SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL FOR GOD
MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE
COLLINS/FOUNT PAPERBACKS 1977
PART I
Chapter 1: Something Beautiful for God
I should explain, in the first place, that Mother Teresa has requested that nothing in the nature of a biography or biographical study of her should be attempted. ‘Christ’s life’, she wrote to me, ‘was not written during his lifetime, yet he did the greatest work on earth – he redeemed the world and taught mankind to love his Father. The Work is his Work and to remain so, all of us are but his instruments, who do our little bit and pass by.’ I respect her wishes in this, as in all other matters. What we are expressly concerned with here is the work she and her Missionaries of Charity – an order she founded – do together, and the life they live together, in the service of Christ, in Calcutta and elsewhere. Their special dedication is to the poorest of the poor; a wide field indeed.
They have houses in other Indian towns, in Australia and Latin America and Rome. There are also houses in Tanzania, Ceylon and Jordan. They are springing up all the time, almost of themselves, wherever the chain of affliction and destitution bites. In that Mother Teresa is the inspirer and mainspring of this work, the one to whom all the others turn, she has to be picked out for special attention. Pretty well everyone who has met her would agree, I think, that she is a unique person in the world today; not in our vulgar celebrity sense of having neon lighting about her head. Rather in the opposite sense – of someone who has merged herself in the common fate of mankind, and identified herself with human suffering and privation.
• It is, of course, true that the wholly dedicated like Mother Teresa do not have biographies. To live for, and in, others, as she and the Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity do, is to eliminate happenings which are a factor of the ego and the will. ‘Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,’ is one of her favorite sayings.
• Her home, she said, had been an exceptionally happy one. So, when her vocation came to her as a school girl, the only impediment was precisely this loving, happy home which she did not want to leave. Of course the vocation won, and won for ever.
• This was the end of her biography and the beginning of her life; in abolishing herself she found herself, by virtue of that unique Christian transformation, manifested in the Crucifixon and the Resurrection, whereby we die in order to live.
• Once I had occasion to see her off, with one of the Sisters, at Calcutta railway station. When the train began to move, and I walked away, I felt as though I were leaving behind me all the beauty and all the joy in the universe.
• Something of God’s universal love has rubbed off on Mother Teresa, giving her homely features noticeable luminosity; a shining quality.
• She has lived so closely with her Lord that the same enchantment clings about her that sent the crowds chasing after him in Jerusalem and Galilee, and made his mere presence seem a harbinger of healing.
• Outside the streets were beginning to stir; sleepers awakening, stretching and yawning; some raking over the piles of garbage in search of something edible.
• It was a scene of desolation, yet it, too, seemed somehow irradiated. This love, this Christian love, which shines down on the misery we make, and into our dark hearts that make it; irradiating all, uniting all, making of all one stupendous harmony.
• I should add, perhaps, that the home Mother Teresa so loved was Albanian in Yugoslavia, and that she comes of peasant stock. This is apparent in her appearance and bearing and way of looking at things.
• Without the special grace vouchsafed her, she might have been a rather hard, and even grasping, person. God has turned these qualities to his own ends.
• I never met anyone less sentimental, less scatty, more down-to-earth. Thus, until she can accommodate her lepers in proper settlements where they can live useful, productive lives together, they still go out to beg in the streets of Calcutta if they want to.
• It was while she was teaching at the Loreto convent school in Calcutta that the second great break in Mother Teresa’s life took place; the call within a call, as she puts it.
• She had occasion to go into some of the very poorest streets of Calcutta – and where are there any poorer? – and suddenly realized that she belonged there, not in her Loreto convent with its pleasant garden, eager schoolgirls, congenial colleagues and rewarding work.
• Again the only impediment to her new vocation was the happiness and happy relationships it required her to relinquish.
• It might seem strange to regard any religious order as an unduly easeful existence, but that was how Mother Teresa saw it in contrast with the lives of the very poor in Calcutta.
• She had to wait for some two years to be released from the vows she had already taken in order to be able to go back into the world, there to take even stricter vows of her own devising.
• Ecclesiastical authority, I should add, is something that she accepts in the same unquestioning way that peasants accept the weather, or sailors storms at sea. It would never occur to her either to venerate or to challenge it. So she just waited patiently.
• When at last her release came, she stepped out with a few rupees in her pocket, made her way to the poorest, wretchedest quarter of the city, found a lodging there, gathered together a few abandoned children – there were plenty to choose from – and began her ministry of love.
