life

Before exploring the secrets of this saint and Nobel Prize winner, let us step back a moment to review the highlights of her extraordinary life — as a refresher for those who may have forgotten the broad strokes of her life, and for the sake of a new generation that has not known Mother Teresa beyond name and renown.

Mother Teresa began life as Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu, the youngest of three children of an Albanian family, born August 26, 1910, in Skopje (in present-day Macedonia). In elementary school she developed a keen interest in the overseas missions, and by the age of twelve the future missionary had decided to devote her life to helping others. Later, at age eighteen, inspired by reports sent home from West Bengal by Jesuit missionaries, she applied to join the Sisters of Loreto, whom she had learned were doing mission work in India, and specifically in West Bengal.

She left home and entered the convent, and after completing her first stage of training with the Loreto Sisters in Rathfarnham, Ireland, took the religious name of Teresa (after her patron saint, Thérèse of Lisieux). Not long thereafter, the young Sister Teresa left Ireland and sailed for Calcutta, where she arrived in January 1929. She was assigned to the Loreto convent in Entally, in northeastern Calcutta, and began teaching geography in their middle school for girls. Her love for her new mission and the people of Bengal moved her to master the language, becoming so proficient that she was awarded the nickname “Bengali Teresa.”

As the years went by, her desire to lift up the poorest moved her to venture into the slums on the other side of the convent wall. Having enlisted the help of her students, together they sought to bring to the poor what little aid and comfort they could. Her life went on this way, happily and productively by all accounts — divided between teaching class, mentoring her pupils, and reaching out to the poor — up until 1946, the eve of Indian independence.

“Come, Be My Light”2

On September 10, 1946, following her yearly custom, Mother Teresa left Calcutta for eight days of spiritual retreat — what was presumably to be a retreat like any other. At Howrah Station, she boarded the train that wound its way from steamy Calcutta and the broad, flat plains of the Ganges Delta, north into the verdant forests and cool nights of the Himalayan hills. Once again this year, Sister Teresa had left behind her work and her students to dedicate herself to prayer and reflection in the hill station of Darjeeling, where the Loreto Sisters had their retreat house, praying over what had taken place during the past semester, and preparing herself for the new school year to come.

Somewhere along the way, Mother Teresa had an extraordinary experience of God (explored more fully in the next chapters). In her characteristic humility, she would refer to this life-changing experience as simply “a call within a call,”³ a call to leave Loreto and go into the slums. Only later would she reveal more of what transpired in her soul that September day, and of the extraordinary interior communications during the following year and a half, in which Jesus would commission her to “carry him” and “be his light” in the darkness of Calcutta’s slums.

Returning to Calcutta shortly after her retreat, she consulted with her Jesuit spiritual director, sharing with him the notes she had made during her days of prayer. He advised her to communicate directly with the archbishop of Calcutta, asking for permission to leave her order and work alone, unaided but unfettered, in the streets of Calcutta.⁴

After long months of discernment and discussion, with letters back and forth, permission was suddenly given. Once she was free, Mother Teresa traveled to nearby Patna for a course in first aid and simple nursing. In December 1948, she returned again to Calcutta, dressed for the first time in the humble white cotton sari that would become her emblem. Alone, with only five rupees to her name (about $1 U.S.), she sought hospitality with the Little Sisters of the Poor, from whose convent she began going daily out into the slums.

She first returned to Moti Jhil, the vast slum she was used to seeing just outside her convent wall. Since she had been trained as a teacher, she began by starting a school for the children of the poor, using the ground as a blackboard, and a tree as roof and shelter. As rewards for attendance she gave out bars of hand soap, since her pupils’ ragged clothing and unhygienic conditions were invitations to disease and early death.

In February 1949, a Bengali Catholic named Michael Gomes lent her a room in his house on Creek Lane. She moved in with a small suitcase and arranged a space for sleeping and working, with one packing case for a chair and another for a desk. As word spread of her one-woman outreach to the poor, people who had known her in Loreto began contributing to her new mission.

On March 19 of that year, one of Mother Teresa’s former students, Subashini Das (who later took the religious name of Agnes, in honor of Mother Teresa’s baptism saint), came to the home on Creek Lane and asked to join her. A few weeks later, another ex-student, Magdalena Gomes (Sister Gertrude), joined as well. By Easter, there were three women dressed alike in white blue-bordered saris, going together each morning to serve in Moti Jhil. By the time the group had grown to twelve, and no longer fit in their lent room, Mother Teresa and her little group were invited to take over an entire floor in the Gomes home.

Eventually, their slum school was moved from beneath a tree to a rented building. But she and her Sisters-to-be had encountered a new challenge. While on their way each day to Moti Jhil, they were coming across unexpected numbers of the dying — struggling for their last breath alone, penniless, and homeless in the alleyways of Calcutta:

Mother Teresa’s fledgling Missionaries of Charity had to pass the bodies of the destitute dying in the lanes and gutters of the city. A dirt-floored room was rented in Moti Jhil where a few dying men and women could be cleaned, fed and cared for until they recovered or passed on.

