Mother Teresa's Secret Fire. Joseph Langford
Three
Calcutta: Backdrop to an Epiphany
Calcutta sunrise. Even at this early hour, noisy, bustling, hot.
Humidity rides the air; from the shops of Chowringee to the hovels of Moti Jhil, it clings to the waking city like second skin. This is the hot breath of Kali — evil goddess who devours her husbands — for whom legend suggests the city was named.
Calcutta’s sixteen million inhabitants begin to stir. Many wake to another day on the sidewalks, huddled under cardboard and tattered cloth. Out in the streets, Calcutta’s traffic begins to move and swell, like a great sea overflowing its borders. Along the lanes and side streets, diesel fumes mix with sandalwood and the sweet smell of cooking fires, far away.
Crows caw noisily overhead, perched in trees and on housetops, arrogant and oblivious. Down on the sidewalk, men squat on the cracked cement smoking bidis and shooing flies, as they pore over the morning paper. Further up the road near Sealdah station, vendors display their wares piled high and spilling onto the footpath, circled by a moving sea of sandals and bare feet.
Along the sides of the road, rickshaw pullers run, swallowed up in smoke and traffic. Sun-bronzed and wizened they go, carrying the uniform-clad children of wealthy families to their private schools, while dodging walkers and hawkers and trams. Huge steel-sided buses ply the main roads, coughing and straining. They hurtle down the streets swollen to overflowing, with riders perched on the sides and hanging out windows and open doors. At each stop, they slow to a crawl, disgorge their passengers, and take off again spewing billows of smoke. Auto-rickshaws weave in and out of traffic, dodging and darting like insects, avoiding oncoming cars by inches and seconds.
Further out on the periphery, barefoot men push their handcarts, piled high and bound for market. They trudge on, amid clouds of mosquitoes, incessant horns, and the non-stop buffeting of passing trucks and speeding buses.
There, on the outskirts of the city, begin the slums that are Mother Teresa’s Calcutta, notorious for their pavement dwellers, street children, scavengers, and disease. Though greatly improved in recent years, in Mother Teresa’s time this area had become a cliché for the worst of human poverty. This would be Mother Teresa’s domain for the rest of her days — her meeting place with God in the poor, and our meeting place with God in her.
To gain a better idea of what Mother Teresa faced when she stepped out of the convent with five rupees in her pocket, let us take a closer look at one of the more famous of Calcutta’s slums, the ironically named “City of Joy,” which once claimed one of the densest concentrations of humanity on the planet: two hundred thousand people per square mile:
It was a place where there was not even one tree for three thousand inhabitants, without a single flower, a butterfly, a bird, apart from vultures and crows — it was a place where children did not even know what a bush, a forest, or a pond was, where the air was so laden with carbon dioxide and sulfur that pollution killed at least one member in every family; a place where men and beasts baked in a furnace for the eight months of summer until the monsoon transformed their alleyways and shacks into lakes of mud and excrement; a place where leprosy, tuberculosis, dysentery and all the malnutrition diseases, until recently, reduced the average life expectancy to one of the lowest in the world; a place where eighty-five hundred cows and buffalo tied up to dung heaps provided milk infected with germs. Above all, however, [it] was a place where the most extreme economic poverty ran rife. Nine out of ten of its inhabitants did not have a single rupee per day with which to buy half a pound of rice…. Considered a dangerous neighborhood with a terrible reputation, the haunt of Untouchables, pariahs, social rejects, it was a world apart, living apart from the world.7
Even amid such extreme poverty, Mother Teresa discovered in the poor of Calcutta a nobility of character, a vitality of family ties and cultural wealth, and an inventiveness and ingenuity that made her genuinely proud. “The poor are great people,” she vigorously insisted. These were people she deeply admired, and of whom she was undyingly fond. She insisted that the two-way exchange that passed between her and the poor of Calcutta was forever tipped in her favor; that she received much more than she gave, and was ever more blessed than she was blessing.
Children sleeping under a portrait of Mother Teresa (Raghu Rai/Magnum Photos)
Volunteers
After their day’s work in the slums, Mother Teresa and her Sisters would return to north-central Calcutta. Here was Mother House, her headquarters, from which hundreds of Sisters would go forth each day to give comfort and care.
Once her mission began to be known outside of India, young people from far and near began offering to help with her work in Calcutta. From all over the world they came, young volunteers in Mother Teresa’s army of love, giving a week or a month or more to help her Sisters serve the poorest of the poor.
Every morning the faces of these young foreigners could be seen moving along the swarming sidewalks, walking up Lower Circular Road on their way to morning Mass with Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity. Later, after a breakfast of chapattis (Bengali flatbread) and home-brewed chai, they would set out for the Kalighat, with its narrow lanes and shop fronts festooned with flower garlands for the gods, on their way to the Home for the Dying. Here they would spend their days changing bandages, comforting the sick, and tending to the dying, alongside Mother Teresa’s Sisters and Brothers.
After their initial struggles with the heat and the food and the difference of culture, these mostly First World youth would often find a new joy and sense of purpose stirring within — an experience often denied them by their affluent life abroad. As the days melted into weeks under Calcutta’s merciless sun, they would slowly discover that while they were touching the poor of Calcutta, God himself was touching the less-accessible, less easily admitted poverty of their own souls. Changed from within, they would return home with new answers and a new peace. But they arrived with new questions as well; questions about the life-changing closeness to God they had experienced amid the squalor and hardships of Calcutta. Questions, too, about the smiling, sari-clad woman who had gently opened their hearts to God. Who was this Mother Teresa, and what made her special? What inner flame did she carry that had kindled their hearts, and brought light into their darkness?
In the Darkness, Light
But before investigating her light, some may ask: How could there be such luminosity in someone whose interior was buffeted by darkness?
Looking back over her life and the documents that have emerged since her death, it is clear that Mother Teresa’s inner (and outer) world was a place in which the brilliance of God’s light and the bleakness of man’s darkness met and mingled — from which her victorious light only shone the brighter. What emerged from that inner struggle was a light in no way lessened by her bearing the cloak of humanity’s pain, but a light all the more resplendent, and all the more approachable. The kind of divine light we saw in her was no more the restricted domain of mystics and sages, but a light entirely accessible to the poorest, beckoning to God’s brightness all who share in the common human struggle.
In the wisdom of the divine plan, God sent Mother Teresa into the Calcuttas of this world — large and small, visible and hidden — so that precisely there, where our world (our inner world as well) appeared its darkest, the light he gave her might shine most brightly. Even more than to bring his comfort to the poor, God sent Mother Teresa to be his light. He invited her to pitch her tent in the blackest of places, not to build hospitals or high-rises, but that she might shine with his radiance.
Mother Teresa’s darkness was neither deviation nor mistake. Rather than being a divine miscue, her journey through the night had a definite and deeper purpose in God’s plan. Besides bringing her to share the dark struggle of Jesus on the cross, and the struggle of the poorest of the poor around