On August 17, 1948, clad in a white sari with a blue border, Mother Teresa
- a European nun alone in newly independent India - set out to begin life as
a Missionary of Charity. Her lifestyle would be as innovative as the dress
she wore. Considering “absolute poverty” essential to her new mission, she
chose to leave the Loreto community with just five rupees. The Calcutta she
faced had been affected by the Second World War, the 1943 famine and
frequent riots. Immediately after India gained independence, the influx of
people into Bengal's capital was enormous, and the street dwellers were at
the mercy of illness, hunger and starvation.
On her first day in Calcutta's slums
“At 8am Veronica [Gomes, her guide to the poor areas] and I went out. We
started at Taltala and went to every Catholic family. The people were
pleased but children were all over the place. And what dirt and misery, what
poverty and suffering. I spoke very little: I just did some washing of
sores, and dressings, gave medicine to some. The old man lying on the street
- all alone sick and dying - I gave him carborsone and water, and he was so
strangely grateful.
“We went to Taltala bazaar, and there was a very poor woman dying, I think of
starvation more than TB. What poverty. What actual suffering. I gave
something that will help her to sleep, but the woman is longing to have some
care. I wonder how long she will last - [her temperature] was just 96
degrees (35.56C). She asked a few times for confession and Holy Communion. I
felt my own poverty there, too, for I had nothing to give that poor woman. I
did everything I could, but if I had been able to give her a hot cup of
milk, her cold body would have got some life. I must try and be somewhere
close to the people where I could easily get at the things.”
On those who criticised her
Besides the poverty, hardship and insecurity that Mother Teresa faced,
there was criticism. This did not alarm her, as her confident manner shows.
“I believe some are saying what use of working among these lowest of the low
- that the great, the learned and the rich are ready to come it is better to
give full force to them. Yes, let them all do it. The Kingdom must be
preached to all. If the Hindu and Muslim rich people can have the full
service and devotion of so many nuns and priests, surely the poorest of the
poor and the lowest of the low can have the love and the devotion of us few.
'The slum Sister' they call me, and I am glad to be just that for His love
and glory.”
On establishing her mission
By 1950 the Society of the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta was
officially established; the next year the first Sisters began their
novitiate as Missionaries of Charity. But for all Mother Teresa's later
reputation for compassion and humility, not everyone supported her.
Accusations and rumours spread among the Loreto nuns and the Daughters of St
Ann. Mother Teresa confided to the Archbishop of Calcutta, the Most Rev
Ferdinand Périer: “I am well compared to the Devil, and the work as
his work and so on. Someday all will be clear. I love Loreto just as much if
not more now as I did for so many years. I pray for them often, and their
'persecution' makes me love my new vocation more.”
On longing
Three years later Mother Teresa gave a detailed description of her
spiritual experience. “I want to say to you something but I do not know
how to express it. I am longing ... to be all for God, to be holy in such a
way that Jesus can live His life to the full in me. The more I want Him, the
less I am wanted. I want to love Him as He has not been loved - yet there is
that separation, that terrible emptiness, that feeling of absence of God. I
am not complaining - I only want to go all the way with Christ. Tell me what
your child should do. I want to obey at any cost, and if you tell me to
continue like this till the end of my life, I am ready to obey cheerfully.
“There is so much contradiction in my soul. Such deep longing for God - so
deep that it is painful, a suffering continual - and yet not wanted by God -
repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal. Souls hold no attraction -
Heaven means nothing: to me it looks like an empty place - yet this
torturing longing for God. Pray for me, please, that I keep smiling at Him
in spite of everything. I am perfectly happy to be nobody even to God.”
On lepers
Immersed in feelings of rejection, Mother Teresa was sympathetic to the
lepers' experience of being unwanted and unloved. “The conditions under
which the leper families live are terrible. I would like to give them better
homes, uplift them close to the Sacred Heart, make them know that they, too,
are the loved children of God and so give them something to live for. I want
slowly to build a little town of their own where our lepers could live
normal lives. If you only knew what goes on within my heart. Sometimes the
pain is so great that I feel as if everything will break. The smile is a big
cloak which covers a multitude of pains.”
