Mother Terresa

Mother Teresa was born on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, Serbia, and the following day she was christened Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. She was the youngest of the three children born to Nikola and Dranafile Bojaxhiu, both of whom were Albanian.

When Agnes was twelve, she felt herself called to religious life. She never talked about it other than to say that it did not take the form of any supernatural or prophetic apparition. For six years Agnes prayed and thought about it. It was a Croatian Jesuit priest, Father Jambrekovic, who provided her with a litmus test during periods of doubt. His response to Agnes’s question as to how she could know whether God was really calling her was that joy was the proof of rightness of any endeavor. Joy, he said, was the compass, which pointed the direction of life. By the time she was eighteen, she was convinced that her own calling was to be a missionary, to “go out and give the life of Christ to the people”.

On the evening of September 26, 1928, she boarded a train to Zagreb. Agnes’s hope was that she was destined for the mother house of the Loreto Sisters in Rathfarnham, Dublin. After a journey to Paris, and an interview, she was recommended. She received her postulant’s cap at Loreto Abbey on October 12, 1928, but she only spent about six weeks there, mostly spent learning English.

December 1, 1928 found her sailing for India, the country of her choice. By then she had chosen the name of Sister Mary Teresa of the Child Jesus – after Teresa of Lisieux, the “Little Flower” who had pointed the way to holiness through fidelity in small things.

She arrived in Calcutta on January 6, 1929, but only for a week. She was sent to begin her novitiate in earnest in Darjeeling, a hill station some 7,000 feet up in the foothills of the Himalayas. The novitiate was a period of preparation and probation for the religious life. On May 23, 1929, Teresa of the Child Jesus was formally made a Loreto novice. Following her first temporary vows on May 24, 1931, Teresa began teaching in the Loreto convent school in Darjeeling. She also worked for a brief period helping the nursing staff in a small medical station.

On May 24, 1937 in Darjeeling Sister Teresa committed herself to her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience for life, and in doing so became “Mother Teresa”.

On September 10, 1946, a date now celebrated annually by Missionaries of Charity and Co-Workers throughout the world as “Inspiration Day”, on the rattling, dusty train journey to Darjeeling, came what she would describe as “the call within the call”. She would say very little about the experience, but the message, in whatever form it was communicated, was clear: “I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail it would have been to break the faith.”

The congregation’s expressed aim was to “quench the infinite thirst of Jesus Christ on the Cross for love of souls”. The importance of this aim would be underlined by two simple words that would be inscribed in each of the Society’s chapels, “I thirst”. Those who were called to respond to the thirst would be required to take a fourth additional vow along with poverty, chastity, and obedience – a unique vow of “wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor:” and they would be called “Missionaries of Charity” – carriers of God’s love. For to Mother Teresa, the words “I thirst” revealed the thirst of man for God.

About December 8th or 9th 1948 (the date is unclear), Mother Teresa moved in with the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of nun’s who ran St. Joseph’s Home. Within a few days, she began her new life. She set off, with some meager rations in her bag, and walked for an hour to the other side of the city. She immediately gathered a group of children around her, all eager to learn, and did what she was trained to do: teach. However, she had no desks, blackboards, or books, so she took a big stick and wrote the alphabet in the mud. On the morning of the very next day the children were waiting for her on the steps of a railway bridge leading down into the slum. By December 28 Mother Teresa had permission to open a slum school in Motijhil. The “school” was an open space among the huts; the children squatted in the dirt.

About December 8th or 9th 1948 (the date is unclear), Mother Teresa moved in with the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of nun’s who ran St. Joseph’s Home. Within a few days, she began her new life. She set off, with some meager rations in her bag, and walked for an hour to the other side of the city. She immediately gathered a group of children around her, all eager to learn, and did what she was trained to do: teach. However, she had no desks, blackboards, or books, so she took a big stick and wrote the alphabet in the mud. On the morning of the very next day the children were waiting for her on the steps of a railway bridge leading down into the slum. By December 28 Mother Teresa had permission to open a slum school in Motijhil. The “school” was an open space among the huts; the children squatted in the dirt.

There were times she was confronted with needs that taxed her abilities to the limit. The story is told that when she was attending to the poor single-handed she found herself confronted by a man with a gangrenous thumb. Obviously it had to come off, so she took a pair of scissors with, undoubtedly, a prayer, and cut. Her patient fainted one way and Mother Teresa fainted the other.

Perhaps her best known contribution, Nirmal Hriday, opened on August 22, 1952, the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Named after a Bengali phrase meaning Pure Heart, it has become a symbol in the West of all that Mother Teresa stands for. It is an abode of last resort, a place to die with a roof and some food, never a hospice. Initially, there was considerable opposition to Mother Teresa being there, as she was on sacred temple property. There were demonstrations and the Brahmin priests were horrified that Catholic sisters had been given permission to work so near their shrine, and worked diligently to have them removed. Then after the Missionaries of Charity cared with devotion for a young Brahmin priest with tuberculosis, who had staunchly opposed Nirmal Hriday, did a slow change in attitude begin.

The work spread fast. Almost 50 years after she founded it, the Missionaries of Charity have grown from 12 sisters in India to over 3,000 in 517 missions throughout 100 countries worldwide. From Venezuela to Jordan, from Italy to Tanzania, from the United States to Russia, more and more bishops were asking for sisters and the number of vocations was increasing, especially in India.

In 1962 she received the Pandra Shri prize for “extraordinary services.” Over the years she had used the money obtained from such awards to set up mobile health clinics, centers for the malnourished, rehabilitation hospices for lepers, homes for alcoholics and drug addicts, and shelters for the homeless. In 1979 she received the Nobel Peace Prize, “for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitute a threat to peace.” After being told of the honor, she replied, “I am unworthy.”

Over the last two decades, Mother Teresa had suffered from heart problems. She suffered a heart attack during a 1983 visit with Pope John Paul II. She suffered another, and more serious heart attack in 1989. It was then that a pacemaker was installed. In 1992, by the election of the New Superior general, she is prepared to hand over the responsibility. But she is re-elected. When in 1996 her health starts to fail seriously, due to her heart becoming worn out, she expresses the wish not to continue. On March 13, 1997 the assembly of sisters elect Sister Nirmala to continue the work.

On September 5, 1997, late in the evening around 9:30 p.m., Mother Teresa goes to Heaven in the Mother house in Calcutta. Totally finished and worn out, as she had given herself totally, wholeheartedly, freely and unconditionally to the service of the poorest of the poor, for the love of Jesus.