Reading Mother Teresa: Her Fears and Ours

Make every effort to live in peace with everyone 

and to be holy; 

without holiness 

no one will see the Lord. Hebrews 12:14

We had again trouble at Kalighat [Nirmal Hriday] – they very coolly told me I must thank God that up to now I have not received a shot or a beating from them, since all those who worked for them death has been their reward. Very peacefully I told them, that I was ready to die for God. Hard times are coming, let us pray that our Society will stand the test of Charity. (152)

I’m not altogether sure what Mother Teresa considered to be “the test of Charity,” but one can infer from what she says in this note to Archbishop Périer, that it was something a good deal more than keeping pantry shelves full of food or pots and pans sparkling. She implies that for her as well as the needy, physical danger, even death was lurking in “the holes of the poor,” and that assessing the Society’s successes could prove difficult if one of the Missionaries of Charity were actually to die carrying out the mission.

Calcutta’s slums in the post-war period go far beyond anything some North American might imagine. Comparing the level of your and my suffering is always impossible, and yet it’s fair to say that even the most impoverished children in these United States will not likely be turned down for medical care if they’re carried, as they often are, to Emergency.

Not so in Calcutta. People died on the streets, their bodies left to rot. The poor of Calcutta lived in impoverishment unlike anything most of us can imagine – and that level of poverty often breeds violence. What the Missionaries of Charity did on the streets was often dangerous work.

Consider also the depth of darkness Mother Teresa faced for a very long time, a darkness she really had to cover in order to lead the young women who came to work with her. Imagine for a moment how hard it must have been to wear a smile, to give comfort, to cheer the depressed when she felt herself totally alone in the world, abandoned somehow by the God she meant to serve with every bit of her being, every moment of her life.

What I’m saying is that it’s not hard to build a case for a daily life lived in torturous difficulty, torment, and fear. I am sure her prayers were unceasing, that she asked every day to be freed from the problems she faced all around,
dangers within and violence without.

It’s impossible for me to go on right now without smiling, for, by her own confession, what shook her world unmercifully, what scared her half to death, was not the war without or the battles within, but – stay with me here – speaking to large crowds. The Missionaries of Charity grew in reach and reputation; and in the fall of 1960, for the first time since she’d come to Calcutta in 1929, she left India, bound for the United States, for Las Vegas – of all places! – where she’d been asked to speak at a convention of the National Council of Catholic Women.

Was she stretching it a bit when she said, “My going to U.S. – was the hardest act of obedience I had ever had to give to God” (204)? Was speaking to 3000 women more difficult than answering the call to mission, than walking the desolate streets around her, than facing the darkness within? Seems impossible.

But human. But incredibly and authentically human. She was scared to death of a microphone.

To know the story is to understand the humanness of this tiny woman. She was a saint, not because there was something about her that made her greater than others, but because she listened to the Lord and did extraordinary things in his name out of obedience. She was not an angel and in no way divine.

But she did saintly things, as all of us know – all of us believers. She modeled courage and love in a way few have done.

But put her in front of a microphone and she wilted.

MT was a composite of flesh and blood and soul. She was only one of us, just another of God’s own children.