Mother Teresa: A Biography (6 page)

On August 16, a week after learning of the Vatican’s decision, Mother Teresa changed her clothes. The long black habit, with its floor-length skirt, the white coif, and black veil were laid aside. She now wore her new religious habit, a symbolic breaking with the religious uniform she had worn for the past two decades. Even though many of her former pupils A N E W D I R E C T I O N A N D A N E W J O U R N E Y

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wished to see their teacher in a sari, her leaving was a solitary affair. That evening, she left the convent grounds in a taxi as quietly as she had come almost 20 years before. In her pocket, she carried five rupees and a ticket to Patna.

A NEW BEGINNING

On August 17, Mother Teresa arrived at Patna, an old city located on the banks of the Ganges River. Sister Stephanie was there waiting to welcome her. They went together to the Holy Family Hospital, where Mother Teresa would spend the next few months receiving her medical training.

The hospital and convent buildings were located in the poorer section of Patna, known as Padri ki Haveli (House of the Fathers), and was named after the first church built in the town. The Holy Family Hospital, which formerly served as a school building, was modest: two stories high with a small separate building to one side that housed the operating and delivery rooms. The hospital was staffed by nuns who were doctors, mainly gyne-cologists, obstetricians, and surgeons. Other nuns served as nurses, laboratory technicians, and nutritionists. The hospital also housed a nursing school that many Indian girls attended.

The convent where Mother Teresa would take her meals and sleep occupied part of the former church. Built of stone blocks, it had a high ceil-ing, a worn stone floor, small gothic-shaped windows, and whitewashed walls. The main part of the church was divided into small cubicles by bamboo rods and white cotton sheets. The garden was once the cemetery; on very hot nights, many slept between the tombstones covered with mosquito netting. The hopsital staff ate in the former servant’s quarters with an old Hindu cook maintaining the small kitchen.

Because the hospital was so busy, there was little fanfare to welcome Mother Teresa. Instead, she was put into a cubicle, given a chair in the dining room, and included in the day-to-day running of the hospital.

Many of the sisters realized that she was in a period of transition, and while Mother Teresa knew what she was to do, she was still unclear about how she was to carry out her calling. In the meantime, the Medical Mission Sisters tried to make her feel at home and helped prepare her for the grueling work ahead.

Now, instead of lecturing students, Mother Teresa’s days were filled with new experiences; she never knew what to expect from one day to the next. Whenever there was a new admission, an impending birth-or-operation, Mother Teresa was summoned at the same time as a doctor was 3 6

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called. This experience not only gave Mother Teresa an opportunity to practice her Hindi, in which she was not very fluent, but to become acquainted with expectant mothers, fatal accidents, ill and abandoned children, and death on the operating table.

She also learned to tend to patients ill and dying with cholera or small-pox. One nun remembered that, no matter what the calamity, Mother Teresa remained unfazed by it, maintaining her focus on the patient. She could always be counted on to hold a dying patient’s hand, to comfort a small child frightened by the hospital, or to cradle a newborn infant in her arms. She learned how to do many simple medical procedures such as making a hospital bed, giving injections, and administering medicines.

She helped assist in delivering babies, something in which she took special delight. Working with the nutritionists, Mother Teresa learned about the importance of a healthy diet, hygiene, and adequate rest. This knowledge was key to carrying out her work in the slums. As Mother Teresa came to know many of the poor families of the area, she attended weddings, feasts, and funerals, slowly entering their world and becoming one of them.

During her time at Patna, Mother Teresa gained her first associate. A young girl, suffering from advanced stages of tuberculosis, asked Mother Teresa whether she could help her in serving the poor. Toward the end of her stay at Holy Family, she appointed the young girl as an associate in her work. Her new helper ministered to other patients sick with tuberculosis and offered prayers for the recovery of those stricken with the disease. Unfortunately, she did not accompany Mother Teresa to Calcutta for she died at Holy Family soon after.

BUILDING A FOUNDATION

During the evenings when not working at the hospital, Mother Teresa discussed her plans with the many members of the Medical Mission Sisters. She welcomed ideas, practical suggestions, and criticism from the others about how she should best implement her plans. One thing that did become clear: if Mother Teresa’s proposed order wanted to work with the poor, they would have to commit themselves to working
only
for the poor.

