MOTHER TERESA - A Biography by Meg Greene, chapter name 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 re- lented 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 per cent 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 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.

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 break- fast, 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 cru- cifix, 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.

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 con- stitution 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 read- ing, 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 humour was of a darker nature. Attending to one poor man who had a gangrenous thumb, Mother Teresa realized that the thumb would have 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, the 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 Ameri- can) as good fortune.

Still, Mother Teresa persevered. As people heard of what she was doing, they came forth with money, supplies, time, and favours. The bus driver who drove the route to St. Joseph’s made her sit in a seat next to him so she should 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 encouragement or help. Mother Teresa then went to another priest who was so de- lighted 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.

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-honoured tradition of mendicancy. Throughout much of India’s history, priests, holy men, and teachers de- pended on the support of the community for their livelihood. Her begging letters and begging expeditions were a natural outgrowth of her own poverty and 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.

During her first months on the Calcutta streets, Mother Teresa’s spiritual advisor, Father Van Exam, 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 a 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 Ameri- can 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 who came to visit her. Seeing her in her sari, some burst into tears. But all were glad to see her and to offer what help they could.

On another occasion, when Michael accompanied Mother Teresa on one of her begging forays, they again encountered rainy weather. Watch- ing from the train window, they saw a man, completely drenched, slumped under a tree. The two hurried to finish collecting medicines and went back with the hopes of helping the man. However, when they reached him, he was already dead. As Gomes later recounted, Mother Teresa was in anguish over the incident and the fact that many other poor and gravely ill men and women, like the unknown man, might have wanted to say something to someone, to have some comfort in their final hours. The incident hardened her resolve to search for a facility where the terminally ill could die in dignity and peace.

Gomes also remembered giving Mother Teresa extra food whenever there was any to spare. Often she would ask him for extra mugs of rice, which she gave away to starving families. Still, from time to time, she encountered hostility. Gomes remembered when a group of passengers on a train, remarking on her strange nun’s habit, said that she was nothing more than a Christian hoping to convert Hindus. For a long time, Mother Teresa listened in silence. Finally, she turned to them and said, “Ami Bharater Bharat Amar” (I am Indian and India is mine).6 The passenger car was silent for the rest of the trip.

“IT WILL BE A HARD LIFE”

On March 19, 1949, the feast day of St. Joseph, foster father of Jesus and the protector of the Virgin Mary, a young girl appeared at 14 Creek Lane. Subashni Das had been a boarder at St. Mary’s at Entally since she was a small girl, and had been one of Mother Teresa’s students. She was now in the last year of secondary school. She had come to join Mother Teresa in her work. Mother Teresa remarked, “It will be a hard life. Are you prepared for it?”7 The young woman said yes, and in doing so became Mother Teresa’s first postulant, taking the name of Agnes, Mother Teresa’s Christian name. She would, in time, become Mother Teresa’s closest aide: she replaced Mother Teresa as the mistress of novices, the nun who over- sees the training of new nuns, and took over the duties of the mother superior when Mother Teresa began travelling.

Soon, two more women arrived to join them. By the beginning of summer, there were 10 young women, all former students of Mother Teresa, living at the Gomes’s home. Since none had graduated from school, Mother Teresa made sure that they completed their studies and that they all passed their final exams. Of the original 10, only 2 eventually left. The others went on to become some of the first novitiates of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.

To make room for the new arrivals, the Gomes’s opened the upper room, which was really more like a large loft. The group used one area of the room as a chapel. Father Henry donated a wood altar and candlesticks. Above the altar was the picture of the Virgin Mother that Father Van Exem had given to Mother Teresa.

Mother Teresa instituted a schedule for the young women. Each morning, they were awakened by a bell, which also summoned them to meals. The same bell also signalled periods of prayer, rest, and work. Every morning, clad in their saris, the young women and Mother Teresa left for the poorest areas of Calcutta. The days followed a set routine: mornings were spent teaching school, while afternoons were given to the sick and dying. By this time, there were two schools to tend to the first one in Motijihl and another in the slum of Tiljala, where Mother Teresa rented another small room for her new students.

