A Mother’s Love to Console the Man Jesus

She was a mother who knew how to love.” This is what Fr Brian said to me, driving back one evening from yet another meeting about Mother Teresa, one of the many planned for the time close to the Beatification on Sunday. This is not so much an interview grabbed at the last minute, at the end of a long and tiring day, but more the confidences of a friend who is also the Postulator of the Cause of Canonization of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. “My sister,” he said, “is a Missionary of Charity. When her doctors diagnosed a melanoma, she was living in one of their houses in Poland. Mother Teresa went to get her and brought her to New York, where I was, and where our parents then joined us. Mother Teresa accompanied my sister to the hospital and did not move from there. My mother wept and Mother Teresa consoled her, and did not go back to India until the doctors told her that everything was all right with my sister. Do you understand what I am saying? She was a mother who knew how to love.”

The words of Fr Tadeusz

Fr Brian is a Canadian of Ukrainian origin. He is tall and as big as a mountain, but with the face and eyes of a child, still full of wonder at the human adventure that has happened to him. The Beatification is three days away, and he is dead tired, like all the Sisters who have worked with him, abandoning their everyday lives to wrestle with computers, journalists, and pilgrims. In the Postulation, everyone dreams of going back to work for and with the poor, but this long and exhausting experience has also been a precious gift that has enabled them to enter into Mother Teresea’s life. Fr Brian and the Sisters have done this with the love and nostalgia of children who go to look through old papers for traces of their dead parents, in order to discover also the suffering hidden behind a mother’s smile. “Simplicity and depth. It is incredible,” Fr Brian says over and over. “Mother Teresa was so simple, and yet she had dizzying depth. More than anything, I was struck by the darkness she experienced. She was truly heroic.”

Rome is a big city, and it takes time to go from one side of it to the other. Thus, as we drive along, the minutes go by as we talk about what Tadeusz Styczen, the Pope’s friend who succeeded Professor Wojtyla to the chair he had occupied at the University of Lublin, had said to journalists the day before. Styczen shared John Paul II’s vacations in the mountains with him for years. “When, in 1978,” Fr Tadeusz told the press during his stay in Rome for the 25th anniversary of John Paul’s pontificate, “the news arrived in Lublin that Karol Wojtyla had been elected Pope, I immediately thought of what the Archbishop of Krakow had said when he preached the Spiritual Exercises to Paul VI and the Roman Curia. The Church–Wojtyla had suggested at that time–had to find the courage to recover the chance lost by the Apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane, to console God-made-Man. When the Archbishop of Krakow was elected Pope,” Styczen went on to say, “I immediately thought that God had accepted the offer, but had decided to entrust its realization not to Paul VI, but to Wojtyla himself. This is the key to John Paul II’s pontificate. Even now in his physical suffering,” Fr Tadeusz added, “the Pope knows Who holds and upholds him.”

Fr Brian likes very much what the Pope’s friend said. “It was like this also for Mother Teresa, to console God-made-Man in the faces and bodies of His poorest children and console Him by accepting the pain of darkness, sharing Gethsemane with Him, the anguish of feeling abandoned and rejected.” How staggering it must have been, and what a human experience, to encounter and live alongside people like this! I understand this also from Sister Gertrude, whom I always meet when I go to the house at Primavalle, where unwed mothers are taken in. Sister Gertrude, an Indian, is 78 years old but still beautiful and with a ramrod spine. She must not have had an easy disposition, and it is not easy even now. She has very beautiful hands, even though they have worked a lot, and when she smiles you are enchanted by her perfect white teeth. Sitting on a bench in the garden, she told me that she was 16 years old and in her last year of school run by the Order of the Sisters of Loreto in Calcutta when her teacher decided to leave the convent and go live in the city streets. Mother Teresa’s first companions were familiarly given numbers by the other Missionaries of Charity. Sister Gertrude is Number 2, joining Mother right after Sister Agnes. “I had gone back home,” Sister Gertrude says, “because I had finished school. Agnes wrote me that Mother Teresa had left the convent. I waited, because I knew that Mother would call for me, and what I wanted was to stay with her. Then Agnes wrote me again: ‘Come, Mother Teresa has found a house.’ I remember my father’s face when I told him I wanted to go away. In the tumult of that time in India, with conflicts between Hindus and Muslims, my brother had disappeared. We never knew if he had died, or how. My father said to me that he had already lost a son, but that he could give his daughter, too, to God. So I left.” The first time I heard her tell this story, brought out by my questions, I was careful also not to tire her, not to make her talk too much. Then I understood that Sister Gertrude would tell her story ad infinitum, until she wore out her listeners, and the reason is simple: what has happened to her is so beautiful, that she would go back unhesitatingly and start all over again, especially now that she misses Mother Teresa’s company so much.