Out of these discussions came the foundation for Mother Teresa’s congregation as well as many of the rules and routines that the group would follow. Perhaps the most valuable lesson was the rule of balance as practiced by the founding mother of the Medical Mission Sisters, Mother Anna Dengel. Like Mother Teresa, Dengal also had to obtain special perA N E W D I R E C T I O N A N D A N E W J O U R N E Y

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mission from the Vatican in order to establish an order of nuns who were also practicing surgeons and midwives. Among Mother Dengel’s tenets was that heavy tasks, physical or emotional, could not be carried out for long without rest and renewal. Therefore, it was imperative for her nuns to take regular rests when needed and retreats to recharge their bodies and minds.

The sisters suggested that with the poor living conditions and hard work that was to be done everyday, prayer should be strictly observed, but no prayer should be scheduled after 9 P.M. This would allow the nuns plenty of rest and relaxation. There should be plenty of protein-rich food for meals, especially at breakfast, but the selection should be simple; no exceptions to meals were to be made except in cases of illness. Mother Teresa had thought that she and her nuns would eat nothing more than rice and salt, the basic diet of the poor. But she learned that this diet was too sparse; she and her nuns would then be unable to work efficiently at their jobs. This kind of diet also left one open to the very diseases of the poor that Mother Teresa hoped to treat and fight. Mother Teresa sagely took the advice given to her.

Mother Teresa envisioned an eight-hour workday beginning at five in the morning. For that schedule to work, the Medical Missionaries suggested there be one daily hour of rest so that the nuns would have the energy to carry out their tasks. They also suggested that one day a week should be taken off, usually a Sunday, but for those who worked Sundays, one full day of rest should be scheduled sometime during the week. There should also be an annual retreat for all, which took place away from their work. Clothing should remain simple; the Medical Mission Sisters wore white cotton habits and veils that were changed everyday, sometimes even twice a day. When Mother Teresa explained that the white cotton sari was to be the habit, the nuns suggested that for the sake of health, all saris should be washed everyday, and each nun should be given three saris: one to wear, one to wash, and one for special occasions and emergencies.

Head coverings, while necessary to protect oneself from the hot Indian summers, were to be kept to a minimum with no starch used on any part of the headdress veil.

TIME TO LEAVE

After only a few weeks, Mother Teresa wrote to Father Van Exem asking for permission to go to Calcutta. She felt she had learned all that she could for now, and was anxious to begin her work. Reading her request, Father Van Exem was skeptical. Mother Teresa had been with the Medi-3 8

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cal Mission Sisters for too short a time. He had fully expected her to stay much longer: at least six months, even up to a year. The archbishop felt similarly; both men wanted Mother Teresa to stay longer, to make sure she had taken advantage of every opportunity for her medical training.

Still, her letters kept coming, asking for permission to leave for Calcutta. She had learned all she could, plus receiving knowledge about diseases that she most likely would not encounter in the city’s slums. Further, she argued, she would learn more about cholera, sores, and other diseases that were prevalent in the slums if she were living and working among the poor who suffered from them. The Medical Missionaries agreed with Mother Teresa; it was time for Mother Teresa to begin her mission.

Not convinced, Father Van Exem traveled to Patna to meet with Mother Teresa and Sister Stephanie to discuss what was to be done.

When he arrived at Holy Family, he looked for Mother Teresa, but could not find her in the group of nurses at the hospital. Finally, a small voice answered, “But Father, I am here.”7 Father Van Exem, having never seen Mother Teresa in her sari, completely overlooked her.

Meeting with Sister Stephanie and the sister-doctor who had been overseeing Mother Teresa, Father Van Exem listened as the two explained why it was time for Mother Teresa to leave. She was ready to begin her life in the slums they told him, and they would always be there should she need advice or direction in medical matters. Father Van Exem then explained that both he and the archbishop were concerned about the possibility of a church scandal should Mother Teresa fail in her mission. She would not make a mistake, the sisters assured him, and again they reminded him that there were others who would share in the responsibility of her undertaking. Finding himself outnumbered, Father Van Exem relented: Mother Teresa could go to Calcutta.

