For Mother Teresa, Everyone She Looked After Was Christ

By Navin Chawla (Mumbai Mirror)

• The writer is a former chief election commissioner, whose biography of Mother Teresa has sold more than half-a-million copies

 

Mumbai, 05 Sep 2016: Mother Teresa was canonised Saint Teresa of Kolkata by Pope Francis at the Vatican on Sunday. This came 19 years after her death, and 13 years after she was beatified by Pope John Paul II, in one of the fastest cases of conferral of sainthood in the history of the Catholic Church.

 

The day was marked with celebration and thanksgiving in many parts of the world. During the course of her life, her mission of mercy helped to alleviate destitution, loneliness, and hunger through a worldwide mission that established her presence in 123 countries, bringing relief to millions irrespective of their religion, caste, faith or denomination. In the process, she became the conscience-keeper of her century.

 

 

While she remained staunchly Catholic, her brand of faith was not exclusive. Convinced that each person she ministered to was Christ in suffering, she reached out to people of all religions. In India, where there has always been great respect for holiness and sacrifice, she was widely revered.

 

I once asked Jyoti Basu, the chief minister of West Bengal, how he as a Communist and atheist supported Mother Teresa for whom God was everything. He famously replied. "We both share a love for the poor".

 

I first met Mother Teresa 36 years ago, in 1975. That meeting remains indelibly printed on my mind. I was taken aback when I came face-to-face with her. She was smaller than I had imagined, dressed in her trademark, hand-woven sari with three blue stripes that was neatly darned in several places. I noticed her back was bent even then. Her feet were twisted and her hands were gnarled, testimony to her arduous life in the slums.

 

Navin Chawla with Mother Teresa

 

She spoke of simple things: of loving, caring and sharing. She seemed at many levels a very ordinary woman. My overwhelming thought that morning was that there was very little difference between the poor whom she and her Sisters served, and their own vow of poverty.

 

There were several mysteries about her that lend themselves to no easy answers. She was hardly qualified in academic terms. She never went to a university and her studies were largely confined to the scriptures. And yet she set up hundreds of schools that lifted poor children from a desolate life on the streets. She provided a safety net for the homeless by opening centres and soup kitchens. She started Shishu Bhavans for abandoned infants. There were homes for the terminally ill, so that they were not alone when they died. Not all these centres were in the poorer parts of the world; many were in the affluent West where loneliness and despair were a sickness she likened to leprosy.

 

Mother Teresa’s work -- indeed the continuing work of the Sisters and Brothers of the Missionaries of Charity -- became possible because she saw in each person she ministered to a manifestation of her God. So, whether it was taking care of an abandoned infant on a Kolkata street, or a homeless destitute sleeping on a cold wintry night in a cardboard box under London’s Waterloo Bridge, or the hungry in a Vatican square, awaiting their only hot meal from Mother Teresa’s ashram, all this became possible only out of her deepest conviction that she was ministering to her God.

 

Otherwise, as she often told me, "You can look after a few loved ones at the most, it is not possible for you to help everybody. Our work becomes possible because to me and my Sisters, they are all God."

 

As a Hindu, armed only with a certain eclecticism, I found it took me longer than most to understand that Mother Teresa was with Christ in each conscious hour, whether at Mass or with each of those whom she tended. The Christ on his crucifix was no different from the one who lay dying at her hospice in Kalighat. There could be no contradiction in her oft-repeated words that one must reach out to one’s neighbour.

 

For Mother Teresa, to love one’s neighbour was to love God. This was what was essential to her, not the size of her mission or the power others perceived in her. "We are called upon not to be successful, but to be faithful," she explained.

 

Saint Teresa exemplified that faith — in prayer, in love, in service and in peace.