• As it happened, I lived in Calcutta for eighteen months or so in the middle thirties when I was working on the Statesman newspaper there, and found the place, even with all the comforts of a European’s life – the refrigeration, the servants, the morning canter round the Maidan or out at the Jodhpur Club, and so on – barely tolerable.
• Conditions then, in any case, were by no means as bad as they are today; for one thing, the refugees had not come pouring in from a newly created and ludicrously delineated Pakistan.
• Even so, they were bad enough, and I always thought of the city as one of the dark places of our time, where the huge fortunes made out of jute and other industries only served to pile ever higher the human debris out of which they were made.
• Thus to choose, as Mother Teresa did, to live in the slums of Calcutta, amidst all the dirt and disease and misery, signified a spirit so indomitable, a faith so intractable, a love so abounding, that I felt abashed.
• With great resourcefulness, and knowing the brawls that could so easily develop when a European car was involved in a street accident, my driver jumped out, grabbed the injured man, put him in the driving seat beside him, and drove away at top speed to the nearest hospital.
• Being a sahib, I was able to follow him into the emergency ward. It was a scene of inconceivable confusion and horror, with patients stretched out on the floor, in the corridors, everywhere.
• While I was waiting, a man was brought in who had just cut his throat from ear to ear. It was too much; I made off, back to my comfortable flat and a stiff whisky and soda, to expatiate through the years to come on Bengal’s wretched social conditions, and what a scandal it was, and how it was greatly to be hoped that the competent authorities would … and so on.
• I ran away and stayed away; Mother Teresa moved in and stayed. That was the difference. She, a nun, rather slightly built, with a few rupees in her pocket; not particularly clever, or particularly gifted in the arts of persuasion.
• Just with this Christian love shining about her; in her heart and on her lips. Just prepared to follow her Lord, and in accordance with his instructions regard every derelict left to die in the streets as him; to hear in the cry of every abandoned child, even in the tiny squeak of the discarded foetus, the cry of the Bethlehem child; to recognize in every leper’s stumps the hands which once touched sightless eyes and made them see, rested on distracted heads and made them calm, brought back to health sick flesh and twisted limbs.
• As for my expatiations on Bengal’s wretched social conditions – I regret to say that I doubt whether, in any divine accounting, they will equal one single quizzical half smile bestowed by Mother Teresa on a street urchin who happened to catch her eye.
• What the poor need, Mother Teresa is fond of saying, even more than food and clothing and shelter (though they need these, too, desperately), is to be wanted. It is the outcast state their poverty imposes upon them that is the most agonizing.
• She has a place in her heart for them all. To her, they are all children of God, for whom Christ died, and so deserving of all love.
• If God counts the hairs of each of their heads, if none are excluded from the salvation the Crucifixion offers, who will venture to exclude them from earthly blessings and esteem; pronounce this life unnecessary, that one better terminated or never begun?
• I never experienced so perfect a sense of human equality as with Mother Teresa among her poor. Her love for them, reflecting God’s love, makes them equal, as brothers and sisters within a family are equal, however widely they differ in intellectual and other attainments, in physical beauty and grace.
• This is the only equality there is on earth, and it cannot be embodied in laws, enforced by coercion, or promoted by protest and upheaval, deriving, as it does, from God’s love, which, like the rain from heaven, falls on the just and the unjust, on rich and poor, alike.
• Her and the Sisters’ and Brothers’ identification with the poor among whom they live is no mere figure of speech. They eat the same food, wear the same clothes, possess as little, are not permitted to have a fan or any of the other mitigations of life in Bengal’s sweltering heat.
• Even at their prayers, the clamour and discordancies of the street outside intrude, lest they should forget for a single second why they are there and where they belong.
• I first met Mother Teresa in person some three years ago at a religious house near Portland Place, where I conducted a television interview with her for the BBC. All I knew about her – such as it was – I had mugged up in the train on my way to London.
• The interview had been setup in a great hurry thanks to the initiative of Oliver Hunkin, for which I shall be eternally grateful to him.
• I sat waiting for her, with appropriate questions running through my head; the camera, the lights, the sound recordist, all in position. A scene desolatingly familiar to me.
• Then she came in. It was, for me, one of those special occasions when a face, hitherto unknown, seems to stand out from all other faces as uniquely separate and uniquely significant, to be thenceforth for ever recognizable.
• Though we pursue egotistic and carnal ends with an avidity that, alas, not even advancing years can wholly cure, we yet recognize with delight the spirit that has detached itself from these purposes.
