Cheryl "The Earthly Angel"
Beloved of All
Great Exam to follow in helping those truly in need. Mother Teresa lead us by showing how to care for those in need by her actions. Reading about her life can help us understand and copy her actions. God Bless and Peace to You!
Mother Teresa of Calcutta strips you and me of every excuse to do nothing to help the hungry, the sick, the lonely, the unloved, the rejected, the hurting, the confused, the imprisoned.
Over and over again the tiny woman, who will be officially proclaimed a saint on September 4, asks us not to praise her but to join her; to remember that slums, homes for the dying, and prisons are not the only places where mercy, love, and attention are needed. Her canonization will take place one day before the 19th anniversary of her death, in 1997 at age 87.
Look across the dinner table, she instructs. Be alert at work, at school, on the subway, at church. Be aware of what’s around you. Constantly. “God doesn’t ask us to do great things. He asks us to do small things with great love,” she tells us.
Those who knew her well repeatedly state that the core message of the “saint of the gutters” is simple, clear, and melded at high mystical heat to Jesus’ words: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these . . . you did for me.”
In his homily to the 300,000 people crowding St. Peter’s Square for Mother Teresa’s beatification ceremony, declaring her Blessed in October 2003, St. John Paul II used one of the pending saint’s often-used descriptions of the abandoned and broken—“Jesus himself, hidden under the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor”—to underscore her conviction “that in touching the broken bodies of the poor she was touching the body of Christ.”
And that is what a 36-year-old Loreto sister who had taken the name Teresa (she was born Gonxha [Agnes] Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia, on August 27, 1910) made the focus of her life after she underwent “a decisive mystical encounter with Christ” on September 10, 1946, on the way to a retreat.
In that interior locution and others over the following months, the future Mother Teresa, by her own account, was told by Jesus “to give up all and follow him into the slums—to serve him in the poorest of the poor.”
“The voice kept pleading, ‘Come, come; carry me into the holes of the poor. Come, be my light,’” she said. It took two years, but in 1948 Sister Teresa received the official permissions needed to leave the comfort and safety of the Catholic girls high school in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where she had taught geography and history since 1931.
After taking basic nurse training at Patna, India, she boarded a train for the slums of Calcutta and would begin her work.
Alone.