CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
HOW THIS BOOK CAME ABOUT by John Cairns
INTRODUCTION by Lucinda Vardey
BEFORE READING ON
THE SIMPLE PATH
PRAYER
FAITH
LOVE
SERVICE
PEACE
APPENDICES
IMPORTANT DATES
THE MISSIONARIES OF CHARITY ORDER
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Copyright
I wish to thank the following people who have helped me with this project: my friend and agent, Carolyn Brunton, for suggesting me as writer for this book; Judith Kendra of Rider Books, Random House, for having confidence in me and for introducing me so well to the amorphism of Calcutta life; Ann Petrie for her generosity, support and wise counsel; Sister Priscilla for her encouragement and cooperation and John Cairns for his conviction, commitment and tireless travelling to gain the contents for this book. My husband, John Dalla Costa, has advised me, supported me and guided me to a deeper understanding of Christian life and, finally, my eternal gratitude to Mother Teresa herself for her generosity of spirit and time, and for sharing her faith. Lucinda Vardey
I greatly appreciate the time, taken away from their real work of helping the poor, that Mother Teresa and the sisters and brothers of the Missionaries of Charity gave in talking to us. I am very grateful to the volunteers from many parts of the world, some of whom we were fortunate enough to work alongside, who shared their experiences with us. In India we received help and advice from Naresh and Sunita Kumar, Michael and Jane Anthony, and members of Omer Ahmed’s family. My thanks to Random House for their encouragement and support, especially Fiona Maclntyre and Judith Kendra. A special thank you to Nix Picasso for her ideas, her help with interviews and her dedication; to Emma Lever for her research and transcription of interviews, and to my wife, Pene, for her help and advice in all areas. I much enjoyed collaborating with Lucinda Vardey, and also acknowledge Omer Ahmed, Tony Allen, Gerald and Jane Bray, Enid Davidge, Jean Maclean, Bob and Neil Maclean, and Richard Taylor who each know the contribution they have made. Finally, I thank my parents for their support and encouragement and my young daughters for waiting patiently to spend time with their father. John Cairns
HOW THIS BOOK CAME ABOUT
‘I CAN TELL you about my path,’ said Mother Teresa, ‘but I’m only a little wire – God is the power. Talk to the others, the sisters and the brothers and the people who work with them. Some are not Christians, talk to them. You will know what it is when you see it. It is very beautiful.’
This book, A Simple Path, began several years ago when Omer Ahmed, a film producer colleague, arranged a meeting with Mother Teresa to discuss ideas for a book and film project. Although he has lived in London for 45 years, Omer comes originally from India and his great grandparents used to own land in the Tiljala and Motijheel districts of Calcutta. Tiljala is, today, on the other side of the railway track from Mother Teresa’s home for the mentally handicapped, and Motijheel is the area in which she started her first home. Omer’s family are Muslim but all of his sisters were educated at Loreto, where Mother Teresa taught in the 1930s and 40s. His family have long supported the work of the Missionaries of Charity.
We had become interested in exploring the extraordinary potency of Mother Teresa as a symbol of love in action. Her impact on the public imagination has been compared to the ripples a stone makes when it is thrown into a calm pool of water. For many non-Christians, Mother Teresa represents a form of Christianity they can wholeheartedly respect.
Yet although most of Mother Teresa’s biographical details are now well known, what is not widely understood is why she and the women and men of her Order live in the way they do – and whether, in this age of complication and confusion, she has anything relevant and accessible to say to those searching for a better way of life at the end of the twentieth century. By listening to what she said, seeing what she did, and why, could we learn more about how to really connect with the people around us? Could Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity offer hope in what seemed like a difficult world?
It was with these, and many other, questions in mind that we came to be waiting at the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, one hot July day in 1994. As in all the houses of the Order around the world, the atmosphere was functional and very busy. Visitors were being dealt with politely but not allowed to distract from the important work of helping the poorest of the poor.
At first, Mother Teresa was unsure at the prospect of yet another book. She said she doubted if any more words would bring anyone closer to understanding the meaning of her mission. It was all so simple, she said. Why should anyone need a guide to her simple path? All we, or anyone else, needed to do was to pray and start loving one another more. First, we should become as familiar as possible with the work of the Missionaries of Charity by visiting Shishu Bhavan (the children’s home); Prem Nivas (the centre for leprosy patients in Titagarh, run by the Missionary of Charity Brothers); Nirmal Hriday (the home for the dying and destitute) and Prem Dan (the home for TB sufferers and mental patients).
