A Saint Remembered
MOTHER TERESA LEAVES AN EVERLASTING IMPRESSION
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
Early in my career, I traveled to India and met with Mother Teresa. I wrote about it in an article that appeared on March 7, 1993, in The Tampa Tribune, where I worked as a staff reporter. Mother Teresa, who died in 1997, was canonized a saint in 2016. I recently discovered my notes and audiotape and share those memories here.
JOHN STANMEYER
IT IS 5:15 on a Monday morning in early October. The night hasn’t relinquished its hold quite yet. Streetlights glow in the misty darkness. Below, cars already are whizzing by. A handful of people walk along the sidewalks; some are still finding their footing, others are wide awake and intent on whatever they are doing—making tea over makeshift metal burners, rummaging for clothing to cover up from the chill, pausing to touch the heads of their sleeping children.
The sidewalks are still partially blanketed by hundreds of slumbering bodies in this city within a city of Kolkata. We walk by street vendors whose heavily laden carts are attached to the backs of their bicycles. They are looking for a place to set up shop for the day. We stop at the entrance of an alley where a dog and teenage boy are asleep in a loose embrace. Ten yards away, a small sign hanging beside two large wooden doors reads, “Mother Teresa In.”
The mist is slowly lifting. The streets are beginning to bustle. Is it only 5:30? We walk up to one of the doors and give it a firm push. The door opens quietly, and we step into what appears to be a compound where Mother Teresa and others who belong to the Missionaries of Charity live and pray.
Within The Mother House, as it’s called, in this serene setting, nuns and novices are scattered in the convent’s courtyard—an ocean of white against slate-gray stone walkways and concrete walls. They alternate between pouring soapy water from a pail onto a small pile of clothes and beating the garments against the ground.
We continue to take in our surroundings. Everything about Kolkata is rich in texture and color, and this was no exception. Suddenly, the work halts, and we follow the others into a large room. That is why we are here, to attend the morning service and talk with Mother Teresa afterwards, if she is even accessible. The room is filled with some 140 nuns and novices sitting on their knees or cross-legged. They all wear habits, some with white cloths wrapped around their head, their long, dark hair spilling out onto their shoulders. All are barefoot; all are reading from their prayer books, with more books piled beside them.
5:40 a.m. Heads are bowed. Many of these nuns and novices are Indian; a handful are foreigners. All sit in rows facing the altar, or are lined up along the walls. The heat and haze drift into the room through the open windows. Cars are honking outside persistently, loudly, reminding us of where we are. At the altar is a long wooden table with a statue of the Virgin Mary on the right, a pulpit on the left, a crucifix affixed on the wall behind the table, and a tabernacle.
5:45 a.m. The sisters rise to a kneeling position, their hands in front of them, holding their books. The lights remain off.
5:46 a.m. Mother Teresa slips into the unadorned room and leans against the back wall, surveying the multitude before her, bodies lost in prayer. At barely five feet tall, she is tinier than the others; she is bent over by age and by her life’s work. Her clothing is similar to the other sisters of the Missionaries of Charity—a sari-like white habit with three blue stripes on the border. (Novices wear a white habit without a colored border.) Her right hand is crossed over her waist; her left hand holds a book.
Mother Teresa begins reading aloud in a low, strong voice. She pauses after each line; the others repeat the words in unison. Her deeply wrinkled face looks like a road map in detail. Her knotted hands cradling the book tell the story of this 82-year-old Albanian woman who has seen so much. Her large, bare feet are twisted and contorted.
5:55 a.m. Many of the sisters leave the room; some 50 remain in prayer. Mother Teresa flips a switch and two fluorescent lights flicker on. She presses her back against the wall, slowly sinks down, puts a handkerchief against her mouth and coughs. She rests her head in one hand and starts to read again.
JOHN STANMEYER
More nuns stream back in, genuflecting and crossing at the entry, then finding a place to stand inside. They are all singing; their voices drown out the honking of the horns, the chaos of the streets. Milky light filters through the windows, cascading softly over the sisters as if candles are being lit, slowly, one by one. Two priests walk in and begin morning mass.
Mother Teresa remains sitting in the back, her head bent. Two candles burn at the altar; the singing continues, somehow softening the harshness outside. During the service, the nuns and novices at times kneel down and bow deeply, touching their foreheads to the floor.
