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by Ranga Jayasuriya

Mother Teresa - I belong to the world

She was not a native Indian, but this frail woman in a white sari bordered by a blue strip was the main representative of India's spiritual identity since Gandhi.

Mother Teresa who died six years ago this week, was proof that kindness, love and charity are qualities attainable by humankind.

She was a willing companion for the dying: washing their wounds, soothing their sores and preparing them for death with dignity.

Her base in Calcutta was an asylum for the city's dispossessed millions and poor whose lives were devastated by poverty, disease and ignorance.

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu who took the name Teresa at the age of 18, was born on August 26, 1926 to a wealthy ethnic Albanian business contractor.

"By blood and origin, I am an Albanian, my citizenship is Indian, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world," Mother Teresa said.

Brought up in Skopje, now capital of Macedonia, Agnes at age 18 joined order of Irish nuns, the Sisters of Loreto, and took the name Teresa in honour of the French Saint Teresa of Lisieux, renowned for piety, goodness and generosity despite illness and early death.

But, Teresa later said that she had a vocation to serve the poor since the time of 12. After a brief stint in Rathfarnham, where she read English at the order's abbey, Teresa sailed to India. For the next 17 years, she was a teacher and later the Principal of the Calcutta High School for the privileged Bengali girls.

Like India's greatest son, Mahatma Gandhi, whose life was changed by two train rides in South Africa leading him to an epic, non-violent struggle, Teresa in a train ride from Calcutta to Darjeeling heard a "call within a call," in which God directed her.

"The message was clear," Teresa told her colleagues.

"I was to leave the convent and help the poor, whilst living among them. It was an order". For the next few years, she taught the children of Calcutta's slums, whose parents could not pay for private education.

One day returning to the missionary, she found a dying woman half eaten by maggots and rats. Teresa sat beside her, stroking her head gently till her death.

Two years after India's independence, Teresa asked for permission from Rome to strike out on her own. With the acceptance of the Vatican, the "Little Society" was set up. Soon she asked the Vatican's permission for her and her disciples to take a vow supplementary to those of poverty, chastity and obedience: "To devote themselves out of abnegation to the care of the poor and needy who, crushed by want and destitution, live in conditions unworthy of human dignity".

It took two years for the Vatican to say, yes. The Missionaries of Charity was formed and Teresa decided on its motto on her own: "Let every action of mine be something beautiful for God."

She set up Nirmal Hriday - Home for Dying, in a former hostel beside a Hindu temple. The initial protests of Hindu priests ceased when a priest diagnosed of advanced stages of tuberculosis ended up at the Nirmal Hriday, being treated by Mother Teresa.

When the priest died, she delivered his body back to the temple for Hindu funeral rites. With this, Calcutta began its long love affair with Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity. In 1979, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her service to poor and since "poverty and distress also constitute a threat to peace". She refused the $ 7,000 official banquet requesting that the money be spent on the poor. Mother Teresa, however, had a controversial side. She was one of the most provocative critics of the secular world. She denounced contraception and abortion as the "greatest evils".

In 1994, Britain's Channel 4 broadcast a revisionist look at Teresa, harshly titled, "Hell's Angel", written by leftist Pakistani writer Tariq Ali and British columnist Christopher Hitchens. The program accused Teresa and Missionaries of Charity of receiving funds from some unsavoury elements and human rights violators including Haiti's former autocrat Jean Claude Duvalier. Mother Teresa countered the accusations: "We have no moral right to refuse donations given to the poor and miserable".

The order's Home for Dying also attracted criticism. No pain killers were given to patients at the home. Once, when a German volunteer questioned, a nun at the Home had reportedly replied: "This is not a treatment centre, this is a place the dying can die with dignity".

During that rainy September in 1997, when Mother Teresa passed away, the poor and dispossessed of Calcutta were the first to pay her their respect. But later they were kept away, when the local Government authorities gave her a flashy and brassy send off. .

For Calcutta's poor, she was a mother; perhaps the counter- balance to Kali, the goddess whose grip on Calcutta is unrelenting.

It is not clear whether the world has comprehended Mother Teresa's message. She believed in the soul, at a time when much of the world has no belief in the existence of the soul. But since her death, Mother Teresa must be dwelling in the spiritual corner of the world, from where she may redeem the lives of at least a few humans.

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Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
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