Christened Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, Mother Teresa went by her middle name, Gonxha. Born on August 26, 1910 in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire, and now the capital of Macedonia.
Her father had a generous spirit and tolerance for other faiths. Because he was so well respected, he held a seat on the city council. Her mother was severely pious and considered any moment not dedicated to Christ, wasted. It was she who maintained the family’s commitment to the poor, opening their home to the needy and adopting the orphans.
When she was 18 years old she told her mother she wanted to be a missionary. Her mother forbade it and sent her to her room for 24 hours. In October of 1928, feeling called to a life of mission work, Gonxha boarded a train leaving Macedonia. She would never see her mother or sister again: “During her 7-week trip, she wrote, “Goodbye, oh mother dear, may God be with you all. A higher power compels me toward torrid India.”
Upon arriving in India, Gonxha joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish based religious order based in Calcutta. She chose her new name of Teresa out of her admiration for St. Therese of Lisieux, a 19th century Carmelite nun who pioneered “The Little Way,” which stressed doing little things with great love for god.
She took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. These vows may seem restrictive, but she viewed them as liberating. Poverty meant freedom from worrying about possessions; chastity meant the freedom to love many rather than one; and obedience means freedom from excessive self-interest. In 1942, she made a fourth vow “Not to refuse [God] anything…under pain of mortal sin.”
In summer of 1946, Calcutta was shaken by religious rioting. Teresa ventured into the city to gather food, and the brutality she saw shook her deeply. Seeing she was near exhaustion, her religious superior sent her on a retreat in Darjeeling.Getting on her train trip from the lowlands to the city in the Himalayan foothills, she heard Christ’s voice and conversed with him. Christ affectionately calls her, “my little one.” She answers him as, “my own Jesus.” He tells her he wants her to leave Loreto and found a new religious order. She also experienced three visions of the crucifixion, one of which Mother Mary supports Teresa while her son asks, “will you refuse to do this for me?” She heard Jesus say “there are plenty of nuns to look after the rich and well-to-do people but for my very poor there are absolutely none. For them I long—them I love.”
In 1947, India achieved independence from British rule after a largely peaceful campaign led by Mohandas Ghandi but at birth the nation split into two parts: India, with a Hindu majority and largely Muslim in Pakistan. Fighting between Hindus and Muslims would claim a million lives and produce some 14 million refugees. Just months before Mother Teresa started her new ministry, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu radical. Hindu refugees streamed in from Pakistan to Calcutta. The homeless population so overwhelmed the train stations and the streets that there was no help for the dying or for sick children who ended up dying of curable diseases.
In 1950 she receives Vatican approval to what will become the Missionaries of Charity. From 4:40am-10pm they prayed they walked to minister to the needy. They were to brush their teeth with ashes. Their saris were made of grain sacks and were undecorated except one wide and two narrow blue stripes. Only a medically trained nun convinced Mother Teresa to provide a more sustaining diet than rice and water.
Early on she asked permission to create a branch of “co-workers.” These volunteers were often as hands on in the ministry to the poor as any of the missionaries but then they went home, often to comfortable residences and many were not Catholic or even Christians. For every Christian who had aided her in India, there were 10 non-Christians.
In 1952 she established her first Home for the Dying in Calcutta. This raised a lot of controversy because the Hindu caste system only allows members of the lowest castes to deal with the dead, who were considered spiritually unclean. One day an enraged mob entered the hospice and threatened to kill her but she replied calmly, “if you kill us, we would only hope to reach God sooner.” They retreated and she earned the respect of her greatest critics because of the tolerance and equal treatment she gave to all faiths.
In 1955 she established her first home for orphans in Calcutta. Mother Teresa also led a leprosy campaign which conflicted with the Hebrew Bible and the medieval Christian bible which regarded leprosy as a spiritual impurity. Even though the church has worked with the poor for centuries, Mother Teresa removed the traditional arm’s length distance between the benefactor and the beneficiary and instead created a mutual bond with the people by living as they did.
By the late 1970’s, 158 Missions are Charity foundations across the world had been established. In 1971, She was awarded the Pope John XXII Peace prize and the Nobel peace prize in 1979. Mother Teresa’s heart gave out and she died on September 5, 1997.
Eight years after Theresa’s death, the book “Come be my Light” was published by Father Kolodiejchuk. It was a collection of letters and notes written by Mother Teresa during the years of her greatest achievements. They revealed that from the moment she began her work in 1948 until her death 49 years later, with an exception of a five week period in 1958, Teresa felt unable to feel the presence of God. Father Kolodiejchuk was Mother Teresa’s chosen “postulator.” The postulator is the person chosen to research the life of anyone being considered for sainthood. He published them to make the argument in favor of canonization.
Mother Teresa had found solace in communication with Joseph Nuener. He was a theologian priest who assured her that her very craving for God was a “sure sign” of his hidden presence in her life and that his apparent absence could be the “spiritual side” of her work for Jesus.
She embraced the idea that her spiritual dryness was actually another way to share in the same passion of the same Christ who said on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
- “I have come to love the darkness. If I ever become a saint- I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will continually be absent from heaven –to light the light of those in darkness on earth.”
Kolodiejchuck suggests that her “abandonment” was more likely to represent her even more profound union with the bleakest moment of Jesus’ life. His execution on the cross.
- “When I pick up a hungry person from the streets, I give them rice and bread, and I have satisfied that hunger. But a person who feels shut out, feels unwanted by society, unloved and terrified-how much more difficult is it to remove that hunger?”
- “You in the West have the spiritually poorest of the poor much more than you have the physically poor. Often among the rich are very poor spiritual people. I find it easy to give a bowl of rice to a hungry person, to furnish a bed to a person who has no bed, but to console or to remove the bitterness, anger, and loneliness that comes from being spiritually deprived, that takes a long time.”
Unbeknownst to almost everyone, she was living in this experience herself, through Christ, with the poorest of the poor.
- “There is no time to enjoy each other, and the lack of love causes so much suffering and unhappiness in the world. Everybody today seems to be in a terrible rush, anxious for greater development and greater riches. So the breakdown of peace in the world begins at home.”
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