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Volunteers
After their day’s work in the slums, Mother Teresa and her Sisters would return to north-central Calcutta. Here was Mother House, her headquarters, from which hundreds of Sisters would go forth each day to give comfort and care.
Once her mission began to be known outside of India, young people from far and near began offering to help with her work in Calcutta. From all over the world they came, young volunteers in Mother Teresa’s army of love, giving a week or a month or more to help her Sisters serve the poorest of the poor.
Every morning the faces of these young foreigners could be seen moving along the swarming sidewalks, walking up Lower Circular Road on their way to morning Mass with Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity. Later, after a breakfast of chapattis (Bengali flatbread) and home-brewed chai, they would set out for the Kalighat, with its narrow lanes and shop fronts festooned with flower garlands for the gods, on their way to the Home for the Dying. Here they would spend their days changing bandages, comforting the sick, and tending to the dying, alongside Mother Teresa’s Sisters and Brothers.
After their initial struggles with the heat and the food and the difference of culture, these mostly First World youth would often find a new joy and sense of purpose stirring within — an experience often denied them by their affluent life abroad. As the days melted into weeks under Calcutta’s merciless sun, they would slowly discover that while they were touching the poor of Calcutta, God himself was touching the less-accessible, less easily admitted poverty of their own souls. Changed from within, they would return home with new answers and a new peace. But they arrived with new questions as well; questions about the life-changing closeness to God they had experienced amid the squalor and hardships of Calcutta. Questions, too, about the smiling, sari-clad woman who had gently opened their hearts to God. Who was this Mother Teresa, and what made her special? What inner flame did she carry that had kindled their hearts, and brought light into their darkness?
In the Darkness, Light
But before investigating her light, some may ask: How could there be such luminosity in someone whose interior was buffeted by darkness?
Looking back over her life and the documents that have emerged since her death, it is clear that Mother Teresa’s inner (and outer) world was a place in which the brilliance of God’s light and the bleakness of man’s darkness met and mingled — from which her victorious light only shone the brighter. What emerged from that inner struggle was a light in no way lessened by her bearing the cloak of humanity’s pain, but a light all the more resplendent, and all the more approachable. The kind of divine light we saw in her was no more the restricted domain of mystics and sages, but a light entirely accessible to the poorest, beckoning to God’s brightness all who share in the common human struggle.
In the wisdom of the divine plan, God sent Mother Teresa into the Calcuttas of this world — large and small, visible and hidden — so that precisely there, where our world (our inner world as well) appeared its darkest, the light he gave her might shine most brightly. Even more than to bring his comfort to the poor, God sent Mother Teresa to be his light. He invited her to pitch her tent in the blackest of places, not to build hospitals or high-rises, but that she might shine with his radiance.
Mother Teresa’s darkness was neither deviation nor mistake. Rather than being a divine miscue, her journey through the night had a definite and deeper purpose in God’s plan. Besides bringing her to share the dark struggle of Jesus on the cross, and the struggle of the poorest of the poor around the world, her darkness was intended as a light for the rest of us. Her night was a metaphor for the blackness of our “vale of tears,” a cartographer’s map etched on her soul to lead us through our own spiritual darkness into divine light. Paradoxically, her darkness became the vehicle for a much greater light, a light it could neither conquer nor contain, but only amplify, as it passed through her soul as through a prism.
A Message Meant for All
The energy and impetus for her new life came not only from her encounter on the train to Darjeeling, but from the message God had communicated to her there — a message revealing the immensity of his love for us, especially in our weakness and struggles. Throughout her life, Mother Teresa would cherish this message in her heart, and model it in all she did.
Mother Teresa shared her message with all who would hear — from Haiti’s President Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who had forgotten his own people starving outside his palace, to the rumpled man on L.A.’s skid row who had forgotten his own name. She knew that the greater our need, the greater our inner or outer poverty, the greater even our sin and moral failings, all the greater was God’s yearning for us. For Mother Teresa, the impulse that led the Good Shepherd to leave the ninety-nine and go in search of a single lost sheep was no longer a mystery, for she had experienced it herself; the same divine impetus had taken possession of her life.
In the months following Mother Teresa’s Nobel Prize, I offered to show the film portraying her work, Something Beautiful for God (later a book by the same name), to any group that was interested. I was invited to churches, civic organizations, schools, and gatherings of every sort — only to find the audience in tears by the end, so moved that they would queue up to offer me donations to send to Calcutta. I was witnessing not just the attraction of Mother Teresa, but the perplexity she caused, as people struggled with the newfound surge of generosity welling up inside them. Curiously, most of the audience seemed unable to find any deeper, more enduring response beyond tears and a hurried check.
Once I understood that people had difficulty extracting Mother Teresa’s message simply from what they saw on screen, I began giving a talk after the film — trying to help them make sense of what they had seen, and deal with the intense feelings the film had stirred up in them. I told them what Mother Teresa herself would have said — that there was no need to go abroad, nor even across town, to imitate her or to do something significant with their lives. She would have pointed to the suffering in the hidden Calcuttas all around them — in their own homes and families and neighborhoods, in the blind man down the street or in the unforgiven relative, forgotten behind the walls of a nursing home. These were all Calcuttas-in-miniature, where Christ, hidden under his “distressing disguise,” awaits our “hands to serve and hearts to love.” As Mother Teresa reminded every audience she addressed, whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sisters, we do it to him (cf. Mt 25:31-46).
Calcutta’s extremes of physical poverty, and the inner pain it brought to the hearts of the poor, were largely foreign to Western audiences. It took a new level of understanding for people to transpose Mother Teresa’s heroic charity in far-off Calcutta into small, seemingly un-heroic gestures of goodness and compassion in their own lives and limited surroundings. They were being challenged to alleviate the same pain of spirit they had seen on the screen, but hidden this time behind the manicured lawns and peaceable facade of their own neighborhood.
Only by explaining the applications of Mother Teresa’s message to every life did my audiences begin to bridge the gap between Calcutta and home, between the material poverty of the third world and the spiritual poverty that was theirs. In the end, God was asking of them, and of us, the same kind of generosity lived by Mother Teresa — only lived in a different setting, and practiced in a different way.
Mother Teresa never asked or expected her hearers to contribute to her work by sending a check — instead, she would suggest that they “Come and see” the work of her Sisters, and learn to spend time with the poor and needy, to give of their heart and not just their pocketbook. Writing a check was easily done, and easily done with. It allows us to do “charity,” while keeping at bay the inner tug that urges us to give more of ourselves and our time, rather than our possessions. This was the challenge people