NOTES

1. Navin Chawla,
Mother Teresa: The Authorized Biography
(Rockport, Mass.: Element, 1992), p. 21.

2. Kathryn Spink,
Mother Teresa
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1997), p. 24.

3. Edward Le Joly,
Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Biography
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 10–11.

4. Le Joly,
Mother Teresa,
p. 12.

5. Spink,
Mother Teresa,
p. 29.

6. Eileen Egan,
Such a Vision of the Street: Mother Teresa
—
The Spirit and the
Work
(Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1986), p. 35.

7. Spink,
Mother Teresa,
p. 33.

Chapter 4

OUT OF A CESSPOOL—HOPE

Shortly after his visit with Mother Teresa and the Medical Mission Sisters, Father Van Exem wrote to Mother Teresa that the archbishop had relented and given his permission for her to return to Calcutta. He had also found a place for her to live with the Little Sisters of the Poor. She arrived at the St. Joseph’s Home for the elderly, located at 2 Lower Circular Road, on December 9, 1948. It had been barely four months since she had left the Loreto convent in Entally and started her training in Patna. Prior to her leaving Patna, Mother Teresa spoke with one of the nun-doctors in the cemetery of the convent grounds. Remarking that she had no idea how she was going to proceed or where she would even begin, Mother Teresa nonetheless remained confident that God would direct her. And with that thought, she made her way back to Calcutta to undertake her life’s work.

Although Calcutta had the third highest per-capita income in India, it was a vast sea of suffering and despair. The streets, where people were born and died hourly, were crowded with beggars and lepers, together with a host of refugees from the countryside who had never known a home. Unwanted infants were regularly abandoned and left to die in clinics, on the streets, or in garbage bins. There were thousands of pavement dwellers within the city itself; 44 percent of the city did not have sewers. It was into this sea of misery that Mother Teresa now came.

The St. Joseph’s Home proved to be a good choice for Mother Teresa.

The Little Sisters of the Poor lived in strict poverty. Although they worked through other institutions, they had no regular source of income 4 0

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to draw on and were completely dependent on donations of food and money. This dependence on God and the charity of others became an important element with the Missionaries of Charity as well. Although the mother superior was at first unsure about whether Mother Teresa could stay at the St. Joseph’s Home, Father Van Exem assured her that Mother Teresa had received a decree of exclaustration and that she was still answerable to the archbishop.

Upon her arrival, Mother Teresa made a short retreat under Father Van Exem’s guidance. They decided to meet every morning; she would spend afternoons in prayer and meditation. She also spent part of her time during those first days at the convent helping the sisters care for their aged patients.

MOTIJIHL

On December 21, 1948, Mother Teresa left her small room on the first floor near the gate of St. Joseph’s and went to mass. After breakfast, she left the convent grounds and boarded a bus bound for Mauli Ali to begin her work. She was dressed in her white sari, but she wore it not as a poor Bengali woman but instead wrapped around her head covering a tiny cotton cap. Completing her habit was a small black crucifix, attached to her left shoulder by a safety pin. Under her rough leather sandals, a gift from the Patna sisters, she wore no stockings.

With a meager lunch in a small packet she entered the world of the Calcutta slums.

Her first stop was in the slum of Motijihl, which means “Pearl Lake.”

While there was no lake, there was a large brackish sump in the center of the neighborhood that provided the area’s residents with water. Raw sewage flowed into open drains and garbage lay piled on the streets. The slum’s residents lived in small hovels with dirt floors. There was no school, no hospital, and no dispensary.

Motijihl was already a familiar place for Mother Teresa. Though she had never personally visited it, many sodality students at St. Mary’s, under Father Henry’s direction, had come to work in the area. Father Henry was more than eager to offer help to Mother Teresa and provided her with a list of families whose children had attended the school at the Loreto convent. Mother Teresa visited with as many families as she could. She told them she had permission to start a school right in the area. As a result, several parents promised to send their children to her the next morning.

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BEGINNING RIGHT ON THE GROUND

The next morning, Mother Teresa was back in Motijihl and was happy to see several children waiting for her on the steps of a railway bridge that led down into the slum. In trying to find a spot where they could meet, Mother Teresa noticed that the only open area was a tree near the sump.

