To answer the “why” of Mother Teresa’s power of attraction, and to understand her relevance in our post-modern world, we need to examine both her and ourselves more deeply. We need to ask what it was in her that moved us so, and what it was in us that responded so readily. What hidden chords of soul was she touching? What was God touching in us, through her?
Understanding what she touched in us is significant, since it points to and constitutes our common ground with her. The unnamed place that she awakened in us reveals an interior terrain, a sacred inner ground that we share with her — placed within us by the One who fashioned us for himself.
Is the same divinity that claimed such unrestricted space in her heart, there beneath the surface of our soul as well? If so, why do we not advert to it, or attend to it as she? Perhaps because, in the main, we inhabit but the surface of ourselves. And so we can be surprised at times by the power of our response to deeper things, to sudden incursions of the divine, to unexpected touches of grace.
For many of us, discovering Mother Teresa, watching her or hearing her speak, became just such an incursion of the divine. She became a portal and guide to our neglected realms of spirit — and to meeting the God who awaits us there.
How do we account for the phenomenon of Mother Teresa, for the impact and attraction she wielded, even among the agnostic and unchurched? What was her secret? What made her who she was? What formed and inspired her? What hidden inner fire motivated her and drew her on, in the most squalid conditions, to become the saint she was?
And what of ourselves? Can we become for others a source of the same kind of goodness we saw in her? Can her inner fire yield a similar light and warmth in us?
Answering these questions is the purpose of this book.
Thankfully, Mother Teresa has left clear and abundant clues — clues that allow us not only to understand, but to share in the secret of her goodness, in the secret of her transformation from ordinary schoolteacher, to Nobel laureate, to saint. For those who would wish to emulate her, her life and teachings are replete — as we will see in these pages — with signs that point the way to finding her same happiness, her same fulfillment, and her same union with the Almighty.
The riches of Mother Teresa’s example and teaching are more abundant than any single volume can hold (the documents used in her cause for sainthood comprise more than eighty volumes). While future volumes will explore other themes from her teaching, the scope of this book is limited to what Mother Teresa herself considered the core of her message.
This present volume is divided into three sections. The story of the inner fire that changed Mother Teresa’s life is told in this first section, “Fire in the Night.” The second section, “Illumination,” introduces the festival of light issuing from this inner fire, a light that illumined the face of God for her — and through her, for so many. The final section, “Transformation,” shows how her “consuming fire” within (Heb 12:29) changed a young and unsure Sister Teresa into Mother Teresa, and how it can transform us as well.
“Through the tender mercy of our God,
… the day shall dawn upon us from on high
to give light to those who sit in darkness and
in the shadow of death.”
— Luke 1:78-79
Two
A Life Bathed in Light
After Mother Teresa’s passing in 1997, a world that had come to admire her was hungry for details of her remarkable life. A multitude of books and articles appeared in those ensuing years, chronicling every aspect of her person and life, from her public accomplishments to the private mystery of her inner darkness. But as celebrated as she was in both life and death, after all these years Mother Teresa’s central message, and the one great secret of her soul, remains almost entirely unknown.
What was deepest in her, what motivated and energized her, is still a mystery even to her most ardent admirers. But it was not her wish that this secret remain forever unknown. The answer to her mystery is there, like a golden thread, woven throughout the teachings she left for her religious family, particularly in the months leading up to her death. Scattered throughout Mother Teresa’s letters and spiritual conferences, the full richness of her soul still awaits us.
Looking Back on an Extraordinary Life
Before exploring the secrets of this saint and Nobel Prize winner, let us step back a moment to review the highlights of her extraordinary life — as a refresher for those who may have forgotten the broad strokes of her life, and for the sake of a new generation that has not known Mother Teresa beyond name and renown.
Mother Teresa began life as Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu, the youngest of three children of an Albanian family, born August 26, 1910, in Skopje (in present-day Macedonia). In elementary school she developed a keen interest in the overseas missions, and by the age of twelve the future missionary had decided to devote her life to helping others. Later, at age eighteen, inspired by reports sent home from West Bengal by Jesuit missionaries, she applied to join the Sisters of Loreto, whom she had learned were doing mission work in India, and specifically in West Bengal.
She left home and entered the convent, and after completing her first stage of training with the Loreto Sisters in Rathfarnham, Ireland, took the religious name of Teresa (after her patron saint, Thérèse of Lisieux). Not long thereafter, the young Sister Teresa left Ireland and sailed for Calcutta, where she arrived in January 1929. She was assigned to the Loreto convent in Entally, in northeastern Calcutta, and began teaching geography in their middle school for girls. Her love for her new mission and the people of Bengal moved her to master the language, becoming so proficient that she was awarded the nickname “Bengali Teresa.”
As the years went by, her desire to lift up the poorest moved her to venture into the slums on the other side of the convent wall. Having enlisted the help of her students, together they sought to bring to the poor what little aid and comfort they could. Her life went on this way, happily and productively by all accounts — divided between teaching class, mentoring her pupils, and reaching out to the poor — up until 1946, the eve of Indian independence.
“Come, Be My Light”2
On September 10, 1946, following her yearly custom, Mother Teresa left Calcutta for eight days of spiritual retreat — what was presumably to be a retreat like any other. At Howrah Station, she boarded the train that wound its way from steamy Calcutta and the broad, flat plains of the Ganges Delta, north into the verdant forests and cool nights of the Himalayan hills. Once again this year, Sister Teresa had left behind her work and her students to dedicate herself to prayer and reflection in the hill station of Darjeeling, where the Loreto Sisters had their retreat house, praying over what had taken place during the past semester, and preparing herself for the new school year to come.
Somewhere along the way, Mother Teresa had an extraordinary experience of God (explored more fully in the next chapters). In her characteristic humility, she would refer to this life-changing experience as simply “a call within a call,”3 a call to leave Loreto and go into the slums. Only later would she reveal more of what transpired in her soul that September day, and of the extraordinary interior communications during the following year and a half, in which Jesus would commission her to “carry him” and “be his light” in the darkness of Calcutta’s slums.
Returning