Mother Teresa was known to declare that we are all capable of becoming saints. She saw her sisters as little flowers in God’s garden.
Mother Teresa speaking to Father James at the Gift of Peace House in Washington, D.C. (1991) PHOTO COURTESY OF FATHER JAMES MCCURRY
1 Although Mother Teresa has now been canonized and is formally known as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, I will refer to her throughout these pages as Mother Teresa. She remains the only leader of the Missionaries of Charity to have received the title “Mother.”
III.
Father James McCurry
During the flight from Italy after Mother Teresa’s beatification, Uncle Hugo introduced me to Father James McCurry, a resident of the Shrine of St. Anthony in Ellicott City, Maryland. Father James’s devotion to Mother Mary led to numerous meetings with Mother Teresa. Over the years, he led many retreats for Mother Teresa in the United States, Rome, and Mexico, often giving short two- or three-day retreats at the contemplative house in New York’s South Bronx, or days of recollection in homes in New York and Washington, D.C.
Following our flight, I arranged with the kindly priest to visit him at the monastery where he lived. I was now growing accustomed to setting up my video gear and preparing for in-depth interviews with devotees of Mother Teresa. Father James is one of the gentlest priests I have met in my research. The morning of our interview, he was very concerned about my needs and even with the details of items to be included in the video interview. We placed a vase of artificial flowers on a table next to the couch where he would be seated for the next few hours. “I have a real African violet,” he offered. The setting was perfect, and throughout our interview he was framed by a statue of Our Lady of Fatima.
Mother Teresa is shown being the typical mother figure as her sisters, taking their final vows to the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, proceed to enter St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Calcutta. (December 1995)
Mother offers a crucifix to kiss for a sister taking her vows to the order in St. Mary’s Church.
“For her, religious life meant giving yourself totally to God and neighbor, nothing more and nothing less.”
• • •
Father James first read about Mother Teresa in Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge. He finally got to see her himself in the late 1970s. Father James explained that the American Catholic Church had heard of Mother Teresa at the time of the Eucharistic Congress in 1976. She came to Philadelphia for the Congress and was given wide exposure to the American public. “A few years later I heard her speak and saw her face-to-face in Chicago.” She spoke about religious life and the consecrated life. “For her, religious life meant giving yourself totally to God and neighbor, nothing more and nothing less.” As Father James said, “Religious life is giving of oneself in love of God to neighbor, and that is what Mother Teresa exemplified.”
The friendship between Father James and Mother Teresa really began in October 1982, when they both attended the canonization of Saint Maximilian Kolbe. Father James told me, “I met Mother Teresa in St. Peter’s Basilica just before the ceremony of the canonization.” He took part in the Mass and carried the portrait of Maximilian Kolbe. Before the ceremony began, Father James waited inside the basilica with other participants. He was taking the opportunity to kneel in front of the Pietá when someone tapped him on the shoulder. A friar brought him into a room where the papal vestments were laid out for Mass. “Just as we were coming out the door past the Pietá, who do we bump into? Mother Teresa.” She told him, “Oh, I love Maximilian Kolbe.” They spoke about the life of the saint and his devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mother Teresa then asked Father James if he would be willing to give talks to her sisters about the new saint and about Our Lady. Father James agreed.
• • •
I asked Father James if he had known of Mother’s inner darkness. “Never, never, ever,” he answered. “In the life of the saint, what is most important is what is going on in their heart and their relationship to God. What they do is the fruit of who they are. Who they are is who they are in relationship to God. So for us to simply look at Mother Teresa, the woman of charity who fed the poor and worked in the slums — it lets us see the external woman but it doesn’t let us see the secret that kept captivating us with those good works. Now in her inner life, the pain helped her to identify with Jesus in his pain. Jesus did not have a good feeling of his relationship with his Father when he was on Calvary. He felt abandoned. He said, ‘My God, my God why have you abandoned me.’ In a sense, Mother experienced that same interior abandonment by God. She knew she wasn’t abandoned, but she didn’t have a warm, cozy feeling in her relationship to God, so it gave authenticity to her work and truth to her inner life. Her inner life wasn’t based on self-satisfaction but on conformity to God’s will.”
Sisters taking their final vows to the Order of the Missionaries of Charity are deep in prayer during the Mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Calcutta. (December 1995)
Mother Teresa outside Sacred Heart Parish after a Mass on the day of her visit to Atlanta, Georgia. The church has since been named Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. (June 15, 1995)
“Her inner life wasn’t based on self-satisfaction but on conformity to God’s will.”
He continued, “Mother Teresa concealed from her sisters and from the world that she was going through that dark night for so many years. Her smile radiated joy and brought Christ into the lives of so many. Behind that smile was an experience of darkness that even the sisters who were closest to her did not know about.” The records of her letters, including correspondence with two archbishops of Calcutta, were only revealed after her death. Archbishops Ferdinand Perier (archbishop of Calcutta from 1924 to 1960) and Lawrence Picachy (archbishop of Calcutta from 1969 to 1986) were among the few privy to the mystery of Mother Teresa’s darkness because, as Father James explained, she was a “spiritual daughter to them.”
Father James compared Mother’s interior darkness to that experience which all go through as they grow closer in their relationship to God. In a person’s relationship with God, the early emotions cannot be sustained on a daily basis. “You can’t live your life on a spiritual high,” explained Father James. “There has to be a purification, so the reason you are praying and serving others isn’t because you get a good feeling out of it but because God is glorified — because Jesus is being praised and honored through your prayer and service. The focus shifts from fulfilling my needs to serving his. Jesus is thirsting for me to be his servant. If you are serving the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, they are suffering too much to say ‘thank you.’ As you grow in your spirituality, God says, ‘I am enough for you,’ and he takes away the consolations. Mother Teresa zeroed in on that theme of Jesus thirsting. What was Jesus thirsting for? He was thirsting for this woman to love him and serve him.”
Based on her letters, it is evident that this period of darkness commenced shortly after she began her ministry of serving the poorest of the poor.
Mother
