Revision as of 13:38, 2 March 2015

Mother Teresa

Helping Hands

Reviewed By Nilofer Sultana

Dawn

Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa

It can be said without any exaggeration that even volumes cannot adequately encompass the multi-dimensional and towering personality of Mother Teresa. The book, a posthumous autobiography, was referred to as being full of ‘stunning revelations’ by the New York Times. It unveils interesting details about Mother Teresa’s very private life which were mainly garnered from her letters to the Archbishop, contemporary priests, her colleagues and sisters.

Tears are sure to well up in readers’ eyes as we get involved in the book and that frail but indefatigable figure clad in a simple white sari flashes before our eyes.

The pages of this edifying book reinforce belief in the fact that Mother Teresa was love personified. Above all else was her immeasurable love for God and His creatures.

Her unswerving resolve to say yes to God under all circumstances is reflected in one of her letters. She writes: ‘I made a vow to God, not to refuse Him anything. I always wanted to give Him something beautiful without reserve.’

It was for this profound love for God and Christ that she decided to be a nun at the age of 18 and left her family and friends to commence life as a missionary. This parting was not easy for her as her verses aptly convey:

I am leaving my friends Forsaking family and home, My heart drives me onward, To serve my Christ.

Her ever-growing love for God and Christ led to her intense love for the poorest people in the slums of India. She claims she felt a strange darkness within and a voice that seemed to call her incessantly, ‘Come, come carry me to the holes of the poor. Come be my light.’ She had visions of Christ summoning her to the poor, suffering the excoriations of want, misery, disease and loneliness. She sought the permission of the parish priest F. Perier to leave the convent and the Sisters of Loreto.

In her letter to him she wrote: ‘Let me offer myself and those who join me for the unwanted poor, the little street children, the sick and dying, the beggars — Let me go into their very holes and bring in their broken homes joy and peace.’

Readers will definitely be touched after reading about the difficulties Mother Teresa had to encounter for the fulfillment of her mission. With an indomitable will, she suffered hunger pangs, walked long distances and worked tirelessly for hours to be there for those who needed her. She unfailingly reached the multitudes suffering through the grave agonies of war (World War II) and also the great famine of 1942-43 in the Bengal.

Along with other members of her order — which she called the Missionaries of Charity — she carried the victims of famine, who were dying in the streets, to the Kali Temple in Kolkata to offer them accommodation, provide them food and medical care and to tend to their sores and wounds with tender concern.

Along with other members of her order — which she called the Missionaries of Charity — she carried the victims of famine, who were dying in the streets, to the Kali Temple in Kolkata to offer them accommodation, provide them food and medical care and to tend to their sores and wounds with tender concern.

The book tells us that though she was often without any money, nothing deterred her from bringing comfort and solace to those languishing in the squalour of poverty.

She won accolades from more quarters than one but one striking trait of her character was her belief in self-effacement. She wrote to the archbishop, ‘I am afraid we are getting too much publicity. Please pray for me that I be nothing for the world and the world be nothing for me.’

Her thoughts were focused on the poor and unwanted and not on her personal achievements even while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Addressing the audience, she begged them to look for those who lived the agonising poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for by their very own.

The book is a must read in these times of selfishness, greed, rapacity and bigotry. No one can deny the truth of Mother Teresa ‘s words like, ‘Tuberculosis and cancer are not great diseases, the much greater disease is to be unwanted and unloved. This is what is happening in every home, every family.’

Her open letter to George Bush and Saddam Hussein is bound to make us tearful. ‘I plead to you for the poor and those who will become poor if war that we all dread happens. Please listen to the will of God. He has created us to be loved by His love and not destroyed. It is not for us to destroy what God has created.’

The book provides a rare opportunity to revive beautiful memories of a legendary figure like Mother Teresa through her own letters.

Mother Teresa: Come be my life Edited By Brian Kolodiejchuk, MC Rider Books, London Available with Paramount Books, Karachi ISBN 978-1-84-604130-3 404pp. Rs695

Did she try to convert?

