The greatest hunger, Mother Teresa always said, was the hunger for love. The greatest poverty, the poverty of love. When she looked at the West, she didn’t see power, progress, and prosperity, she saw lonesome valleys filled with the brokenhearted, the almost living:
Prophet to a Lost Generation
(Editor's Note: This is the second in a two-part series. Click here to read Part One.)
“In some countries there is no hunger for bread. But people are suffering from terrible loneliness, terrible despair, terrible hatred, feeling unwanted, helpless, hopeless. They have forgotten how to smile, they have forgotten the beauty of the human touch. They are forgetting what is human love.”
That’s how it was with this saint. She judged the health of a civilization by its ability to smile, by whether parents had time for their children, husbands for their wives, the young to listen to the stories of the old; whether we knew how to laugh and play, to be tender, to be still and know that God lives in every breast.
She watched patiently as wave after wave of young men and women headed East, following some star they thought was rising as their parents’ Christianity gave up its ghost, exhausted by a century of gulags and gas chambers, holocausts and hypocrisy.
“People come to India,” she would say, “because they believe that in India we have a lot of spirituality and this they want to find…Many of them are completely lost.”
She sensed this generation of seekers was more like a band of runaways, in flight from identities they wanted to shed like bad skin, from the mess they’d made of relationships back home.
One of those who crossed her path was Morris “Mo” Siegel. In 1969, the Summer of Love, he launched an herbal tea company, Celestial Seasonings, Inc., that caught the first wave of the all-natural, go-organic, health craze and rode it all the way to the bank.
By 1985, he had sold his company for $40 million and was desperately seeking meaning, his mid-life crisis manifesting itself in charitable outfits with names like “Earth Wise” and the “Jesusonian Foundation.” He wound up, as so many of his generation did, in Calcutta, trying to find himself as a volunteer at Mother Teresa’s home for the destitute dying.
She just poked him the chest and sent him home with these words: “Grow where you’re planted.”
Mother Teresa knew it wasn’t her that we were looking for.
“First Forget Yourself”
“You must first forget yourself,” she would say. “Once we take our eyes away from ourselves — from our interests, from our own rights, privileges, ambitions — then we will become clear to see Jesus around us.”
She knew it was easy to love strangers. So easy that it was no love at all. For her, holiness, like charity, always begins at home:
“It is easy to smile at people outside your home. It is easy to take care of the people that you don’t know well. It is difficult to be thoughtful and kind and to smile and be loving to your own in the house day after day, especially when we are tired and in a bad temper or bad mood. We all have these moments and that is the time that Christ comes to us in a distressing disguise.”
Could it be just coincidence that in a century of world war and mass movements of social engineering, God would send us a saint who not only sweated the small stuff but told us the road to heaven was paved with it?
She was the saint of ordinary time, of the divine found in the routine. It’s not what she did that made her holy — saying her prayers, going to Mass, serving others, speaking out for what’s right and true.
It’s why she did it. How she did it.
Holiness is for Everyone
Mother Teresa is a saint because with every breath she drew she tried to do something beautiful for God. She is a saint because she tried to make everything she did, even the smallest thoughts and tiniest gestures, an oblation, an offering of love. She tried to do all for Jesus.
In this she made herself transparent. We could see right through her. We could see Jesus.
But she wanted us to see something more. She wanted to be our mirror.
That’s why every time she fielded the inevitable “What’s it like to be a living saint” question, she always shot back: “I’m very happy if you can see Jesus in me, because I can see Jesus in you. But holiness is not just for a few people. It’s for everyone, including you.” This was her most sublime message to our times: God didn’t share in our humanity so that a chosen few could be raised to the altars by the Pope at St. Peter’s. He has global ambitions. He wants to create a new humanity, a race of heroes and saints, a race that includes you and me.
You were made to be a saint. That’s why He made you, that’s the purpose He had in mind when you were in your mother’s womb. Mother Teresa talked this way. She spoke the language of the Bible, made it sound so natural, so ordinary. It wasn’t anything new she was sent to tell us. We had just never heard it put that way before.
It wasn’t just words, either. She made sainthood seem possible, something within our reach, a call we could respond to. All we had to do was what she did — make every moment count. Make it beautiful for God. Do all for Jesus.
That’s what is so special about Mother Teresa.
She showed us the glory that could be ours if we were fully alive. She gave us another chance to see Jesus. Another chance to become truly human.
© Copyright 2003 Beliefnet
David Scott, former editor of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper, is a writer and editor with a special interest in religion and culture. Scott is Research Fellow and Editorial Director of The St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and Editor of the Center's academic journal, Letter & Spirit, and Editor of the Center's monthly newsletter, Breaking the Bread, as well as Managing Editor of the www.salvationhistory.com website.
He is finishing a book on Mother Teresa of Calcutta that Loyola will also bring out in 2004. His other books include: Praying in the Presence of the Lord with Dorothy Day and Weapons of the Spirit: The Selected Writings of Father John Hugo.
