e
cannot be sad at the news of the death of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
Partly because it was expected: a woman of 87, suffering from heart
trouble and fitted with a pacemaker, was ready to leave this world.
Partly also because her life was one long preparation for death, as she
accompanied so many, (50 thousand) she used to say, to the threshold of
Paradise. She taught us to see that
death – Life – is the door which opens from earth onto heaven.
Her patients and her Sisters understood this well.
In the house for the dying Nirmala Hriday (Tender Heart) there was
a simple message chalked on the board: “Our Dearest Mother went home to Jesus
– September 5th, 9:30pm.”
Messages of sympathy and gratitude poured in from all over the world to mark the death of this little woman, as frail as a sparrow, whose eyes glowed with child-like confidence and joy. A proof of the universality of her testimony, of a love able to teach out to every poverty and to every Calcutta, all over the world. Her friends are Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, even atheist who saw in her the model of the humanity and their beliefs.
The
most impenetrable borders dissolved before her: Cambodia, Cuba, Vietnam.
Only in China, where she was twice a guest, was she told: “In China
there are no poor people.” Her
reply was: “That’s all right, the time will come.”
This woman, so bold and determined in her defense of human life and death,
certainly met with opposition: progressive Catholicism and pragmatic secularism
accused her of being too “traditional,” of overlooking the structural causes
of poverty. Teresa might appear to
have been “out of touch.” And
yet the way she threw herself and her whole life into loving, serving and
sheltering the world’s outcasts, says much to our analysis, accurate, yet
unable to prompt us to give of ourselves. What
is more, the attractiveness of her joy and humor and her passion for Jesus, say
much for her feminine genius.
This woman who led reporters and princesses to take an interest in people suffering from leprosy or dying of hunger, always described what she and her 4000 Sisters were doing in 120 countries, as “a little drop of water,” without which the “ocean of goodness” would not be complete.
And this “drop” is now a precious stone left in heritage: the witness of her life as a missionary, to discover and to carry Christ to the ends of the earth, to the outskirts of humanity where dignity is unknown, among the dying, in the gutters; where there seems to be nothing but the hell of life without love (“the poorest ones are those suffocated by egotism and despair”).
No, we cannot be sad. Mother Teresa’s path is the path of the Christian mission. Thousands of others, priests, religious and lay people are treading the very same path as Mother Teresa and her Sisters: the path of self-giving, which joins earth to heaven.
(From Xaverian Mission Newsletter)