A Mother Theresa Story

In 1982 Mother Theresa visited Detroit to establish a convent of her Missionaries of Charity the Hispanic community there.  Those of us who served in Christian Service Commissions were invited to meet her.  At the time, she had not yet been lionized by the media, but was spoken of in quiet and reverent conversations as an example of compassionate service to the dying and the poor since Malcolm Muggeridge had interviewed her in 1970.  This excerpt from that interview, as she walked through the streets caring for the people in the filth and squalor of the streets of Calcutta, recalls to us the characteristic candor and simplicity of her faith.

“Do you do this every day?” he began his interview.

“Oh, yes,” she replied, “it is my mission. It is how I serve and love my Lord.”

“How long have you been doing this? How many months?”

“Months?” said Mother Teresa. “Not months, but years. Maybe eighteen years.”

“Eighteen years!” exclaimed Muggeridge. “You’ve been working here in these streets for eighteen years?”

“Yes,” she said simply and yet joyfully. “It is my privilege to be here. These are my people. These are the ones my Lord has given me to love.”

“Do you ever get tired? Do you ever feel like quitting and letting someone else take over your ministry? After all, you are beginning to get older.”

“Oh, no,” she replied, “this is where the Lord wants me, and this is where I am happy to be. I feel young when I am here. The Lord is so good to me. How privileged I am to serve him.”

When she entered the room and greeted the fifty or so of us, Calcutta seemed to enter the room with her, on her blue-edged habit and in the deep wrinkles in her face.  I immediately felt revulsion for our privilege here, our good clothes, and our relatively comfortable lives.  She seemed to read my mind. 

“You don’t need to come to the streets of Calcutta to serve the poor.  They are here among you.  There are all kinds of poverty; you will find it, if you look, in your homes and in your neighborhoods.  You can serve the poor for Jesus right where you are.”  But she was calling us not to sacrifice, but to joy.  We would find, she said, the face of God in those we serve; we would learn from them as she and her sisters did.   She told us a story to elucidate this.

Two of my sisters and I were taking a bag of rice to a mother who we had heard was starving, and her children with her.  When she came to welcome us, we gave her the bag of rice, and she expressed her gratitude and excused herself.  We assumed that she was going into her kitchen to get us some water; it is expected that when a guest arrives, even if you are poor, you bring them some little thing to honor them.  But a few minutes went by, and I was beginning to be a little put off, because she seemed to have simply left us.  Some minutes later, she came in with three glasses of water.  I asked her “Mother, where did you go?”  She answered, bowing, that the mother next door was starving too, and she had taken half of the rice to her, and stayed to share a glass of water.

In this week following the Feast of Corpus Christi, tears come to my eyes as they did in that little conference room with Mother Theresa.  The goodness of that starving woman to share the rice with her neighbor reminds me again how little I trust that there is enough bread for all of us, how I tend to be self-concerned, to store up, to want to be self-sufficient.   

Taken, blessed, broken, and shared.  I want to share, like that starving mother did.  And these next few days I will reflect on this four-step ritual that was given to us by the simple carpenter who became a preacher and healer, and who gave himself to us, who gives himself to us as bread, and who is enough.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.