We visited these, and other homes, several times and the experience made us absolutely sure that a book which would help us learn how to pray, how to love more easily, how best to offer service to others was indeed needed. These questions could perhaps be dealt with readily by the Missionaries of Charity, but in the West we needed a series of clear and coherent steps to help us follow the path.
At this point the religious writer, Lucinda Vardey, was chosen to compile the book and joined us in further research. During the following months, we were offered more and more support with the project by Mother Teresa and her community and began by talking to Mother Teresa at great length on a wide range of subjects. We then discussed her approach and the work of the Missionaries of Charity with specific sisters and brothers in India and in the West, whom Mother introduced. Next, our research led us to individuals from many parts of the world who had volunteered in the Missionary of Charity homes – and we asked them to share their experiences and feelings about their work too. Finally, Mother Teresa and her Order saw and approved the text and wished it well. The results are laid out in the succeeding pages.
John Cairns
INTRODUCTION
WHATEVER OUR VIEWS of Mother Teresa as a courageous missionary or a living saint, she has made a lasting impression. We all have an opinion about her. She has been recognized as an exponent of world peace and often appears on lists of the world’s ten most admired women. Yet, she herself has never claimed to be, or to be doing, anything extraordinary.
But how much do we actually know of her philosophy and her work? When we take the trouble to look beyond the public view, we find that her faith and her clarity of purpose give us powerful lessons in the ways of loving, serving and respecting our fellow human beings, especially those who are poor and deprived. She practises what she preaches. She treads a simple path and it can be followed by anyone.
In the past, we have had extraordinary spiritual leaders sent to us at times when the world urgently needed leadership and spiritual guidance. These people, of vast spiritual strength, were clearly linked to the Divine and in many cases were revolutionary in their teachings. One such figure was the charismatic St Francis of Assisi.
Born in twelfth-century Italy, Francis sold all his possessions to obey Christ’s calling to repair his Church. Initially, he devoted his life to living in poverty (wearing only a coarse robe), begging for food and caring for lepers and outcasts. Later, he founded an Order of friars and was influential in reforming the then very rich, and frequently misguided Catholic church. By the time of his death, he had gathered over 5,000 professed monks, priests and nuns to carry on his work. Today, the Franciscan Order thrives as one of the largest religious Orders in the world.
St Francis was a radical in his day – even perceived as a heretic – because he offered a fresh view of the Christian life by living as a beggar, believing in providence, and closely following the teaching of the Gospels. But what was also unusual about him was that he reformed his own religion from within the institutional Church rather than by breaking away from it. Mother Teresa’s life has many similarities with that of Francis. Her path is also through poverty, simplicity and adherence to the teachings of Christ, and because of this she has been viewed as a progressive in the present fundamentalist framework of the patriarchal Church. Yet she preaches her love and peace in action in a world still devoid of strong female leaders and from one of the largest and poorest, and most polluted, cities in Asia.
Mother Teresa received God’s call to serve the poorest of the poor in 1946 and began, in a small way, by caring for one sick and dying person whom she found on the streets of Calcutta. Today, she is head of the Missionaries of Charity, a religious Order which she formed with the Vatican’s blessing in 1950. Over the last 45 years, when vocations have been slowly declining in the Catholic church, the numbers of the Missionaries of Charity sisters and brothers have been growing and now total more than 4,000 worldwide.
Sisters and brothers of the Missionaries of Charity practise their life of poverty with the absolute faith that this will bring them nearer to God. They trust and believe in His providence and, like Francis, live and work only through the generosity of others. Also, like Francis, they live what they teach including not owning any more than the poor they serve. They eat frugally, possess only two sets of clothes, a pair of sandals, a bucket, a metal plate, the basic utensils and sparse bedding. Their community life is built upon the words of the Gospel – the Christian way of prayer, love, forgiveness, non-judgement, humility, truth and total surrender to the Word.
A brief look at some of the landmarks in Mother Teresa’s life helps to shed light on the many-faceted parts of herself and on the aim of her work. Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Albania, on 26 August 1910, the youngest of three children. She had a comfortable childhood – her father was a building contractor and importer, her mother was strict but loving with a deep faith. After her father’s premature death, life became harder and to support her family Agnes’ mother set up a business selling cloth and embroidery. In her teens, Agnes became a member of a young people’s group in her local parish called the Sodality and through the activities there, guided by a Jesuit priest, Agnes became interested in the world of missionaries.
