The Radical Simplicity of Mother Teresa

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than be comforted; to understand than to be understood; to love than to be loved; for it is by forgetting self that one finds ; it is by dying that one awakens to eternal life. Amen. --The daily prayer of Mother Teresa.

The miracle of Mother Teresa, say those who have touched her large, worn but surprisingly soft hands, is the perfect simplicity of her homage.

Her chalice is a tin cup. She walks the world in sandals made by lepers, and her only habit is a cotton sari beneath a very down-at-elbow blue cardigan. She is the poorest of the poor, she says, who must hold no belongings, no trappings of her order, no glint of church gold and certainly not the vanity of collected honors--not even the plaque that came with the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 1979.

“I don’t really know where it is,” Mother Teresa says. She recognizes the anomaly here and her grin is mischief. “But I think it must be back at the motherhouse somewhere.”

This week--on a short and gentle West Coast business visit that San Francisco, San Diego and Tijuana still managed to turn into numerous and crowded public audiences--Mother Teresa of Calcutta, a living saint, a savior of babies from garbage cans, again performed the unthinkable: She traveled coach on all flights, didn’t once do lunch, toured in borrowed vans instead of limousines and arrived without an advance team, entourage, secretaries, security men or publicists.

Looking to the Life of Jesus

“Jesus never had anything like that, so why should I?” she asked. “I come to these visits as he would come, without anything. . . . You see, to be able to understand the poor and to be able to love the poor we must be poor ourselves. So we possess nothing, we own nothing, we are the poorest of the poor.”

So were her immediate surroundings, the house of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of the Charity in a shabby colonia here where the only abundance is poverty and sickness.

Opened in February, Misioneras de la Caridad is built from adobe and hollow brick, reused timbers, green tar paper and rough sawed plywood. It is an uncarpeted chapel, a bare lobby, a small kitchen and a Spartan bedroom for four permanent sisters. It also is a place of love, warmth, hope, smiles (“I tell my sisters if you do not stand straight and smile, please do not come to work”) and doors that are open even when the revered Mother Teresa is visiting for a few days.

Tuesday had been a crusher. Mother Teresa, despite a cold, no matter a fever, ignoring as she has for years the declining heart that requires daily medication, had been up since before 5 a.m. There were prayers and tea and discussions about work on the order’s shelter for derelict men, now near completion near a bus depot outside Tijuana. Also, the first of 100 meetings with people wanting guidance, encouragement, a glimpse and hopefully some word from an icon.

Before noon, Mother Teresa had been driven from Tijuana to the University of San Diego. There, a 15-minute talk to local members of her lay auxiliary, the worldwide Co-Workers of Mother Teresa. Then over to Torero Stadium for the presentation of her honorary doctorate in humane letters and down to the inner-city Our Lady’s School in the district of Golden Hill, which is anything but, and back into the motor home and across the border again to Tijuana. . . .

But at 7:30 p.m., after a supper of donated processed cheese slices and hamburger buns and strawberries in blancmange, while another line of friends and strangers was forming, Mother Teresa reached for a reporter’s hand with her hands and said now there would be time to talk.

No Talk of Politics

She would not discuss politics or individuals or causes of the international hunger, disease and privations that her order tends. Nor would she depart from her stock answer to critics who have said that she could better serve the world by joining the effort to solve the root causes of suffering, and by lending her enormous influence and example to charities and viewpoints beyond her own.

Such business, she has said, is God’s business, not hers. She is a missionary who feeds fish to the sick and helpless. When these people are fed and stronger and able to stand, she says, it is up to the charities to take over and further ease the problem by teaching the needy to fish.

But what of those who might physically attack Mother Teresa as President Reagan, Pope John Paul II and other world leaders have been attacked? Why not some security system for her visits?

“They are presidents and the head of a church,” she said. The voice is incongruous because the Albanian-born Mother Teresa’s English is spoken with an Indian accent. “They (Reagan and the Pope) are important. I’m just a missionary. I’m unimportant.”

Four Decades of Service

In her work, 40 years that have produced an order of 3,000 sisters, 400 brothers and half a dozen priests in 85 nations, is there a favorite satisfaction?

“Satisfaction doesn’t come into it. I do it for Jesus, not for myself. Self-glory is not important, but the glory of God and the glory of poor people . . . that’s important.”

But surely a Nobel Peace Prize was a satisfaction?

“I only accepted the Nobel Prize on the condition that they (the Nobel committee) not have a (awards) banquet and (instead) donate that money to the poor. They did do that. If not, I would not have accepted Nobel Prize.”

Of all her diverse shelters, from homes for pregnant prostitutes in the Philippines, to establishing the first Christian community in Yemen since the 6th Century, to AIDS hospices in New York and San Francisco, what has been her greatest happiness?

“The joy of loving Jesus. I would do anything for him.”

Then what brings unhappiness to Mother Teresa?

“When people refuse love and kindness to the needy. That suffering does not have to be. It can be solved. So I feel sadness at that . . . but not anger because anger has helped no one.”

A Drop in the Ocean

Yet despite all the clinics, all the shelters, all the colonies for her 158,000 lepers, there remains unconquered so much suffering and disease and starvation.

“That is true. Always there is need everywhere and even all that we are doing is only a drop in the ocean. But I will keep putting that drop in the ocean because if you don’t, the ocean will be one drop less.”

