A Wake Up Call from Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Does all this sound too preachy, too overwhelming? Maybe it is enough just to get to church on Sundays!!! Please take a few minutes to read below before you decide. You may hear His voice. I don't think I am any better or worse than you, I am just another Earth pilgrim sharing my journey.

Some Simple Questions – Simple Does Not Mean Easy

Are we looking for the face of Jesus? Are we Christ to someone in need?

Has our interior prayer life spilled over to external prayer in action [so that our whole life is a prayer]?

Saint Francis of Assisi taught us to pray/preach and even use words if necessary. Prayer should not be confined to just words in our churches and our homes. Prayer itself calls us to action for prayer is the first step in changing people, and people change the world.

Are the poor and suffering of Calcutta so far away that we can only pity and pray for them? Look again – for Calcutta could be as close as your family or your neighbor!

I wish to share a few words of Mother Teresa; the insight is a wake up call to all.

Excerpt from the book “Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light” – The Private Writings of the ‘Saint of Calcutta.’ The book is Edited and with Commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk, Missionaries of Charity. Copyright @ 2007 by The Mother Teresa Center, All Rights Reserved – ISBN 978 – 0-385-52037-9.

In the book, within the section identified as “A Much Greater Disease Is to be Unwanted, Unloved” we hear Mother Teresa’s own statement given in October 1980 at a Synod of Bishops in Rome.

“Recently, a man met me on the street. He said: ‘Are you Mother Teresa?’ Yes. He said: ‘Please send somebody to my house. My wife is half mental and I am half blind. But we are longing to hear the living sound of a human voice.’ They were well-to-do people. They had everything in their home. Yet they were dying of loneliness, dying to hear a loving voice.

How do we know someone like that is not next to our house? Do we know who they are, where they are? Let us find them and, when we find them, love them. Then when we love them, we will serve them [and in so doing, serve Jesus].

Today God loves the world so much that He gives you, He give me, to love the world, to be His love, His compassion. It is such a beautiful thought for us – and a conviction – that you and I can be that love and compassion.

Do we know who our own poor are? Do we know our neighbor, the poor of our own area? It is so easy for us to talk and talk about the poor of other places. Very often we have the suffering, we have the lonely, we have older people – unwanted, feeling miserable – and they are near us and we don’t even know them. We have no time to smile at them.

Tuberculosis, [AIDS], and cancer are not the great diseases. I think a much greater disease is to be unwanted, unloved. The pain that these people suffer is very difficult to understand, to penetrate. I think this is what our people all over the world are going through, in every family, in every home.

This suffering is being repeated in every man, woman and child. I think Christ is undergoing his Passion again. And it is for you and for me to help them – to be Veronica, to be Simon [of Cyrene] to them.

Our poor people are great people, a very lovable people. They don’t need our pity and sympathy. They need our understanding love and they need our respect. We need to tell the poor that they are somebody to us, that they, too, have been created, by the same loving hand of God, to love and be loved.”

On another page we hear Mother Teresa say: “I…[visited] a home where they had all these old parents…I saw in that home that they had everything…but everybody was looking toward the door…And I turned to the sister and I asked:…How is it that these people who have everything here, why are they all looking toward the door, why are they not smiling? I am so used to the smiles on our people, even the dying ones smile. And the sister said: ‘This is nearly every day…They are hoping that a son or daughter will come to visit them. They are hurt because they are forgotten.’…This is where love comes…Maybe in our own family we have somebody who is feeling lonely, who is feeling sick, who is feeling worried…Are we there to receive them?”

Mother Teresa had great sympathy for those who felt rejected and unwanted: the rejected parent left in an old people’s home, the lonely youth whose family did not care for him or her, and very especially, the unborn child. Mother Teresa said “I find the unborn child to be the Poorest of the poor today- the most unloved – the most unwanted, the throw away of the society.”