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Doing small things with great love
Dorothy Victor
Last Updated IST
Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa

When Pope Francis pronounced Mother Teresa of Kolkata a saint at St Peter’s Square in Rome on September 5, 2016, it was merely a formality that was fulfilled. For, Saint Teresa, often referred to as the ‘Saint of the gutters,’ was a living saint of her times. When she came to India as a missionary in 1931, it was the first step of her long journey in serving the poorest of the poor.

As Teresa hailed from the league of contemporary saints, the message that can be garnered from her life and times cannot be brushed aside as quaint or irrelevant. Her life of love, lived wholly through service to those people nobody was prepared to serve, leaves a deep impression and during these times of a global pandemic, it beckons everyone to action.

Teresa showed the world what it takes to really love the poor among us. A conversation she once had with a reporter vividly describes her understanding of it. The reporter had just watched Teresa nurse the maggot-infested wounds of a leper. “I wouldn’t do what you do for a million dollars,” he commented thoughtlessly. With a wry smile, Teresa replied, “I wouldn’t either.”

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For a person who did all that she did for love, loving another was to be exemplified through service. In the wake of the century’s worst pandemic, this is just what is being replayed in the lives of scores and scores of people who are putting themselves on the line and doing their bit to assuage its effects. From the prominent frontline workers to others behind the scenes and to every responsible citizen, people across the globe are living that which Teresa believed: “Love cannot remain by itself; it has to be put into action, and that action is service.”

Teresa’s journey to service began on a day in September 1946, on the winding tracks to Darjeeling that was the venue of her annual retreat. The ‘call’ she felt on the speeding train was both palpable and compelling. Over the next two years, she would contemplate this intensely drawing call. After much discernment, dressed in a white, blue-bordered sari that became the dress code of the sisters of ‘Missionaries of Charity’, she would walk through the gates of the Loreto Convent to which she belonged, to start her own congregation. Her congregation, ‘Missionaries of Charity,’ would soon become a recognised ‘International Religious Family’ with centres in every part of the world to reach out to the destitute and the dying living on the other side of the tracks.

Like all mighty initiatives that have a humble beginning, Teresa’s beginning was small. Initially, she was just a one-woman team. She had no funds, no medicines and no food to offer those poor people who were dying. All she had to offer was her love and service. And this made those on their death beds brighten up. Just as a child hot with fever would lighten up at the attention and embrace of his mother, these poor people were momentarily strengthened. She brought back their life and dignity, even if only on their death beds and only for those few, last moments of their lives.

Teresa truly believed that it was not the material poverty of the poor that made them so miserable. Rather, their misery stemmed from the way they were treated, stripped of all the God-given dignity of a human person, in a materialistic world. Her sincerity and service flowed at ease from the awareness of this great truth that unfolded before her. “Do small things, with great love,” became her motto.

For those, like the reporter who was repulsed at what she did, and wondered what could possibly be the secret of her willingness and energy to do it, she would say plainly, “My secret is simple, I pray.” Perhaps in these times, when the world is ravaged by an invisible, tiny terminator, it would do all humanity good to borrow Teresa’s secret. In the aftermath of the spread of the virus that has seen tragedies of the likes of World Wars, one can only keel and pray to a just God for the protection of the vulnerable, relief to the burdened, justice to the oppressed, health to the sick and comfort to the bereaved.

The debilitating effects of this pandemic have been seen all over the world. Yet, Teresa’s message of love can rekindle our sapping energy and drooping spirit. And as we too attempt and begin to do “small things with great love,” it will become a fitting tribute to pay her on her 22nd death anniversary this September 5.

Teresa would famously say, “By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world.” Through her life of love and service, she showed the world that everyone can enjoy a sense of belonging to the world simply through “small acts of great love.” To follow the example of this great Nobel laureate is a tall order. Yet, it is the only sure one that can work wonders during these times, as it did in Teresa’s times.

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(Published 04 September 2020, 23:42 IST)