Reading Mother Teresa--Ambassador of Joy

“Shout aloud and sing for joy, people of Zion, 

for great is the Holy One of Israel among you.” Isaiah 12:6 

There’s something so elemental about Mother Teresa’s success that when you witness it, you’re shocked at its simplicity. “Every Sunday I visit the poor in Calcutta’s slums,” she wrote in letter. “I cannot help them, because I do not have anything, but I go to give them joy” (27).

Ambassador of Joy.

Because she had nothing in her pockets, she didn’t have to refuse beggars. Quite simply, she had nothing to give them except joy, which is, of course, a marvelous gift – and very, very expensive.

Great cheerleaders don’t win ball games, and everyone knows you can’t reverse malnutrition with a smile, fight disease with sheer happiness, nor deliver people from hapless poverty by a winning personality.

Some significant criticism of Mother Teresa and her work begins with that knowledge, the assessment that just being nice isn’t enough. That criticism is understandable.

But it can’t deny her gift.

What Mother Teresa brought to the poorest of the poor, and gave away freely, was essential for life: she brought them joy – joy as a synonym for love. In the same letter, she tells the story of a mother whose family suffered immensely, a woman who “did not utter even a word of complaint about her poverty,” a woman who begged Mother Teresa to return: “Oh, Ma, come again! Your smile brought sun into this house” (27). 

Mother Teresa brought that family the sun.

I don’t have neighbors so deeply impoverished. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know from whence his or her next meal will come. Those sad children with extended bellies – you’ve seen them in a ton of photographs – live somewhere in a world other than my own. I’m a long ways from Sudan and all the way around the world from Calcutta.

But then, I suppose, darkness has a thousand faces.

And I can, just as nimbly as she did, lug in the sun, even as she did.

Or could, if I wanted.