MOTHER TERESA: HER PEOPLE & HER WORK
DESMOND DOIG
COLLINS FOUNT PAPERBACK 1976
PART I
Prayer of St Francis of Assisi
Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not
So much seek to be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying
That we are born to eternal life.
St Francis of Assisi
Foreword by Mrs Gandhi (The Prime Minister)
How appropriate that this book should begin with St. Francis’ beautiful and well-loved prayer. For it so eloquently epitomizes the gentleness, the love and the compassion that radiate from Mother Teresa’s tiny person.
Who else in this wide world reaches out to the friendless and the needy so naturally, so simply, so effectively? Tagore wrote “there rest thy feet where live the poorest, the lowliest, and lost”. That is where Mother Teresa is to be found – with no thought of, or slightest discrimination between colour or creed, language or country.
She lives the truth that prayer is devotion, prayer is service. Service is her concern, her religion, her redemption. To meet her is to feel utterly humble, to sense the power of tenderness, the strength of love.
Indira Gandhi
New Delhi,
September 26, 1975.
Prologue
When Mother Teresa first learnt that yet another book was being written about her, she very characteristically thought for a while, then requested that it be about her people and her work, and not about personalities. Mother’s people are the poorest of the poor, be they in India, where her work began, or in the affluent countries of the world to where it has spread. Her work, shared by a growing number of Missionaries of Charity, is to give help and love where it is needed. The Brothers and Sisters of the Order are today working in the ghettos of New York, the slums of London, in Australia, South America and in the shadow of the Vatican at the Pope’s personal request. Mother Teresa maintains that the suffering of the poor in affluent countries is more a searing loneliness and rejection. In India, strong bonds of family, religion and tradition lessen the rigours of poverty, but it is still there, a product of history, geography and exploding population.
This book in trying to be true to Mother Teresa’s request concerns itself with poverty that might appear to be out of all proportion to the many achievements and attractions of a great, emerging country like India. It also concerns itself innocently with personalities, despite Mother Teresa’s expressed wishes, because the extraordinary work described is inevitably the endeavour of a comparatively few people, however much they might be carrying out the will of God. Without Mother Teresa, there would have been no Missionaries of Charity, just as without Calcutta there would have been no Mother Teresa.
Calcutta, a city I love, has had its problems ever since it began. The Calcutta of this book is not the city of millionaire merchants and thriving commercial houses, neither is it peopled by men of letters, politicians, artists and businessmen. It is the city of the poor and Mother Teresa. One could not have been without the other.
Whilst writing this book we have talked to a number of people, such as Father Henry and Sister Agnes, who have known Mother Teresa for many years. Inevitably their accounts overlap in places, but because each has a personal story to tell and a slightly different slant on Mother Teresa we have decided not to cut passages which to some people may seem a repetition but to us appear more like variations on a theme.
• One other explanation is necessary. The ‘we’ I have used so commonly in the book is not the royal ‘we’. It encompasses several people. Raghu Rai, Teki and Kalyan Singh, who took the photographs, while Dubby Bhagat and I made notes and wielded tape-recorders.
• We thank Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity for not only putting up with us but making us feel a part of their Congregation.
Chapter 1: Shantinagar: A Place for Peace
• Calcutta, always teeming with people, was almost asleep when we called on Mother Teresa at 5 a.m. One hardly noticed at first the sleeping bodies along the pavements.
• Women cooked frugal morning meals while naked children awoke and swarmed about, and the street dogs that detached themselves from the sleeping figures stretched and edged hungrily towards the warmth and the smell of food.
• We were there to take Mother Teresa with us to her leper colony at Shantinagar some 200 miles and four hours away by train, which meant that we would be taking her away from her people in Calcutta a whole day.
• She confided afterwards that when she had made this date with us she had forgotten that it was the day on which several of her newly-ordained nuns were leaving the Mother House for far-flung centers of the Missionaries of Charity in India.
• When I suggested we might call off the visit, Mother said one of those firm noes with which there is no argument, but asked if it would be all right if we took an earlier train back. If we could, she might at least see off the batches going to South India and Darjeeling.
