The Train to Darjeeling: Another Reading
On the morning of September 10, 1946, Sister Teresa Bojaxhiu left Calcutta’s Howrah Station, bound for Siliguri, in the northern plains of West Bengal. She would disembark in Siliguri and board what was affectionately called the “Toy Train,” so nicknamed for its tiny dimensions, and from there continue on the last leg of her journey.
The tiny train’s steam-powered engine climbed along a narrow, two-foot gauge track up to Darjeeling, snuggled five thousand feet high in the foothills of the Himalayas. We can surmise something of Mother Teresa’s journey from an earlier account of a similar trip to Darjeeling, recorded by a visiting Englishman:
Riding the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway on the “Toy Train” (Raghu Rai/Magnum Photos)
[The fact that] here the meter gauge system ends and the two foot gauge of the Darjeeling-Himalayan railway begins, confirms what these things hint at. One steps into a railway carriage which might easily be mistaken for a toy…. With a noisy fuss, out of all proportion to its size, the engine gives a jerk and starts. Sometimes we cross our own track after completing the circuit of a cone, at others we zigzag backwards and forwards; but always we climb….9
“Inspiration Day”
As the train ascended into the clean, cool mountain air, Sister Teresa would have looked out her window onto lush, thickening forests. Trains were slow in that day, not because the engines were weak, but because the track was unreliable. A trip of several hours could turn into days, as late-summer heat could buckle rails and add hours to the journey. But, when the little train was moving, a passenger’s mind could ride the rhythm of the train’s progress and easily move into prayer.
Somewhere on this ordinary journey, in the heat, in the gathering shadows, in the noisy, crowded car, something extraordinary happened. At some unknown point along the way, there in the depths of Mother Teresa’s soul, the heavens opened.
For decades, all she would tell her Sisters of that life-changing moment was that she had received a “call within a call,” a divine mandate to leave the convent and to go out to serve the poor in the slums. But something incomparably greater and more momentous had transpired as well. We now know, thanks to early hints in her letters and conversations, and her own later admissions, that she had been graced with an overwhelming experience of God — an experience of such power and depth, of such intense “light and love,” as she would later describe it, that by the time her train pulled into the station at Darjeeling, she was no longer the same. Though no one knew it at the time, Sister Teresa had just become Mother Teresa.
For the still young nun, barely thirty-six years old, another journey was beginning — an inner journey with her God that would turn every aspect of her life upside down. The grace of the train would not only transform her relationship to God, but to everyone and everything around her. Within eight short days, the grace of this moment would carry her and her newfound inner fire back down the same mountainside, and into a new life. From the heights of the Himalayas she would bring a profoundly new sense of her God back into the sweltering, pestilent slums of Calcutta — and onto a world stage, bearing in her heart a light and love beyond her, and our, imagining.
From then on, Mother Teresa would simply refer to September 10 as “Inspiration Day,” an experience she considered so intimate and ineffable that she resisted speaking of it, save in the most general terms. Her silence would prevail until the last few years of her life, when she at last was moved to lift the veil covering this sacred moment.
The Message of Divine Thirst
Reflecting on her writings, and on my conversations with her Sisters in Rome and now in the Bronx, I had begun to conclude that Mother Teresa had been entrusted with a message — in addition to her divine encounter that day, and as the result of it: a message that in some way echoed Jesus’ words “I thirst,” placed in every chapel.
But what message could there be in these words that could be so important to her? What deeper meaning could they hold? Mother Teresa had already hinted at their core meaning in her Original Rule Explanation, written a few short years after the experience of September 10. In explaining the mystery of Jesus’ thirst, she writes that “He, the Creator of the universe, asked for the love of His creatures.” He thirsted not for water, but for us and for our love.
For Mother Teresa, already at the beginning of her mission in the early 1950s, the message behind Jesus’ cry of thirst was clear, inviting, and urgent. As she told her early followers, these words reveal much more than the dying Jesus’ desire for water. Towards the end of his time on the cross, as the need for water increased due to loss of blood, Jesus’ physical thirst reached its apex, and became symbol of an inner thirst that far surpassed it. At this deeper level, Jesus’ words speak eloquently, even passionately, of God’s “thirst” for man, of his thirst to “love and be loved.”10 In Jesus crucified and thirsting, God was revealing his “infinite longing”11 for his children, a longing just as keen as any man’s thirst for water in the desert heat.
Putting It All Together
As I worked on our constitutions in the Bronx, I began to ask myself if there might be a connection between Mother Teresa’s experience on the train and Jesus’ words “I thirst.” Could they both be part of the same grace? Could it be that Mother Teresa’s encounter on the train was, at its core, an encounter with Jesus’ thirst? If that were the case, the words on the wall would simply be her way of telling us, without training the spotlight on herself, yet in a way we would not forget, the essence of what had happened that grace-filled day on the train.
As I prayed and thought over it in those months, I became more persuaded that the grace of the train had been, at least in part, Mother Teresa’s own overpowering experience of Jesus’ thirst. The only thing left to complete my quest was to seek her confirmation.
On her next visit to New York, in early 1984, I finally had both reason and opportunity to ask her about the experience of the train. A few days into her visit, when I was alone with her in the front garden outside our house in the Bronx, I told her of what had been my long search to better understand her “inspiration,” and my desire to describe it accurately in our community’s constitutions. I explained to her that, for me, the only thing that made sense of her placing “I thirst” in her chapels, was that it grew out of her own experience of the thirst of Jesus — and most importantly, that her encounter with the divine thirst had been the heart and essence of September 10. If this were true, I did not want to leave it out of our constitutions; but if it were not, I did not want to continue being in error.
I waited in silence for an answer. She lowered her head for a moment, then looked up and said, “Yes, it is true.” Then after a pause, she added, “And one day you must tell the others….”
At last I had the confirmation I was seeking, and the answer to the questions sown in my soul years before in a Roman bookstore. Here, finally, was the core of Mother Teresa’s secret. In the end, it had not been some dry command to “work for the poor” that had made Mother Teresa who she was. What had forged Mother Teresa’s soul and fueled her work had been an intimate encounter with the divine thirst — for her, for the poor, and for us all.
More than a confirmation, her words that day were a mandate. This was not to be the end of my quest, nor of delving into the words on the chapel wall. It was, instead, another beginning. I had to somehow “tell the others.” And while I felt entirely inadequate to the task, I needed to find some way to share her words, not only with her Sisters, but with a wider public.
In the most indirect and humble of ways, not unlike the Virgin Mary, Mother Teresa had wished to exalt the goodness of the God she had met on the train, and the divine message that, after changing her life, held the power to change our own. She had always known, as I later realized, that