With no blackboard, chalk, books, or desks, Mother Teresa took a stick and used it to write in the mud. As the children squatted and watched, she traced the letters of the Bengali alphabet with the stick. Mother Teresa had made a start, or as she would later describe it, beginning “right on the ground,”1 which became one of the defining concepts of the constitution of the Missionaries of Charity.

Soon the number of pupils attending classes multiplied as word spread that a school had been started in Motijihl. In time, the sounds of children reciting the alphabet competed with the other everyday noises of the slum. When morning lessons were finished, Mother Teresa looked for someplace to eat her small lunch, seeking out a quiet spot where she could find drinking water. Once, when she stopped at a local convent to ask if she could come inside to take her meal, the nuns, thinking Mother Teresa was a beggar, refused. Instead, they directed her to the back to eat under the stairs where the other beggars ate. In later years, she would never mention the name of the convent that had turned her away.

Mother Teresa became a familiar, if strange, sight on the Calcutta streets: many watched as the lone woman, dressed like a poor Indian, spent her time visiting in the alleyways and mean streets of the slums. Even one of her strongest supporters, Father Michael Gabric, a Jesuit priest from Yugoslavia and a member of the missionary group whose actions first influenced Mother Teresa as a young girl, was puzzled by her actions. He candidly admitted in an interview, “We thought she was cracked.”2

At the request of the archbishop, Mother Teresa kept a record of her early efforts, dating from December 25, 1948 until June 11, 1949. Only a small part of this fascinating record survives. These pages are her accounts of her first days working in Motijihl, especially with the children. Children who were dirty were given a bath. After lessons in hygiene and reading, she helped the children learn their catechism. She noted especially the joy the children gave her, remembering how she laughed when teaching them.

There were also entries in which Mother Teresa described moments when humor was of a darker nature. Attending to one poor man who had a gangrenous thumb, Mother Teresa realized that the thumb would have 4 2

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to be amputated. Saying a prayer and taking a pair of scissors, she snipped it off. Her patient then fainted in one direction and she in the other. She often gave her bus fare away to those who needed it more and, instead, walked home.

THE DARK NIGHT

Although the remaining pages of her journal document the people and situations that she saw and even the feelings she had while doing her work, it is still hard to imagine the tremendous loneliness that Mother Teresa must have felt as she made her way through the slums of Calcutta in those first months. For someone who had been accustomed to the order and peace of convent life, the reality must have been jarring. But Mother Teresa’s faith in God was absolute, and so she kept up her work, despite the exhaustion and pain she felt at the end of the day.

Her faith also kept Mother Teresa from falling into despair, for she sensed that her work accomplished very little. Calcutta faced intractable problems. Since winning independence from Great Britain, India had been divided into two nations: Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India. Despite the creation of a separate country for Muslims, conflict between them and the Hindus continued, sometimes erupting into bloody violence, which left families devastated and areas ravaged. Many Hindus seeking jobs flooded the streets of an already-overcrowded Calcutta.

Most ended up in the streets, and with a growing shortage of food and water, many were plunged into unrelenting poverty. Much of the food and water available became contaminated from the overflowing sewage.

Many considered the acquisition of one rupee (about 11 cents American) as good fortune.

Still, Mother Teresa persevered. As people heard of what she was doing, they came forth with money, supplies, time, and favors. The bus driver who drove the route to St. Joseph’s made her sit in a seat next to him so she should would not have to make the hour-long walk back to St.

Joseph’s. A former teacher at St. Mary’s came to help her teach classes. On one occasion, she went to a local parish priest for help. As much as he said he was glad to be of service, he offered her little in the way of encourage-ment or help. Mother Teresa then went to another priest who was so delighted with what she had accomplished, that he presented her with a gift of 100 rupees to help carry on her work. It was a princely sum that allowed Mother Teresa to rent two small huts in Motijihl for five rupees each. One hut served as a school where the students met for class and where they were given milk at lunchtime and free bars of soap as prizes.

