Mother Teresa's Secret Fire. Joseph Langford
blackness of our “vale of tears,” a cartographer’s map etched on her soul to lead us through our own spiritual darkness into divine light. Paradoxically, her darkness became the vehicle for a much greater light, a light it could neither conquer nor contain, but only amplify, as it passed through her soul as through a prism.
A Message Meant for All
The energy and impetus for her new life came not only from her encounter on the train to Darjeeling, but from the message God had communicated to her there — a message revealing the immensity of his love for us, especially in our weakness and struggles. Throughout her life, Mother Teresa would cherish this message in her heart, and model it in all she did.
Mother Teresa shared her message with all who would hear — from Haiti’s President Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who had forgotten his own people starving outside his palace, to the rumpled man on L.A.’s skid row who had forgotten his own name. She knew that the greater our need, the greater our inner or outer poverty, the greater even our sin and moral failings, all the greater was God’s yearning for us. For Mother Teresa, the impulse that led the Good Shepherd to leave the ninety-nine and go in search of a single lost sheep was no longer a mystery, for she had experienced it herself; the same divine impetus had taken possession of her life.
In the months following Mother Teresa’s Nobel Prize, I offered to show the film portraying her work, Something Beautiful for God (later a book by the same name), to any group that was interested. I was invited to churches, civic organizations, schools, and gatherings of every sort — only to find the audience in tears by the end, so moved that they would queue up to offer me donations to send to Calcutta. I was witnessing not just the attraction of Mother Teresa, but the perplexity she caused, as people struggled with the newfound surge of generosity welling up inside them. Curiously, most of the audience seemed unable to find any deeper, more enduring response beyond tears and a hurried check.
Once I understood that people had difficulty extracting Mother Teresa’s message simply from what they saw on screen, I began giving a talk after the film — trying to help them make sense of what they had seen, and deal with the intense feelings the film had stirred up in them. I told them what Mother Teresa herself would have said — that there was no need to go abroad, nor even across town, to imitate her or to do something significant with their lives. She would have pointed to the suffering in the hidden Calcuttas all around them — in their own homes and families and neighborhoods, in the blind man down the street or in the unforgiven relative, forgotten behind the walls of a nursing home. These were all Calcuttas-in-miniature, where Christ, hidden under his “distressing disguise,” awaits our “hands to serve and hearts to love.” As Mother Teresa reminded every audience she addressed, whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sisters, we do it to him (cf. Mt 25:31-46).
Calcutta’s extremes of physical poverty, and the inner pain it brought to the hearts of the poor, were largely foreign to Western audiences. It took a new level of understanding for people to transpose Mother Teresa’s heroic charity in far-off Calcutta into small, seemingly un-heroic gestures of goodness and compassion in their own lives and limited surroundings. They were being challenged to alleviate the same pain of spirit they had seen on the screen, but hidden this time behind the manicured lawns and peaceable facade of their own neighborhood.
Only by explaining the applications of Mother Teresa’s message to every life did my audiences begin to bridge the gap between Calcutta and home, between the material poverty of the third world and the spiritual poverty that was theirs. In the end, God was asking of them, and of us, the same kind of generosity lived by Mother Teresa — only lived in a different setting, and practiced in a different way.
Mother Teresa never asked or expected her hearers to contribute to her work by sending a check — instead, she would suggest that they “Come and see” the work of her Sisters, and learn to spend time with the poor and needy, to give of their heart and not just their pocketbook. Writing a check was easily done, and easily done with. It allows us to do “charity,” while keeping at bay the inner tug that urges us to give more of ourselves and our time, rather than our possessions. This was the challenge people faced, as they discovered that the tug of conscience and heart Mother Teresa awakened both frightened and fascinated them at once.
Mother Teresa would point out that no matter how noble our intentions in giving monetarily, both God and neighbor needed more and better. God had not sent us a check in our need, but his Son. He gave of himself, without measure — as any of us can, anywhere we are, and whenever we choose. We are the ones called to help those around us, not Mother Teresa, not her Sisters in the far corners of the Third World, who have already done their part and more. We are the ones already there, living on the same street, in the same neighborhood, where so much hidden suffering and need go unheeded. We are the ones sent by God, anointed and equipped to give of ourselves to those he has placed around us. We need no special abilities or resources to do the work of love; we need “only begin,” even in the smallest ways. Mother Teresa knew that even the smallest seeds of charity could yield a rich and lasting harvest, had we but the courage to roll up our sleeves and begin. She would invite her audience to take some concrete step, no matter how small, to serve those around them, to put God’s love and theirs into “living action.”
In deference to the invitation of her friend, Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa spent the greater part of her later years sharing this message with audiences worldwide, from kindergartens to the plenum of the United Nations. John Paul had asked her to proclaim God’s love especially in those places where he could not go — places ravaged by war and hardship, and wherever political realities prevented him from visiting, such as the then Soviet bloc, and the vast expanse of the Muslim world.
If Mother Teresa’s encounter and message were of such importance, why haven’t we heard of them — or why have we heard so little? The main reason is that she chose to live out the grace of her encounter in her own life first, in silent service to the neediest, before sharing it with her Sisters or the world. Because of her long silence, not only the importance of her message but its very existence may come as a surprise, even to her admirers. This had been her great secret, from 1946 on. This was the inner flame that led her through her dark night of the soul, just as the column of fire that led Israel through the desert long ago.
Apart from the grace of Mother Teresa’s encounter on the train, nothing adequately explains her. Nothing else can fully account for the life she led, or the extraordinary things she accomplished. Mother Teresa was more than merely a female Albert Schweitzer. She was above all a mystic, although a mystic with sleeves rolled up, whose spirit scaled the heights even while her body bent lovingly over the downtrodden and the dying. By exploring the secrets of her deep mysticism in the chapters to come, those who already knew Mother Teresa will know her better, and those who knew her only via the media will come to know her soul.
Her encounter and its message were, in the divine plan, more for us than for her. While this book is about the transformation Mother Teresa’s encounter produced in her soul, more than anything else it is about God and about the reader — about what Mother Teresa learned about God and how he sees each one of us, how he longs for intimacy with us, and for the chance to remake our lives as he did hers. More than about God’s message to Mother Teresa, this book is about God’s message through her, to you who read these lines. It is surely her hope, from her place in the kingdom, that this message laid once gently on her soul, and retold in these pages, might touch and transform your life even as it did hers.
“The experience of 10th September is [something] so intimate….” 8
—St. Teresa of Calcutta
Four
A Message Discovered
First Encounter
I can never forget August 17, 1972; it was the day Mother Teresa would change my life. I had gotten up that morning knowing nothing about