On doubt
Mother Teresa was unable to express herself even to those she trusted most,
which contributed to her sense of alienation. Yet in prayer she could
express herself, and her doubts about her faith, with ease. “Lord, my
God, who am I that You should forsake me? The child of your love - and now
become as the most hated one - the one You have thrown away as unwanted -
unloved. I call, I cling, I want - and there is no One to answer, no One on
Whom I can cling. The darkness is so dark, and I am alone. Unwanted,
forsaken. The loneliness of the heart that wants love is unbearable. Where
is my faith? Even deep down, there is nothing but emptiness and darkness.
“I have no faith. I dare not utter the words and thoughts that crowd in my
heart and make me suffer untold agony. So many unanswered questions live
within me. I am afraid to uncover them, because of the blasphemy. If there
be God, please forgive me. Trust that all will end in Heaven with Jesus.
When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven there is such convicting emptiness
that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.
Love, the word, it brings nothing. I am told God loves me, yet the reality
of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my
soul. Before the work started there was so much union: love, faith, trust,
prayer, sacrifice. Did I make the mistake in surrendering blindly to the
call of the Sacred Heart? The work is not a doubt, because I am convinced
that it is His, not mine. Not a single simple thought or temptation enters
my heart to claim anything in the work. It is the cloak by which I cover the
emptiness and misery.”
On her spiritual journey
In 1957 a Jesuit priest, Joseph Neuner, wrote an article about Mother
Teresa for a German mission magazine. A few years later he visited Calcutta
and they met again. Later she wrote to him, touching on the highlights of
her spiritual journey: “In Loreto, Father, I was very happy. I think the
happiest nun. Then the call came. Again and again He asked in 1946. I knew
it was He. Fear and terrible feelings - fear lest I was deceived. But as I
have always lived in obedience I put the whole thing before my spiritual
father, hoping the whole time that he will say it was all Devil's deception.
But no, like the voice, he said it is Jesus who is asking you. Then ... my
Superiors sent me to Asansol [West Bengal] in 1947. And there [it was] as if
Our Lord just gave Himself to me to the full.
“The work started in December 1948. By 1950, as the number of the Sisters
grew, the work grew. Now, Father, since 1949 or 1950 this terrible sense of
loss, this untold darkness, this loneliness, this continual longing for God,
which gives me that pain deep down in my heart. Darkness is such that I
really do not see, neither with my mind nor with my reason. The place of God
in my soul is blank. There is no God in me. When the pain of longing is so
great I just long and long for God and then it is that I feel He does not
want me, He is not there. My very life seems so contradictory. I help souls
- to go where? Why all this? Where is the soul in my very being? God does
not want me. Sometimes I just hear my own heart cry out ‘My God' and nothing
else comes. The torture and pain I can't explain. From my childhood I have
had a most tender love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament but this, too, has
gone. Yet I would not miss Holy Commmunion for anything.
“You see, Father, the contradiction in my life. I long for God - I want to
love Him, to live only for love of Him, and yet there is but pain - longing
and no love. Years back, about 17 years now, I bound myself under pain of
Mortal Sin not to refuse Him anything. Since then, I have kept this promise
and when sometimes the darkness is very dark and I am on the verge of saying
‘no' to God the thought of that promise pulls me up.
“I want only God in my life. 'The work' is really and solely His. He directs
every movement I take, puts the words in my mouth, makes me teach the
Sisters the way. All that and everything in me is He. This is why when the
world praises me it really does not touch my soul.
“Before I could spend hours before Our Lord, loving Him, talking to Him; now
not even meditation goes properly. Yet deep down in my heart that longing
for God keeps breaking through the darkness. When outside in the work or
meeting people there is a presence of somebody living very close - in me. I
don't know what this is but very often, that love in me for God grows more
real. I find myself telling Jesus unconsciously strange tokens of love.
“Very often I long to make use of the food I give my Sisters but I can never
do it. The same for spiritual books. All these things were so natural to me
until Our Lord came fully in my life. I loved God with all the powers of a
child's heart. He was the centre of everything I did and said. Now, Father,
it so dark, so different, yet my everything is His - in spite of Him not
wanting me, not caring as if for me.
