Читать книгу Mother Teresa's Secret Fire - Joseph Langford - Страница 12

Four

A Message Discovered

First Encounter

I can never forget August 17, 1972; it was the day Mother Teresa would change my life. I had gotten up that morning knowing nothing about her. I had never seen her face, never heard her name.

I had recently arrived in Rome to begin theological studies and, booklover that I am, found my way, almost immediately off the plane, to one of the large bookstores near St. Peter’s Square. While browsing in the upstairs English section, my gaze fell on the cover of one particular book. Suddenly, my attention, and my whole being it seemed, was seized by the image looking back at me from this book. There, on the cover of this small paperback was the face of Mother Teresa — though at the time I had no idea who it was. Her countenance seemed somehow alive and engaging, almost three-dimensional. There was a goodness in her face, a kindness in her gaze, something appealing and deeply soul-soothing that was tugging at deep places in my spirit, places rarely touched. I felt as if she were looking through me, drawing me; and I found that I could not, I did not want to, resist.

Still shaken by what had taken place — more like a meeting with a living person than having stumbled across a book — I picked up the tiny volume, noticed its title (Something Beautiful for God, by Malcolm Muggeridge), paid for it, and made my way outside. I sat down at the bus stop, lost in thought, drinking in the goodness radiating from her countenance, reflected in page after page of photos depicting her work in the slums of Calcutta.

Who was this woman? How had she managed, in an instant, to touch the deepest part of me? How had she suddenly brought me to the end of a lifelong search, when I wasn’t even aware that I was searching? How had her photo on the cover of a book brought me face-to-face with divinity, and stirred up in me a new hope in what was best in mankind, and in myself? If it took the rest of my life, I was determined to find out.

Such was my first encounter, mediated by a book, with the woman who had already changed so many lives, and was about to change my own.

Journey of Discovery

That first vicarious encounter launched me on a personal quest: I was determined to discover what it was that I had seen in her — and more, to learn what had made her who she was. How had Mother Teresa become Mother Teresa? My hope was that the goodness I saw in her might somehow be reproduced, in myself and others. I reasoned that if her secret was understood, those who admired her around the world might have a better chance of emulating her.

But to begin my quest I needed direction. I needed a starting point.

I began by approaching the Sisters and Brothers of the Missionaries of Charity stationed there in Rome. From them I learned that the key to understanding Mother Teresa lay in the two simple words she placed on the wall of her chapels around the world — Jesus’ words from the cross: “I thirst” (Jn 19:28).

In each of her chapels I had visited in Rome, or seen in books depicting her work, there were always those same words written large beneath the cross. Carved in wood, painted on plaster, or cut from paper, the same mysterious words spoke silently of some great truth that had apparently been Mother Teresa’s anchor and inspiration.

At the time, none of the biographies of Mother Teresa ventured to guess where, when, or why these words had entered her soul with such force; why she continued to place them so prominently for all to see; or what exactly they represented for her. While no one disputed their importance, their meaning in Mother Teresa’s spirituality was not clear, even to the authors who lauded her most. Were these words part of some longstanding devotion? Did they come out of her early religious upbringing, or her training in Loreto? Or did they represent some personal, even mystical experience — since she was obviously a woman of deep prayer. Could it be that, unbeknown to all, she was not only a missionary but also a mystic?

I had already learned, both from reading and from the Sisters in Rome, that the inspiration for Mother Teresa’s work with the poor had come from an extraordinary grace she received on a train ride to Darjeeling in 1946. But she explained that as simply God’s call to leave her convent and to work in the slums — with no mention, no reference to the words she had placed on the wall, “I thirst.” I began to wonder if more had happened that day on the train than she was letting on. At least it represented a place to begin my search.

As I started to ask questions about her grace of the train, I was told that Mother Teresa spoke of it very little and very reluctantly. Many years later, she would confide that she considered her experience of September 10 so intimate, and her own person of so little importance, that she preferred to talk around the subject rather than about it. Among the Missionaries of Charity, it was understood that the one thing you could not ask Mother Teresa was about the grace of the train. She would deflect the question, and speak only of a divine “command” to go into the slums to serve the poor. While true, this was but half the story, hiding under a mantle of silence the magnitude of what had transpired in her soul.

With few exceptions, her silence continued unabated throughout her early years. She was content to allow her wordless love for the poor, together with the silent words of Jesus placed on the chapel wall, to speak for her. Her most revealing comments would come only later, as the time of her passing drew near.

And so I found my first attempts to know Mother Teresa more deeply being thwarted by mystery, and this became both a challenge and a blessing. At the time, only two things were clear. First, that “something” extraordinary had happened on the train to Darjeeling, something that had changed her life. Second, that once she had left the convent and was free to do so, she placed the words “I thirst” next to the crucifix in Mother House. But there was still a veil of secrecy over what actually had happened on the train, and over the enigmatic origin of these words on the chapel wall.

