So we made our way through the streets of Calcutta to the little side alleyway leading to the entrance to the Mother House. There was a little sign on the door saying, "Mother is in" or "Mother is out", and the sign said, "Mother is in".
When we went through the door a young Indian sister said, "Would you like to meet Mother?"
"Yes please!"
So we waited for a few minutes on simple wooden benches and then Mother Teresa came out and shook our hands and asked where we had come from. "Have you come to give you life in service to God's holy poor?" she asked.
I felt not too big. I had only come as a curious Protestant tourist. I was tongue tied, but James was quicker off the mark. "We've only brought you a check." he said.
She thanked us and asked another sister to show us around, so we had the tour of the Mother House, the home for the dying and then we were taken around various other homes around Calcutta.
What was it like to meet a saint? My main memory was of an intense kind of reality. Mother Teresa was a connector to another world. She was a kind of human wardrobe that leads into Narnia. Meeting her and spending time in the Mother House opened up a new dimension for me--something I had never experienced before, and this sense of reality--this new level of awareness made me feel both small and great at the same time.
Small because of my own inadequacy and frailty and sinful selfishness and stupidity in the presence of that reality, but also a great-ness, knowing that I was not only a fellow human being, and therefore had the same capacity for greatness as Mother Teresa, but also because I was her brother. I was also one of the baptized, faithful.
I also had the gifts she had, and all I had to do was say "Yes."
And that also made me feel both small and great.
I loved Mother Theresa! I often felt guilty that my life was not given to doing more for the poor. She lived what she believed.
ReplyDelete"Have you come to give your life in service to God's holy poor?"
ReplyDeleteThe poorest of the poor, Mother Teresa often remarked, are not those who lack for material goods, but those who are unloved and unwanted. The "thirst" of Jesus that she worked to quench is the thirst for love. Loving the unloved.
You don't need to serve in the streets of Calcutta to give your life in service to God's holy poor. The poorest of the poor are in every city, every town. Probably not a few of them can be seen in the nearest parish at Mass, utterly poor even with a belly full of food because they have a heart that is empty and they are starving for someone's love.
Love the unloved, love the unwanted, let the invisible people and social lepers see the face of Jesus in your own, and you will be of service to God's holy poor. Love them, and you give them life itself.
Have you given your life, or at least some portion of it, in such service?
"a kind of human wardrobe that leads into Narnia....and this sense of reality--this new level of awareness made me feel both small and great at the same time." You just described my ministry as a Perinatal Hospice Nurse...the babies come into the world with one foot still out of it and in our arms and in our care, we see them make a huge shift from very weak to very strong. I love to kid with my Priest that I know more Saints than he does.
ReplyDelete