The young women and Mother Teresa also established a dispensary, which was located in a classroom in the local parish school. After school hours, the large room was turned into a screening room for tuberculosis patients. The classroom, which opened onto a veranda, was often the scene of long lines of people waiting to be examined. The nuns tried to get the most seriously ill into city hospitals. However, when necessary, they cared for the sick on the spot as they lay in the streets and alleys of the city. 

Mother Teresa worried about her charges. Remembering the advice of the sisters at Patna, she was especially concerned that they were getting enough to eat. Michael Gomes remembers one instance in which Mother Teresa, sitting in the back of a truck with some bags of rice and flour, returned at the end of the day from one of her begging expeditions. She had not eaten all day nor gotten any water for fear that someone would steal the food meant for her postulants. She went without in order that the food would be delivered safely to the house.

To help the sisters, Father Van Exem and Father Henry made an announcement at Sunday mass calling for mushti bhikka, a Bengali custom where any families that were able put aside a handful of rice for a beggar. This effort marked the start of the feeding program that the Missionaries of Charity oversaw and that would in time include not only food but clothing and soap for the poor.

A YEAR’S END

And then the first year was over. On August 16, 1949, Mother Teresa’s year of exclaustration came to an end. Now Archbishop Périer had to decide whether she would remain outside the cloister of Loreto or return. By this time, the archbishop had received reports of Mother Teresa and her growing band of young women. In his mind, there was no turning back for Mother Teresa; she would remain outside of the cloister. If she had returned, the young women would have disbanded. They were not recognized as a formal order of nuns; they were simply a group of very religious women who happened to be living with a rather unorthodox nun. A course that would allow Mother Teresa to continue her work with her assistants would be to accept them as a congregation for the diocese of Calcutta answerable to the archbishop just as Mother Teresa was. This was a real possibility since the little group now numbered more than 10, the required number needed to begin a new congregation.

Still, the archbishop remained cautious. Before making any decision, he needed to know if there had been any negative reports about Mother Teresa and her work. He went to Father Van Exem, who admitted that there had been one report, that of an old Jesuit who believed Mother Teresa was doing the work of the devil. He had gone to the mother superior at Loreto, asking her why a woman who was doing such a fine job as a teacher in an established school would leave to wander about the slums of Calcutta. The archbishop, so incensed by the comments, insisted that the priest in question immediately apologize to the superior for his criticism of Mother Teresa and her work.

While Mother Teresa awaited the archbishop’s decision, she took another very important step: she applied for and was granted Indian citizenship. The act was a potent one, signifying not only her break with her European roots but a pledge to become one with the people she served. By the end of 1949, the archbishop had become so supportive of Mother Teresa and her efforts that he stated his willingness to recognize her group as a congregation in his archdiocese. The final approval would have to come from Rome, but the archbishop was willing to make the journey himself and plead Mother Teresa’s case on her behalf. He planned to go to Rome in April 1950 to present the Vatican with the necessary documents. Now, Mother Teresa struggled with a draft of the proposed order’s constitution, which outlined the rules by which the nuns would live. She wrote of her spiritual calling on the train ride to Darjeeling and outlined the first three vows all would take when coming into the order: poverty, chastity, and obedience. To these, she added a fourth vow: “to give wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor,”8 which would become known as “our way.”9 She also decided on a name for the new order: the Missionaries of Charity.

She turned over her draft to Father Van Exem, who worked on it, tightening up the language, as Mother Teresa’s grasp of English was not good. Father Van Exem forwarded the document to a priest who specialized in canon, or church, law. Then five copies were made and taken to the arch-bishop who presented the documents to Cardinal Pietro Fumosoni- Biondi, head of the Office for the Propagation of the Faith for the Catholic Church. The Vatican accepted the constitution, even with the fourth vow, which over time brought many to the order and quieted even the most sceptical. On October 7, 1950, the church had a new congregation in its fold: the Missionaries of Charity, headed by Mother Teresa.

