Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Founder of the Missionaries of Charity
September 5 · d. 1997
also known as Teresa of Calcutta, Agnus Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa is the most famous nun of the modern age, the tiny woman in the white-and-blue sari who spent half a century picking the dying poor up off the streets of Calcutta. Born in the Balkans as Anjezë Bojaxhiu, she left a comfortable teaching convent in answer to what she called a "call within a call," and founded the Missionaries of Charity to serve, in her own phrase, the poorest of the poor. Canonized in 2016, she is honored the world over; and her private letters, opened after her death, revealed that she did all of it through nearly fifty years of an inner darkness in which God seemed wholly absent.
Almost everyone knows the picture: a small, bent woman in a white sari edged with blue, cradling a dying stranger in a Calcutta gutter. Her name in the world was Mother Teresa, but she was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in 1910 at Skopje, in the Balkans, today the capital of North Macedonia, into an Albanian family, and as a girl she felt God call her to be a nun. At eighteen she joined an Irish teaching order, the Sisters of Loreto, and was sent to India, where for seventeen years she taught geography to the daughters of the Calcutta middle class inside a walled and pleasant convent. She was happy there. And then, on a train in 1946, going up to the hills for a retreat, she heard God ask her for something more. She called it ever after a call within a call: to leave the convent and the classroom and go down into the worst slums of the city, to live among the poorest of the poor and to serve Christ in them.
It took two years to get permission, and then she walked out of the convent gate in a cheap white sari with a few rupees and no plan but obedience. She started a school in the open air, scratching the letters in the dirt. She found a man dying in the street, half eaten by sores and rats, and carried him to shelter so that he could die having been loved, and that became her life's work, the Home for the Dying, where the destitute the hospitals turned away could die clean, and fed, and held. Women came to join her, and she made them an order, the Missionaries of Charity, bound by a fourth vow beyond the usual three: to give wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor. From that one room the order spread across India and then the world, to lepers and orphans and the abandoned and, in time, the dying of the AIDS wards, until there were houses on every continent and the little Albanian sister was, improbably, one of the most famous people alive, given the Nobel Peace Prize and known to everyone.
But the most astonishing thing about her stayed hidden until after she died. When her private letters were opened, they revealed that for almost fifty years, through all the fame and all the work, Mother Teresa lived in a terrible spiritual darkness. The God whose love she carried to the dying had, to her own felt experience, gone silent and absent; she prayed into what seemed an empty heaven and felt nothing, year after year after year. She had known one season of vivid closeness to Christ, around the call on the train, and then it was withdrawn, and never in this life fully came back. And she kept going. She rose every morning and loved the unlovable in the name of a God she could no longer feel, on nothing but the bare will to be faithful.
The world, when it learned this, did not know what to make of it; some thought it proved she had secretly lost her faith. The church saw the opposite. Here was love stripped of every reward, obedience with no consolation left in it, a woman who served Christ in the poor for half a century without the comfort of his felt presence and never once stopped, because she had decided that his absence would not change what she owed him. It is, in the end, the purest kind of faith there is, to love God in the dark. The Roman Catholic Church canonized her in 2016. The Missionaries of Charity go on, in the slums of the whole earth, doing small things with great love; and their founder, who felt nothing for fifty years, is believed now to see at last, and forever, the face she served so long without seeing.
Mother Teresa is among the most thoroughly documented religious figures of the twentieth century, in her own letters and the records of her order, in the detailed files of her canonization, and in a vast contemporary literature; her interior life, long hidden, is now known from the private correspondence published in 2007 as Come Be My Light. She was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on 26 August 1910 at Skopje, then in the Ottoman Empire and now the capital of North Macedonia, into an ethnic Albanian family. She entered the Sisters of Loreto in 1928, professed vows as Sister Mary Teresa, and taught in Calcutta until the "call within a call" she dated to 10 September 1946; she received permission to leave the cloister in 1948 and founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, died at the Calcutta motherhouse on 5 September 1997, was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2003, and canonized by Pope Francis on 4 September 2016.
The publication of her letters disclosed what almost no one had known: that from about 1949, and for the rest of her life, she experienced a profound and persistent spiritual darkness, an absence of any felt sense of God, which she described to her confessors in language of real anguish. Commentators have read it variously, as depression, as doubt, or as the classic dark night of the soul described by John of the Cross, in which God withdraws all consolation to purify the soul's love. Her own directors, and the church in canonizing her, took it as the last, and not as a loss of faith but as its furnace, a share in the abandonment Christ himself felt on the cross and in the darkness of the very poor she served; that she sustained five decades of the most demanding charity through it is, in the church's judgment, not a mark against her holiness but the proof of it. Critics have pressed other questions, about the medical standards of her homes and the sources of her funds, and her defenders have answered them; but the central fact, of a life spent on the dying in obedience to a God she could not feel, stands on its own.
Mother Teresa is commemorated on 5 September, the day of her death, in the Roman Catholic Church, where she is Saint Teresa of Calcutta, and is honored on or near that day across many other churches and far beyond the church entirely; her liturgical color is white. She is patron of the Missionaries of Charity and of World Youth Day, and is invoked by those who work among the dying and the destitute, and by those who must pray in spiritual dryness.
Her monument is her order and her image. The Missionaries of Charity, with their thousands of sisters and brothers in the white-and-blue sari, continue her work in the poorest places on earth. And her own figure, the small stooped woman among the dying, has become one of the defining images of Christian charity in the modern age, recognized far past the bounds of the church. In a skeptical century she made holiness visible and almost undeniable; and then, in the revelation of her darkness, made it deeper and harder and more wholly God's than anyone had guessed.
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Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta(English, 2007)
Recommended: edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. (Image / Doubleday)
Her own letters, edited by the postulator of her cause, which revealed the fifty-year darkness behind the public saint; the one book that makes sense of her, and the most searching modern account of her soul.
Further reading. The essential book is Come Be My Light (2007), her private writings edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk, listed above, which discloses the inner darkness and is the true key to her; for the outward life, the biographies by Navin Chawla and by Kathryn Spink are the standard accounts.
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British (Received Pronunciation): Anjezë /ˈɑːn.jɛ.zə/
Readings for a Monastic or Religious
Lamentations 3:22–33Psalm 1Hebrews 4:1–13 or Acts 2:42–47Mark 10:23–31
O God, your blessed Son became poor for our sake, and chose the Cross over the kingdoms of this world: Deliver us from an inordinate love of worldly things, that we, inspired by the devotion of your servant Mother Teresa of Calcutta, may seek you with singleness of heart, behold your glory by faith, and attain to the riches of your everlasting kingdom, where we shall be united with our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.