MOTHER TERESA
"It is not how much we do,
but how much love we put in the doing.
It is not how much we give,
but how much love we put in the giving."
Beloved Mother Teresa left her physical
body on September 5, 1997. She was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, the youngest
of three children of an Albanian builder, on August 26, 1910 in Skopje,
Macedonia. She felt that August 27, 1910, the day of her baptism, was her
true birthday.
At the age of 18 she joined the
Order of the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto in Ireland. She trained in Dublin,
where the motherhouse of the Loreto Sisters was. She chose the name of
Sister Teresa, in memory of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.
In December 1928 she began her
journey to India and continued to Darjeeling, at the base of the Himalayan
Mountains, where she would continue her training towards her religious
vows. Soon after, on January 6, 1929 arrived in Calcutta, the capital of
Bengal, India to teach at a school for girls. While in Calcutta, she was
moved by the presence of the sick and dying on the city's streets.
On September 10, 1946, on the long
train ride to Darjeeling where she was to go on a retreat and to recover
from suspected tuberculosis, something happened. She had a life-changing
encounter with the Living Presence of the Will of God.
Mother Teresa recalls:
"I realized that I had the call to take care of the sick and the dying,
the hungry, the naked, the homeless - to be God's Love in action to the
poorest of the poor. That was the beginning of the Missionaries of Charity."
She didn't hesitate, she didn't
question. She asked permission to leave the Loreto congregation and to
establish a new order of sisters. She received that permission from Pope
Pius XII. Surely it was no coincidence that she chose a simple white sari
with sapphire blue bands (representing God's Will) as her order's garment.
In 1952 Mother Teresa and her Missionaries
of Charity began the work for which they have been noted ever since.
Her order received permission from Calcutta officials to use a portion
of the abandoned temple to Kali, the Hindu goddess of transition and destroyer
of demons. Mother Teresa founded here the Kalighat Home for the Dying,
which she named Nirmal Hriday (meaning "Pure Heart"). She and her fellow
nuns gathered dying Indians off the streets of Calcutta and brought them
to this home to care for them during the days before they died.
Ever since then, thousands of men,
women and children (more that 42,000) have been aken from the streets of
Calcutta and transported to Nirmal Hriday. Approximately 19,000 of those
have had the opportunity to die in an environment of kindness and love.
In their last hours they met human and Divine Love, and could feel that
they also were children of God. For those who didn't die, the Missionaries
of Charity tried to find jobs or they were sent to homes where they could
live happily some more years in a caring home.
Mother Teresa's first orphanage
was started in 1953, while in 1957 she and her Missionaries of Charity
began working with lepers. In the years following, her homes (she called
them "tabernacles") have been established in hundreds of locations in the
world. You can contact them at one of their United States locations
at: Missionaries of Charity, 335 East 145th Street, Bronx, New York 10451;
or their Calcutta location: Missionaries of Charity, 54A, Acharya Jagadish
Chandra Bose Road, Calcutta 700 016, India