call to leave her convent and to work in the slums — with no mention, no reference to the words she had placed on the wall, “I thirst.” I began to wonder if more had happened that day on the train than she was letting on. At least it represented a place to begin my search.
As I started to ask questions about her grace of the train, I was told that Mother Teresa spoke of it very little and very reluctantly. Many years later, she would confide that she considered her experience of September 10 so intimate, and her own person of so little importance, that she preferred to talk around the subject rather than about it. Among the Missionaries of Charity, it was understood that the one thing you could not ask Mother Teresa was about the grace of the train. She would deflect the question, and speak only of a divine “command” to go into the slums to serve the poor. While true, this was but half the story, hiding under a mantle of silence the magnitude of what had transpired in her soul.
With few exceptions, her silence continued unabated throughout her early years. She was content to allow her wordless love for the poor, together with the silent words of Jesus placed on the chapel wall, to speak for her. Her most revealing comments would come only later, as the time of her passing drew near.
And so I found my first attempts to know Mother Teresa more deeply being thwarted by mystery, and this became both a challenge and a blessing. At the time, only two things were clear. First, that “something” extraordinary had happened on the train to Darjeeling, something that had changed her life. Second, that once she had left the convent and was free to do so, she placed the words “I thirst” next to the crucifix in Mother House. But there was still a veil of secrecy over what actually had happened on the train, and over the enigmatic origin of these words on the chapel wall.
As my association with Mother Teresa grew over the ensuing years, however, I was given the opportunity to delve more deeply into her letters and conferences, and was able to begin an ongoing conversation with her that would eventually reward my search, even beyond my hopes.
A Second Quest
During my studies in Rome, I had begun to volunteer at the homeless shelter run by Mother Teresa’s Sisters near the Colosseum. During those years, and later after ordination, I was blessed with the opportunity to spend time with Mother Teresa during her frequent stops in Rome on her way from Calcutta to her various missions around the world. While I continued my quest to understand her inner fire, another quest was growing within me, even more unexpected than the first.
On one of her many visits to Rome (Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos)
That first day in the bookstore, as I held Something Beautiful for God, I knew in my heart that I not only wanted to know all I could about Mother Teresa, but I also wanted to somehow dedicate my life to her work. While my first quest had proved difficult, the second was impossible. There was no branch of her religious order for priests, and in her advanced age she seemed in no position to start such a venture (her Sisters and Brothers had already been founded thirty years earlier). But as this desire would not disappear, my growing acquaintance with Mother Teresa reached a point where I was comfortable enough to mention the idea of beginning an order of priests devoted to her mission. Ironically, it would be this second, more improbable quest that would be realized first, well before my original endeavor to learn the secret of the words on the chapel wall.
After a long process of discussion and discernment, peppered with starts and stops, in the summer of 1983 Mother Teresa at last decided to undertake the foundation of a branch of her order for priests, to eventually be called the Missionaries of Charity Fathers. As I had come back to Rome after a series of assignments in the United States, once Mother Teresa said yes, we went together to the Vatican to seek permission and advice in establishing the new foundation.
After setting up our first house in a run-down area of New York’s South Bronx, the first years were taken up not only with ministry in the streets and soup kitchens, but also in crafting the infrastructure of our fledgling community. In drafting our first constitutions, I wanted to present as full an understanding of Mother Teresa’s grace as possible, as a model for our own — and so I hoped to include some more telling reference to, and explanation of, her experience on the train. To that end, I set out to gather as much information as possible about her trip to Darjeeling, in an attempt to understand, even in its external details, the events of September 10. What follows is an outline of the events as I could reconstruct them at the time.
The Train to Darjeeling: Another Reading
On the morning of September 10, 1946, Sister Teresa Bojaxhiu left Calcutta’s Howrah Station, bound for Siliguri, in the northern plains of West Bengal. She would disembark in Siliguri and board what was affectionately called the “Toy Train,” so nicknamed for its tiny dimensions, and from there continue on the last leg of her journey.
The tiny train’s steam-powered engine climbed along a narrow, two-foot gauge track up to Darjeeling, snuggled five thousand feet high in the foothills of the Himalayas. We can surmise something of Mother Teresa’s journey from an earlier account of a similar trip to Darjeeling, recorded by a visiting Englishman:
Riding the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway on the “Toy Train” (Raghu Rai/Magnum Photos)
[The fact that] here the meter gauge system ends and the two foot gauge of the Darjeeling-Himalayan railway begins, confirms what these things hint at. One steps into a railway carriage which might easily be mistaken for a toy…. With a noisy fuss, out of all proportion to its size, the engine gives a jerk and starts. Sometimes we cross our own track after completing the circuit of a cone, at others we zigzag backwards and forwards; but always we climb….9
“Inspiration Day”
As the train ascended into the clean, cool mountain air, Sister Teresa would have looked out her window onto lush, thickening forests. Trains were slow in that day, not because the engines were weak, but because the track was unreliable. A trip of several hours could turn into days, as late-summer heat could buckle rails and add hours to the journey. But, when the little train was moving, a passenger’s mind could ride the rhythm of the train’s progress and easily move into prayer.
Somewhere on this ordinary journey, in the heat, in the gathering shadows, in the noisy, crowded car, something extraordinary happened. At some unknown point along the way, there in the depths of Mother Teresa’s soul, the heavens opened.
For decades, all she would tell her Sisters of that life-changing moment was that she had received a “call within a call,” a divine mandate to leave the convent and to go out to serve the poor in the slums. But something incomparably greater and more momentous had transpired as well. We now know, thanks to early hints in her letters and conversations, and her own later admissions, that she had been graced with an overwhelming experience of God — an experience of such power and depth, of such intense “light and love,” as she would later describe it, that by the time her train pulled into the station at Darjeeling, she was no longer the same. Though no one knew it at the time, Sister Teresa had just become Mother Teresa.
For the still young nun, barely thirty-six years old, another journey was beginning — an inner journey with her God that would turn every aspect of her life upside down. The grace of the train would not only transform her relationship to God, but to everyone and everything around her. Within eight short days, the grace of this moment would carry her and her newfound inner fire back down the same mountainside, and into a new life. From the heights of the Himalayas she would bring a profoundly new sense of her God back