The Times of India Feb 26 2015

Akshaya Mukul

Former chief election commissioner Navin Chawla, Mother Teresa’s biographer was closely associated with her for decades.said that a few months before Mother Teresa’s death he had asked her which was the saddest case she remembered over her years of service to the cause of humanity. “So many, she said. I persisted ‘Tell me one case Mother’,” Chawla recounted. To which Mother Teresa said, “Once in Kolkata I was walking with a Sister when we heard a human voice. We went back and saw a woman crying.

We brought her to our house, washed her, cleaned her, gave her a new sari. As she lay in my arms I asked her ‘who did this to you’. She said ‘my son’. I asked her to forgive him. She said she wouldn’t forgive him.” Mother then told her that soon she would meet her maker (God). “Mother told the woman ‘you say your prayer to your God and I will say my prayer to my God but forgive him’,” Chawla recalled. “After the woman lay in her arms for 45 minutes, she opened her eyes smiled and said ‘I have forgiven him’ And then she died in Mother Teresa’s arms. Is this conversion?” Chawla asked. Chawla said he had even asked Mother Teresa directly if she converted people. “You know what she said? `I do convert but convert you to be a better Hindu, better Muslim, better Catholic and better Sikh.Once you have found Him, it is up to you to do what you want. Conversion is not my work',“ Chawla said.

Chawla said abandoned babies brought to Nirmal Hriday were never converted and many were adopted into Hindu households. “Such a conversion would then have been a cardinal sin which she would never commit,“ he said.

Chawla also revealed that when inmates of Nirmal Hriday died, she ensured that their last rites were conducted as per the religious beliefs of the deceased.

Did Mother Teresa exploit Indian poverty?

The Times of India Feb 26 2015

Jug Suraiya

Did Mother Teresa exploit poverty and disease to bring their victims into the Christian fold? Or was she the `saint of the slums', whose myriad devotees cut across religious lines and included people of all creeds? Mother's detractors were as impassioned about denouncing her as her adherents were in championing her cause. The left-wing British author and neo-atheist Christopher Hitchens called her `Hell's Angel' and accused her not only of blatant proselytisation but also of misuse of donated funds and of hobnobbing with dictatorial regimes.

Her ardent followers included the former sceptic and lapsed Catholic, Malcolm Muggeridge, who in his book on her described the `miracle of light' which allowed him successfully to film documen tary footage in the Missionaries of Charity's Nirmal Hriday , or home of dying destitutes, in what was then Calcutta, even though his cameraman told him that the place was too dimly lit for the purpose. Muggeridge attributed this `miracle' to Mother's innate faith which could literally illuminate darkness.

Indeed, Mother Teresa, and all she did, remained inseparable from her faith. One of her favourite sayings was to `Do something beautiful for God'.

Without her faith, she couldn't have done what she did: bringing final solace to those who had been abandoned by society to die on the streets. “When I clean the sores of a leper, I clean the wounds of Christ,“ she said.

It was her belief in the Christ which exists in all of humanity that enabled her to face the horrors of what she saw every day , tending to human beings reduced to living skeletons devoid of all identity , of name, or creed, or even gender.

“I cannot save them, but I can help them die with dignity ,“ she would say.What was this dignity that she sought to impart to the homeless and terminally diseased she'd picked up from the pavements and who were dying in her care? According to the tenets of her faith ­ her faith in the Christ that is within each of us, no matter what religion, or lack of it, we profess ­ what mattered much more than the saving of the mortal body was the salvation of the immortal soul, which she saw as a manifestation of the universal Christ, a Christ who is beyond being defined only in terms of the Church which has taken his name.

Indeed, not a few members of the Christian community questioned her methods and motives, calling her a fraud seeking sainthood. Mother remained as impervious to such denunciation as to accolades.

So, did Mother covertly convert people to become believers in Christ? She didn't have to. Because the Christ she believed in was in all of us, her followers as well as her detractors, which would include Mohan Bhagwat.