The Story Of Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa did not work for money. Her motivation for tireless work came only from unconditional love for suffering humanity and a will to serve God whom she saw in every face. 
Her life was a living prayer, a practical prayer. She said, “I see Christ in every person I touch because he has said, ‘I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was naked ,I was sick, I was suffering, I was homeless and you took me…' It is as simple as that. Every time I give a piece of bread, I give it to Him. That is why we must find a hungry one and a naked one. That is why we are totally bound to the poor.”
Mother Teresa was a Roman Catholic nun traveling on a train from Darjeeling to Calcutta when she heard the “call within the call” to tend with her own hands the destitute and desperate dying on the streets of Calcutta.
Mother Teresa was born in 1910 in Skopje, Albania (present day Macedonia) and named Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu by her parents. Her father was a political man who died when she was about 8. Her mother brought her up as a Catholic.
She was a religious child, fascinated by stories of saints and missionaries, and when she was 18, she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto as a missionary, never to see her mother or sister again.
First, she went to Ireland to study English in a Loreto convent and then to India in 1929 to teach children in English. In 1931 she took her first religious vows and changed her name to Teresa after Therese de Liseux, the patron saint of missionaries. While teaching, she became disturbed by the level of poverty and suffering she witnessed in Calcutta after famine and Hindu-Muslim violence.
In 1948 Mother Teresa began her missionary work with the poor. She traded her nun’s habit for a simple white sari with a blue border, adopted Indian citizenship and went into the slums.
Doubt And Difficulties
First, she started a school and soon she was looking after the destitute and starving. It was hard. She had no income and had to beg for food and supplies. She was also lonely and there were times when she experienced doubt.
This private crisis of faith continued to haunt her until her death but she remained undeterred in her work. She asked herself: “Where is my faith? Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness”. This doubt was something which her namesake also knew. St Therese spoke of “a night of nothingness“, rather like a dark night of the soul.
With permission from the Vatican, Mother Teresa founded the Missions of Charity . The purpose was to tend “the hungry, the naked, the crippled, the blind, the lepers -all those who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people who have become a burden to society and are shunned by everyone.“
The mission began in Calcutta, 1950, with 13 members and later expanded throughout India and beyond. Today there are more than 4000 sisters, 300 brothers and 100,000 volunteers running hospices, orphanages , AIDS and leprosy homes, schools and soup kitchens worldwide. Children and family counselling are also offered as a service. Now there are 610 missions in 123 countries.
Like many of those who are unconventional and pure of heart Mother Teresa encountered opposition from authorities who tried to bulldoze her “city of peace“.
She and her helpers were trying to build the lepers a sanctuary on a neglected waste land and petty officials began to destroy the building work with bulldozers, claiming she did not have a permit. Half way through the destruction, it was miraculously halted.
She was also attacked by angry villagers throwing stones when she took over an abandoned temple in order to open a hospice for the poor and dying . The villagers were angry because they thought she was trying to make a Hindu temple Christian.
The furious villagers threw stones and insults. They thought that Mother Teresa was converting the poor to Christianity. They sent a Police Commissioner to confront Mother Teresa inside the temple and push her out. The Commissioner said he must first see things for himself.
When he entered the temple he saw Mother Teresa putting potassium permanganate on the sores of a patient. Maggots were coming out and the smell was terrible. When the Police Commissioner saw what she and her helpers were doing, he was transformed. In fact , though some people being cared for were Christian, most were Hindu and some were of other faiths.
Honoring Diversity
Mother Teresa, though Catholic herself , had no intention of converting anyone and tried to grant each person their dying wish, according to their own beliefs. For instance, she and her helpers would try to find water from the Ganges for a dying Hindu or would read the Koran to a dying Muslim.
She wanted people to die with dignity, according to their own beliefs. Desperate people of many faiths were being tended with gentleness and love.
The Police Commissioner said about Mother Teresa : “At the back of this place is a black stone image of the goddess Kali. Here is the living Kali.”
Mother Teresa was aware of how much people everywhere crave love, whether they have money or not and that is why her missionaries are able to work in the so-called wealthy countries, like America and Australia as well as in the third world. Even those who have bread may experience a different kind of helplessness.
She said that in England people suffer from loneliness. They don’t need bread but they need human love.
“There is a terrible hunger for love. We all experience that in our lives-the pain, the loneliness. We must have the courage to recognise it. The poor you might have right in your own family. Find them. Love them”
Mother Teresa believed that the word love was misunderstood and misused - that “love hurts” for it must be painful to love someone, painful to leave them and you might have to die for them.
When people marry, she said, they have to give up everything to love each other and it is the same in the religious life -“to belong fully to God we must give up everything.”
A young American couple once told Mother Teresa: “ You know a lot about love. You must be married.” She replied: “yes, but sometimes I find it difficult to smile at Him.”
Mother Teresa had a heart attack in Rome while visiting the Pope. She died in 1997 after heart surgery, malaria and generally deteriorating health.
In death, as in life, her need to withdraw, to be alone with God was as important as her work in the world. This is why the missionaries began and ended their day with prayer.
She considered herself lucky to have the “leisure to pray” unlike worldly people. “It is a beautiful gift of God for us to have that amount of time.”
After her death, as in her life, she received much criticism as well as praise. She was accused of many things including her own admission of lack of faith in her diary. Her critics did not understand that doubt can be part of the development of faith.
The Catholic church recognises this, for many saints have been through similar trials in the privacy of their own hearts but their doubt and inner despair did not stop them. Their sense of separation from God only made their longing for God more intense. After a thorough investigation, of her character, Mother Teresa was beatified by the Catholic church and remains a source of inspiration to people of all faiths.
How You Do What You Do
Her attitude to work was one of service and her life inspires us to do our own unique work in the world. Despite times of inner struggle and doubt we must not lose our focus, dedication and love.
I want to finish with the words of Mother Teresa herself for she expresses this better than I can: “If you really belong to the work that has been entrusted to you, then you must do it with your whole heart. And you can bring salvation only by being honest and by really working with God. It is not how much we are doing but how much love, how much honesty, how much faith, is put into doing. It. It makes no difference what we are doing. What you are doing , I cannot do and what I am doing, you cannot do. But all of us are doing what God has given us to do. Only sometimes we forget and we spend more time looking at somebody else and wishing we were doing something else. We waste our time thinking of tomorrow and today we let the day pass and yesterday is gone.”