our, imagining.
From then on, Mother Teresa would simply refer to September 10 as “Inspiration Day,” an experience she considered so intimate and ineffable that she resisted speaking of it, save in the most general terms. Her silence would prevail until the last few years of her life, when she at last was moved to lift the veil covering this sacred moment.
The Message of Divine Thirst
Reflecting on her writings, and on my conversations with her Sisters in Rome and now in the Bronx, I had begun to conclude that Mother Teresa had been entrusted with a message — in addition to her divine encounter that day, and as the result of it: a message that in some way echoed Jesus’ words “I thirst,” placed in every chapel.
But what message could there be in these words that could be so important to her? What deeper meaning could they hold? Mother Teresa had already hinted at their core meaning in her Original Rule Explanation, written a few short years after the experience of September 10. In explaining the mystery of Jesus’ thirst, she writes that “He, the Creator of the universe, asked for the love of His creatures.” He thirsted not for water, but for us and for our love.
For Mother Teresa, already at the beginning of her mission in the early 1950s, the message behind Jesus’ cry of thirst was clear, inviting, and urgent. As she told her early followers, these words reveal much more than the dying Jesus’ desire for water. Towards the end of his time on the cross, as the need for water increased due to loss of blood, Jesus’ physical thirst reached its apex, and became symbol of an inner thirst that far surpassed it. At this deeper level, Jesus’ words speak eloquently, even passionately, of God’s “thirst” for man, of his thirst to “love and be loved.”10 In Jesus crucified and thirsting, God was revealing his “infinite longing”11 for his children, a longing just as keen as any man’s thirst for water in the desert heat.
Putting It All Together
As I worked on our constitutions in the Bronx, I began to ask myself if there might be a connection between Mother Teresa’s experience on the train and Jesus’ words “I thirst.” Could they both be part of the same grace? Could it be that Mother Teresa’s encounter on the train was, at its core, an encounter with Jesus’ thirst? If that were the case, the words on the wall would simply be her way of telling us, without training the spotlight on herself, yet in a way we would not forget, the essence of what had happened that grace-filled day on the train.
As I prayed and thought over it in those months, I became more persuaded that the grace of the train had been, at least in part, Mother Teresa’s own overpowering experience of Jesus’ thirst. The only thing left to complete my quest was to seek her confirmation.
On her next visit to New York, in early 1984, I finally had both reason and opportunity to ask her about the experience of the train. A few days into her visit, when I was alone with her in the front garden outside our house in the Bronx, I told her of what had been my long search to better understand her “inspiration,” and my desire to describe it accurately in our community’s constitutions. I explained to her that, for me, the only thing that made sense of her placing “I thirst” in her chapels, was that it grew out of her own experience of the thirst of Jesus — and most importantly, that her encounter with the divine thirst had been the heart and essence of September 10. If this were true, I did not want to leave it out of our constitutions; but if it were not, I did not want to continue being in error.
I waited in silence for an answer. She lowered her head for a moment, then looked up and said, “Yes, it is true.” Then after a pause, she added, “And one day you must tell the others….”
At last I had the confirmation I was seeking, and the answer to the questions sown in my soul years before in a Roman bookstore. Here, finally, was the core of Mother Teresa’s secret. In the end, it had not been some dry command to “work for the poor” that had made Mother Teresa who she was. What had forged Mother Teresa’s soul and fueled her work had been an intimate encounter with the divine thirst — for her, for the poor, and for us all.
More than a confirmation, her words that day were a mandate. This was not to be the end of my quest, nor of delving into the words on the chapel wall. It was, instead, another beginning. I had to somehow “tell the others.” And while I felt entirely inadequate to the task, I needed to find some way to share her words, not only with her Sisters, but with a wider public.
In the most indirect and humble of ways, not unlike the Virgin Mary, Mother Teresa had wished to exalt the goodness of the God she had met on the train, and the divine message that, after changing her life, held the power to change our own. She had always known, as I later realized, that her message was meant for us all — for the neediest and furthest away first of all. And the message of Jesus’ thirst, of his longing to love us, silently conveyed in her works of love as much as by her few and gentle words, was bearing fruit all around her and all around the world. Already, in the time I had known her, I had seen with my own eyes how her unspoken message could touch, and heal, and change lives.
Thankfully, in the ensuing years, perhaps as she saw the growing impact of her message, Mother Teresa became less insistent on passing over her grace in silence. What had been confided in whispered tones outside our house in the Bronx, she would begin to confirm — gradually and obliquely at first, but then ever more clearly, in her conferences and general letters. One of her handwritten letters, in particular, would help launch the writing of this volume.
“I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.” 12
— St. Teresa of Calcutta
Five
In Her Own Words
Mother Teresa’s Handwritten Presentation
Sometime in 1986, not long after receiving Mother Teresa’s confirmation and the mandate to “tell the others,” I began to work on presenting the insights I had gleaned from her over the years, especially the one great secret of her soul: the mystery of Jesus’ thirst. After discussing this project with her on various occasions, and pointing out the great good her message could do for so many struggling with their own inward “Calcutta,” she not only gave the project her blessing, but put pen to paper and wrote the presentation reproduced below.
Through twenty years of starting and stopping, these lines she wrote have kept both author and manuscript on track. Providentially, the long march from her handwritten presentation in 1986 to a completed manuscript years later allowed Mother Teresa to express her insights on the thirst of God more clearly and fully in the interim, right up until her death, and allowed access to the invaluable personal documents that came to light after her passing.
A page from Mother Teresa’s handwritten presentation (courtesy of the author)
Besides lending these pages a validation only she could bestow, the importance of her presentation is simply in the fact that she offered to write it at all. If there was much of her soul recorded in her private letters that she had hoped to keep hidden (which, fortunately for us, did not occur, inspiring as these are), this presentation, and the divine message it introduces, represents that which she expressly did want known. In the end, this is what she had wanted to “tell the others.”
Her Message Launched
Mother
