These reflections about Mother Teresa of Calcutta are by a priest who spent years working closely with her in India, especially with the Hansen’s disease patients under her care. These passages were first published in the July and August parish bulletins of St. Damien of Molokai Parish on Molokai where the author, a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, is pastor. He wrote them in preparation for the Sept. 4 canonization of Blessed Mother Teresa in Rome.
By Father William F. Petrie, SS.CC.
Special to the Herald
Exchanging smiles
If you have “eyes to see it” God intervenes in our life every day and our response becomes one of daily thanksgiving. If there is something missing from your life or a lack of fulfillment, Mother Teresa’s life somehow gives meaning. During the course of her life, thousands of people have been touched and uplifted by her charism. That charism was her love of God and neighbor.
Reflecting on the youthful Mother Teresa, at the age of 16 she left Albania to enter the Irish Sisters of Loretto because of her desire to be a missionary in India. I could identify with that. At the age of 16, after reading the life of Father Damien of Molokai, I entered the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts with the desire to go to India to work with patients of Hansen’s disease (leprosy).
Our paths crossed in July 1973. Although Mother Teresa never answered my letters, in my last correspondence to her I included information of my travel plans to Calcutta. No one was at the airport to meet me. Wondering where I would go and stay, the words of Jesus to a would-be follower struck me: “Foxes have dens and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.”
There was no panic but a realization that a good sense of humor was required to face the challenges of life. This was reinforced with our first face-to-face encounter, both of us with smiling faces.
Mother Teresa was delighted to learn that I was a member of the same religious congregation as Father Damien. He was her inspiration for starting the Hansen’s disease work for the Missionaries of Charity. She wanted to know more about the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and what lead me to India for a three-month visit. I informed her that she was the reason for my coming to Calcutta because of her Hansen’s disease work.
Mother Teresa’s smile seemed to convey her appreciation with my presence, but really it was I who was happy, after 15 years of perseverance, to have this happen. The moment was an occasion to give thanksgiving to God, for the both of us. Mother Teresa called the Archbishop of Calcutta to inform him of my arrival and would send me to his office to receive priestly faculties to minister in the Archdiocese of Calcutta. Then I would be brought to the Missionaries of Charity Brothers House where I would temporarily stay. In her farewell remark that day at the motherhouse convent door, Mother Teresa said: “Let us do something beautiful for God.”
House of Pure Heart
“Nirmal Hriday” means the “House of Pure Heart.” When started by Mother Teresa in 1952 it was called “Home for Dying Destitutes.” It was her response to those who were close to death, unwanted, uncared for and unloved. People who were brought to the home received medical attention and love by the Missionaries of Charity and were given the opportunity to die with dignity according to the rituals of their faith. Mother Teresa would say it was a place for those abandoned living on the streets to die as angels.
Entering the building, a prayer was said. When a Catholic priest was present Mass would be arranged. My initial feeling was that we were on sacred ground made holy by the love of those who served and the lives of those who died with a pure heart. Over the years a multitude from around the world has volunteered to be present with the sisters in this self-giving atmosphere. Mother Teresa never sought volunteers. On the contrary, she advised people to work with the poor and needy where they lived. “If you have eyes to see, Calcutta is everywhere,” she said.
To this present day you don’t write the sisters to volunteer, you just show up at the Missionaries of Charity motherhouse where, after the 6 a.m. Mass, volunteers are assigned to a place. In those days, if you wanted to meet Mother Teresa, it was after the morning Mass that she would greet visitors. For many that brief encounter was an uplifting experience. People of faith enjoyed being in her presence whether at Mass, the evening motherhouse holy hour with the sisters or while volunteering where Mother Teresa was present.
Mother Teresa’s House of Pure Heart might be considered a forerunner of hospice houses around the world. Medical personnel recommend hospice care when death is approaching rather than staying in a hospital where beds are needed for illness, surgical or recovery care.
Side-by-side sacrifices
The city of Calcutta was named after the Hindu goddess Kali. It was on the property of the Kalighat temple that Mother Teresa received permission to use a building for the dying. Pilgrims come from all over India to worship goddess Kali. In the temple there are two altars for blood sacrifice, the larger one for buffalo sacrifice, the smaller one for goats, which were offerings of thanksgiving or for seeking prosperity, protection from harm or Kali’s blessings.
