A remembrance:

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, 1910-1997

It was in August 1910 on 26th that Mother Teresa was born in Yugoslavia. She was given the name Agnes with the family name of Bojaxhiu.

In October 2003, Pope John Paul II beautified her. This in a sense is the culmination of the life of this "woman amongst women" who in 1928 joined the Sisters of Loreto, a community of nuns in Ireland with missions in India.

From Dublin she went to India, where on May 24, 1931 she took her initial vows as a nun, choosing the name Teresa in honour of Saint Teresa Lisieux. From then till 1948 she taught in Kolkata (Calcutta).

However, it was not the teaching of geography in a "five star" convent that inspired her, but the burdens of that enormous Indian city.

The suffering and poverty in Calcutta was the reason for her to seek Papal permission to leave the Loreto Sisters and Star the new order of the Missionary Sisters of Charity. In 1948 therefore she was granted permission to work in the slums of Calcutta.

In 1950 she started her new Order, with the primary task of loving and caring for those persons nobody else was prepared to look after.

When she died in 1997 a week after the tragic death of Princess Diana whom she knew because of Diana's social awareness, Mother India gave this woman from Europe a state funeral.

What then was the secret of the Mother's life that made her very attractive? Following the life of her Lord and Master, she began the day in the Chapel. It was there that she developed her inner life and spirituality. That Chapel-centred life was the foundation on which she built her work in the world.

This writer, while being in Calcutta in the 1960s, has the great privilege of working with the members of Mother's Order.

The Calcutta of urchins in the big railways stations of Howrah and Sendali, work with the lepers; work with those who were brewing illicit liquor and work at the Kali Temple. Kali is the Hindu Goddess of death, but in that Temple, Mother Teresa with her sisters gave hope to those sick and dying on the streets of Calcutta.

The Mother did not belong to the fraternity of those who critiqued society and wanted to change its structure. Instead, she accepted the sinful society and there served "the wretched of the earth".

If the Mother was alive today, she may have come to Sri Lanka to be with the countless internally displaced persons in our midst.

May her soul Rest in Peace and rise in glory!

- Sydney Knight