A Book Review…. Serving The Poorest Of The Poor
By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY
Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Personal Portrait, by Fr. Leo Maasburg (Ignatius Press, 240 pages, paperback and Kindle).
Fr. Leo Maasburg is an Austrian priest who was ordained in Fatima in 1982. For many years he accompanied Mother Teresa on her worldwide travels, acting as her translator and confessor. He begins Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Personal Portrait, by describing her as a “forceful, shrewd, charismatic, and humble personality who did not try to dominate but wanted to serve.”
He then quotes one of the rare statements she made about herself. “By birth I am an Albanian. I am an Indian citizen. I am a Catholic nun. In what I do, I belong to the whole world, but my heart belongs entirely to Jesus.”
The author describes the beginning of Mother Teresa’s Order, the Missionaries of Charity; it was her response to Christ’s cry on the cross, “I thirst,” in a life dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor in India.
Fr. Maasburg described this phrase as key for understanding her whole work, as she indicated in saying, “It is a message that attempts to remind us of what Jesus yearns for: love for Him and love for souls, that is, our fellow human beings.”
He describes how early one morning he was with her on the streets of Calcutta, where thousands of people who had spent the night on the street were lying. Mother Teresa said, “Look, Father; there’s Jesus, waiting to be loved.”
Fr. Maasburg also relates the story of how on a visit with her to the Vatican, when she was due to attend one of Pope St. John Paul’s very early morning Masses, she managed to “smuggle” him in with her, despite the protests of some of the Swiss Guards and other officials, who knew the priest was not officially due to attend the Mass.
While they were waiting to enter, they prayed the rosary together, and also prayed Mother Teresa’s Quick Novena, consisting of ten Memorares, with the extra one in thanksgiving for the favor received — such was her confidence in Providence. She constantly prayed this novena for all sorts of needs, spiritual or physical.
They entered and came to the Pope’s chambers, but the way was barred by two polite but very firm policemen — the priest had not been announced, and so could not enter. Mother Teresa merely replied, “Father is with us,” and started to move off to get permission, if necessary, from the Pope himself.
This was too much for the policeman, who gave in and let Fr. Maasburg accompany the diminutive nun, who had a heart of gold but also a will of iron. And so he was able to celebrate Mass with the Holy Father, an experience which he described as “overwhelming.”
Mother Teresa’s order was an enterprise run entirely on trust, trust in the Providence of God and the power of prayer. Fr. Maasburg recounts how on numerous occasions, last-minute donations of food or money would arrive just in time to avoid disaster. This includes an occasion when he was with her in Vienna and money was needed for the rent for premises where the Missionaries of Charity sisters were staying; the situation looked bleak, but then they were stopped by two elderly ladies who handed over $15,000 to her.
She did not see her job as being to convert people — only God could do that, but rather to put the people she met in touch with Jesus. Sometimes she would hold up five fingers on one hand and say — with reference to the passage in St. Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus said, “as you did it to one of the least of my brethren, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:40) — that the whole Gospel could be counted on five fingers: “You-did-it-to-me.”
She was implicitly reproached for not helping people to help themselves, along the lines of the saying about giving people a fish rather than giving them a fishing rod and teaching them to fish. Her retort was: “My people are too weak to hold the fishing rod themselves.”
Her firm principle was to hand on every gift she received as quickly as possible — everything belonged to the poor. One of her favorite sayings was, “It doesn’t matter how much we give. It matters how much love we put in the giving.”
Not only did Mother Teresa and her sisters work for the poor, they also lived the life of the poor in their convents — washing their saris by hand, and going without radio, television, and air conditioning, with the difference that this was a freely chosen life, chosen for the sake of Christ.
In the rules for her communities, she defined the kind of spirit they should have, emphasizing three points; loving trust, total surrender, and cheerfulness. She particularly displayed this last attribute of cheerfulness, despite, as we now know, suffering an extremely painful “dark night of the soul,” a trial which deprived her of any sense of God’s presence, for many years.
She shared in all the work of the sisters, and quite often took on the dirtiest work, including cleaning toilets. A favorite maxim of hers was, “How do you learn humility? Only through humiliations.” Another was, “God didn’t call me to be successful but to be faithful.”
And she also said, “God will not ask us how many good things we did in our life, but only with how much love we did them.”
She was once asked her “secret” and replied, “That’s very simple: I pray.” She later said to Fr. Maasburg, though, that when praying we should be conscious of what we are doing, and pay attention; and in her case, a rosary was always in her hand. For her the fruit of prayer was love, and the fruit of love was service, and only when a person prayed could they really serve the poor. Indeed the motto of her life was, “Love in action.”
As a matter of principle she never said a negative word about anyone. Her attitude about this was “excuse rather than accuse.” She believed that if you judge someone then you have no time to love them — and also that it is, in any case, much better to pray for them.
Fr. Maasburg also notes that when she was speaking to someone she concentrated on them completely, and remarks that he noticed something similar with Pope John Paul II.
He asked her about the causes of poverty in Africa, and she replied, “You see, Father, we don’t think about this sort of question. We don’t think about the why, and how and when. We simply see the need and help as well as we can.”
Once, when a reporter said to her that what she was doing was wonderful, she simply said, “You know, I am only a little pencil in the hand of God, a God who is about to write a love letter to the world.” She was emphatic about this point, and when asked whether she felt pride at all her achievements and the praise she received she said simply, “It is His work!”
When she died she left behind a religious family consisting of five congregations in nearly six hundred houses spread all over the world. On her tomb in Calcutta is a verse from St. John’s Gospel: “Love one another, as I have loved you.”
This is an inspiring book, full of enlightening personal stories about Mother Teresa and her life of service, a life which made her such a moving and saintly figure. In Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Personal Portrait, Fr. Maasburg has indeed succeeded in giving us a beautiful portrait of probably the most outstanding woman of the twentieth century. Starting from nothing, her achievements were absolutely incredible and give a much needed message of hope for our times.
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(Donal Anthony Foley is the author of a number of books on Marian apparitions, and maintains a related website at www.theotokos.org.uk. He has also written two time-travel/adventure books for young people, and the third in the series is due to be published next year — details can be seen at: http://glaston-chronicles.co.uk.)
