THE WORD AND THE SAINT
September 5, 2020: Celebrating Mother Teresa of Kolkata1 Corinthians 4: 6b-15; Luke 6: 1-5
The love of Christ urges me, is a fitting one liner for the life of Mother Teresa of Kolkata. Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, she chose the name Mary Terese in admiration of St. Teresa of Lisieux, in 1928 when she entered the convent of the Loreto Sisters in Ireland. In 1929 she travelled to India, since when it became her second home. Making her first profession in 1931 and her final profession in 1937, Calcutta (today's Kolkata) became her epicenter from where she would shake the world to regaining its consciousness. She began teaching in the famous Loreto school which stands till date proud to have given the world a giant of pastoral zeal and Christian charity. She was appointed the Head Mistress in 1944 but within hardly 2 years, she would have the life transforming "call within her call", which would change her forever from Sister Teresa to Mother Teresa!
It was, as she notes, 10th September 1946 when she heard that piercing cry from the suffering Lord: "I Thirst"... and she began to thirst. Soon she found herself out of those walls of Loreto, from the safety of those building into an open air school, from the well formed daily schedules to endless wanderings on the street, from being a Loreto nun to being a strange ostracised nun to the foundress of a humble and simple but a miraculously challenging Order called 'Missionaries of Charity' in 1948. The rest is history!
Let us draw lessons from this great person. She struggled to make sense of what God wanted of her, to understand what her faith is all about, to translate the love that she had for the person of Jesus Christ into action and to love everyone with the same love as that of Christ. She understood what Paul and Jesus mean in today's Word: it is better to be ignorant or deprived than to be haughty with pride!
Our sense of ego and our urge to prove ourselves can sometimes fill us with a prejudice so strong that we can miss the obvious. Not just the pharisees and the scribes in Jesus' time, but even for us, it is a real danger. With our preconceived ideas and over glorified ego, we would be so filled with ourselves that we would not be able to see, feel with, or love our brothers and sisters around us who are suffering, and in that suffering manifest to us the suffering face of God. In such case, is it possible to really see and love God? It is possible only if, just like the great Mother Teresa, the love of Christ urges us on (2 Cor 5:14)!
Our sense of ego and our urge to prove ourselves can sometimes fill us with a prejudice so strong that we can miss the obvious. Not just the pharisees and the scribes in Jesus' time, but even for us, it is a real danger. With our preconceived ideas and over glorified ego, we would be so filled with ourselves that we would not be able to see, feel with, or love our brothers and sisters around us who are suffering, and in that suffering manifest to us the suffering face of God. In such case, is it possible to really see and love God? It is possible only if, just like the great Mother Teresa, the love of Christ urges us on (2 Cor 5:14)!