The city fathers of Calcutta, overwhelmed with immense human need and lack of resources, welcomed the work of these young Indian women and offered [them] a building. It was a hostel for pilgrims to the shrine of Kali, Hindu goddess of destruction and purification — two large halls opening on an inner courtyard.

City ambulances began to bring destitute men and women to the hostel. Because of its proximity to Kali’s temple and the nearby ghats (cremation places), it was called Kalighat, a name applied to that section of Calcutta.

Already by the mid-1950s the Sisters in their blue-bordered white saris were a distinctive part of the great sprawling city. They trooped out in the morning, two by two, to feed homeless families, chiefly refugees, to a dozen slum schools, to the Home for the Dying, and to children’s clinics in the worst slums.

In the Home for the Dying, Mother Teresa and her Sisters leaned over cadaverous men and women, feeding them slowly and gently. They lay side-by-side on a raised parapet, in separate wards, with a walkway in the center of the hall. Mother Teresa would go from patient to patient, sitting beside them on the parapet, giving them human comfort by holding their hands or stroking their heads.

“We cannot let a child of God die like an animal in the gutter,” she declared. When asked how she could face this agony and serve these suffering people day after day, she answered, “To me, each one is Christ — Christ in a distressing disguise.”⁵

The quantity of work and the number of her Sisters began to grow apace. She was invited to open new foundations in other parts of India, and soon extended her work to the rest of the world — beginning in Venezuela, in 1965. By the time of her death in 1997, her Missionaries of Charity had spread to more than 120 countries.

As she traveled to establish missions in other parts of the world, Mother Teresa soon discovered that the West was no less indigent, though its poverty better disguised, than what she had found in the Third World:

In the developed world, in Europe and in the United States, the sisters had to deal with a different kind of need. Mother Teresa explained, “I found the poverty of the West so much more difficult to remove. When I pick up a person from the street, hungry, I give him a plate of rice, a piece of bread, I have satisfied, I have removed that hunger.”

In the West, she said, “there is not only hunger for food. I see a big hunger for love. That is the greatest hunger, to be loved.”⁶

By the early 1970s, her work was being recognized and honored by religious and secular authorities alike. Most notably, she was awarded India’s highest honor, the Bharat Ratna (the Jewel of India), as well as a host of accolades and honorary degrees from governments and institutions around the world — crowned by the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1979.

Mother Teresa went on to found five separate religious communities for the care of the poor. Along with the Sisters, founded in 1950, she began a male branch, the Missionaries of Charity Brothers, in 1966; then the Contemplative Sisters (dedicated to prayer and intercession for the poor), in 1976; the Contemplative Brothers, in 1979; and finally, as the child of her old age, the Missionaries of Charity Fathers, founded in 1984 to serve the inner pain and spiritual poverty of those served by her Sisters and Brothers.

In June 1983, while visiting her Sisters in Rome, she was hospitalized for a chronic and untreated heart condition. Over the next decade her health gradually but steadily weakened, though she would always rally and take up her exhausting schedule yet again. Finally, in March 1997, her deteriorating condition forced her to resign as head of her order. A few short months later, on September 5, at 9:30 in the evening, Mother Teresa breathed her last — she had “gone home to God.”

Not long after her passing, with the approval of Church authorities and at the insistence of faithful the world over, Mother Teresa began her journey on the path to sainthood, that last and ultimate stage from which to lift up the light she had carried all her life — no longer for the poor alone, but for us all.

Mother Teresa’s inner light drew our attention not only to her work for the poor, but to the city that had become part of her name, and part of a new vocabulary of compassion. She focused the eyes of the world on the open wound that was Calcutta in the 1950s — a sprawl of burgeoning slums and bustling sidewalks, seemingly forgotten by God and man. Calcutta was to be the divinely appointed backdrop for her work and her message, symbol of the wounds of the entire human family.

But Calcutta was likewise a symbol of the wounds of each human soul, of each of the least, the last, and the lost the world over — trampled upon and forgotten in modern society’s rush towards a life free from suffering. But it is precisely there that Mother Teresa remained, rooted and anchored to the very places of pain we fled. Where there was no love, she put love. Where there was no hope, she sowed seeds of resurrection. She turned Calcutta, at least for those she was able to touch, into a true “City of Joy.” Many saw — and many, from the beggar at her feet to the Nobel Committee half a world away, understood. The draw, the mystery, and the phenomenon of Mother Teresa and her mission had begun.

In Calcutta’s night, a light was rising.

The people who sat in darkness

have seen a great light, and for those who sat in

the region and shadow of death

light has dawned.

— Matthew 4:16