Celebrating Mass in Mother Teresa’s house of the dying is almost a mystical experience. While the bloody Old Testament animal sacrifice is taking place, in the next building the unbloody sacrifice of the New Testament, the sacrifice of the Mass, is being celebrated. The death of Jesus was the last blood sacrifice, replaced by the bread and wine, the Body and Blood of Jesus offered to our heavenly Father.
Renewing this new covenant sacrifice is what contributes to making the house of the dying part of the mystical experience. It is also a reason why many non-Christians attend the motherhouse daily Mass. They desire to receive the graces that empower Mother Teresa and the sisters with divine love. The great realization that many volunteers receive is that it is the same Mass with the same graces celebrated around the world.
Always fresh and authentic
Mother Teresa, in her religious life and work with people, was never on “auto pilot.” There was integrity every day in her prayer and association with people. Her spirituality and interaction with others was always fresh and authentic. For Mother Teresa, prayer and work were not performed in a boring routine manner. Every day had opportunities to identify with the words of St. Paul: “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, on behalf of his body which is the Church …” (Col.1:24).
Whenever Mother Teresa ministered at the House of the Dying it was truly with a new pure heart. The new day brought challenges and opportunities for giving glory to God. Neither people nor hands-on activities were taken for granted. If I was shaving, washing or spoon feeding a patient, Mother Teresa might give a word of encouragement about sharing in the Calvary of a dying person or express gratitude for me being there. Those were treasured moments — Mother Teresa giving loving time to the patient and the worker performing simple tasks.
All the Missionaries of Charity sisters and volunteers could witness Mother Teresa’s compassionate bedside style. She made the connection in her own life with how priests delicately handle the consecrated host on the altar, so we can imitate and delicately encounter others.
In the early 1970s, Mother Teresa’s popularity was not as extensive as it became after receiving the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. Before that, Mother was more available to bring a visitor to the various Missionaries of Charity works for children, the mentally challenged and the elderly. But she always tried to bring people to the House of the Dying because it was an experience that was grace-filled.
On one occasion after a Mass at the motherhouse, Mother Teresa introduced me to a prince from a European royal family and asked me to take him as an anonymous volunteer to the House of the Dying. While he was feeding a patient a volunteer recognized him. With tears in his eyes he expressed how proud he was to be a citizen of that country. The tearful prince replied how proud he was because of citizens like him. Repeatedly, the best of people emerged from being connected with Mother Teresa and the works she started, even after her death in 1997.
Destitute, sick or dying people do not need a sad face in front of them. Mother would tell her sisters, if you can’t smile, don’t go to the poor as they already have enough problems. Smile at a dying person and they try to smile back. Mother Teresa’s cheery face was uplifting to all. Such axioms Mother would share over and over with people who met her. Introducing yourself to Mother was received with a smile on her face, and unconsciously returned. Such gestures are contagious. A smile from a homeless or rejected person, or any person, is a gift of love from that individual. It’s a love that is genuine that can bring mutual spiritual joy.
Being a sacred presence
A “life lesson” became apparent to me after the House of the Dying work experience. I accompanied Mother Teresa to a mobile clinic for Hansen’s disease patients. A week had been skipped because of the delayed arrival of medical supplies. Mother was informed of the reason, but one patient said, “You should have come anyway.” Being a “sacred presence” to others was the insight gained. It was not just the medicine, the distribution of clothes or food, but the charism of spiritual energy given to another in a spirit of love.
Charisms are the divine gifts we are born with and incorporated into our personality. Every morning, beginning the day with prayer, meditation and Mass, Mother Teresa first encountered Christ in the chapel. She then radiated Christ to others with her presence. This was not a one-time experience, but repeated every time we were together. My conviction was deepened witnessing others having the same experience. There are countless others who do the same loving corporal works of mercy, but Mother Teresa was gifted by God to be a special witness of love just as Father Damien was called to be such a universal witness. The insight into Mother Teresa’s “sacred presence” has motivated me to discover the charism of each person connected with my life.
Although it was not known to Mother, scientists tested people in an audience where Mother Teresa spoke. They discovered that the selected participants went into a brain state of “alpha.” In the state of alpha we are in complete relaxation and receptivity. Our pulse slows and our blood pressure is lower and we are more apt to breathe more deeply, which oxygenates the brain resulting in heightened awareness. If you are sensitive to what is taking place it can be like a moment of ecstasy. Most people would not say they were in an alpha state, but rather that they just “felt good” after meeting or hearing Mother Teresa.
