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
Three
Calcutta: Backdrop to an Epiphany
Calcutta sunrise. Even at this early hour, noisy, bustling, hot.
Humidity rides the air; from the shops of Chowringee to the hovels of Moti Jhil, it clings to the waking city like second skin. This is the hot breath of Kali — evil goddess who devours her husbands — for whom legend suggests the city was named.
Calcutta’s sixteen million inhabitants begin to stir. Many wake to another day on the sidewalks, huddled under cardboard and tattered cloth. Out in the streets, Calcutta’s traffic begins to move and swell, like a great sea overflowing its borders. Along the lanes and side streets, diesel fumes mix with sandalwood and the sweet smell of cooking fires, far away.
Crows caw noisily overhead, perched in trees and on housetops, arrogant and oblivious. Down on the sidewalk, men squat on the cracked cement smoking bidis and shooing flies, as they pore over the morning paper. Further up the road near Sealdah station, vendors display their wares piled high and spilling onto the footpath, circled by a moving sea of sandals and bare feet.
Along the sides of the road, rickshaw pullers run, swallowed up in smoke and traffic. Sun-bronzed and wizened they go, carrying the uniform-clad children of wealthy families to their private schools, while dodging walkers and hawkers and trams. Huge steel-sided buses ply the main roads, coughing and straining. They hurtle down the streets swollen to overflowing, with riders perched on the sides and hanging out windows and open doors. At each stop, they slow to a crawl, disgorge their passengers, and take off again spewing billows of smoke. Auto-rickshaws weave in and out of traffic, dodging and darting like insects, avoiding oncoming cars by inches and seconds.
Further out on the periphery, barefoot men push their handcarts, piled high and bound for market. They trudge on, amid clouds of mosquitoes, incessant horns, and the non-stop buffeting of passing trucks and speeding buses.
There, on the outskirts of the city, begin the slums that are Mother Teresa’s Calcutta, notorious for their pavement dwellers, street children, scavengers, and disease. Though greatly improved in recent years, in Mother Teresa’s time this area had become a cliché for the worst of human poverty. This would be Mother Teresa’s domain for the rest of her days — her meeting place with God in the poor, and our meeting place with God in her.
To gain a better idea of what Mother Teresa faced when she stepped out of the convent with five rupees in her pocket, let us take a closer look at one of the more famous of Calcutta’s slums, the ironically named “City of Joy,” which once claimed one of the densest concentrations of humanity on the planet: two hundred thousand people per square mile:
It was a place where there was not even one tree for three thousand inhabitants, without a single flower, a butterfly, a bird, apart from vultures and crows — it was a place where children did not even know what a bush, a forest, or a pond was, where the air was so laden with carbon dioxide and sulfur that pollution killed at least one member in every family; a place where men and beasts baked in a furnace for the eight months of summer until the monsoon transformed their alleyways and shacks into lakes of mud and excrement; a place where leprosy, tuberculosis, dysentery and all the malnutrition diseases, until recently, reduced the average life expectancy to one of the lowest in the world; a place where eighty-five hundred cows and buffalo tied up to dung heaps provided milk infected with germs. Above all, however, [it] was a place where the most extreme economic poverty ran rife. Nine out of ten of its inhabitants did not have a single rupee per day with which to buy half a pound of rice…. Considered a dangerous neighborhood with a terrible reputation, the haunt of Untouchables, pariahs, social rejects, it was a world apart, living apart from the world.7
Even amid such extreme poverty, Mother Teresa discovered in the poor of Calcutta a nobility of character, a vitality of family ties and cultural wealth, and an inventiveness and ingenuity that made her genuinely proud. “The poor are great people,” she vigorously insisted. These were people she deeply admired, and of whom she was undyingly fond. She insisted that the two-way exchange that passed between her and the poor of Calcutta was forever tipped in her favor; that she received much more than she gave, and was ever more blessed than she was blessing.
Children