DRAWING ON THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE

The new constitution of the Missionaries of Charity may have been polished by the priests of the church, but the document reflected the spirit of Mother Teresa. In it, she not only outlined why she believed what she was doing was so important and the specific vows for her new order, but also some basic rules that the Missionaries of Charity continue to follow today. She began by stating the goal of the order:

Our aim is to quench the infinite thirst of Jesus Christ for love by the profession of the evangelical counsels and by whole-hearted free service to the poorest of the poor, according to the teaching and the life of our Lord in the gospel, revealing in a unique way the salvation of God Our particular mission is to labour at the salvation and sanctification of the poorest of the poor... We are called THE MISSIONARIES OF CHAR- ITY.10

Whoever the poorest of the poor are, they are Christ for us— Christ under the guise of humans suffering... Our food, our dress; it must be just like the poor. The poor are Christ himself. We should not serve the poor like they were Jesus. We should serve the poor because they are Jesus.11

Mother Teresa sought to reinforce the vow of poverty in other ways, too. In the constitution of the order, it is stipulated that at no time will the Missionaries of Charity own any buildings or other property. Postulants were to be members of the Roman Catholic Church, which would pre-serve the very core of the congregation. However, in time it became clear that because the church was not a strong institution in India, this stipulation would have to be modified. Still, the core tenets of the constitution for the new congregation showed the influence of those groups that had the greatest impact on Mother Teresa’s own life, from the missionary efforts of the Jesuits who swore devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and obedience to God and also to the Loreto Sisters who stressed a similar devotion and obedience to carrying out the work of the Lord on earth.

The last matter that needed to be attended to was the question of the sisters’ dress. Sent to Rome were three photographs: one depicting a postulant in a plain white sari and short-sleeved habit, the second of a novice in a white sari and habit with sleeves that entirely covered the arm, and last a picture of Mother Teresa in the sisters’ dress of white sari with the distinctive blue border. The new style of dress, while unorthodox, was accepted.

A NEW BEGINNING

On October 7, 1950, Archbishop Périer came to the house at 14 Creek Lane for the first time to celebrate mass at the altar located in the tiny chapel on the second floor. A large number of persons assembled to hear Father Van Exem read the decree of erection recognizing the Missionaries of Charity as a new congregation limited to the diocese of Calcutta. That same day, 11 young women began their lives as postulates of the new order. It was a joyous occasion for all.

Over the next two years, 29 young women joined Mother Teresa. All took up residency on the second floor of the Gomes’s house, which resonated with their activity. Mother Teresa wrote in her journal of the trust, surrender, and cheerfulness of the newcomers. She observed with special pride how dutifully they accepted the vow of poverty required of them. It was not an easy life. The novices washed their clothes and their bodies using communal buckets. They cleaned their teeth with ashes and slept on thin pallets. Their meagre pile of garments consisted only of their cotton saris, coarse underwear, a pair of sandals, a crucifix pinned to the left shoulder, a rosary, and an umbrella to protect them from the monsoon rains. All these items were packed in a small bundle (potla), which they used as a pillow.

To celebrate the completion of the new nun’s postulancy, or taking of vows, Father Van Exem created a special ceremony. The novices came to the cathedral dressed as Bengali brides. During the service, they went to a room where Mother Teresa cut their hair. This practice represented a tremendous sacrifice, as many Bengali girls regarded their long hair as a great gift. The women’s hair was often so long that the entire process took several hours to complete. They then reappeared in their religious habits as novices. It was a beautiful ceremony and one that Mother Teresa completely approved for its incorporation of high church ritual with the local culture. Father Van Exem remembered with some amusement the reaction of the locals to the first ceremonies of this kind: “The ordination of a priest takes two hours, the consecration of a bishop three hours, the reception of a Missionary of Charity four hours!”12 Not everyone, however, was pleased at the spectacle of young Bengal brides who were in fact not really married but had entered into the Catholic Church.

It was soon apparent that the quarters at Creek Lane were becoming too small for the growing number of sisters. Father Van Exem and Father Henry once again went to work searching for new quarters for the order. One of the first nuns to join the order remembered how Mother Teresa and her nuns helped the two priests:

Father Henry organized a procession every evening. He ac- companied the sisters as we went through the Calcutta streets saying the rosary aloud   And from six to nine, we went on the road from our house to St. Teresa’s Church and hence to Fatima Chapel, praying there and again on our way home. We were asking our Lady of Fatima to obtain for us the new house we needed.13