Travelling on a six-hour train ride in tropical heat, a superior would forewarn me that Mother Teresa would not eat a snack or drink water until reaching the destination convent. Dehydration was evident on her face when wrinkles appeared. The personal sacrifice helped her identify with the words of Jesus, “I thirst.” The act was a reparative prayer. Mother Teresa delighted in creative simple ways to offer things up to Jesus as an act of love. You never mentioned it to her when you became aware of what she was doing. She was having what I would call a “spiritual alpha state” radiating a sense of joy and peace. It was not narcissistic but a spiritual practice of love between Jesus and herself.
Never called me by name
After a week in mid-July 1973 of what might be called an exposure program in the Archdiocese of Calcutta, Mother Teresa brought me and two other volunteers to stay with the Missionaries of Charity Brothers in a suburb called Titagarah where she had established a Hansen’s disease center. What seemed to bring delight to Mother Teresa was the opportunity to bring a sense of joy to others. Mother could intuitively tell that I was happy beginning this new experience. My introduction to the patients was always “this is the priest from Father Damien’s congregation.”
In those early days I sensed that Mother Teresa couldn’t remember my name. It wasn’t necessary. Being the only priest volunteer, when she spoke of “Father,” that was me. Having to write letters to the government for sponsorship, Mother finally remembered my name. But she still never called me by name, but only Father. For clergy, she believed in the sacramental vocation — for the priest to administer the sacraments, preach the Gospel, pray for the people of God and “whatever else can you do for the patients.”
When Mother Teresa departed I felt abandoned as she left everyone there with a hope and expectation that great things were going to happen during my week’s stay. Mother Teresa’s departing words were, “Do it for Jesus.”
Spirituality of powerlessness
That moment of aloneness, of “what do I do now,” was the beginning of the insight which I later shared with Mother Teresa, her “spirituality of powerlessness.” When asked to explain, she used the analogy of Mary standing on Calvary during the crucifixion. There was nothing she could do. Mary was powerless.
Explaining how she stood on symbolic cavalries sharing peoples’ sufferings around the world, Mother Teresa said she was powerless, but God used her is such situations and often with positive results. “For when I am powerless, then I am strong.” (2 Cor.12:10) My awareness of being powerless began as Brother Superior brought me around to each bed to greet the patients, to the patient workers, to the bandaging room, to those dispensing medicine, to those laundering sheets by pounding them on slabs of stone, to those on kitchen duty, to the men and women in the garden, and to the rehab patients on weaving looms making bandages, towels and sheets.
Everyone, self-taught, knew what to do. Each department, whether in the works of the Missionaries of Charity Sisters or Brothers, were young professed religious supervising a bee hive of activity. Brother Superior brought me into his clinic room, and with a radiant face, took my hands into his hands and revealed that he too was a cured Hansen’s disease patient and no one knew. I was humbled standing before another Father Damien.
When the week ended, Brother Superior expressed how he and the patients were sorry to see me leave for they felt uplifted, affirmed and happy. I only accompanied them each day and felt that I did nothing to deserve such a compliment. The question asked itself: Being powerless, did God use me in some way? Returning to the motherhouse, I shared my week’s experience with Mother Teresa. After a few more days in Calcutta, Mother recommended that I visit Shantinagar (City of Peace) Leprosy Rehabilitation Center. Later I was to discover that Mother Teresa was confident of my ability to be with Hansen’s disease patients. She told me the sisters who volunteer usually gave accounts of their Hansen’s disease work with closed hands. I spoke with my hands open!
Don’t bother unpacking
Fourteen years after she established the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa went to the 1964 Eucharistic Congress presided over by Pope Paul VI. Reports of her work had reached the Vatican. Pope Paul VI donated the gift he received, a Lincoln Continental limousine to Mother Teresa. It took almost three years to raffle the car to gain sufficient funds to construct the Shantinagar Leprosy Rehabilitation Center. The land, given by the government, was more than 20 miles from the closest city, bus depot, train station and shopping bazaar. And it was dry, a former jungle that had been deforested.
After a few years, Shantinagar was filled with eight sisters, close to 200 patients, and approximately 70 children — but had no priest for daily Mass. After the Calcutta orientation, Mother, with profound eye contact, asked if I would be willing to go to Shantinagar. The response was positive. The following day, accompanied by a religious brother, two young ladies and two young men volunteers, we arrived without the Shantinagar sister superior knowing of Mother’s decision to send us.