As my association with Mother Teresa grew over the ensuing years, however, I was given the opportunity to delve more deeply into her letters and conferences, and was able to begin an ongoing conversation with her that would eventually reward my search, even beyond my hopes.

A Second Quest

During my studies in Rome, I had begun to volunteer at the homeless shelter run by Mother Teresa’s Sisters near the Colosseum. During those years, and later after ordination, I was blessed with the opportunity to spend time with Mother Teresa during her frequent stops in Rome on her way from Calcutta to her various missions around the world. While I continued my quest to understand her inner fire, another quest was growing within me, even more unexpected than the first.

On one of her many visits to Rome (Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos)

That first day in the bookstore, as I held Something Beautiful for God, I knew in my heart that I not only wanted to know all I could about Mother Teresa, but I also wanted to somehow dedicate my life to her work. While my first quest had proved difficult, the second was impossible. There was no branch of her religious order for priests, and in her advanced age she seemed in no position to start such a venture (her Sisters and Brothers had already been founded thirty years earlier). But as this desire would not disappear, my growing acquaintance with Mother Teresa reached a point where I was comfortable enough to mention the idea of beginning an order of priests devoted to her mission. Ironically, it would be this second, more improbable quest that would be realized first, well before my original endeavor to learn the secret of the words on the chapel wall.

After a long process of discussion and discernment, peppered with starts and stops, in the summer of 1983 Mother Teresa at last decided to undertake the foundation of a branch of her order for priests, to eventually be called the Missionaries of Charity Fathers. As I had come back to Rome after a series of assignments in the United States, once Mother Teresa said yes, we went together to the Vatican to seek permission and advice in establishing the new foundation.

After setting up our first house in a run-down area of New York’s South Bronx, the first years were taken up not only with ministry in the streets and soup kitchens, but also in crafting the infrastructure of our fledgling community. In drafting our first constitutions, I wanted to present as full an understanding of Mother Teresa’s grace as possible, as a model for our own — and so I hoped to include some more telling reference to, and explanation of, her experience on the train. To that end, I set out to gather as much information as possible about her trip to Darjeeling, in an attempt to understand, even in its external details, the events of September 10. What follows is an outline of the events as I could reconstruct them at the time.

The Train to Darjeeling: Another Reading

On the morning of September 10, 1946, Sister Teresa Bojaxhiu left Calcutta’s Howrah Station, bound for Siliguri, in the northern plains of West Bengal. She would disembark in Siliguri and board what was affectionately called the “Toy Train,” so nicknamed for its tiny dimensions, and from there continue on the last leg of her journey.

The tiny train’s steam-powered engine climbed along a narrow, two-foot gauge track up to Darjeeling, snuggled five thousand feet high in the foothills of the Himalayas. We can surmise something of Mother Teresa’s journey from an earlier account of a similar trip to Darjeeling, recorded by a visiting Englishman:

Riding the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway on the “Toy Train” (Raghu Rai/Magnum Photos)

[The fact that] here the meter gauge system ends and the two foot gauge of the Darjeeling-Himalayan railway begins, confirms what these things hint at. One steps into a railway carriage which might easily be mistaken for a toy…. With a noisy fuss, out of all proportion to its size, the engine gives a jerk and starts. Sometimes we cross our own track after completing the circuit of a cone, at others we zigzag backwards and forwards; but always we climb….⁹

“Inspiration Day”

As the train ascended into the clean, cool mountain air, Sister Teresa would have looked out her window onto lush, thickening forests. Trains were slow in that day, not because the engines were weak, but because the track was unreliable. A trip of several hours could turn into days, as late-summer heat could buckle rails and add hours to the journey. But, when the little train was moving, a passenger’s mind could ride the rhythm of the train’s progress and easily move into prayer.

Somewhere on this ordinary journey, in the heat, in the gathering shadows, in the noisy, crowded car, something extraordinary happened. At some unknown point along the way, there in the depths of Mother Teresa’s soul, the heavens opened.

For decades, all she would tell her Sisters of that life-changing moment was that she had received a “call within a call,” a divine mandate to leave the convent and to go out to serve the poor in the slums. But something incomparably greater and more momentous had transpired as well. We now know, thanks to early hints in her letters and conversations, and her own later admissions, that she had been graced with an overwhelming experience of God — an experience of such power and depth, of such intense “light and love,” as she would later describe it, that by the time her train pulled into the station at Darjeeling, she was no longer the same. Though no one knew it at the time, Sister Teresa had just become Mother Teresa.

For the still young nun, barely thirty-six years old, another journey was beginning — an inner journey with her God that would turn every aspect of her life upside down. The grace of the train would not only transform her relationship to God, but to everyone and everything around her. Within eight short days, the grace of this moment would carry her and her newfound inner fire back down the same mountainside, and into a new life. From the heights of the Himalayas she would bring a profoundly new sense of her God back into the sweltering, pestilent slums of Calcutta — and onto a world stage, bearing in her heart a light and love beyond her, and our, imagining.

