Thankfully, in the ensuing years, perhaps as she saw the growing impact of her message, Mother Teresa became less insistent on passing over her grace in silence. What had been confided in whispered tones outside our house in the Bronx, she would begin to confirm — gradually and obliquely at first, but then ever more clearly, in her conferences and general letters. One of her handwritten letters, in particular, would help launch the writing of this volume.
“I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.” 12
— St. Teresa of Calcutta
Five
In Her Own Words
Mother Teresa’s Handwritten Presentation
Sometime in 1986, not long after receiving Mother Teresa’s confirmation and the mandate to “tell the others,” I began to work on presenting the insights I had gleaned from her over the years, especially the one great secret of her soul: the mystery of Jesus’ thirst. After discussing this project with her on various occasions, and pointing out the great good her message could do for so many struggling with their own inward “Calcutta,” she not only gave the project her blessing, but put pen to paper and wrote the presentation reproduced below.
Through twenty years of starting and stopping, these lines she wrote have kept both author and manuscript on track. Providentially, the long march from her handwritten presentation in 1986 to a completed manuscript years later allowed Mother Teresa to express her insights on the thirst of God more clearly and fully in the interim, right up until her death, and allowed access to the invaluable personal documents that came to light after her passing.
A page from Mother Teresa’s handwritten presentation (courtesy of the author)
Besides lending these pages a validation only she could bestow, the importance of her presentation is simply in the fact that she offered to write it at all. If there was much of her soul recorded in her private letters that she had hoped to keep hidden (which, fortunately for us, did not occur, inspiring as these are), this presentation, and the divine message it introduces, represents that which she expressly did want known. In the end, this is what she had wanted to “tell the others.”
Her Message Launched
Mother Teresa’s understanding of the thirst of God was entirely simple, yet deep, powerful, and engaging. She learned that God not only accepts us with all our misery, but that he longs for us, “thirsts” for us, with all the intensity of his divine heart, no matter who we are or what we have done.
But how can God “thirst” for us if there is no lack in God? While thirst can imply lack, it also has another sense. In Mother Teresa’s lexicon, thirst signifies deep, intense desire. Rather than indicating lack, the symbol of divine thirst points to the mystery of God’s freely chosen longing for man. Simply put, though nothing in God needs us, everything in God wants us — deeply and intensely, as he shows throughout Scripture.
Mother Teresa’s insights reveal something important, even essential, in the depths of God’s being. Mother Teresa insists that the thirst of Christ reveals something not only about Jesus, but about God himself. Jesus’ thirst points us toward a great mystery in the very bosom of the Godhead — what Mother Teresa describes as “the depths of God’s infinite longing to love and be loved.”13 As ardent a statement as this is, her insights are confirmed by no less a source than the Fathers of the Church. The great St. Augustine would write that “God thirsts to be thirsted for by man” (see Appendix Three for a collection of patristic quotes on the divine thirst). In our own day, Pope Benedict XVI would affirm that “Christ’s thirst is an entrance-way to the mystery of God.”14
The mystery of God’s thirst for us was the one great light Mother Teresa held high in the night, hers and ours. This was the banner she raised for the poor and suffering of Calcutta and beyond. It was as witness to this message that Jesus commissioned her, soon after the experience of the train, to “Be My light”15 — and this she would energetically do, in season and out of season. She would spend her whole life proclaiming the light of divine love — even when her words fell silent, her hands spoke more eloquently still.
The “Varanasi Letter”
It took many years for Mother Teresa to feel less uneasy in speaking about her experience of the train — a grace she at first felt unworthy to bear, and unable to express. Though she had at times made passing references to September 10, it was not until the 1990s that she began to speak more clearly and openly of the “light and love”16 she had received on the train.
I personally had the chance to witness her gradual change of heart, late in 1992, just five years before her death. Mother Teresa was eighty-three at the time, and had already suffered numerous bouts with heart disease. During my stay in Calcutta that year, I had gone one afternoon with another member of our community, to visit with Mother Teresa in Mother House. While we were with her in the parlor, the conversation unexpectedly turned to September 10, to her experience on the train, and to the importance of the message she had received that day.
To our surprise, she began to speak animatedly of Jesus’ thirst, of what she had experienced and understood that day, and of how life-changing it could be. She kept coming back to how different the lives of her Sisters and her poor would be if only they drew closer to, and took more seriously, the reality of Jesus’ thirst. Encouraged by our enthusiasm and primed by our questions, she went on speaking for the better part of an hour — about the beauty of this message, about the power of her encounter to heal and transform, and how all of us could share in this grace.
Though we may never know what prompted Mother Teresa’s unprecedented outpouring that afternoon, she may have felt interiorly freed to do so by Pope John Paul II’s Lenten letter, released just prior to our conversation with her.17 For the first time, the thirst of Jesus had been mentioned in a Church document, and in Mother Teresa’s same terms and language. She had been deeply moved by the letter, and spoke of it repeatedly. Touched and grateful for this implicit affirmation of her insights, and for helping her to lift up the light of the divine longing, she immediately wrote to John Paul to thank him. This exchange, and the fresh enthusiasm that John Paul’s letter had generated in her, had been the larger context behind what we had just heard her so uncharacteristically, yet so eagerly, share.
When she had finished speaking, Father Gary and I both urged her to share what she had said with her entire order, perhaps in one of her general letters, recording this for posterity. Despite her initial misgivings, she agreed to go upstairs and write down what she remembered. Since she had been speaking spontaneously, the writing turned out to be more difficult than she had foreseen. But with the help of a few memory jogs (she asked that I jot down the main points of her conversation as best I could), over the coming weeks she was able to complete the task.
Her conversation that Calcutta afternoon became the seed for her “Varanasi Letter,” the end result of her efforts at recording her conversation. The letter was so named after the city on the Ganges where she visited on March 25, 1993, the feast of the Annunciation to Mary — the date she wished to affix to this letter that, for the first time, would speak openly of her experience and her message. Her insistence on that date for her letter would honor the original “message” announcing the fullness of divine love given in Jesus, revealed to Mary by the angel Gabriel on this day.
After Mother Teresa’s arrival in Rome some weeks later, she continued going over her letter, editing and revising the text