MOTHER TERESA

ADIEU, MOTHER !

MOTHER GANGA  -  MOTHER KALI

            Calcutta is the last great city to receive the Mother Ganga as she finally diffuses into small rivers and streams, like the Hooghly and Rupnarayan, to ease herself into the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. Like the eternally flowing Ganga, pilgrims from all over India and the world flock to the imposing temple of Kali in the crowded south sector of Calcutta, joining the pell-mell of local people for a “darshan” of the benign Mother, to quaff a palm-full of the true Ganga, to offer flowers, sometimes gold, in thanksgiving or propitiation, or to sacrifice a goat amidst rending cries of “Kali Mai ki jai”. A very liberal Calcutta receives them all with indiscriminate hospitality. On a little island in the Bay there also takes place the annual “Ganga Sagar mela”, upon which the devotees converge in their thousands. Pilgrims traverse the length and width of the country by road and rail for the experience of the life-giving encounter with the Mother and a cleansing dip in the Sagar.

            That is the large and pretentious part of the story of Calcutta But the inconspicuous and picayune are not usually, if ever, mentioned, or even noticed. Some devotees don’t make it. They enter the teeming city, weak, ill, even dying, and anonymous. As if Calcutta did not already have its bizarre share of the unknown suffering and dying on its squalid street corners, the outsiders who failed to make it to the great temple completed the baleful picture of brokenness and death. Whether insiders or outsiders, the city extended to them the liberality of its streets and the honour of death without distinction. Vehicles sped by inexorably, pedestrians hurried past, too flustered with pressing engagements to take note of the moribund humanity at their quickening feet. The city of the benign Kali had no way of helping the destitute. They died alone and unknown; their bodies in the macabre postures in which the final pang of death left them. The sick and dirty smelled, but their odour was tolerated. Not so their putrefying corpses. So the open tin truck of the “Hindu Satkar Samity” came round to pick them for their last journey to the burning ghat. If the body happened to be that of a Muslim, it was collected by the “Anjuman Mufidul Islam” in its chunky van, the only added distinction being that the vehicle boasted a convex top cover.

MOTHER TERESA

Once upon a time there was a Loreto nun. She was put in charge of a large group of well-fed giggling school girls. One day she was chaperoning the girls back to their prestigious boarding upon the hill, after the long winter vacation. But as the little train chugged up the slope, she felt a tug in the opposite direction that left her with a sense of unease among the children of the affluent. That was the turning point of a story that was being told all over the world the week of her death and will be repeated a thousand times ten thousand till the end of time: the story of how this woman from Albania turned in her Loreto card and how Calcutta awoke one morning to Mother Teresa picking up the diseased and dying off the mean city streets, a phenomenon hitherto unseen and unheard of. She was permitted to use the “dharmsala” meant for pilgrims, a short distance from the great Kali temple, to shelter her dying, her “pilgrims of the Absolute”. From then on, no one need be abandoned and dying on the streets of Calcutta, for her “missionaries of charity” are a telephone call away and can be trusted to do a job that is quick and thorough, even to the clipping of the patient’s toe     nails !

THE GOD OF THE POOR

            “We do it for Jesus”, they keep saying, and, one may add, like him, too. The ethic that has the bench mark of Jesus Christ is one of urgent and complete action. What, for instance, would you do with a bunch of grubby urchins  -  loveable kids in their own right  - who are running loose and messing up the neighbourhood ? Hit them on the head with the Jerusalem Bible ?  You would surely go at them with plenty of water and soap and fresh towels, scrub them down till their skin was shiny and ruddy with the glory of their Creator. Then you would put them into clean and well-fitting clothes, have them medically checked and treat any that were disease-ridden. You would then feed and educate them into an integral humanity to qualify them for life, and, if opportune, give them the most precious possession you have, the Faith. It could be the beginning of another community of faith, in which they would discover the true God as the God of the poor; for the poor are Christ here and now , and constitute the route to a discovery of and discourse upon God. The body of Christ is not clothed in idyllic silence, because the Incarnation means what it has always meant: something messy, noisy, smelly, bloody and painful. To be in Jesus is to be with God with the people in our heart. That was Mother Teresa.

SHOT TO THE CENTRE

            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 checkerboard 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. Like the other two Teresas before her, of Avila and Lisieux, she was faithful to the end.

SURRENDERED IN THE SPIRIT

            “I thirst”, said Jesus on his cross; “I can’t breathe”, replied Teresa on her deathbed. To thirst for water and to gasp for air mean only thing which is the essence of virginity, and that is to acquiesce in the ultimate impotence of human help and sustenance in order to wait alone on the largesse of divine liberality. Water and breath: two symbols pointing to and re-presenting the same reality which faith names “the Holy Spirit.” The Spirit was given and the bride surrendered in death. The nuptials are complete.

            We have carried the bride amidst joyful sounds to the edge of our shore, there to place her in the boat that will waft her gently across the sea to the further shore that we cannot see but are sure she will reach, for the sail is swelled by the Breath she thirsted for. And as on the horizon her boat blends crimson with the setting sun, she turns to wave her last fond farewell and to take our own “Adieu” as she vanishes into the day that will never end.

“Adieu, Mother !”