• What we most want, we most despise, and we yet give our hearts where our hopes and desires are most alien. So, I knew that, even if I were never to see Mother Teresa again, the memory of her would stay with me for ever. As, indeed, it surely will.
• Mother Teresa was almost laconic when I asked her whether she did not think that the destitution she was trying to cope with in Calcutta required a government agency disposing of vastly greater resources of money and manpower than her Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity did or could. The more government agencies did the better, she said; what she and the Sisters had to offer was something else – Christian love.
• Criticism of Mother Teresa is often directed at the insignificant scale of the work she and the Sisters undertake by comparison with the need. It is even suggested that, by seeming to achieve more than she does, or can, she may actually lull the authorities into a complacency the situation by no means warrants, or at any rate provide them with an excuse for inaction.
• Again, her necessarily limited medical resources, and the old-fashioned methods allegedly used, are pointed to as detracting from her usefulness.
• It is perfectly true, of course, that, statistically speaking, what she achieves is little, or even negligible. But then Christianity is not a statistical view of life.
• That there should be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over all the hosts of the just, is an anti-statistical proposition.
• Likewise with the work of the Missionaries of Charity. Mother Teresa is fond of saying that welfare is for a purpose – an admirable and necessary one – whereas Christian love is for a person. The one is about numbers, the other about a man who was also God. Herein lies the difference between the welfare services and the service of Christ.
• Imagine Bernard Shaw and a mental defective on a raft that will hold only one of them. In worldly terms, the obvious course would be for Shaw to pitch the mental defective into the sea, and save himself to write more plays for the edification of mankind.
• Christianly speaking, jumping off and leaving the mental defective in possession of the raft would give an added glory to human life itself of greater worth than all the plays that ever have been, or will be, written.
• Again in my television interview with Mother Teresa I raised the point as to whether, in view of the commonly held opinion that there are too many people in India, it was really worth while trying to salvage a few abandoned children who might otherwise be expected to die of neglect, malnutrition, or some related illness.
• It was a point, as I was to discover subsequently, so remote from her whole way of looking at life that she had difficulty in grasping it. The notion that there could in any circumstances be too many children was, to her, as inconceivable as suggesting that there are too many bluebells in the woods or stars in the sky.
• To suppose otherwise is to countenance a death-wish. Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.
• The God Mother Teresa worships cannot, we are told, see a sparrow fall to the ground without concern. For man, made in God’s image, to turn aside from this universal love, and fashion his own judgements based on his own fears and disparities, is a fearful thing, bound to have fearful consequences.
• What, I wonder, will posterity – assuming they are at all interested in us and our doings –make of a generation of men, who, having developed technological skills capable of producing virtually unlimited quantities of whatever they might need or desire, as well as enabling them to explore and perhaps colonize the universe, were possessed by a panic fear that soon there would not be enough food for them to eat or room for them to live?
• It will seem, surely, one of the most derisory, ignominious and despicable attitudes ever to be entertained in the world of human history; though containing its own corrective.
• In seeking to avert an imagined calamity, the promoters and practitioners of birth-control automatically abolish themselves, leaving the future to the procreative. An interesting case of self-genocide.
• The response was greater than I have known to any comparable programme, both in mail and in contributions of money for Mother Teresa’s work. They came from young and old, rich and poor, educated and uneducated; all sorts and conditions of people.
• All of them said approximately the same thing – this woman spoke to me as no one ever has, and I feel I must help her.
• Discussions are endlessly taking place about how to use a mass medium like television for Christian purposes, and all manner of devices are tried, from dialogues with learned atheists and humanists to pop versions of the psalms and psychedelic romps.
• Here was the answer. Just get on the screen a face shining and overflowing with Christian love; someone for whom the world is nothing and the service of Christ everything; someone reborn out of servitude to the ego and the flesh, and into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
• It might seem surprising, on the face of it, than an obscure nun of Albanian origins, very nervous – as was clearly apparent – in front of the camera, somewhat halting in speech, should reach English viewers on a Sunday evening as no professional apologist, bishop or archbishop, moderator or knockabout progressive dog-collared demonstrator ever has.
• The message was the same message that was heard in the world for the first time two thousand years ago; as Mother Teresa showed, it has not changed its sense or lost its magic.
• As then, so now, it is brought, ‘not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power; that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God’.
