The Washington Post | Sept. 6, 1997; Page D01
All week the world has heard the word "humanitarian." It's been connected to a ravishingly beautiful woman who died too young and too terribly. But yesterday, the word "humanitarian" took a deeper slice at our psyches. A wrinkly, bent, 4-foot-11, 87-year-old, globally admired holy woman died in Calcutta. Her name was Mother Teresa. She died of heart ailments and malaria and simple old age.
Mother Teresa: As with Princess Diana, though not for the same reasons, her name came to have an amazing and mythic quality. You could say it in practically any corner of the globe, and people knew instantly whom you meant. It was a name that stood overwhelmingly for good works. It was a name that came to be so much larger than the name itself.
She was an enduring symbol of the idea of selflessness in a society that seems to be in a crazed sprint to self-obsession.
Just having her there, in our world and in our imagination, was a kind of stay against the demons of pettiness, pride, all kinds of casual cruelty.
She showed us that we could be our better selves. That sounds almost quaint, certainly not cool, though it happens to be true.
Mother Teresa, uncanonized "saint of the Indian gutters." Mother Teresa, humankind's wizened little Catholic missionary nun, the one in the coarse white habit and blue-bordered headdress who wished only to go about helping the poor and the destitute by little and little.
Say the name, her name, and you see the prayer-tipped hands. She is bowing, holding beads, grinning. Is it the grin of the serenely knowing? As open as she was, there was always a distance.
Perhaps one of the things that make her so difficult to comprehend in a secular world is that she was always and ever an old-fashioned Catholic. Meaning that she understood, as it says in the Bible, that the poor we shall always have with us. The poor can redeem us. The poor can show us the way. The poor can make us blessed.
The answer to solving the problem of the poor, Mother Teresa seems to have known instinctively, is not to storm the gates of the bourgeoisie. Rather, just to bear witness. To be among the poor. To serve them and face their suffering with faith.
Mother Teresa: Heathens knew that name. Infidels knew it. Popes and kings and bishops and presidents knew it and wanted to be in her company. And, yes, cynics by the carloads knew the name — all those who never wished to believe in the first place that one small nun could have been all the things she was.
Debunking a myth of goodness always has its uses, one of the chief uses being that you don't have to look at yourself, your own failings, quite as closely.
So there were those who wished to tear her down. And yet one is tempted to say that, long after the last cynic and naysayer is dust, Mother Teresa, like Albert Schweitzer, will continue to epitomize the sort of person who casts off the world and goes to work amid the needy.
As there was in Schweitzer, the physician who went to Africa, there was in Mother Teresa the alchemy of good works, great longevity and certain exotic qualities that seemed to stoke the legend. Schweitzer was an Alsatian medical missionary, a theologian and a musician. Mother Teresa, born in Macedonia in 1910 of Albanian parents, began her missionary work in India, and from India that work spread worldwide.
The mystery of how exactly she did it — well, let historians of the next century tell us that.
She thought her vocation as a nun was going to center itself as a teacher of upper-class young women. The call of the poor was too great.
She was not a perfect person, and there is no inclination here to say otherwise. One senses from afar that she probably did have her eye just a tad too much on her own legacy. One senses from afar that perhaps she did understand the great journalistic PR machine just a little too cannily for a person in religious life. And yet one is tempted to say that's okay. If anything, her attempt to control her image, her relish to be around the famous and powerful, merely speaks of her human frailty.
But think of all those thousands (millions?) who might not have had their bellies fed or thirst quenched or brows dampened with cool cloths, if no Mother Teresa of Calcutta had ever existed.
With her humanness and frailty, she founded a religious order called the Missionaries of Charity. Beginning with a single convent not quite five decades ago, she ended up with hundreds of religious centers and convents on six continents. She also founded a vast organization of laypeople dedicated to her work and philosophies.
She won the Nobel Peace Prize. She won so many prizes, it would be useless to try to name them all here.
She was in bad health for about the last decade and a half. But she still tried to travel worldwide to visit her various sisters and convents.
About a year ago she was asked — by an interviewer for the Ladies' Home Journal, of all secular places — if she thought much about death.
"I see so much of it," she answered. "When my time comes, I will just take a bed in the house in Kalighat and wait for the end."