“We lived together for fifty years. Her last day, I was near her bed, but she sent me away. ‘Go to the chapel,’ she told me, ‘and tell my Friend I am not doing well.’ I obeyed, but after ten minutes I came back. The she said, “I can’t breathe.’ I knew she was about to have another attack. The other times, too, it had started like this. I immediately called for help and started praying. She repeated my words, then at a certain point she looked up high and said, three times, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.’ That is how she died.” Each time, Sister Gertrude cannot tell this story without her eyes tearing. And when you hear her, you always get the impression that, with Mother Teresa, a piece of her went away too. “I always have in front of my eyes when she died,” she confides, “and at the same time, the first time I saw her after she had left the convent. After Agnes’ letter, I went to Calcutta, but when I got there, Mother Teresa was not at home. So I stood at the door to wait for her. I can still see her as she turned the corner and drew near, dressed in a sari and holding her purse tight, accompanied by a woman. The first time I had seen her at the school in Entally, I was struck greatly because she welcomed me in the Indian way and spoke to me in Bengali. This time, instead, she hugged me and spoke English, and for the rest of my life never said another word of Bengali to me. I didn’t know what to think. At school, we girls looked up to the Sisters as though they were… who knows what–they seemed so elegant to us in their habits. Now Mother Teresa was coming towards me dressed like the Calcutta women who clean the streets. For Indian society, this was scandalous, do you understand? My father, too, needed time to be able to accept it. He had let me go, but for him it was humiliating in front of people to have a daughter who went around dressed like that.” I listen to her, and never tire of listening to her, and marvel that God’s history can be so human.

Two days before the Beatification, when I went with the cameraman to the house on Via Casilina to film the footage for the TV newscast for which I work, I met Sister Gertrude again. She had come over from Primavalle, because Missionaries from all over the world were arriving there: two for each of Mother Teresa’s houses, and no more, I was told, because the ticket costs too much. Sister Gertrude looked at me and started laughing. She turned her back on me and headed for the chapel, took off her shoes and left them beside the door, then quickly went to crouch down in a corner of the chapel where my cameraman could not film her. She is also mischievous! Just like a child. I understood very well that she could not take any more of this uproar that has been unleashed by the Beatification. In the Via Casilina house, the Sisters normally number 80, and now there are 300 of them. This is the biggest of all of Mother Teresa’s houses. It was left to the Missionaries of Charity by a congregation of Sisters who lived there before. Tents have been set up all over the grounds to house the Sisters coming from all over the world, but the biggest tent has been reserved for their permanent Guest. I peeped in and saw the Crucifix with this inscription next to it: I thirst. I have learned from the Sisters that this is what Jesus says to each of us: I thirst for you and your love.

I am personally grateful to this courageous woman whom I have always felt beside me. Mother Teresa, an icon of the Good Samaritan, went everywhere to serve Christ in the poorest of the poor. Not even conflict and war could stand in her way….
The cry of Jesus on the Cross, “I thirst” (Jn 19: 28), expressing the depth of God’s longing for man, penetrated Mother Teresa’s soul and found fertile soil in her heart. Satiating Jesus’ thirst for love and for souls in union with Mary, the Mother of Jesus, had become the sole aim of Mother Teresa’s existence and the inner force that drew her out of herself and made her “run in haste” across the globe to labor for the salvation and the sanctification of the poorest of the poor.

“As you did to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Mt 25: 40). This Gospel passage, so crucial in understanding Mother Teresa’s service to the poor, was the basis of her faith-filled conviction that in touching the broken bodies of the poor she was touching the body of Christ. It was to Jesus himself, hidden under the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor, that her service was directed. Mother Teresa highlights the deepest meaning of service–an act of love done to the hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick, prisoners (cf. Mt 25: 34-36) is done to Jesus himself…. She wanted to be a sign of “God’s love, God’s presence, and God’s compassion,” and so remind all of the value and dignity of each of God’s children, “created to love and be loved.” Thus was Mother Teresa “bringing souls to God and God to souls” and satiating Christ’s thirst, especially for those most in need, those whose vision of God had been dimmed by suffering and pain.