Her first call to a vocation as a Catholic missionary nun was when she was 18 and she picked an Irish Order to join – the Loreto Sisters – who were well-known for their missionary work, particularly in India. From an early age Mother Teresa wanted to work in India, but she went to Ireland first to learn English and later to be transferred as a teacher to St Mary’s Loreto Convent High School in Calcutta. She arrived in Calcutta on 6 January 1929 and when she took her vows as a Sister of Loreto on 24 May 1931 she chose the name Teresa after St Theresa of Lisieux, known as the ‘little flower of Jesus’.
Both of the decisions to leave her homeland and go to the other side of the world, and the choice of Teresa as her professed name, are two essential clues to understanding Mother Teresa’s strength, character and purpose. The fervour for not just becoming a religious, but wanting clearly to do missionary work – ‘to go out and give the life of Christ to the people’ is how she refers to this first call.
The missionary life is one of zeal with a clear evangelistic thrust and a strong belief in compassion in action. Mother Teresa’s pioneering spirit was there from the start. Yet missionary work is not only about compassionate action, and Mother Teresa gives us a first sign of the contemplative side of her mission by picking St Theresa of Lisieux as a saintly guide. The youngest child of a French watchmaker and his wife, Theresa entered the Carmelite Order of sisters in 1888 at the very early age of 15, announcing that her vocation was ‘love’ and that one of her principle duties was to pray for priests and missionaries. Unable herself, through sickness, to be a missionary she taught the ways of a healthy spirituality which was simple, full of sacrificial spirit, generosity and orientated towards the essential truth of the Gospels. She wrote, ‘My little way is the way of spiritual childhood, the way of trust and absolute self surrender.’ She likened herself to ‘a ball in the hands of the Child Jesus’. Mother Teresa, on the other hand, takes a less playful, more practical view of her simple way of trust and self surrender by calling herself ‘a pencil in God’s hands’.
In Calcutta, Mother Teresa taught geography and catechism at St Mary’s and learnt Hindi and Bengali and in 1944 took over as principal of the school. It was a time of hardship – with food rationing and an increasing workload – and Mother Teresa, not ordinarily a physically strong woman, succumbed to tuberculosis. She was unable to continue teaching and was sent to Darjeeling, in the foothills of the Himalayas.
It was on the train on 10 September 1946 that she received her second calling – ‘the call within the call’ as she refers to it, ‘and when that happens the only thing to do is to say “Yes”. The message was quite clear – I was to give up all and follow Jesus into the slums – to serve Him in the poorest of the poor. I knew it was His will and that I had to follow Him. There was no doubt that it was to be His work.’ ‘I was to leave the convent and work with the poor, living among them. It was an order. I knew where I belonged but I did not know how to get there.’fn1
It took a couple of years to gain permission to redirect her missionary service from teacher to servant, from a secure and comfortable community to having nothing except exceptional faith and remarkable vision.
Many sisters who worked with Mother Teresa during her 19 years at St Mary’s, when interviewed, always spoke of the then Sister Teresa’s fragile health and ordinariness. Yet today, one could regard her as the quintessential, energetic entrepreneur, who has perceived a need and done something about it, built an organization against all odds, formulated its constitution, and sent out branches all over the world. And therein lies another example of the apparent anomalies within her character and her life. Mother Teresa is that rare combination of the grounded being and the transcendent soul, a combination which is brought about by prayer, which she says helps her strike ‘a proper balance between Earth and Heaven’.
This balance between a strong will and a complete surrender to God is instructive because she has said of her progress in holiness that ‘it depends on God and myself – on God’s grace and my will. The first step to becoming is to will it.’
Mother Teresa, when asked about her holiness or saintliness, always answers in a matter-of-fact way that holiness is a necessity – and explains that it is not the luxury of a few, like those who take the course of religious life, but ‘is a simple duty of all. Holiness is for everyone.’
The fact that she is called a ‘living saint’ by many people may be to do with a concept which is becoming more and more prized in contemporary life: balance. The renowned Indian teacher, Krishnamurti, interpreted holiness as a derivative of ‘wholeness’, meaning all the disparate parts of ourselves combined evenly into the whole person. Mother Teresa’s spiritual path shows how important it is to balance the prayerful, contemplative life with the practical one of loving action. It is certainly simple, but behind Mother Teresa’s simplicity are years of experience and devotion resulting in a faith and will and wisdom unsurpassed.