A large guest room held six beds, a table with six chairs, two soft chairs and a coffee table. I felt like an experienced missionary as I shared the instructions first given to me: don’t unpack, there is no place to put your belongings, everyone will have a plastic bucket for a daily bath and for washing clothes. The accommodations sometimes resulted in volunteers not staying too long. In those days we had erratic electricity, no running water, lack of privacy, a diet of rice, lentils, vegetables, bread, the occasional egg or chicken and miniature bananas three times a day, along with plenty of mosquitoes.
I concluded that you could only be happy and fulfilled if you were truly meant to be in Shantinagar. For me, the whole Shantinagar world with the patients, sisters, children and neighboring villagers was heavenly. I would have to return to the United States in two months time, but I thought, like all my assignments, I could have taken a vow of stability here.
I received a profound blessing upon my return to Shantinagar. Mother Teresa was Macedonian, an ethnic minority in her homeland of Albania, a part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia until 1992. At 16, when Mother left Skokie, Albania, to enter the Irish Sisters of Loreto, another young girl from Yugoslavia was to follow. They went through the sisters’ formation in Ireland and both were assigned as missionaries to India. They became friends as they taught at Loreto English medium schools. After Mother Teresa started the Missionaries of Charity, her friend joined her a few years later. This person was Shantinagar’s sister superior.
During my almost four years at Shantinagar I was privileged to hear stories of their acquaintance, and their religious life in Loreto. Mother Teresa did not talk about those years which were rarely covered by authors or journalists. There was nothing spectacular to share, but hearing tidbits of those 20 hidden years gave me another bond in knowing a saint.
When I returned to Calcutta, Mother Teresa wanted to know about my experience, especially with Shantinagar’s sister superior. We had a good few laughs. Mother was interested in one event. The contractors who built the facility were making an assessment. In the guest room they asked how I, as a person from the United States, could stay there without a wife, children and all the material things that would be available elsewhere. They said that none of them could do it.
While reflecting on the question for a moment, Shantinagar’s sister superior spoke out: “He can do it because God loves him.” Mother Teresa shared that once a person realizes they are loved by God, it is true, you can do the unbelievable. She said that, in her life, one miracle takes place after another not because of her, but because she is an instrument, like a pencil, in God’s hands. Although Mother Teresa did not feel it during her period of darkness, she believed it with her heart and soul.
Her internal struggles
Many people were inspired when praying in the same church or chapel with Mother Teresa. It was for some a heavenly experience. But after Mother Teresa’s death on Sept. 5, 1997, when some of her personal letters to spiritual directors were published, the world saw a saint who had many internal struggles. Mother Teresa’s writings gave a personal transparent account of what everyone occasionally goes through in his or her life —a dark spiritual experience.
“I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is no one to answer … The reality of darkness and coldness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”
Before starting the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa had quietly made a private vow, a vow of “spiritual espousal” in which she would be all for Jesus and to refuse him nothing.
“If my pain and suffering, my darkness and separation give you a drop of consolation, my own Jesus do with me as you wish … I am willing to suffer with all my heart all that I suffer … I have begun to love my darkness for I believe now that it is a part of Jesus’ darkness and pain on earth.”
On several occasions when travelling with Mother on a several-hour flight there was the usual pattern of her first saying the rosary, then reading from Scripture, followed by a meditative silence. I often wondered what Mother Teresa might be thinking, or praying. Little did I think there might be a spiritual combat taking place. Then it was the time for a little conversation which always began by her asking a question connected with spirituality. After my response she would give her comment about the same question.
Opportunities like this were what made people think they were such personal friends with Mother, because she immediately opened her heart to you leaving out superficial conversation. Yes, there would be some light talk and musings, but it all seemed so spiritual. You were invited into her heart and soul without experiencing her personal “cross.” That cross, Mother Teresa carried for more than 50 years alone.
From whatever interior desolation Mother Teresa might have experienced in life, she moved on and above that reality. Her secret: Mother would say “peace always begins with a smile.” We can understand the cross and many personal struggles of Mother Teresa by the multitude of smiles she expressed to everyone and at all times.
I will never forget her first smile when we met, or the last time she smiled at me before her death.
