Reading Mother Teresa--"the holes of the poor"

Carry each other’s burdens, 

and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. 

Galatians 6:2 

“Come, come, carry Me into the holes of the poor.” (44) 

I must admit that if I were Christ’s English prof, I’d suggest He find some alternative to “the holes of the poor,” language he used, says Mother Teresa, when he told her about the new mission he had for her, language which, these days, to say the least, lacks politically correctness. Holes makes the poor seem like pocket gophers – moles maybe, or, worse, rats. “Think of the image you’re creating,” I might say, professorially.

But some history is in order. If in your imagination, you see Mother Teresa’s work among the poor the way I do, the backdrop is a U.S. slum landscape, circa 1980 or so. Think Chicago, New York, LA. But Calcutta in the 1940s was a slum of wholly different magnitude.

In the Great Famine of 1942 and 1943, somewhere between two and four million people – I’m spelling those words so you don’t think them typos – died on Bengal streets for reasons which that are, trust me, still hotly debated and more than fiercely remembered. Two and four million people. Chicago’s population, in total, in 1940 was 3,400,400. Consider them gone.

Once the Second World War ended, the battle for Indian independence from England resumed mightily until the British partitioned the country into India and Pakistan, one predominantly Hindu, the other Muslim, on Partition Day in August of 1947. At the very heart of the liberation movement and the division between national religions sat Bengal and its central city, Calcutta.

National pride and religious hatred notwithstanding, there is no way to describe what happened in Calcutta in August of 1946, other than sheer madness, just a year before Partition Day. For four days and four nights Muslims slaughtered Hindus, and Hindus slaughtered Muslims in a holocaust of religious madness called today, “the Week of the Long Knives.” Exactly how many people died is almost anyone’s guess – hundreds, thousands.

In September of that year, 1946, just two weeks or so after “the Week of the Long Knives,” Mother Teresa heard Jesus’s voice on the train and at the retreat at Darjeeling. She was cloistered, of course, a teacher in a girls school; but she had to know that just outside those religious walls, hell itself had come to earth.

But there’s more. In the time that surrounded Indian and Pakistani liberation from English rule, the time of national independence, the largest migration of population in the history of the world was taking place, millions of Hindus leaving their homes in Pakistan to take refuge in what would become Hindu Indi – and millions of Muslim Indians leaving their homeland for refuge in what would become Muslim Pakistan. Millions became homeless and hungry, and right there at the heart of the suffering once more was Calcutta.

I don’t claim to know what kind of language Jesus uses in his interlocutions, and I certainly don’t know what’s appropriate for the Savior of Mankind, if and when he speaks to any of us, to you or to me.  But because I know some history, I am not about to critique the language Mother Teresa claims he used to tell her he was calling her to service to the poor, right in their very “holes,” because the world she saw and experienced outside the fortress of the school and convent where she lived was a suffering place unlike anything I can imagine.

The patio door is open now, and a beautiful breeze is coming into my study. It’ll get hot soon once again, and I’ll have to close it all up to keep the sun out, temperatures arising. The truth is, I know absolutely nothing about the suffering Mother Teresa saw every day on the streets of Calcutta – absolutely nothing in my life comes anywhere close.

When he told Mother Teresa to go to “the holes of the poor,” he used language that couldn’t possibly have made the situation more horrible than it actually was. She must have known something of that herself. All that suffering came to her as the voice of the Lord, horror and death happening daily all around.

In 1975, Paul Theroux wrote of Calcutta, “The city seemed like a corpse on which the Indians were feeding like flies.” That was 30 years after Mother Teresa heard the Lord tell her to go to the poor, the ones who lived in holes. The task was not just daunting, it was impossible – without faith.