• For Mother Darjeeling, in the Himalayan foothills, must hold a very special place, for it was there she went as a young Yugoslav Loreto nun just arrived from Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham, in Dublin.
• And it was on a train to Darjeeling many years later that she heard God’s call to leave the Loreto Order and set out alone to work among the poorest of India’s poor.
• Her serene face looked strained and her hands were tightly clasped about her rosary. Here, in one place, was a shattering glimpse of what Mother Teresa is all about: a single frail woman in a white sari reaching out to a multitude of homeless and bewildered, nameless and destitute, diseased and dying people.
• When they ended their prayer, the young Sister began reading the Bible and Mother a well-thumbed copy of Seeds of the Desert by Charles de Foucauld.
• Here was I sitting next to someone to whom God had personally spoken, and I wanted to know about the awesome majesty of such an experience.
• ‘Mother, how did you know? Were you not for a second in doubt? After all, Christ Himself had moments of doubt. In Gethsemane.’
• ‘No. There was no doubt. It was only for a moment that He felt unsure. That was as a human being. That was natural. The moment you accept, the moment you surrender yourself, that’s the conviction. But it may mean death to you, eh? The conviction comes the moment you surrender yourself. Then there is no doubt. The moment Jesus said, “Father, I am at your disposal, Thy will be done”, He had accepted. That was His agony. He felt all the things you and I would feel as human beings. That’s why He was like unto us in all things, except sin.’
• ‘No, I have never had doubt. But I am convinced that it is He and not I. That it is His work, and not my work. I am only at His disposal. Without Him I can do nothing. But even God could do nothing for someone already full. You have to be completely empty to let Him in to do what He will. That’s the most beautiful part of God, eh? Being almighty, and yet not forcing Himself on anyone. You have to do it as if everything depends on you – but leave the rest to God.’
• ‘Mother, do you feel that everything is directed by God? Right and wrong?’ ‘There may be mistakes. Many mistakes. We may make mistakes. But He cannot make mistakes. He will draw the good out of you. That’s the beautiful part of God, eh? That He can stoop down and make you feel that He depends on you. The same thing with Our Lady, no? When the angel was sent to Her and said, “You are to be the Mother of Jesus,” Our Lady emptied Herself and said, “Do unto me according to Thy will. I am the handmaid of the Lord.”
• ‘Until and unless She had surrendered, Christ would not have come into the world. There would have been no Christ, no Jesus, born. Because she was so humble, so empty, She became full of grace. At the moment She received Jesus, her first thought was to give Him to others. She went in haste to John’s house. And what did she do there? She did the servant’s work. That’s the most beautiful part of the goodness of God and the greatness of God’s love for the world. God loved the world by giving Christ to the world. Always giving’, she said, laughingly, ‘constantly giving.’
• Sister Francis Xavier, a jovial and garrulous Yugoslav, a few years younger than Mother Teresa, welcomed us in an avenue of flamboyantly flowering trees and bustled us into a surprisingly chintzy parlour.
• Shantinagar, which means ‘The Place of Peace’, is the fulfillment of one of Mother Teresa’s most cherished dreams – to give lepers a place of their own, a place where they can live and die with dignity, where they can work gainfully and lead lives close to normal.
• It came as a shock to discover that John, well-built and handsome, and with no apparent blemish on him, was a leper.
• Sister Francis Xavier was, like Mother, once a Loreto nun. She joined the Order in 1951, bringing with her a very valuable qualification: she is a doctor. Like Mother, she is an enthusiastic, well-scrubbed dynamo who led us off at a fast trot to visit the piggery, the poultry farm, and the family cottages.
• Shantinagar was made possible by a Government gift of thirty-four acres of land and generous donations from India and abroad. A very ordinary middle-ages man approached Mother and pressing some money into he hand said, ‘I wish to make a present.’ We sang hymns on the way back to Calcutta, in Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali and English.
• She began telling me of the approaching twenty-fifth anniversary of her Order. I have known her occupy land, take over buildings and set up shop where the proverbial angels would fear to tread because she was convinced that it was necessary for ‘her people’ and her work.
Chapter 2: Calcutta: Setting for a Mission