• When the Pope visited India, on leaving he presented her with his white ceremonial motor-car. She never so much as took a ride in it, but shrewdly organized a raffle with the car as the prize, thereby raising enough money to get her leper colony started.
• She has never accepted any government grants in connection with her medical and social work. This, she says, with another of her quizzical smiles, would involve keeping accounts. She grudges every moment expended and penny spent other than on carrying out Christ’s two commands – to love God and to love her neigbour.
• Actually the efficiency with which everything is managed is quite remarkable. Computers would only spoil it.
• After this experience of interviewing Mother Teresa, I had a consuming desire to go to Calcutta and participate in making a television programme about her and her work.
• This became possible in the spring of 1969, thanks to the BBC. We arrived at Calcutta airport on one of those heavy humid days for which Bengal is famous.
• Mother Teresa was waiting for us in the little courtyard of their house. The sight of her, or even the thought of her, always gives me a great feeling of happiness.
• We knelt side by side. I have always found praying, in any definitive sense, very difficult. I squirm when I hear trendy clergymen asking God to attend to our balance of payments, or to adjust the terms of trade more in accordance with the interests of under-developed countries, or to ensure, in a forthcoming general election, that the best man wins.
• Also, when old-style evangelicals, with, I am sure, utter sincerity, recount how in response to their prayers God made their businesses prosper, or brought them into contact with a particularly lucrative client.
• Nonetheless, there is a prayer of St Augustine, a fellow communicator who once called himself, as I must, a vendor of words, that I often say over, and did on this occasion, kneeling beside Mother Teresa: ‘Let me offer you in sacrifice the service of my thoughts and my tongue, but first give me what I may offer you.’
• I once scribbled down my own version on the flyleaf of the paperback edition of St Augustine’s Confessions: ‘Oh God, stay with me. Let no word cross my lips that is not your word, no thought enter my mind that is not your thought, no deed ever be done or entertained by me that is not your deed.
• When I left Calcutta, Mother Teresa gave me a copy of the little manual of devotion she and the Sisters use. In my copy, a very precious possession, she wrote:
Make us worthy, Lord, to serve our fellow men throughout the world who live and die in poverty and hunger. Give them through our hands this day their daily bread, and by our understanding love, give peace and joy.
• We came down from the chapel together, and the filming began. In the ordinary way, making a fifty-minute documentary, which is what our film came out at, takes two to three months. To produce a sufficiency of footage in five days necessarily put a heavy strain on all concerned.
• It was impossible to get a report on the film taken before moving elsewhere, so there was no chance of re-doing any that was unsatisfactory.
• All this, as anyone with experience of filming expeditions will know, amounted to a kind of miracle.
• The Home for the Dying is dimly lit by small windows high up in the walls, and Ken was adamant that filming was quite impossible there. We had only one small light with us, and to get the place adequately lighted in the time at our disposal was quite impossible.
• In the processed film, the part taken inside was bathed in a particularly beautiful soft light, whereas the part taken outside was rather dim and confused.
• Ken has all along insisted that, technically speaking, the result is impossible. To prove the point, on his next filming expedition – to the Middle East – he used some of the same stock in a similarly poor light, with completely negative results.
• I am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn.
• Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying is overflowing with love, as one senses immediately on entering it. This love is luminous, like the haloes artists have seen and made visible round the heads of the saints. I find it not at all surprising that the luminosity should register on a photographic film.
• One thing everyone who has seen the film seems to be agreed about is that the light in the Home for the Dying is quite exceptionally lovely. The light conveys perfectly what the place is really like; an outward and visible luminosity manifesting God’s inward and invisible omnipresent love.
• This is precisely what miracles are for – to reveal the inner reality of God’s outward creation. I am personally persuaded that Ken recorded the first authentic photographic miracle.
• It so delighted me that I fear that I talked and wrote about it to the point of tedium, and sometimes of irritation. Miracles are unpopular today – to the scientifically minded because they seem to conflict with so-called scientific miracles, like bumping television programmes across the world by satellite, or going to the moon; to the ostensibly religiously minded because they remind them of miraculous claims made in the past and now discredited, which they wish to forget.
• I record the matter here in the hope that, in years to come, Christian believers may be glad to know that in a dark time the light that shone about the heads of dying derelicts brought in from the streets of Calcutta by Mother Teresa’s Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity, somehow got itself recorded on film.
• The day begins for the Sisters with prayers and meditation at 4.30 am, followed by mass. After the mass they do their washing and other chores with great vigour. Everything is done vigorously.