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The infectious enthusiasm of the children spread throughout the community. Here and there, people came forward with small gifts for the school: a stool, an odd table, even books and slates appeared. By January 4, 1949, less than two weeks after she first set out, Mother Teresa had a schoolhouse, over 50 students, and three teachers to help her. Not only were the children learning their alphabet and numbers, but classes in needlework were offered for the young girls as well as the continuing emphasis on teaching the children hygiene and catechism. The school was soon formally blessed. It was one of Mother Teresa’s greatest successes.

The other hut on the premises was used for a more solemn purpose: caring for the ill and dying poor, a place where Mother Teresa offered comfort, solace, and, above all, dignity to those who had no home and no hope. Her reasons for creating the small hostel arose out of one of her many experiences in dealing with the poorest of the poor. One day, Mother Teresa saw a woman dying on the street beside a hospital. She picked the woman up and took her to the hospital but was refused admission because the woman had no money. The woman later died on the street. Mother Teresa then realized that she must make a home for the dying.

Still, she was plagued by doubt about whether she was doing the work God had called her to do. There were moments when she wished to return to the quiet and security that the Loreto convent offered. On one occasion when she approached a priest for financial aid, he treated her as if she were doing something wrong by begging, telling her to ask instead her own parish priest for money. He left her saying he did not understand and brusquely turned away. The experience reduced Mother Teresa to tears and raised grave self-doubts. She would later say that God was training her; but in order to carry out His will, she had to feel completely useless and inadequate to the task before her. Continually, she struggled to turn her will aside and place her faith completely with God in the hope that He would continue to show her the way. She later wrote of this period as the “dark night of the birth”3 of her order, the Missionaries of Charity.

But in her begging for food, medicine, clothing, and money, Mother Teresa was actually carrying out a time-honored tradition of mendicancy.

Throughout much of India’s history, priests, holy men, and teachers depended on the support of the community for their livelihood. Her begging letters and begging expeditions were a natural outgrowth of her own poverty and a dependence on providence to provide for her basic needs and the needs of those she helped. Although in some western cultures such overt dependence is often looked down upon, in India, as well as in traditional Roman Catholic practice, begging was nothing to be ashamed about.

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14 CREEK LANE

During her first months on the Calcutta streets, Mother Teresa’s spiritual advisor, Father Van Exem, watched carefully to see how she was holding up. After talking, both he and she decided that it was time for her to have a place of her own where she could start her work and no longer im-pose on the Little Sisters of the Poor. But Mother Teresa’s first efforts to find affordable housing met with little success. Often landlords would not keep their appointments. Others, upon seeing the strange European nun with no visible means of support, refused outright to rent to her. Mother Teresa did not lose heart, but identified her plight with that of the people she served. She later wrote:

Our Lord just wants me to be a “Free Nun,” covered with the poverty of the Cross. But today I have learned a good lesson—

the poverty of the poor must often be too hard for them. . . . I walked and walked till my legs and arms ached. I thought how they must also ache in body and soul, looking for home, food, help.”4

Father Van Exem finally stepped in. He spoke to a member of a Bengali Catholic family, Albert Gomes, who, along with his brothers, owned a sizeable property at 14 Creek Lane in East Calcutta. One brother, Michael Gomes, lived in the house with his family. Finally an agreement was reached in which Mother Teresa would move into a room on the second floor. She would pay no rent. The home’s location was later described by Mother Teresa as “rich in its poverty.”5

In February 1949, she moved into her new quarters, bringing with her only a small suitcase. Her room was spartan in appearance: a single chair, a packing case for a desk, and some extra wooden boxes for seats. The wall was adorned with an image of the Virgin Mary, a gift from Father Van Exem who had originally received it from Mother Teresa as a Christmas gift years before.

Mother Teresa now had some helpers who accompanied her so that she would not be alone in the slums. Charur Ma, a widow who was the cook at St. Mary’s at Entally, often went with her on shopping trips. Mable Gomes, the young daughter of the family with whom she boarded, also went with Mother Teresa on occasion. Even Michael Gomes, when he had time, went with Mother Teresa to chemists’ shops, similar to American pharmacies, to ask for donations of medical supplies. Father Van Exem sent a parish worker to accompany her on some of her daily visits to the poor and dying. She was even joined by some of her former students O U T O F A C E S S P O O L — H O P E