From then on, Mother Teresa would simply refer to September 10 as “Inspiration Day,” an experience she considered so intimate and ineffable that she resisted speaking of it, save in the most general terms. Her silence would prevail until the last few years of her life, when she at last was moved to lift the veil covering this sacred moment.

The Message of Divine Thirst

Reflecting on her writings, and on my conversations with her Sisters in Rome and now in the Bronx, I had begun to conclude that Mother Teresa had been entrusted with a message — in addition to her divine encounter that day, and as the result of it: a message that in some way echoed Jesus’ words “I thirst,” placed in every chapel.

But what message could there be in these words that could be so important to her? What deeper meaning could they hold? Mother Teresa had already hinted at their core meaning in her Original Rule Explanation, written a few short years after the experience of September 10. In explaining the mystery of Jesus’ thirst, she writes that “He, the Creator of the universe, asked for the love of His creatures.” He thirsted not for water, but for us and for our love.

For Mother Teresa, already at the beginning of her mission in the early 1950s, the message behind Jesus’ cry of thirst was clear, inviting, and urgent. As she told her early followers, these words reveal much more than the dying Jesus’ desire for water. Towards the end of his time on the cross, as the need for water increased due to loss of blood, Jesus’ physical thirst reached its apex, and became symbol of an inner thirst that far surpassed it. At this deeper level, Jesus’ words speak eloquently, even passionately, of God’s “thirst” for man, of his thirst to “love and be loved.”¹⁰ In Jesus crucified and thirsting, God was revealing his “infinite longing”¹¹ for his children, a longing just as keen as any man’s thirst for water in the desert heat.

Putting It All Together

As I worked on our constitutions in the Bronx, I began to ask myself if there might be a connection between Mother Teresa’s experience on the train and Jesus’ words “I thirst.” Could they both be part of the same grace? Could it be that Mother Teresa’s encounter on the train was, at its core, an encounter with Jesus’ thirst? If that were the case, the words on the wall would simply be her way of telling us, without training the spotlight on herself, yet in a way we would not forget, the essence of what had happened that grace-filled day on the train.

As I prayed and thought over it in those months, I became more persuaded that the grace of the train had been, at least in part, Mother Teresa’s own overpowering experience of Jesus’ thirst. The only thing left to complete my quest was to seek her confirmation.

On her next visit to New York, in early 1984, I finally had both reason and opportunity to ask her about the experience of the train. A few days into her visit, when I was alone with her in the front garden outside our house in the Bronx, I told her of what had been my long search to better understand her “inspiration,” and my desire to describe it accurately in our community’s constitutions. I explained to her that, for me, the only thing that made sense of her placing “I thirst” in her chapels, was that it grew out of her own experience of the thirst of Jesus — and most importantly, that her encounter with the divine thirst had been the heart and essence of September 10. If this were true, I did not want to leave it out of our constitutions; but if it were not, I did not want to continue being in error.

I waited in silence for an answer. She lowered her head for a moment, then looked up and said, “Yes, it is true.” Then after a pause, she added, “And one day you must tell the others….”

At last I had the confirmation I was seeking, and the answer to the questions sown in my soul years before in a Roman bookstore. Here, finally, was the core of Mother Teresa’s secret. In the end, it had not been some dry command to “work for the poor” that had made Mother Teresa who she was. What had forged Mother Teresa’s soul and fueled her work had been an intimate encounter with the divine thirst — for her, for the poor, and for us all.

More than a confirmation, her words that day were a mandate. This was not to be the end of my quest, nor of delving into the words on the chapel wall. It was, instead, another beginning. I had to somehow “tell the others.” And while I felt entirely inadequate to the task, I needed to find some way to share her words, not only with her Sisters, but with a wider public.

In the most indirect and humble of ways, not unlike the Virgin Mary, Mother Teresa had wished to exalt the goodness of the God she had met on the train, and the divine message that, after changing her life, held the power to change our own. She had always known, as I later realized, that her message was meant for us all — for the neediest and furthest away first of all. And the message of Jesus’ thirst, of his longing to love us, silently conveyed in her works of love as much as by her few and gentle words, was bearing fruit all around her and all around the world. Already, in the time I had known her, I had seen with my own eyes how her unspoken message could touch, and heal, and change lives.

Thankfully, in the ensuing years, perhaps as she saw the growing impact of her message, Mother Teresa became less insistent on passing over her grace in silence. What had been confided in whispered tones outside our house in the Bronx, she would begin to confirm — gradually and obliquely at first, but then ever more clearly, in her conferences and general letters. One of her handwritten letters, in particular, would help launch the writing of this volume.

“I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.” ¹²

— St. Teresa of Calcutta