But we must accept a truth, Mother Teresa. In August you will be 78. What happens to the Missionaries of Charity when you are gone?

“Nothing. I have 3,000 sisters and anyone can do what I’m doing because the work is his (God’s) work, not my work. All the thinking and all the decisions are his. I’m just a little pencil in his hand.”

Is she prepared for death?

“Whenever he says it is time for me to come home . . . then, yes, it will be all right.”

And for the future?

“One day, one thing at a time. God bless you. And thank you for coming.”

The what of Mother Teresa is well known.

She was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu of Albanian parents in what is now Yugoslavia. As a student she was a member of a Roman Catholic sodality with an interest in foreign affairs.

At 12 she knew her affinity for helping the poor.

At 15 she became interested in the work of Jesuit missionaries in Bengal.

At 18 she had left home and after final vows began teaching in Calcutta. There, amid the street urchins, the lepers, the dying in alleys, the abandoned babies, her order and legend began.

The who of Mother Teresa isn’t quite so easy to plot because she is vitally ordinary and in today’s complex, deceiving world that maybe is too difficult to accept.

‘Radical Honesty and Faith’

“I think it has to do with her undivided, unceasing love for Christ,” says George Tracy. He is a Marine Corps chaplain from Tustin who has assisted Mother Teresa in India and the Philippines. He visited her in Tijuana because soon, upon leaving the corps, he will be working with her full-time.

“She also is a woman of radical honesty and truth and radical faith in acting upon that.”

Joseph Langford is father of the Missionaries of Charities Brothers, a handful of priests plus 30 seminarians, in New York. He will soon relocate their headquarters to Tijuana.

The wonder of Mother Teresa, he says, is that of “simple purity in a person able to live the Gospel in the 20th Century. She is an oversimplification and that is part of the message to those who are inclined to look at today’s problems and say: ‘It can’t be done.’

“And I don’t care if you’re a Pope, a president or a pauper, you can look at her and get the feeling you are being looked at through the eyes of God. I think that for some reason, God wanted to take this woman, hold her up to the world and say to others: ‘You can do it too. You don’t have to be a Mother Teresa to do this work.’ ”

Always the Same Messages

In this week’s public appearances, Mother Teresa was all those simple things. Her addresses--to her adult volunteers, to college students, to grade schoolers, to the Mexican media, to the congregation of a new Tijuana church--never varied.

Love others as God loves us. Homelessness is not just a lack of a roof but lack of caring. Hunger is not only for bread but for love. Also, the family that prays together stays together, and when giving, give until it hurts.

Her only piercing attack was her now constant public stand against abortion as a dire enemy of peace “because it destroys two lives, the life of the child and the conscience of the mother.

“So let us thank our parents for wanting us, for loving us, for giving us the joy of living.”

To some, it was all maybe . . . well, a little too naive.

To others, to her close followers, it simply endorsed Mother Teresa’s total absorption with basic devotion and the overlooked tenets of human decency.

A Working Woman’s Face

She is a tiny woman, just 5 feet tall before age began stooping her walk. The eyes are deep and the face is lined and it is the heavy look of a working woman. She must now accept steadying hands and stronger arms for steps and stages.

But those eyes glow and there’s the authority of pure determination in a still strong voice . . . and her sense of humor is a twinkle.

To the woman involved in a deal to expand the lot size of the sisters’ house: “You do the talking and I’ll do the praying.”

To the man who has just described a donor of a mobile home as an individual who can easily get things done: “More easy than Mother Teresa?”

To a question about the length of her drive from Tijuana: “About four decades (on her rosary), so about 18 minutes.”

She is a phenomenon whose succor is in constant public demand. At San Diego University it was a wheelchair patient with Lou Gehrig’s Disease and at Our Lady’s School a multiple sclerosis victim and at a Mass at Tijuana’s Bullring-by-the-Sea it was a parade of some three dozen persons of all handicaps.

20-Hour Workday

Tuesday, Mother Teresa worked a 20-hour day in preparation for Wednesday, which stretched only to a piddling 18 hours.

She was badgered by the media in an overheated parish hall, squeezed inside a small circle of escorts within shrieking crowds, hauled on and off a living room chair bolted atop a chopped and elderly Dodge Colt (promptly christened the Mothermobile), barraged by 90-degree heat and 25,000 singing followers at the bullring and begged to perform every deed from accepting a monk’s loaf of bread to autographing a boy’s copy of Mother Teresa’s Marvel Comic Book.

She was indefatigable, tireless, quite level, always willing and clearly at peace throughout it all.

Later, she spoke of such crowds and their demands.

“They are not a difficulty for me,” she explained. “Because I’ve already offered myself to their service. They expect me to pray for them, to give them a blessing, and I do that for all of those I have met everywhere.”

It was evening and Mother Teresa was in the back yard of her Misioneras de la Caridad. Sisters’ habits were flapping and drying on clothes lines. The conversation was light and of the day’s successes and tomorrow’s dealings on a fresh piece of property.

Mother Teresa had left her sandals in the house.

Her big feet are gnarled and the toes bunch upon themselves and they are almost worn out.

But she is feeling cool yellow sand against her bare feet and her quiet smile says that little reward is immense and the moment quite private.