6:30 a.m. Mother Teresa slowly walks up to one of the priests to receive communion as the others form multiple lines behind her. The sun has burned off the haze; heat has settled in. The women are wiping their foreheads with white cloths. “The mass has ended. Let’s go forth and serve our blessed Lord,” says one of the priests upon completion of communion.
The women continue to quietly pray as the priests leave. Then they file out, books in hand.
6:45 a.m. It’s a return to washing clothes in the courtyard and whatever else the novices had been doing. The buildings within this complex are three to four stories high with wood shutters. Volunteers from different points of the globe gather afterwards for breakfast—a banana, some tea, a piece of bread. Written on a small blackboard: “The capacity for faithfulness makes saints.”
Mother Teresa slowly makes her way down a hall after service, coughing again, and disappears into a room for 30 minutes. She reemerges and speaks quietly to every person who is waiting to meet her, her eyes twinkling like a child’s. She firmly holds each outstretched hand in both of hers. One man asks her to say a prayer for his dying mother. She nods, then blesses him and gives him a shiny pendant of the Virgin Mary and a neatly folded slip of paper with a printed prayer on one side and a photograph of herself on the other. She also hands him a card. “My business card,” she says jokingly. It reads:
The fruit of SILENCE is Prayer
The fruit of PRAYER is Faith
The fruit of FAITH is Love
The fruit of LOVE is Service
The fruit of SERVICE is Peace
I wait and watch, humbled by the attention she gives each visitor. When it is my turn, she is welcoming but pushes off the mini-recorder I have in my hand and says she doesn’t want to be taped. We should visit the Home for the Dying, she says, and help there. That is how we will understand what she is doing here.
I ask if there is any advice she would like me to share. She replies, “The family that prays together, stays together.” She tells me that she just returned two weeks ago to Kolkata and plans to stay here for a while, this place she calls home. She touches my hands; I tell her that we are thankful that she has allowed us to have time with her, and we’d like to know about her work in Kolkata and around the world.
“Everyone knows what I do,” the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize winner tells me. “Go to the Home for the Dying and understand what I do. Each person must help. We must do things one at a time.”
She gives me a pendant and her card, we talk a little longer, and she sends me back into the streets of Kolkata. She turns to leave, and visitors press money into her hands. She accepts with a faint smile and walks to the chapel again, a solitary figure crouched against a wall. She stoops over a prayer book, mouthing the words in silence as her index finger touches every line.
This compound is where Mother Teresa began the Missionaries of Charity in 1950, an order dedicated to the poorest of the poor. They live simple lives of poverty and austerity and minister to some of the most marginalized members of society, including orphans and abandoned children, the elderly, those with physical or mental disabilities, the homeless, the dying, and people afflicted with leprosy, addiction, or HIV/AIDS. The order now has spread to more than 5,000 sisters active in over 130 countries.
We leave The Mother House to go to the Kalighat Home for the Dying, a hospice for the sick, the destitute, the dying established by Mother Teresa. Before she sought permission to use it, the building was an abandoned Hindu temple to the goddess Kali. It was founded on her 42nd birthday in 1952.
I received word earlier this year about the new film Mother Teresa & Me and plan to see it soon. This still image from the movie depicts The Home for the Dying in the way I remember it. The film was written and directed by Bollywood filmmaker Kamal Musale and stars British actress Banita Sandhu as Kavita and Jacqueline Fritschi-Cornaz as Mother Teresa. COURTESY OF FATHOM EVENTS
We knock on the door of the indescript building several kilometers away. A nun opens the door and asks, “Can I help you?” “Mother Teresa sent us here,” I reply. “We are here to do a story on the Home for the Dying. She told us to visit and write about it.”
The nun looks around and says, “Come inside!” She pauses and then adds, “How do you know what it’s like in here? Go and help; start bathing people.”
And for the day, we do just that. We wash linens and towels, bathe individuals covered with lice, play with children, bow our heads in silent prayer for three people who die in the course of the day in the arms of those caring for them.
The time spent at the Home for the Dying (whose name was later changed to Kalighat, the Home of the Pure Heart), and with Mother Teresa changed everything for me. It all comes down to a single word. Compassion. It’s not standing on the sidelines. It’s setting aside barriers and stepping into someone else’s life, fully and selflessly. Those moments—early morning darkness when we walked the streets, at The Mother House with the purity of prayer, observing Mother Teresa sitting so simply in meditation, talking with her and seeking answers. She turned us away and told us that the answers come from touching others, helping others, being human, being one big caring family.