“When the work started, with my whole heart I accepted everything. My Sisters,
Father, are the gift of God to me, they are sacred to me, each one of them.
I love them more than I love myself.
“My heart and soul and body belong only to God - that He has thrown away as
unwanted the child of His Love. And to this, Father, I have made that
resolution in this retreat to be at His disposal. Let Him do with me
whatever He wants, as He wants, for as long as He wants. If my darkness is
light to some soul - even if it be nothing to nobody - I am perfectly happy
to be God's flower of the field.”
On perseverance
In September 1962, writing to the Right Rev Lawrence Picachy [later
Archbishop of Calcutta], Mother Teresa emphasised the darkness of her
interior state. “The other day I can't tell you how bad I felt. There
was a moment when I nearly refused to accept. Deliberately I took the Rosary
and very slowly, without even meditating or thinking, I said it slowly and
calmly. The moment passed but the darkness is so dark, the pain so painful.
But I accept whatever He gives and I give whatever He takes. People say they
are drawn closer to God seeing my strong faith. Is this not deceiving
people? Every time I have wanted to tell the truth - 'I have no faith' - the
words just do not come, my mouth remains closed. Yet I still keep on smiling
at God and all.”
On acceptance
The condition of Calcutta's poorwas, she claimed, “the true picture of my
own spiritual life”. As she said in a speech in 1977: “Some time
ago a group of professors came from the US and said: ‘Tell us something that
will help us.' And I said: ‘Smile at each other.' I must have said it in a
very serious way, so one asked: ‘Are you married?' And I said: ‘Yes, and I
sometimes find it very difficult to smile at Jesus because He can be very
demanding'.”
This is an edited extract from Mother Teresa Come Be My Light: The private
writings of the Saint of Calcutta, edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk. It is
published on August 7 by Rider & Co, £8.99.
I never heard anybody working with Mother Teresa complaining about her character. Just the reverse. She reveals true spirituality which goes into the desert time and again where the oasis free from mirages is always there to be found through Trust.
Father Bryan Storey, Tintagel, UK
RS , I think you mean YOU define that Church by lies and cruelty. Are you of the school that would consider her charitable actions as a result of religious indoctrination? That despite what she did, it was somehow from the root of all evil that is religion? Tierd, boorish comments.
i.e., Norwich, England
To RS of Torquay - I'm about to become a Catholic so you won't mind if I ignore your advice - will you ?
ian payne, walsall,
Mother Theresa had the doubts all thinking people should have. In the absence of anything at all definitive as to the existence of a super being, increasing numbers of people steer clear of religion. Her lasting epitaph can ever be that despite her doubts she stayed true to the course she had set.
Dave, Totnes, England
This Mother Teresa mythology needs to be knocked right on the head. Ask the people who worked with this woman. She was cruel,arrogant and anything but saintly.
Puuurrleeeeze. Get real. Don't believe the hype and propaganda. The Catholic Church is defined by lies and cruelty. Wake Up !!!
R.S, Torquay, U.K
Wake up people-Here is clearly a shining example of humanity & spiritual goodness. It's quite remarkable-If Jesus said on the cross 'Father, why have you deserted me?', then surely God could seem to desert anyone-She must have walked very closely in Jesus' footsteps-if she's isn't good, then who is?
Joe, London,
Preach the Gospel and use words if you have to. Mother Teresa is a fine example of a human being (full of contradictions, faults and love) who walked with God. By the way I'm an Anglican.
Trevor, London, UK
"Not really one of the poor at all.
Lady Portia, London, UK"
And I assume, "Lady Portia," that your achievements with the poor are greater than Mother Teresa's, and for that reason you are casting slurs on her? Please explain.
A.N, London, uk
Tormented by the unresolvable contradiction between the reality of a painful world and a hypothetical god of love. Tragic.
Derek, Lewes, UK
Why did she collect so much money for the poor and then give it to the Vatican.
Then build a statue of herself??
People need to hear the truth of this woman.
Like how she went abroad for the best treatment while the poor went without.
Not really one of the poor at all.
Lady Portia, London, UK