• They each have a shining bucket, which is pretty well their only possession, apart from their habits and devotional books.
• Then comes breakfast, after which they go off to their various schools and dispensaries, some to the lepers, and some to look after the unwanted babies and children who come into their charge in increasing numbers as it becomes known that, however over-worked they may be, and however over-crowded the available accommodation, none will ever be refused.
• Their life is tough and austere by worldly standards, certainly; yet I never met such delightful, happy women, or such an atmosphere of joy as they create.
• Mother Teresa attaches the utmost importance to this joyousness. The poor deserve not just service and dedication, but also the joy that belongs to human love. This is what the Sisters give them abundantly.
• Today, the religious orders are short of vocations. Nor is the shortage being rectified by permitting nuns to use lipstick, wear mini-habits, and otherwise participate in the ways and amenities of contemporary affluence. The Missionaries of Charity, on the other hand, are multiplying at a fantastic rate.
• Their Calcutta house is bursting at the seam, and as each new house is opened there are volunteers clamoring to go there.
• Accompanying Mother Teresa, as we did, to these different activities for the purpose of filming them, I found that I went through three phases. The first was horror mixed with pity, the second compassion pure and simple, and the third, reaching far beyond compassion, something I had never experienced before – an awareness that these dying and derelict men and women, these lepers with stumps instead of hands, these unwanted children, were not pitiable, repulsive or forlorn, but rather dear and delightful; as it might be, friends of long standing, brothers and sisters.
• During the period of our filming I went each morning to Mass with the Sisters. One of them was always posted to let me in, and in the chapel there was a place beside Mother Teresa for me, and a missal opened at the correct page.
• The various controversies and conflicts now shaking the Church scarcely touch her; they will pass, she says, and the Church will remain to perform its divinely inspired and directed function.
• She wrote:
I believe the film has brought people closer to God, and so your and my hope has been fulfilled. I think now more than ever that you should use the beautiful gift God has given you for His greater glory. All that you have and all that you are and all that you can be and do – let it all be for Him and Him alone. Today what is happening in the surface of the Church will pass. For Christ, the Church is the same, today, yesterday, and tomorrow. The Apostles went through the same feeling of fear and distrust, failure and disloyalty, and yet Christ did not scold them. Just: ‘Little children, little faith – why did you fear?’ I wish we could love as He did – now!
• The gift she refers to so generously – far too generously – would always, such as it is, be at her and her Master’s disposal. There are few things I should rather do than please her. Yet everything tells me that to enter the Church would be wrong.
• Why not? Because, for me, it would be fraudulent, and we cannot, dear Mother Teresa, buy faith – least of all faith – with counterfeit urges. I know perfectly well that, however much I long for it to be otherwise, the bell does not ring for me. Nor is there a place for me at the altar rail where they kneel to receive the Body of Christ. I should be an outsider there, too.
• The Church is an institution with a history; a past and a future. It went on crusades, it set up an inquisition, it installed scandalous popes and countenanced monstrous inequities.
• Institutionally speaking, these are perfectly comprehensible, and even, in earthly terms, excusable. In the mouthpiece of God on earth, belonging, not just to history, but to everlasting truth, they are not to be defended. At least, not by me.
• Today, there is the additional circumstance that the Church, for inscrutable reasons of its own, has decided to have a reformation just when the previous one – Luther’s – is finally running into the sand.
• I make no judgement about something which, as a non-member, is no concern of mine; but if I were a member, then I should be forced to say that, in my opinion, if men were to be stationed at the doors of churches with whips to drive worshippers away, or inside the religious orders specifically to discourage vocations, or among the clergy to spread alarm and despondency, they could not hope to be as effective in achieving these ends as are trends and policies seemingly now dominant within the Church.
• Feeling so, it would be preposterous to seek admission, more particularly as, if the ecumenical course is fully run, luminaries of the Church to which I nominally belong, like the former Bishop of Woolwich, for whom – putting it mildly – I have little regard, will in due course take their place in the Roman Catholic hierarchy among the heirs of St Peter.
• So in my unspoken dialogue with Mother Teresa, I conclude that I could not in honesty seek to be received into her Church; not even to please her – something that, in the ordinary way, I would go to almost any lengths to achieve.
• It is probable, in any case, that so potentially discontented and troublesome a member would be refused admission anyway.
• Just because her faith is so sure, Mother Teresa has no need to be an evangelist in the old propagandist sense. She preaches Christ every moment of every day by living for and in him.
