MOTHER TERESA OF CALCUTTA

Blessed Mother Teresa

Communicator of Compassion

The word “compassion” is from the Latin “patior” = I suffer.

The prefix “com” means “with”. To have compassion is to suffer with. “Patior” is a verb, a peculiar type of verb, deponent verb, i.e., it is passive in form but active in meaning. Compassion is active at all times. It has no season, but flourishes and bears fruit in season and out. A man or woman who is transparently compassionate will never collapse with compassion fatigue. It is not a thing or an ephemeral feeling or emotion, but a persistent power, inexhaustible dynamic that transfigures the whole person, making her dazzle like a million suns like Jesus on the Mount of his Transfiguration. And like Jesus she so transfigures others, making them like suns walking the earth as Thomas Merton observed very ordinary people in Louisville which he visited after many years of life in a Trappist monastery. Compassion is not an adventitious quality attaching to a person like a mask or imposture that can collapse under stress like a cosmetic in a heavy shower. It is more like an Olympic skill acquired by a trained athlete. Compassion is the person and the person is compassion. If it is not, there is no hope for the world.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta was “compassion transparent”; she had no option, having given herself to Jesus in an irrevocable once for all. She never kept a clinical distance from the sick, abandoned and dying. The encouraging look, the uplifting word, the grasp of her strengthening hand, the maternal warmth of her bosom to which she held a child (in most cases they were smiling) all communicated the old message that was ever new: you have nothing to fear, you’re at home where the walls, roof and chimney top are blessed with never fading reassurance.

The Gospel tells us that Jesus was often moved with pity, mercy, compassion. “Moved”, indeed! The English translation fails to convey the gut level significance of the Greek “SPLANCHNIZEIN”

(Mt. 9,36) – something that you feel that churns your stomach at the sight of a tragedy: a child smashed by a speeding truck, her brain and guts splattering the road, the blood spouting out on to your clothes. Your instinctual gut response is to turn your face away, sick at the sight; but if you are a responsible person, you will turn back in order to rescue what can be restored – the order of human existence, the order of being. This is the truth of the radical intentionality of graced human nature: the restoration of humanity through the works of compassion. That restoration goes on today on the local and international levels. Come earthquakes and explosions, floods and fire, landslides and losses – there is no compassion fatigue. The succeeding generations of humanity, young and old, are responding spiritedly to newer and greater challenges as never before. The world was never a more compassionate place than now. “Bonum EST diffusivum Sui” – good is self-diffusive, and compassion is infectious with many beneficial side effects.

Like the virtue of love, compassion is caught, not taught. Blessed Mother Teresa did not transmit compassion, she communicated it. Transmission is a combination of two Latin words meaning “to send across”; whereas “communication” conveys the goodness of sharing in community, simply by being present and loving. The structures and methods of compassion are taught with the help of anthropology, sociology, and ethics. Compassion grabs these sciences and turns them into the art of developing humanity. Like the Word becoming flesh, flesh in turn becomes Word, bringing out the glory of God in flesh fully alive. Listen to Mother: “As a rule it begins with a smile of the eyes, a smile of the face, the smile of the touch, the way we touch people, the way you give to people. All that is love in action. And that is why people who come in contact with the Sisters feel that presence, feel that touch, that contact with Christ in the Sisters, and the Sisters feel that contact with Christ in the desolate disguise of the poor.”

One day the Sisters brought home a very ill man, malodorous and eaten by worms. Mother was at home. She could see that the poor man was dying and that nothing could be done. So what she do? She pulled out a pair of nail clippers and began to pare his nails, hands and feet. By the market mentality it didn’t matter whether the man died with nails clipped; but from the divine perspective it made all the difference on earth and heaven that he was served by a compassionate fellow human. What rejoicing must there not be in heaven by the thousands of men, women and children who were served by Mother. The definition of love according to Thomas Aquinas is “The effective desire for the good of the other.” The key word you must have guessed is “effective”. Love is not merely a desire but something good that you’re going to do in practical terms for fellow humans. Mother Teresa’s compassionate love was effective from day one, which she communicated to her Sisters, MC priests and Brothers, and lay co-operators – a community of compassion enveloping the world. Listen to Mother: “Calcutta is everywhere. People are surprised when they see our poor people, when they see our street people. But at the same time they find in Calcutta the warmth. See the people lying there. But there is that connection. If there is only one blanket, and there are 10 people, they will cover with that one blanket. There is that greatness of love among them. Suffering here is much more physical, much more material. But in some other places where our Sisters are working suffering is deeper and it is more hidden. You can find Calcutta all over the world if you have eyes to see; not only to see but to look.” Mother continues: “It is not all that easy, but it’s a beautiful and very wonderful way, and it brings slowly that presence of God through our actions to the people. People are scientifically trying to prove that God was. And yet the presence of the poor, the work and loving action that is going on has proven that God is.”

