COME, BE MY LIGHT
Mother
Teresa of Calcutta is a name many have heard but may know only the barest
details about. Born in Albania in 1910 she died in 1997 little more than twenty
years ago. The story of her life, viewed through her letters[1],
has come my way and makes for astonishing reading.
Born
Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu, she joined the Loreto (Mary Ward) sisters, in Dublin in
1928 and soon found her way to India. For eighteen years she followed the
normal course of training and became a teacher at St Mary’s School for girls in
Calcutta. Then on the 10th September 1946, on a train going to
Darjeeling, she had an experience which she could never put into words. It was
a direct call from God – ‘a call within a call’ – to give up her life in Loreto
and ‘go into the slums and serve the poorest of the poor’. She could not doubt
this call but it took her months to convince the bishop and her own superiors
of its genuineness. On 6 January 1948 the bishop finally felt satisfied and
from that day on he gave her his full support. Still she had to wait for the
final answer from Rome and it was 17th August 1948 when she finally
set out alone to begin her work among the poorest in Calcutta.
The
work quickly grew and young women came to join her and they started houses in
different parts of India and beyond.
They lived simply, desiring to share the lives of the poor and wore an
Indian saree. By 1986 they had 350 houses in 77 countries.
So
much for what people could see on the ground.
Wherever Mother Teresa went she radiated a great joy and confidence in
God. But only a handful of people, the letters now reveal, had any idea what
she was really living. They could see
the smile and joy but within Mother Teresa was in continual agony from the time
she started her work in 1948 until her death in 1997, virtually fifty
years. She had asked to have her letters
destroyed but the recipients realised that they were a precious testimony to
what she was really living. And it takes a big effort on our part to grasp what
was happening. She had offered Jesus everything and in response he invited her
to share his agony in the garden and his abandonment on the cross. At one point
she wrote:
The
greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference
towards one’s neighbour who lives at the roadside assaulted by exploitation,
corruption, poverty and disease’. Jesus asked Teresa to share in the experience
of the poor, who were so rejected and assaulted, by experiencing ‘rejection’ by
him, although it was impossible for Jesus to reject her. Her ‘darkness’ was a
way in which she completely identified with the poor.
‘His
Father’ Teresa wrote later to her sisters, ‘did not claim Jesus as His beloved
Son (at Gethsemane) as he did at the Baptism and at the Transfiguration.
Why? Because God cannot accept sin and
Jesus had taken on sin – He had become sin … when you accept the vows you
accept the same fate as Jesus’, that is, the sense of rejection by God; ‘Why
have you forsaken me?’ Jesus committed no sin but he took on the consequences
of sin. The poor are often innocent victims and Teresa became one of them. She
did not simply do things for them.
This is not to say that
there was anything false or forced in her smile and the joy she radiated. It was just that it came from deep within and
was not something she ‘felt’ on the surface. The three readings this Sunday
form a sandwich! The two pieces of ‘bread’ on the outside are joyful readings
from Isaiah and Luke. But the meat of the sandwich is the reading from
Galatians; ‘the only thing I can boast about is the cross of our Lord Jesus.’
7 July 2019 Sunday 14 C
Isaiah 66:10-14 Galatians 6:14-18 Luke 10:1-12,17-20
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