• It would be absurd to suggest that Mother Teresa is neutral as between Christianity and Hinduism. Her preference is clear for all to see and understand. Yet she manages nonetheless to induce high-caste Indian ladies to participate in ever increasing numbers in her work.
• I look back on the days I spent with Mother Teresa in Calcutta as golden ones. Talking with her was a constant delight. She lets things out casually; as that she bought a printing press for the lepers so that they could print pamphlets and leaflets and make a little money.
• She has, I found, a geography of her own – a geography of compassion. Somehow she hears that in Venezuela there are abandoned poor; so off the Sisters go there, and a house is set up.
• Then that in Rome – in this case, from the Pope himself – there are derelicts, as in Calcutta. Or again, that in Australia the aboriginals and half-castes need love and care. In each case, wherever it may be, the call is heard and answered.
• To me, Mother Teresa represents, essentially, love in action, which is surely what Christianity is about.
Chapter 2: Mother Teresa’s Way of Love
On Love of God
‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, with thy whole soul and with thy whole mind.’ This is the commandment of the great God, and he cannot command the impossible. Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within reach of every hand. Anyone may gather it and no limit is set. Everyone can reach this love through meditation, spirit of prayer and sacrifice, by an intense inner life.
On Prayer
It is not possible to engage in the direct apostolate without being a soul of prayer. We must be aware of oneness with Christ, as he was aware of Oneness with his Father. Out activity is truly apostolic only in so far as we permit him to work in us and through us, with his power, with his desire, with his love. We must become holy, not because we want to feel holy, but because Christ must be able to live his life fully in us. We are to be all love, all faith, all purity, for the sake of the poor we serve. And once we have learned to seek God and his will, our contacts with the poor will become the means of great sanctity to ourselves and to others. Love to pray – feel often during the day the need for prayer, and take trouble to pray. Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of himself. Ask and seek, and your heart will grow big enough to receive him and keep him as your own.
On Silence
We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence.
On Holiness
Our progress in holiness depends on God and ourselves – on God’s grace and our will to be holy. We must have a real living determination to reach holiness.
On Humility
Let there be no pride or vanity in the work. The work is God’s work, the poor are God’s poor. Put yourself completely under the influence of Jesus, so that he may think his thoughts in your mind, do his work through your hands, for you will be all-powerful with him who strengthens you.
On Submission
Make sure that you let God’s grace work in your souls by accepting whatever he gives you, and giving him whatever he take from you. True holiness consists in doing God’s will with a smile.
On Suffering
Without our suffering, our work would just be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, nor part of the Redemption.
On Joy
Joy is prayer – Joy is strength – Joy is love – Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls. God loves a cheerful giver. She gives most who gives with joy.
On Kindness
Be kind and merciful. Let no one ever come to you without coming away better and happier.
On Our Lady
Let us ask our lady to make our hearts ‘meek and humble’ as her Son’s was.
On thoughtfulness
Thoughtfulness is the beginning of great sanctity. If you learn this art of being thoughtful, you will become more and more Christ-like, for his heart was meek and he always thought of others.
On Leaving Loreto
Our Lord wants me to be a free nun, covered with the poverty of the Cross. But today I learned a great lesson. The poverty of the poor must be so hard for them. When looking for a home (for a center) I walked and walked until my legs and arms ached. I thought how much they must ache in soul and body looking for a home, food and health. Then the comfort of Loreto came to tempt me, but of my own free choice, my God, and out of love for you, I desire to remain and do whatever be your holy will in my regard. Give me courage now, this moment.
Peace
We shall make this a year of Peace in a particular way – to be able to do this we shall try to talk more to God and with God and less with men and to men. Let us preach the peace of Christ like he did. He went about doing good; he did not stop his works of charity because the Pharisees and others hated him or tried to spoil his Father’s work. He just went about doing good.
Apostle of the Unwanted
The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody. The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference towards one’s neighbour who lives at the road side assaulted by exploitation, corruption, poverty and disease.
Holy Communion
In Holy Communion we have Christ under the appearance of bread. In our work we find him under the appearance of bread. In our work we find him under the appearance of flesh and blood. It is the same Christ. ‘I was hungry, I was naked, I was sick, I was homeless.’
Chapter 3: Mother Teresa Speaks
Chapter 4: A Door of Utterance
Constitution of ‘The International Association of Co-Workers of Mother Teresa’ Affiliated to the Missionaries of Charity
Chronological Table of Mother Teresa’s Life