The poor cannot wait, for they are “anxious for tomorrow” and “worry about what to eat and what to wear” [Mt. 6, 34], and unless someone helps them immediately, “they will collapse on the way” [Mk 8, 3]. Jesus spans the Hebrew chequerboard, but his focus is primarily on the outcasts. These were social throwaways  -  dumped on the human trash pile. Jesus touches them, loves them, and names them God’s people. His actions were thorough and charged with urgency. Those at the periphery were shot to the centre: the poor, diseased, hungry and lamenting, the possessed, the persecuted and heavy laden, the ignorant rabble, the little ones, the lost sheep, the foreigners and the harlots. From now on they have a voice; which is why Pope John Paul II at his Calcutta rally could declare, “Let the poor of Mother Teresa speak!”

            Mother Teresa, indeed.  By the divine magic of intrinsic analogy Teresa would do as Jesus did, beginning with Calcutta, spreading throughout India and, like an expanding spiral, the world. The radiance of her face, the comfort of her words, the electric magic of her touch have now become the stuff of deathless legend. The world’s acclaim that followed fast on the heels of success left her cool and detached, allowing her but the liberty of exulting in the triumph of “the poorest of the poor.” She never claimed to be perfect or have the right answers: all she desired was to be faithful.

On one occasion Mother made a visit to a poverty stricken village in Venezuela. By then her fame had spread, and some press correspondents accompanied her on the visit. The inhabitants who were told about her arrival waited in eager expectation. The children were leaping with excitement and, when they got the first glimpse of her, they screamed with joy as they ran out and held and kissed her hands as they dragged her into their village square. The village elders were waiting with joyous serenity as they saw the compassionate one advance. The press correspondents exchanged glances and their opinions. What will these people of Mother Teresa this time? Tin sheets for their shanty huts? Bulgur from the U.S.? Oversized second-hand clothes from Germany? Imagine their surprise when the elders, stretching out their hands, said: “MOTHER, GIVE US GOD”.

“Mother, give us God.” In the final consummation that is what compassion is all about. In compassion, man annihilates himself, gives his being unreservedly, bestows himself disinterestedly on anyone he meets. Compassion brings about a concentration of the divine in our world. An immense power is concealed in it, the power of divine presence in the world. The world has – so to speak – sent the compassionate man in advance, to prepare the way for mankind. He takes the life of the world with him into the breath-taking adventure of union with God. He drags the others with him. A tremendous responsibility lies upon him. He belongs no longer to himself, but to mankind. He is a gift of God to the world. Man’s assent to the creature is nowhere so radically expressed as in the virtues of compassion. If anyone truly deserves to be called happy, it is the person to whom God sends one who is in need of his compassion. (cf. Ladislaus Boros, “Pain and Providence”, pp. 62 63)

 The best stories of heroes are about leaving the ancestral mansion and striding towards an unknown future, and about adventurous travels and conquests.

Yahweh himself was not a God of a particular time and locale; he was no God of the hearth. He accompanied his people on their Exodus, in fact, initiated it and “went before them;” and it was no weakling that did so but the God with “a strong arm” (Deut. 7, 8).   

Like Yahweh, the resurrected Christ “now goes ahead of you to Galilee” (Mt 28, 7) where he would commission his apostles to go in all directions to proclaim his liberty of soul that knows no fixity to a particular time or place.

            In the latter half of the 40’s, the people of Kolkata awoke to the phenomenon of a new apostle in their midst; someone who took them by surprise and with whom every encounter was a refreshment of soul and body. Frail-looking on the exterior, but, robust with rectitude and mobile with the Spirit, she led her legions from the vibrant heart of Kolkata to the wider world of the “poorest of the poor”, as no armies of Alexander or legions of Rome had ever done, and with no more intent of conquest than that of giving them God in the form of a healed and healthy humanity. This woman was inserted into the grand narrative of the God of salvation. There is no nook or cranny left on this earth that has not received the comforting benediction of this apostle, who will be known forever as

                          “SAINT TERESA OF KOLKATA”

MY PERSONAL TESTIMONY

When I was an 18/19 year old adolescent I was apprenticed to a British engineering firm in Calcutta and a member of the Young Christian Workers movement. We decided that each one of us help Mother Teresa one day every week, usually a Sunday. That was in 1952-1953 when Mother was very young and finding her way. We worked under her in Nirmal Hriday, the Home for the dying in Kalighat, even helping her with Rs. 5/- or 10/-. Having worked under her for two years, I left for the seminary in Kandy, Sri Lanka. As a priest I was absorbed in the anonymity of pastoral work. The compassionate Mother Teresa became universally known and loved. Our paths never crossed. After 12 years of ministry I flew to Rome for studies. On arrival at the Collegio Urbano, my Rector Fr. Pelligrino Ronchi welcomed me at the door and said: “Mother Teresa was here yesterday saying, “My priest from Calcutta is coming.” It was 1974.