Personal Tribute to Mother Teresa

Marlene Elias is a gospel singer with an important following that took her to India this week to sing for her friend Mother Teresa.

The 64-year-old Ventura County woman who maintained a close friendship with the revered nun was invited to sing at her state funeral in Calcutta.

“I’m still kind of shocked and really nervous,” said Elias, who lives in Newbury Park and has recorded 11 gospel albums in the last dozen years. “I’m still not sure what to say.”

Although the honor of such an invitation hasn’t been lost on Elias, she said it’s also a chance to say a final goodbye to someone she considered her dearest friend.

“No one really knew how funny she was,” Elias said. “Everyone always sees these pictures of her looking very serious, but she had the sweetest smile and she could really laugh.”

Elias met Mother Teresa 10 years ago when she accompanied her brother, a missionary, to Calcutta.

Her brother, Mon. John Esseff, worked in shellshocked Beirut assisting the poor and was invited by Mother Teresa to help organize a retreat for the sisters in the Congregation of the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta.

But the joyous anticipation of meeting Mother Teresa was soon replaced by tears of horror and disbelief when she saw the dirty throngs of Calcutta’s destitute, crippled and diseased masses along the city’s alleys and dank streets.

“I literally cried for three days straight because of what I saw,” Elias said.

As resident of an affluent Ventura County suburb, she said, she was unprepared for the nightmarish scenes of discarded babies tossed in garbage bins, of scabby lepers begging for charity and crippled people huddled along streets. “Here I came from little old Newbury Park and I couldn’t imagine the suffering I saw there.”

*

On her third day of despair, she said, Mother Teresa placed her wrinkled hands on her shoulders.

“You’ve got to stop crying,” Elias said, recounting the words of the renowned nun. “They have enough tears of their own. What they need is your smile.”

Elias said Mother Teresa gave her strength to meet India’s suffering with a brave and sympathetic face. She accompanied Mother Teresa and her sisters as they made their daily circuits through the streets to swaddle and collect abandoned babies, provide relief to the sick and embrace the dying.

“I watched her, this little woman, lift these people from the street and bring them with her,” she said. “It was, at the same time, so sad and so uplifting.”

After that 1987 visit, Elias kept in close touch with Mother Teresa. Elias, who works as a receptionist at the Pierce Brothers Mortuary in Thousand Oaks, kept Mother Teresa’s phone number on her speed dialer.

Personally, Elias said, she has lost a friend whom she loved dearly. But she also knew the extent of Mother Teresa’s illness and physical suffering and was happy she had been “released.”

“I feel like I’ve lost my mother,” she said in a faltering voice as her eyes moistened. “I miss her, oh do I miss her, but in my heart I know she’s happier.”

Elias said she taped hours of conversations with Mother Teresa and plans to write a book--not only to commemorate a life spent embracing the world’s untouchables, but also to spread the wisdom of her cherished mentor.

She said she will donate all proceeds earned through any album sales to the Congregation of the Missionaries of Charity to aid their efforts to help the poor.